War Crimes for Social Justice
Examining how "anti-imperialist" leftist commentators justify atrocities.
Gaza is in flames, the streets of surrounding Israeli communities are soaked with blood, politicians are pounding the table calling for more war, and celebrities are rapidly scrambling to figure out which side gives the better value for their solidarity virtue signaling. Didn't you miss the Middle East being in flames and dominating all news coverage? I didn't, but what it does reinforce is the fact that a diversity of opinions will always include dishonest ones. To reinforce my message from the last newsletter article, I am not going to be able to remain objective and unbiased on this topic, even more so now that one of my cousins lost his daughter in a Hamas rocket attack in Sederot, Israel last Thursday.
There are a number of journalists that over the past five years, despite previously exhibiting shameless partisanship on political and international issues, did laudable work on a number of key issues. I would point to Glenn Greenwald in particular for his work on journalistic coups like the Edward Snowden leaks and Matt Taibbi for the Twitter files. Having an opinion on a particular topic, no matter how wrong it is, does not mean one cannot speak about other issues. But with the latest outbreak of violence in the Middle East, one that across the board has been correctly defined as a Hamas assault against Israel that included deliberate civilian casualties, I have heard the repetition of the same wrong story by the same wrong people that I've heard my entire life: "open air concentration camp", "ethnic cleansing", "apartheid". All of these are epithets that have been used by pro-Palestine advocates that, whatever their motivation is, are committed to deflecting condemnations of verified acts of barbaric cruelty by blaming the Israelis, America, or world institutions.
Fully autonomous well armed concentration camps
One figure who has been widely hosted by the pro-Palestine media is Norman Finkelstein, a former professor of political science and history at NYU and DePaul University, whose entire career has been bathed in controversy over various stances that he has taken. In 2000 his book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering created an outcry over how he alleged that the tragedy of the Holocaust has been exploited for political gain and even financial benefit. In the years since its publication, much of the book's subject matter has become part of the public debate over who can or cannot invoke the Holocaust, Nazis, Adolf Hitler, or related topics in order to make rhetorical arguments in the present day. Case in point, Holocaust museums rebuked those that analogized COVID19 restrictions and vaccine mandates to Nazi era laws.
Finkelstein's greatest device has been to allege that using the Holocaust is a guilt mechanism that is used to stifle criticism of Israel as well as other Jewish figures. But in the context of Palestinian struggles against Israel he has often turned the switch and used the analogy with the exact type of emotional blackmail as those he usually criticizes. On October 9 he appeared on The Jimmy Dore Show and spoke to guest host Craig Jardula and Kurt Metzger. He used the description of Gaza as a "concentration camp" several times, often adding the qualifier that it is an "open air" concentration camp. As it so happens when it comes to allegations of concentration camps elsewhere, such as in China's Xinjiang region, Jardula says these are "CIA talking points" meant to manufacture consent for a future US intervention in Taiwan, even though these are actual camps fully run by Chinese government staff and forcibly indoctrinate Muslim Uyghurs into Chinese culture and lifestyle while performing forced labour in its cotton industry.
Finkelstein has also made such comparisons on his X (Twitter) and Substack accounts as well as to the Turkish state-controlled English news site TRT World. Often he has added references to the Nat Turner slave rebellion in order to justify the gratuitous cruelty of the "escaped inmates" when they burst out of Gaza. The core reasons for this analogy are these: the extremely high population density of Gaza, its large proportion of children as part of the general population, the lack of freedom of movement in and out of the territory, the unemployment rate, and more. He invokes his own parents' experiences at WWII concentration camps as well as the statements of Red Cross officials and Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling in order to back up this label
But citing his own family history and a fellow academic are not evidence. Definitions matter here, so what is a "concentration camp"? Such places existed not only during the Holocaust but before that in South Africa during the Boer Wars, Cuba under Spanish rule, and colonial Libya. The term simply means "a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard". Those guarding the camp seek to separate the inmates from the outside world, often as a means to tamp down a rebellion. The connotation of a concentration camp does not mean that the inmates are meant to be killed. In the Holocaust only a handful of the concentration camps were for extermination out of almost one thousand total camps and subcamps, and many victims of the Holocaust died by other means, such as being shot by execution squads. However, in popular parlance due to the infamy of those camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka many are under the incorrect impression that all concentration camps were death camps.
