Hamas’ murder of Jewish civilians in the Kfar Aza kibbutz on Oct. 7 was “without doubt a war crime,” the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen concluded in his report from southern Israel this week. What, Bowen then asked, about the lives of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, who now face bombing and siege — and possibly an imminent ground war — as Israel retaliates?
Bowen asked a fundamental wartime question. In response, the Israeli commander in Kfar Aza, Major General Itai Veruv, gave him an impeccable and restrained reply. “You fight with [your] values and you keep your values at the same time,” he replied. “I know we will be very aggressive and very strong, but we will keep our morals and values.”
Let us hope so. It is difficult to be confident. Israel’s moral case for defending itself against the slaughter last weekend is rock solid. The general said the right things. Yet modern warfare has found multiple ways of putting civilians in harm’s way. An almost medieval siege of the sort now being enforced on Gaza, depriving it of power and water, or the gunfire and shelling of the urban battle that might begin there at any time, could kill innocent civilians too. So, in particular, could a war from the skies. Precision bombing is a semantic contradiction, all the more so in a densely populated place such as Gaza.
The need to cause as little harm as possible to civilians is one of the laws of modern warfare. These laws have evolved over centuries. They have roots in the Old Testament, the Mahabharata and pronouncements by seventh-century Islamic leaders. The laws took the form of military codes and then, later, of international legal conventions. They covered topics such as appropriate resort to force, use of particularly lethal weaponry, protections for medical and humanitarian agencies, the treatment of prisoners, respect for civilians and the safety of women.
Respect for civilians is intrinsic to soldiering. In 1945, the US World War II general Douglas MacArthur called this “the very essence and reason for his [the soldier’s] being ... a sacred trust.” An exaggeration, perhaps. Yet in spite of terrible civilian suffering in that global war, MacArthur’s words voiced a widely accepted aspiration. In warfare, every effort should be taken to protect civilian life.
The cumulative effect was slow, incomplete and uneven, to put it mildly. Abuses and war crimes continue to this day. Yet the behavioral restraint that all such laws express and require has nevertheless saved many lives, preserved communities and helped to uphold truth and justice. As Anne Applebaum says in an essay in The Atlantic: “These documents have influenced real behavior in the real world.”
Hamas’ attacks on Israel, like the horrific killings in Kfar Aza and elsewhere, could not have been more contemptuous of this culture. Those who ordered and carried them out were trashing ancient norms, many with deep religious roots. Yet that does not mean those who retaliate are entitled to act in the same manner toward civilians on the other side. Veruv clearly knows that. He is right. Israel has been atrociously wronged. Yet Israel and its allies remain bound to uphold their humane principles.
Rules like the laws of war are sometimes dismissed as naive and impractical. Some culture warriors might denigrate them as luxury beliefs — Tell that to those who have survived because of them. Ask those who live in fear in lawless lands what they would prefer. Laws of war are part of the world’s imperfect networks of rules, norms and values, which protects human beings from anarchy. They attempt to describe how the world should work, especially in dangerous and conflicted times. They sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. Yet they are better than no networks and no rules.
Some of the rules — such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN in 1948 — are rooted in the “never again” mood of World War II’s aftermath. More than 70 years later, the world has moved on, and that determinedly reforming mood has inevitably slackened. This comes at a high price for our times. The rules are becoming less effective.
It is not just the Middle East. Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine without embarrassment about any conventions it was brushing aside when it did so. Russia continues to target and attack civilian targets without shame. Yet western democracies are not exempt from thinking that the rules do not apply to them. Twenty years ago, the US and the UK invaded Iraq without UN support and on dubious legal grounds. If Donald Trump is re-elected to the US presidency next year, rules of every kind would be cast to the wind.
The respect for international rules has weakened in the UK too. That is partly a result of Brexit. Compare the Strategic Defence and Security Review published by former British prime minister David Cameron’s government less than eight years ago. This contained no fewer than 30 references to the UK’s strong commitment to rules-based networks. “We sit at the heart of the rules-based international order,” the review stated proudly.
Contrast that with 2021, when then-British prime minister Boris Johnson’s government published its post-Brexit “integrated review” of security, defense and foreign policy, those 30 references to the rules-based order had dwindled to ... none at all. The updated version of the review published by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in March rows back a little by saying that a rules-based system is “no longer sufficient” but that the UK is keen to uphold international law. Yet the commitment that marked 20th-century Britain is draining away.
This has wider causes than Brexit alone. A long tradition of state secrecy shows up once more in the UK’s new law ending Troubles-era legal cases in Northern Ireland. It shows again in the shutting down of investigations into allegations against UK special forces in Afghanistan. It shows in the UK’s eagerness to ship asylum seekers to Rwanda without properly examining their claims to refugee status. It also shows in the calls from the Conservative right for the UK to walk away from the European human rights process.
The reality was always that an international order based on agreed and observed rules was an aspiration falling short of fulfillment. The system lacked symmetry and was based as much on power bargains as rules. Yet the process of gradual but imperfect convergence around the universal rules set out after 1945 that seemed to accelerate in the early part of the post-Cold War era has now, in the era of Trump, Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), gone into reverse. The horror of what happened in Kfar Aza on Oct. 7 is a consequence of that much wider international failure and, even more tragically, a driver of it.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist.
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