34
votes
Israel's Gaza evacuation order could breach international law [by forcibly transferring civilians]
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- Authors
- Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber
- Published
- Oct 17 2023
- Word count
- 432 words
Are they referencing this law
In this instance, wouldn't the security of the civilians involved or imperative military reasons so demand?
It seems from this quote their problem is the treatment of civilians, not if they can forcibly transfer them:
Why would that be the case, though? I haven't yet heard any argument for why the millions of people living peacefully in Palestine need to evacuate their homes under risk of death; only that the Israeli military has demanded it.
A ground invasion is official in all but words right now, and it will be horrific for all parties involved. I suppose the Israeli government, knowing this, would prefer to minimize the already very bad humanitarian situation in Gaza.
Unless it's all a ruse and the IDF is planning something unexpected, as has been floating around, I imagine they're just going to turn the place to dust.
My interpretation was that this document assumes you're part of a lawful war with another country, complying with conventions and the rest of law. If you're already breaking international conventions by committing war-crimes or forcefully removing people from their homes, then you're not really going to care about the rest.
Is this war legitimate? Hell if I know. That's for the UN to decide, and hopefully soon. That's the crux of the issue and will be the deciding factor of whether Israel is or isn't responsible for a massive humanitarian (potentially even refugee) crisis.
That's a good point but it wasn't really in my consideration. I was mainly referring to the question in and of itself; that is, whether or not Israel is breaching international law depends on if the war is internationally justified. Whether or not they'll actually care is another deal that I can't say I'm equipped to answer.
Of course not, I never intended to say so. Again, I was specifically referring to whether or not it's an international crime, and not about the morality of the situation. To me the question was "can a country tell citizens to move without breaking international law?" To which my answer is "Yes, but only if the war is justified according to the UN."
If you want to get into morality, then of course this is a wrong and evil thing to do that will result in hundreds if not thousands of deaths.
Poor St Augustine is rolling in his grave!
In paragraph three it does say that
I think it's harder to be clearer than that.
The security of the civilians involved (the Palestinians) does not demand their being moved – if the IDF were to just not bomb them then they would be safe where they are (in terms of immediate safety).
If you can't distinguish between civilian and military targets you don't fire. You don't wring your hands and say the opponent is pulling the trigger. You are pulling the trigger. You are pulling the trigger and killing civilians.
Knowingly killing civilians is killing civilians, no matter how you try to qualify it, no matter what the history is, no matter what scores are being settled. It's immoral to even quibble over it.
Taken out of context, this could easily read as you supporting Hamas's terror attacks against Israeli civilians as an act of self-defense.
It sounds like an argument that all wars are justified, so long as both sides believe they are in danger, and no atrocity is unethical so long as it serves this end. Is this really what you think? If two people pick up guns and aim them at each other, they are morally justified in shooting at each other even if dozens of innocent bystanders are killed as well?
Hamas is run by psychopaths who believe this is the best strategy to secure Hamas's position in the long term. I do not believe they care about average Palestinian civilians the tiniest bit; civilians are tools to be used and discarded. What's worse, I think their strategy is actually very effective, if we assume their intent is to serve Hamas and secure its existence well into the future; terrorists shrivel away in peace, but they proliferate in war—particularly in religious/ethnic wars that make it very easy to paint themselves as David fighting Goliath.
Israel's response is very bad for Palestinian civilians, but it is good for Hamas. It will secure Hamas as the sole righteous guardian against Israeli terror and garner support for them in the Middle East. This is a war that everyday Palestinians lose, but Hamas's leadership win; for them, civilian deaths (both Israeli and Palestinian) are just collateral damage in service to saving Hamas, which is a viewpoint that seems to align with your earlier comments — that knowingly and willingly killing civilians is not unethical, so long as it's done for self-defense.
Israel should cut off Hamas's head — which seems to be largely located in Qatar (e.g., Ismail Haniyeh), not so much Gaza. By targeting Gaza, they kill thousands of civilians unnecessarily and strengthen Hamas's power and influence in the Middle East. To be honest, I'm not convinced that Netanyahu actually wants to see Hamas destroyed; his power waxes when tensions are high and Israel unites behind him against a common enemy.
This is why I can't get behind the idea that it is justifiable to kill bystanders to defend oneself. It incentivizes these kinds of wars. Leaders routinely conflate their own self-interest with the interest of the communities they lead, and to maintain their own positions, they pursue strategies of escalation. They kill each other's civilians — where killing the other side's civilians is "for the greater good", but it's "evil" when the other side does it to their own civilians — and somehow never take any steps to actually bring the war to a conclusion (e.g., assassinating each other's leadership, deescalating, fostering moderate opposition, coming to peace agreements, etc.). Thus horrific wars are maintained for decades, and both leaders benefit at civilians' expense.
