Moreover, one party is deliberately raising the civilian death toll: Hamas. “Yahya Sinwar has resisted pressure to cut a ceasefire-and-hostages deal with Israel. Behind his decision, messages the Hamas military leader in Gaza has sent to mediators show, is a calculation that more fighting — and more Palestinian civilian deaths — work to his advantage,” the Wall Street Journal reports. That’s right: The goal is civilian deaths. “Sinwar in a message urged his comrades in Hamas’s political leadership outside Gaza not to make concessions and instead to push for a permanent end to the war. High civilian casualties would create worldwide pressure on Israel, Sinwar said.”
Most recently, the Israel Defense Forces’ daring operation that rescued four Israeli hostages held for more than eight months provided new context for the war. The hostages were rescued from ostensibly civilian apartment buildings. The Times of Israel reported, “At 11:00 a.m. the order was given to the Yamam and Shin Bet officers to raid two multistory buildings in Nuseirat, where Hamas was holding the hostages.” The report continued, “[Noa] Argamani was held by Hamas guards alone in the home of a Palestinian family, while the other three hostages were held at a separate home, also with guards. According to the IDF, Hamas pays such families to hold the hostages in their houses.” (Reports that one hostage was held in the home of an Al Jazeera journalist were “stridently denied” by the Qatari news network.) Civilians were killed during the raid, but the U.S. government has yet to confirm the number, nor do we know whether the dead included the hostage takers and minders.
The hostages’ location requires some rethinking of how we assess Israel’s conduct of the war and how to count and classify casualties.
Hamas committed war crimes on Oct.7 by killing, raping and abducting civilians. It has continued to commit war crimes by holding civilians hostage and, again, by treating them inhumanely. And in making military targets of civilian homes by turning them into hostage cells, Hamas has again committed war crimes. Any civilian death is regrettable, but in this scenario, Hamas is solely responsible for the casualties resulting from the rescue mission.
The rescue certainly raises troubling questions about the degree to which civilians are aiding and abetting terrorists (either voluntarily or by force). To the extent civilians become participants — including hostage-holding — they lose the protection of international law. In evaluating whether Israeli’s actions comply with international law and in counting civilian casualties, we therefore must know whether and to what degree they have became combatants and adjuncts to the terrorists. Until we do, the civilian casualty figures are uninformative.
Finally, many news reports labeled a protest outside the White House last weekend as “pro-Palestinian” or “pro-Gaza.” Really? It included explicit tributes to Hamas and unabashed antisemitic messages. NBC News reported:
“We don’t want no two state, we’re taking back ’48,” some protesters chanted, referring to the 1948 war that led to the establishment of the state of Israel.
A group of protesters also yelled, “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here.” …
A handful of protesters wore green headbands that appeared to be similar to those worn by members of Hamas.
One protester wearing the headband said that it was “Hamas’ one,” though the protester said he does not speak Arabic and was not sure what it said. When asked if he supported Hamas, the protester, who would not give his name, said that he “wouldn’t say supporter, I would say maybe sympathizer.” …
Multiple statues in Lafayette Square across from the White House were vandalized during the protest with spray paint, graffiti and painted red handprints. Protesters attached signs reading slogans such as “Hands off Rafah! Stop the genocide!” to statues. Some graffitied slogans such as “free Gaza,” “kill pigs” and “f— pigs” on the statues.
Social media posts showed demonstrators chanting, “Hezbollah, Hezbollah, kill another Zionist now.” Video circulated of marchers bearing a banner that read: “Jihad of Victory or Martyrdom.” Where is the condemnation from those claiming to pursue human rights for all and who deny antisemitic motivations?
The bottom line: Israel has to answer for any noncompliance with international law and inadequate measures to shield civilians and facilitate humanitarian aid. However, lost in the shrieking at Biden and Israel is a recognition that Hamas sparked the war with a brutal attack, is responsible for civilians killed during the hostage rescue, and has committed a grave legal and moral wrong in erasing the line between civilians and combatants. Hamas wants more civilians to die. It’s incumbent on Israel’s harshest critics to dissociate themselves from Hamas enablers and antisemites. If not, they have no claim to the moral high ground.
Distinguished person of the week
Retired federal judge David S. Tatel’s “Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice,” recounts his work as a civil rights lawyer and his 30 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, as well as his challenges coping with blindness. The book has received added attention for its straight talk about the Supreme Court.
The Post reports that Tatel castigates the Supreme Court for “chipping away at past precedent, most notably overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022 and restricting the use of race in college admissions last year.” (Tatel retired partially out of disgust for, in his words, “a Supreme Court that seemed to hold in such low regard the principles to which I’ve dedicated my life.”)
Tatel does not hold back. “It was one thing to follow rulings I believed were wrong when they resulted from a judicial process I respected,” he writes. “It was quite another to be bound by the decisions of an institution I barely recognized.” He also calls for term limits for justices.
Our democracy cannot survive the collapse of the Supreme Court’s legitimacy if jurists and former jurists maintain a conspiracy of silence. Both retired and active judges need to be candid about the crisis at the Supreme Court. (Retired justice Stephen G. Breyer exhibited little candor in his memoir.) Jurists have the credibility to demand that the justices abide by mandatory ethics guidelines that bind all lower courts. State judges and retired judges can go further to urge the justices to cease their partisan harangues, respect precedent and refrain from cherry-picking history and misrepresenting facts.
With approval of the Supreme Court stuck around an all-time low, Congress and the American people need to push for reform. But judges are uniquely able to elevate and guide the debate. Tatel provides a perfect role model.
One of my favorite genres is historical fiction. If the author has done her homework, she can illuminate hidden corners of history and rescue important figures from obscurity. Here are a few recent finds:
“The Berlin Letters: A Cold War Novel”: Katherine Reay weaves a fascinating tale of a family divided by the Berlin Wall as she explores the intellectual and moral trauma of living in an authoritarian regime. The characters are fictional, but the setting and divisions were all too real.
“A Shadow in Moscow: A Cold War Novel”: Also from Reay, we get the story of two women and multiple generations involved in cat-and-mouse espionage, which often requires deceiving their own family. Spies’ personal betrayals and emotional isolation are as fascinating as the superpower politics.
“March”: Geraldine Brooks’s “sequel” to “Little Women” imagines Mr. March’s Civil War experience. Brooks portrays in horrible detail the plantation system as well as the mental and physical costs of war.
“Finding Margaret Fuller”: Allison Pataki traces the life of Fuller — a member of the Transcendentalists, a close confidante of Ralph Waldo Emerson and David Thoreau, a feminist, a glass-ceiling-breaking publisher, an author and a foreign journalist. If not for Fuller’s gender, she would be as well known as her male peers.
“The Women”: Kristin Hannah portrays the harrowing experience of women nurses in Vietnam — and the emotional consequences the war had on women whose service was ignored or even denied.
“A Death in Harlem”/“Gone Missing in Harlem”: Karla F.C. Holloway sets crime thrillers in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance while revealing the struggles of neighborhood’s first Black police officer. These are deft accounts of race and class.
Every other Wednesday at noon, I host a Q&A with readers. Submit a question for the next one.
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