During the Holocaust one can also add that inmates had no medical care and were used as slave labour. Children in particular, unlike in Gaza where they make up 44% of the population, were marked for killing if they were under the age of 12. Adolescents were used as slave labour and worked to death like parents and older relatives. This was the official policy of the German SS, because an inmate was only needed alive so long as he or she had value as forced labour.
Still, what if Finkelstein adheres to the true definition of the Gaza Strip being an internment camp for Palestinians? This ignores another basic reality of life in any of the concentration camps of WWII or other conflicts: That the people detained were under constant guard by their hostile overlords and had no means to defend themselves. In the Holocaust camps, there were sporadic attempts by inmates to resist the Germans such as the 1943 Sobibor Uprising that led to the escape of 300 Jewish and Soviet prisoners from the camp in eastern Poland. However this was not accomplished, as in Gaza with weapons that were smuggled in by foreign powers or manufactured in house, but through surreptitiously killing SS guards on duty and stealing their weapons. These people were certain that they were to be killed by the Germans at some point, whether by forced labour until they die or extermination as Sobibor was one of the few death camps.
There are many elements of life that are present in Gaza that would have never occurred in any concentration camp over history: Conventional weapons and earth moving equipment, its own TV stations and newspapers like Al-Aqsa TV that encourage resistance against Israel, and schools at all levels including the four colleges and universities, many of them founded during the period of Israeli military control. Finkelstein has every right to empathize with the suffering of the people of Gaza, but he cannot denounce everyone else as exploiting the Holocaust for political purposes and then turn around and do it himself like he is the bearer of the ring.
Targets of Opportunity
In a well-publicized appearance on the show Timcast IRL, pro-Palestine author and filmmaker Max Blumenthal (The Greyzone) attempted to put the civilian atrocities into context when challenged by host Tim Poll and co-host Phil Labonte about Hamas's choice to directly attack the Supernova music festival at Re'im, an Israeli kibbutz (communal farm) in the Negev Desert close to the fence separating Gaza and Israel when they could have easily focused their wrath only on the military targets that were only meters away from there. His explanation was this:
"That appears to have happened is a military base was targeted these this this music festival became a target of opportunity. . . which is you know unfortunate and maybe gut-wrenching. There's no way to justify it. And here's what the objective of these fighter(s) -- one of the main objectives -- which is not really discussed properly in our media and it doesn't matter if you support Israel or Palestine here. You have to acknowledge this objective: It's to get as many Israeli citizens [my emphasis] into the hands of the authorities in Gaza to negotiate, because Israel is holding thousands and thousands of Palestinian captives in its prison. There is one guy named Khader Adnan who died this this may after a three month three-month hunger strike."
The person Blumenthal is referring to was a spokesperson for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Organization, an organization whose mission of a Jihad against Israeli at all costs had started in the early 1980s as a reaction to the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt and the subsequent murder of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat by its Egyptian parent group. Khader Adnan also had not been a long-term prisoner in Israel, but rather had been arrested numerous times for his connection to PIJ's terror network in the West Bank. Like its Egyptian parent organization, PIJ seeks the abolition of secular governments in Muslim lands and their replacement with Islamic theocracies.
Kidnapping Children
Another issue where Blumenthal attempted to downplay the impact of the original attack was in responding to Phil Labonte's statements regarding Hamas's kidnapping of children to hold as hostages. "I've watched Israel kidnap children from their beds in occupied villages", responded Blumenthal without missing a beat. To what is Blumenthal referring? One possible example was the 2014 staging of Israeli forces within the home of the Wahdan family in the Gaza Strip during Operation Protective Edge that he described in an interview with Greenwald, calling the Wahdan family human shields. Later, as the Israelis left their homes the Wahdans were told they would be safe, but were eventually killed by shelling on Aug. 8, 2014. Civilian deaths caused by Israel should not be excused, notwithstanding any of the explanations such as terror threats in the area or human error, but this was not terrorism or the use of the family as human shields as Blumenthal states. For one thing, they weren't announced as hostages or ransomed off, as is done by Hamas and other terror groups with kidnapped Israelis.
The other possible incident was the July 2014 abduction and gruesome murder of Mohamed Abu Khdeir, a 16 year-old Palestinian boy from East Jerusalem by Jewish assailants in revenge for the killing of three Jewish yeshiva students a month earlier. He discussed this in a 2015 interview with Guernica magazine. It was these incidents that are widely credited with causing the flare-up of violence that became Protective Edge. There are three obvious differences between this case and the kidnapping of the Jewish children into Gaza.