I grew up in the 70s in the troubles of Northern Ireland. I have few illusions in this sphere. Beyond the moral implications, if you can't see clearly on that point, it's exactly this type action that made the troubles worse, drove paramilitary recruitment and solidified community support of the paramilitaries.
Genocide is very much on the table – if Israel continues to withhold water they will have a lot of blood on their hands
Your logic seems very faulty to me – your argument seems to be "a small subset of the Palestinian population has committed atrocities against Israel so it's acceptable to use forcible explosion and starvation as a form of collective punishment". I don't believe in collective punishment and I don't believe that inflicting asymmetric casualties solves anything except to make a population of 2 million people who have already suffered a hundred years of colonialism even more desperate and angry.
Can you describe what you think is both a reasonable and realistic solution?
Well for one I think the Israeli strategy of essentially trying to expel 1-2 million people to Egypt will end in anything other than a humanitarian catastrophe.
I think that a one state solution is really the only workable one at this point. This would entail things like granting more Palestinians work permits, ending the bulldozing of Palestinian homes and granting Palestinians citizenship.
I'm sceptical that you could make a workable representative democracy when parliament would be composed of two constituent groups of different ethnicities who hate each other's guts. Even some form of federation/confederation might just end up in gridlock. To have a functioning democracy you need some degree of goodwill and pursuit of the common good. Maybe one day this can happen, but it is hard to see how it could in the short term.
Honestly, while it would be hard, it’s easier than what a two state solution would entail: Israel sacrificing control over its security and/or Palestine sacrificing full sovereignty.
I've already posted my ideal solution here. I think they need is genuine democracy, transparency and rule of law.
From this, Israel gains security by knowing how funds are being spent and how decisions within Palestine are being made. Palestinians gain by having genuine agency in their government. IMO this form of sovereignty is better than being part of a larger, dysfunctional body.
That addresses the long-term situation of the Palestinians and Israelis, but what about the short term? The existence of Hamas and even more radical groups in the Gaza Strip will not cease to be in the short term even with what you outlined. I've seen the idea floated of what you said combined with active policing which would require occupation. To get to occupation, Israelis have to venture into the Strip first which the extremist groups are unlikely to allow easily.
I mean if I were the Israeli government I would try to bring the settlers in the West Bank to heel so that security resources can be moved back to Gaza (i.e. undo the rightwing policies responsible for this attack).
What I would not do is execute a mass murder on the border which is sure to undermine support for Israel and massively inflame tensions in the Arab world (where the local population intensely support the Palestinians, even if their states don't, which will lead to serious repercussions if there are demonstrations in Arab countries) reducing the chance for normalisation of relations with Israel.
Edit: I think economic development would certainly help. For example an end to a ban on exports from Gaga. Of course the problem is that Israel has delegitimised the PA over the past 20 years which has given rise to Hamas. Trying to give the PA authority to actually run some state-like functions in the West Bank might help.
Oh and ending the illegal settlement program!
This all reads like a very weird conflation of the is-ought fallacy. Of course states will use disproportionate violence and cause harm to innocent people if they feel threatened. The fact that this happens doesn't make it morally or legally justified, and pointing that out isn't "rainbows and unicorns" stuff. Having a moral stance requires moving beyond the revenge/sad-but-necessary framing and looking at the situation as it actually exists WRT the killing of civilians.
I don't generally think that it's ethical to argue "well if I knowingly kill x people, but those deaths could have been prevented by someone else acting differently, it's perfectly fine". The whole point of fighting terrorism is to not give the terrorists what they want, and to avoid marking yourself as indistinguishable from them by comitting atrocities that are actually worse than what the terrorists do.
For example if Israel kills all two million Palestinians in Gaza, "well if Egypt had allowed them all to resettle in Egypt they wouldn't have died" does not justify it.
At this point I can't really engage with you any further because you seem to be suggesting that collective punishment and ethnic cleansing are acceptable actions for states to undertake.
A law is only as useful as the law makers ability to provide some consequence that the law breaker would rather avoid, and the law makers ability to enact consequence only exists within the realm of the political will to provide it.
All to say the UN and global 'laws' are relatively toothless and consequence free.
Even the extensive sanctions of Russia over Ukraine didn't really deter them, and short of military action which there is no political will for, there's nothing else to be done, in Ukraine or in Gaza.
Frankly the good guys and bad guys is much less cut and dry in Gaza (compared to Ukraine where Russia is the bad guy) and I can't really blame Israel for retaliation right now so any laws that will not have any consequences have 0 bearing on what happens in Gaza.
Short of deploying a ground force to physically stop them by force, there's nothing anyone else in the world can do to change Israel's mind on this. And there's 0 political will to do that. (not that I'm advocating for or against it.)
The US could pause, reduce, or completely pull their military aid. I don't think we will, but we could.
