Tuesday, December 05, 2023
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: The Dream of Peace After the Nightmare
Seth Mandel: The Dream of Peace After the Nightmare
Avi Dabush, of Rabbis for Human Rights, said he still believes in his work but that it’s unrealistic to expect it to bear fruit in Gaza as long as Hamas rules the enclave: “Right now I can’t see any way that we, the communities there and myself and my family, can live with Hamas on the border.”Victor Davis Hanson: Weimar America
There’s a hard-earned realism in those comments that doesn’t surface in the younger, Tel Aviv-based activists profiled by CNN and calling themselves Gen Zayin (Get it? Gen Z?): “The group’s anti-war position won’t be welcomed by most of the Jewish population at this current moment, they say, which is why Gen Zayin members stick up posters in the dead of night and surreptitiously share pamphlets that espouse their anti-war, anti-government manifesto in high schools.” The CNN article also interviews family members of victims and other activists, not just the know-it-all high school manifesto crowd. They, too, speak with anguish of reconciling their desire for peace with their will to continue as before.
There is a very good chance, however, that they will never come any closer to their goal than they were before Oct. 7, when it became tragically clear just how far they had been from it.
The picture we see in our minds of the border communities only contains what’s visible: the nearness, the friendly interaction, the breaking bread, the stillness between rocket alarms, a tense and hopeful status quo maintained by a fence. But that picture is painted by the unseen: surveillance cameras, remote-controlled machine guns, and underground barriers. Hamas used drones to disable the cellular-reliant surveillance and remote-controlled guns. The underground barrier was rendered useless because the terrorists simply bulldozed barricades and drove over the fence.
In other words, what you saw was only a façade. When Hamas made it so that what was visible was all there was, Israel fell victim to an unprecedented massacre followed by widespread Palestinian looting and rioting while Israeli survivors hid in safe rooms. Israeli border security—of which there will be more, not less, going forward—made it possible to believe that one day Israeli border security wouldn’t be needed. I don’t know how many Israelis will be prepared to believe that ever again, no matter what they see when they look out their windows.
For the last 40 years, while Western leftists have naively supported Palestinian terrorists, their governments have appeased terrorist-supporting Middle Eastern governments for very practical reasons. The old subtext to such mollification was that 500-million irate Arab Muslims, and a Middle East with 40 percent of the world’s oil reserves, in realist terms, simply argued against the interests of 10 million Israelis.A Plea to the International Law Community: On De-Humanizing and the October 7th Atrocities
But now there are two new, venomous elements in the matrix.
One is that the racist DEI industry assumes that all intersectional nonwhite communities are victims of white privilege and supremacy. Therefore, as permanently oppressed, they are declared incapable of being racist themselves. And so they can harass with impunity the supposed victimizers—in this case American Jews, who are declared culpable whites.
So the oppressed, according to the DEI bible, cannot be anti-Semitic, though many certainly are. And they apparently cannot be held accountable for their hatred or frequent violence.
Secondly, in the last two decades there has been an epidemic of immigration into Western nations from the Middle East. In often-divided democracies like ours, politicians seek to appease as many pressure groups as possible, whether citizen voters or merely resident demonstrators, to acquire and maintain power.
Such pro-Hamas demonstrators, rah-rahing from a free, prosperous, and secure West, expect no rebuke for their obvious hypocrisy in cheering on an autocratic, dictatorial Hamas that has wrecked the economy of Gaza, shoots dissidents, and allows no free expression. And Middle Eastern guests and immigrants are never reminded that their very demonstrations are predicated on not being physically present in their homelands, where they might be shot for what they say and do freely in the West.
We are on a trajectory similar to that of 1930s Germany.
Every time a student is cornered, harassed, or threatened; a high school mob tries to swarm and harm a teacher; a government spokesperson dismisses such hatred; or American soldiers are targeted by Iranian-fed terrorist organizations; the madness, racism, and anti-Semitism will increase—until it reaches a saturation point of abject violence in our streets.
Once a society mainstreams the values of thuggish brownshirts, and ignores their “from the river to the sea” eliminationist chants and screams of “beat the f—king Jew,” then the next emboldened step is foreordained.
True, most Americans were appalled by October 7 and accept that every nation has the right to defend itself from terrorist killers. Most Americans deplore vicious demonstrators and their calls for violence on behalf of the Hamas death cult. And most Americans want their President to demand the release of American hostages and to deter Iranian-backed terrorists who attack U.S. military personnel in the region.
But unless the public demands that their universities enforce on campus the Bill of Rights and the right to move freely in safety, that police enforce laws against mob violence on America’s streets and in our schools, and that the United States stops greenlighting mass immigration from anti-Western nations and extending student visas to residents of anti-American, terrorist-supporting, and autocratic Middle East regimes, then in suicidal fashion we are headed for a 1930s nightmare.
The paper that I was going to present today addresses cases where there is an apparent contrast between the formal articulation of international law and shared basic moral intuitions. When I initially used the term “common sense” it was in the assumption that we have shared basic moral intuitions. I assumed that we could be consistent with our positions and apply the same academic standards to all cases in good faith regardless of who the parties are. And in fields that deal with a broken world such as jus ad bellum and jus in bello, I assumed an ability to accommodate complexity and contrasting interests that literally involve life and death.
I am currently having significant doubts about whether this is really the case. The reaction to the events of October 7th by so many of our international legal community have left me broken.
Let me give a few examples. In a post published on Opinio Juris on October 10, the author almost celebrated the Hamas atrocities that had occurred 3 days prior.* Not only was there an apparent lack of empathy expressed for the victims of those atrocities or even an acknowledgment of those crimes, the author instead referred to October 7 as a “counter-offensive” and cited Frantz Fanon and Sukarno to justify the events stating that “‘decolonization is always a violent phenomenon’ for the coloniser ‘does not give up their loot easily.’ ״ For the reader to understand their use of the term, “counter-offensive,” the author hyperlinked to an essay that speaks at length in unvarnished celebration of the October 7 attack (e.g., lauding the “spectacular feat … an amazing and highly daring offensive;” an attack that “dealt a heavy blow to the unbearable haughtiness” of the Israeli government and stating, “[t]he Israeli flag was projected on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on the evening of 7 October in a contemptible display of fawning over the state of Israel”).
Sadly, this is not a unique example, but instead is representative of a trend within the academic community in general and within the community of international lawyers in particular. Various academics celebrated the atrocities in various public forums, while others justified the horrible crimes on social media. In a recent post, Opinio Juris published a piece calling for States to act to prevent a potential genocide in Gaza without any reference to the events of October 7 or their perpetrator, Hamas,—not to mention the analysis of those acts under the Genocide Convention. It is no wonder that this author failed to mention the October 7 atrocities, as he had in fact justified it on that day, posting that morning on X: “UNGA Res. A/RES/33/24 on 29 November 1978: ‘Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, particularly armed struggle’.” There were and are, of course, many such posts on X and elsewhere celebrating the atrocities of October 7. But what is notable here is that mainstream international law blogs are willing to publish posts that justify such atrocities without much resistance of the international law community.
How can we truly think of shared moral intuitions if one of the leading international law blogs is willing to publish a post that effectively celebrates the brutal and intentional murder of children, men, and women including holocaust survivors, the raping of women, the destruction of entire communities, and the abduction of more than 200 hostages including children as young as 9-months-old? How can we reconcile the acceptance of such posts and public positions by some members of our community? Are we willing to accept a situation where some human beings do not deserve protection, like my young son Gev, due to the power relations between parties to a conflict?