1. Abu Khdeir's assailants were three Israeli civilians, two of them minors along with two further accomplices with knowledge of the abduction, and were acting on their own behalf and not on behalf of Israel or a terror group. While Abu Khdeir was an innocent victim, his abduction as a 16 year-old cannot be placed in the same category as those of small children and even infants as young as nine months.
2. While the abduction and murder did occur, it was done on the street near Abu Khdeir's home and not from his bed.
3. The Israeli Police investigated and arrested Abu Khdeir's murderers and they were all charged, tried and convicted including those that were underage. Two of them received life sentences.
I am not aware of any other incidents similar to what Blumenthal was referring to, however if one were to happen then no doubt the international community would unify in condemnation, especially if they were ransoming off women, children, infants and elderly people like Hamas is intent on doing. Do Israel, or Israeli citizens, commit acts of violence against Palestinian civilians? Yes. The difference is that it is not celebrated and treated as commendable by the media and institutions of Israeli society, and offenders face criminal charges by Israel's legal system whereas their families are compensated financially by the Palestinian government if they are imprisoned in Israel.
This is also not the first time that Max Blumenthal has waved off criticism of Palestinian indoctrination and use of children as combatants and the targeting of Israeli children by Palestinian terrorists. In 2013 he was interviewed by The Real News Network's Paul Jay and analogized such atrocities to the justified attacks by Native Americans on frontier homesteads and by anti-apartheid ANC terrorists against white South African farmers. This was juxtaposed with his criticism of Israeli society for being militaristic in his book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. But that is the whole point of his worldview, as he said to Labonte "for me it's about justice and injustice. . . one side is more powerful than the other and [Israel] has been abusing them historically". With this type of statement Blumenthal is revealing that "human rights" is not the determining standard for whether an act of war is right or wrong. Rather, because Israel is the oppressor and Palestine is the oppressed there is no level of brutality that he will not excuse as a result of his ideological anchoring. Would he respond differently if Hamas somehow deployed biological weapons, or there were nuclear weapons deployed? Based on his standard that is unlikely.
Democracy was the solution to Hamas
Finkelstein made one of the most absurd prognostications ever by a pro-Palestine figure during his discussion with Craig Jardula regarding the origins and governance style of Hamas, in which he lamented that the economic blockade leveled on Hamas after its victory in the Palestinian Authority's January 2006 legislative election denied them the ability to have the chance to prove their ability to govern without Israeli or international interference in Palestinian internal affairs. Finkelstein's hypothesis was that if they would have ended up being incompetent everything would have turned out fine. Hamas would have been voted out in the next election!
Here are his words: "If that economic blockade had not been imposed, and Hamas failed in its leadership responsibilities, presumably it would have been voted out. Hamas would have been voted out in the next election. The Democratic process was never allowed to the Palestinian people." Finkelstein had earlier stated correctly that Hamas's mandate is owed to the internationally observed free and fair elections in Gaza and the West Bank that resulted in them winning an outright majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council, and its candidate Ismail Haniyeh being selected as the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority government. Finkelstein also supposes that Hamas's trajectory after the victory may have eventually led to direct negotiations with Israel: It is true that up until the election of 2006 Hamas didn't recognize Israel as a state. However once it came into power it was . . .undergoing an evolution which quite possibly . . . it quite possibly would have resulted in a leadership willing to negotiate with Israel. They were never given the chance."
Finkelstein's hedged speculation about squandered potential for Hamas engaging in peace negotiations, as well as that they would have permitted and honoured free elections after having come to power in one is an exercise in delusion. We do have a track record for reference, and that includes the June 26, 2006 Hamas attack that resulted in the kidnapping of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, who was held captive for five years. The conditions of Shalit's release had nothing to do with lifting the Gaza blockade, but rather the release of Palestinian security prisoners. Finkelstein also forgets that a central plank of Hamas's campaign was the rejection of the peace process and recognition of Israel. Going back on this position would have been betraying their voters, and likely would have led to a further split where more militant Hamas partisans would abandon the group and form an even more hardline Islamist movement like PIJ. Another factor that mitigated against Hamas moderating its stance was the fact that neither Hamas nor any of the other terror groups ceased their armed activities before or after the election and in fact they continued their terror activities as if nothing had changed.
