Declaration

 

Son and daughter of Gaza's first professional photographer, Kegham Djeghalian (whose shadow is in the foreground), on the beach sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s, via Vice. 

This morning, an international group of 800 civil servants, mostly working in foreign ministries, coordinated by participants in the Netherlands, European Union federal institutions, and the United States and joined by individuals from those governments plus 10 other EU countries and the United Kingdom, released a formal declaration of concerns and  to their countries' and institutions' policies on the ongoing horror in the Gaza Strip. 

I heard about it on BBC; it's also reported in The New York Times (gift link here), though not in my view very well. The signers are anonymous, out of fear of retaliation (as one State Department veteran told The Times). They are not resigning in protest, but rather doing what they regard as their proper work in public, as they have been doing internally up to now:

• We have been hired to serve, inform and advise our governments/institutions and we have demonstrated professionalism, expertise, and experience that our governments have relied on over the past decades of our service;
• We have internally expressed our concerns that the policies of our governments/institutions do not serve our interests and called for alternatives that would better serve national and international security, democracy and freedom; reflect the core principles of western foreign policy; and incorporate lessons learned;
• Our professional concerns were overruled by political and ideological considerations;
• We are obliged to do everything in our power on behalf of our countries and ourselves to not be complicit in one of the worst human catastrophes of this century...

Their concerns include the obvious: the unboundedness of the killing of civilians perpetrated by the Israeli Defense Forces, both by weaponry leading to tens of thousands of deaths and by the deliberate blocking of aid, condemning thousands more to starvation and disease; and the risk run by the European, UK, and US governments of being accomplices in grave violations of international law, war crimes, and possible ethnic cleansing or genocide. But I'd also want to single out the following points, which I've been emphasizing in my own writing since Israel's initial response to the terrible massacres of October 7, and which get less attention:

• Israel's military operations have not contributed to its goal of releasing all hostages and is putting their well-being, lives and release at risk;
• Israel's military operations have disregarded all important counterterrorism expertise gained since 9/11; and that the operation has not contributed to Israel’s goal of defeating Hamas and instead has strengthened the appeal of Hamas, Hezbollah and other negative actors;
• The ongoing military operation will be detrimental not just for Israel’s own security but also regional stability; the risk of wider wars is also negatively impacting stated security objectives of our governments...

The Israeli prime minister and IDF continue to assert that they aim to bring all the hostages home, clearly a legitimate and desirable aim, but they continue to conduct operations in a way that ensures that this will not happen. It's obvious that the more successful they are in bombarding Hamas hiding places, the greater the likelihood that they will kill Israeli hostages themselves. Indeed a good number have already been confirmed killed in IDF bombardments along with the three escaping hostages shot dead in spite of their white flag, though I don't know what the number is, since it's not public. It's equally obvious that their Hamas captors won't surrender them unless they're given an incentive to do so; you can't just say, "Give them back now, and we'll kill you all afterwards." It's understandable that Israel would not want to let any of the Hamas fighters go, but it's what they'll have to do if they want all the hostages back, just as they let the PLO leadership flee to Tunisia in 1982. If they've decided to sacrifice the hostages in the name of total victory, they should stop pretending they haven't.

Some people seem to believe the only important lesson we needed to learn from 9/11 was the one of the Iraq fiasco—don't stage your war in the wrong country—which is clearly irrelevant to Israel (though I sometimes think their fixation on Iran as the origin of all evil is pretty similar to the PNAC obsession with Saddam Hussein), but the US and its allies were making terrible mistakes long before the buildup to the Iraq war. The first was the mass surveillance and oppression unleashed in the United States on Arab Americans and Arab immigrants and eventually anybody wearing a turban, without regard to religion or origin, amounting to the criminalization of an entire faith group in defiance of the 14th Amendment right to equal protection. The invasion of Afghanistan soon afterwards was a doubling down in this ethos of collective punishment—failing to target the actual Qa'eda perpretrators in their mountain redoubt and attacking an entire country, bringing down its government, instead, and launching a completely unnecessary 20-year war.

Israel denies having any idea of collective punishment (as did the W. Bush administration), but the extreme violence and cruelty of their behavior belies this, as does Netanyahu's refusal to entertain Hamas proposals for hostage release in the weeks before the ground invasion began on October 27. The intransigence displayed by the prime minister and IDF has indeed made Israel less secure. The corrupt and reactionary Hamas organization, which had a public approval rating of 36% in Gaza in polling released October 6, now has majority support in Gaza and the West Bank, where serious fighting is taking place, abetted by armed Jewish settlers in the West Bank who are no less terrorist than the Muslim terrorists are. Israel is losing such friends as it has in the neighborhood, notably in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and of course among Democrats in the United States, where a genuine revolution has been taking place. And EU, US, and UK are becoming less secure too:

• Our governments’ current policies weaken their moral standing and undermine their ability to stand up for freedom, justice, and human rights globally and weaken our efforts to rally international support for Ukraine and to counter malign actions by Russia, China and Iran...

Shoutout, on that point, to President Joe Biden, who has consistently articulated most of these points, most recently in his welcome executive order placing sanctions on the terroristic behavior of some West Bank settlers, as Jonathan Katz writes

behavior that sounds like the stories my grandparents told about the Cossacks who attacked their family shtetls in the Russian Pale of Settlement: driving into the Palestinian hamlet of Susiya on a tractor and, according to the New York Times, “participated in the destruction of olive trees, crops and water wells, prompting residents to flee the village.” 

He continues to believe nothing can be gained by his threatening to cut off Israel's access to US weaponry unless he has the means to carry it out, using the word "genocide", or publicly attacking Netanyahu, but continues to work assiduously for the things that might do some good to the situation: the cessation of hostilities (he won't call it a "cease-fire"), the delivery of fuel, water, food, and medicine to the Gazan population, the freeing of hostages, and the establishment at long last of the long-promised Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, goals largely shared by the international authors of today's Declaration:

• Hold Israel, like all actors, accountable to international humanitarian and human rights standards applied elsewhere and to forcefully respond to attacks against civilians, as we are doing in our support to the Ukrainian people; this includes demanding immediate and full implementation of the recent order of the International Court of Justice;
• Use all leverage available - including a halt to military support -  to secure a lasting ceasefire and full humanitarian access in Gaza and a safe release of all hostages; and
• Develop a strategy for lasting peace that includes a secure Palestinian state and guarantees for Israel’s security, so that an attack like 7 October and an offensive on Gaza never happen again.

Stress on the "international", it's not something Biden can do by himself.