The problem with that line of thinking is that Isreal is constantly under a very real threat of extermination from other surrounding Arab states. So removing aid is tacitly agreeing to allow the destruction of Isreal. It's not a "maybe" or a "perhaps", there are many players who would love nothing more than to conquer Isreal.
I don't actually want them to fully remove aid, but I would love some signaling that you can't explicitly target civilians or that the bombing campaigns shouldn't have “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy”. Israel has agency to work with the US and other supporting nations to work within the rules of war. I don't think it's radical to say that we could pause their funding if they purposefully engage in war crimes. There are direct lines of communication and an international understanding/agreement on what is expected.
Isreal generally doesn't explicitly target civilians. They aren't great at surgically striking only the military segments of infrastructure, but they are generally working to hit valid military targets which have been very intentionally intertwined with civilian infrastructure. It's impossible to strike Hamas without civilian casualties unless they're holding out on using the secret jewish laser base on the moon.
How could any nation strike back at Hamas without collateral damage of some degree? Sure Isreal could use smaller bombs but there would still be casualties and I doubt the anti-Isreal sentiment would be any different. The only true solution would be for Gazans to destroy Hamas themselves but they have no desire to police their terrorists in office.
Is that really what you care about? Because this sounds an awful lot like you are saying, "Oh well, they already killed a bunch of civilians, so I guess they might as well kill a bunch more."
It's a little hard for a poverty-stricken populace over-represented by hungry, unarmed children to overthrow wealthy, authoritarian terrorists located in a foreign country, especially when their movement is legally restricted.
But Israel and allies actually have the means to do exactly that. If Israel focused on eliminating Hamas's leadership in Qatar and cultivated a more moderate and democratic alternative in Gaza, it would do the people of Gaza a hell of a lot of good — not to mention the people of Israel. That's something that Israel and allies could do far more easily than the general populace living in Gaza can.
And yet that is not what they are doing. Instead, they are traumatizing the next generation of Palestinians and further galvanizing them against Israel in an escalation that will be felt for decades.
The leadership outside of Gaza is not the immediate problem. They are not the ones firing rockets. They are not the ones opening oppressing the Gazans. They are not the ones that slit Israeli throats. The danger is the actual militants in Gaza committing the violence and they are in hardly much better position than those they oppress.
That's who the Gazans need to over throw. The blowhards can hardly do anything to oppose the Gazan citizens if they revolted.
Israel killing the leadership does little to change situation for Gaza either. It would feed their desire for retribution, but it would not make Hamas militants cower or relent.
Do you think that terrorists inside Gaza are working with minimal instruction, coordination, or funding by the politburo and their allies? It sounds like you think they are a small rabble of gangsters running amok, rather than a complex military and political organization with weapons, training, and logistics supplied by Iran.
I'm also curious if you hold people of other nations to the same standards as you hold Gazans. For example, do you expect the hungry, unarmed Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied zones to overthrow the Russian invaders who have taken over their local governments?
There really is no comparison. A typical leader is able to call up more external resources by reaching out to friends. They can also move internal resources about to handle situations. But Gaza is very different. Hamas cannot get external resources into the area without a ton of secret effort. And Gaza is small enough that a poor citizen can cross the entirety within a day. So yes, they are able to coordinate militants but they can't really bolster forces.
China is again a bit different because their economy and willing to build stuff cheap meant that they were the wests best trading partner for the last 30 years of Chinese hyper growth. We have obviously seen that falter as their growth slows and they figure out what to do with their growing middle class that now wants a western living standard.
Compared to Chinas trade, what happens in Gaza is small potatoes, hence the lack of political will. Let's be honest since all of our stuff is produced in China, the west is happy to overlook China's regimes internal behaviour see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps
I think it's important not to conflate "didn't stop the war in its tracks" with "didn't have any effect at all."
Of course it matters that the UN condemned the invasion of Ukraine. Did it stop the war? No. But the UN's actions laid the framework for the extensive Western sanctions which are theoretically making it harder for Russia to fight that war.
And the UN is (militarily) toothless by design. It's what keeps every country involved and engaged instead of the UN turning into "america and friends."
The UN (rightfully) waves it's finger at the us pretty regularly too. I mean, we literally ran torture camps for years and still hold a boatload of black/brown people captive.
The us has the power to inact something against Israel though. We give them a significant amount of money and weapons every year. We wouldn't be hurt much to stop it anymore, or at least install child locks on them.
I think it's a mistake to expect the UN to be "doing" organisation, it is supposed to act as a forum to bring people together. A space in which even diametrically opposed nations can engage in good-faith discourse. It's not supposed to wag fingers at anybody. The US (mostly, along with others) has pushed it in this direction by being the biggest (richest) actor in the room. It's like the red telephone in the White House that connects directly to the Kremlin (does that even exist now?), it's just a means of communication.
In practice, it wags fingers left, right and centre, but it shouldn't. It should just be a bunch of rooms that China, the US, Norway, hell, any state, can sit down in and dialogue.