The other issue that he raised, that Hamas could have been dealt with electorally, omits several events of that period. First of all, as he correctly points out, democracy was foisted upon the Palestinian government of Mahmoud Abbas by the Bush Administration. The last previous time that Palestinians had gone to the polls was 1996 when Yasser Arafat's ruling Fatah party essentially conducted rigged elections meant to shore up their mandate to continue negotiations started in 1993 with Israel. International observers like the Carter Center led by former Pres. Jimmy Carter helped ensure that 2006 was different, but contrary to their hopes Hamas overwhelmingly won after initially it had been speculated that they would refuse to participate. After the election Hamas had made overtures to form a government of national unity with Fatah, even though they already had a majority. While Haniyeh was nominally the head of government in the PA, control of the security forces remained with the president, Abbas. The two factions engaged in a tit-for-tat campaign of intimidation and violence against one another that culminated in June 2007 with the launching of a coup d'etat by Hamas forces in Gaza. Fatah forces were completely overwhelmed in a grueling battle that included atrocities such as firing in hospitals and summary executions.
Hamas in its defense called this a defensive strike, speculating that Fatah and Israel were conspiring with the CIA to overthrow Haniyeh and impose a form of martial law in Gaza. In either case, Palestinian rulership became effectively divided between Gaza under Hamas and the West Bank under Fatah. The smooth and efficient execution of Hamas's coup in Gaza suggest that it had been planning this contingency for some time, and following its success Gaza's institutions of government were purged of Fatah loyalists who were replaced by those of Hamas. The brand of justice exercised by Hamas since then has been completely anti-democratic, including arresting alleged collaborators and summarily executing them without due process and appeals.
If he was consistent, Finkelstein would apply the realistic view on democracy in the Middle East, which is that it is not embraced by Arab and Muslim societies as a whole. Democracy is extremely rare, and even more rarely functional, in that region. But if Finkelstein is not satisfied with the example of Hamas's actions in 2007, he has only to look further north. Lebanon has a nominally democratic electoral system where different religious sects are assigned positions such as president (Christian), prime minister (Sunni Muslim), and speaker of parliament (Shia Muslim) in a tenuous power sharing arrangement.. It is fraught with sectarian violence between communities and within them, including having a president and prime minister assassinated. In the 1970s, starting after Palestinian guerrillas made it a base for their operations against Israel, Lebanon devolved into civil war as other religious communities armed up to defend themselves specifically because the Lebanese state and army were unwilling to do so. In 1989 factions came together to end the civil war after 14 bloody years, and all Lebanese militias disbanded or merged into the army, with the exception of the Iranian-backed Shiite Hizbullah movement, the PLO guerrilla faction remnants, and Israel's allied South Lebanese Army militia (which disbanded in 2000 with the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon). Since then Hizbullah's forces have evolved to become more sophisticated and run a parallel state in southern Lebanon and have effective veto power on the policies of the official government in Beirut. In 2008 they even occupied West Beirut in defiance of the government, burned the TV station affiliated with the ruling political party, and besieged the homes of rival politicians. This is supposedly As Finkelstein knows the USA has failed to impose democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan by force, so why would Hamas abide by it simply because they were initially elected through such a process? Hizbullah doesn't let that stop them. These are facts that he either knows but ignores out of ideological commitment, or does not due to his blindness to reality.
Everything in moderation, bigot!
A major lesson that Americans learned in Vietnam was that allowing a conflict to fester can often lead to a bigger quagmire and a greater price to pay in human lives and violence. Israel learned that first in Lebanon and now in Gaza. Some believed that disengaging with Gaza in 2005 by removing all Israeli settlers would allow for the terror threat there to be contained. Instead it has became much more potent. Far from being a ragtag gang of refugees and street children, Hamas is a well-organized, regimented military force with land, sea, and as we now know air capabilities albeit not to the degree as the IDF. In the midst of all of this, pro-Palestine supporters like Al-Jazeera have condemned Israel's "disproportionate retaliatory attacks" against Hamas and Gaza. In response to this, I want to raise a point: If there is a conflict between two parties where one of them regards the one as irredeemable, or "illegitimate" as most Israel opponents see it, then there is no level of retaliation that can be deemed as proportionate. If one does not believe in someone else's right to merely exist, he cannot then accept their right to act. Piers Morgan ran into that issue this past week when he asked Palestinian comedian Bassem Youssef what he would think is a "proportionate" response and got no answer. So complaints about disproportionality are like putting a Post-It note with a mild insult on the corner of a wall covered in vulgar graffiti.