Rights and Wrongs

This morning, Reuters reported that the Israeli government showed no signs of scaling back its offensive, in spite of a UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. In the article, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is quoted as saying in a statement that "Israel has acted, is acting, and will act only according to its considerations, the security needs of its citizens, and its right to self defense."

Now the exact details and order of truce-breaking are still fuzzy. Israel most definitely invaded Gaza in November, killing 6 Hamas gunmen, The Guardian reported. Israel has said repeatedly that Hamas has habitually broken the ceasefire by continuing to fire rockets into Southern Israel. And for its part, Hamas maintains that since Israel failed to lift the blockade of Gaza, as promised, they invalidated the ceasefire from the beginning, making Qassam rocket attacks justified.

Much has been written about the vast military and technological unevenness of the "war" between Israel and Hamas. Popular opinion here is that Hamas is firing nothing significantly more dangerous than hommemade fireworks, and in return entire blocks are obliterated in Gaza. While loss of human life should not be measured in some grim utilitarian math equation, the numbers do blow a hole in the Israeli narrative. Hamas rockets have killed 22 people in the past 8 years, whereas the Israeli military has killed over ten times that many children in the past two weeks. Thirty times as many Palestinians have died in the most recent Israeli offensive. As has been pointed out, Hamas' lesser scale of casualties is probably more attributable to lack of capable weaponry than lack of trying, but the numbers still seem horrendously lopsided. News accounts of attacks in Israel cite people being treated for shock, not buried.

Reading between the lines in recent news reports on the bombing of the UN school that killed over 40 has brought several disturbing questions to the fore - most of which remain unanswered. John Ging, director of the United Nations relief agency, was quoted in the New York Times as saying there were no militants inside the school. Those taking refuge there were monitored, he said, and presumably registered. Additionally, Ging also said that the Israeli army had been provided with the coordinates of all UN schools and compounds, and such places where identifiably marked. The assurances of caution and pinpoint accuracy also ring hollow from an army that has killed at least three of its own soldiers in friendly fire accidents. And on January 9, UN Relief and Works Agency suspended all aid distribution in Gaza after a driver was killed by tank fire from the IDF.

IDF spokespeople have said that rockets were fired from "inside the school compound" and countered that Hamas deliberately launches military operations from in and near residential and heavily populated areas. The above context brings me to the essential question of this post, what exactly is the right to self defense, and more importantly, what are its limits?

Security concerns are often cited by governments as a reason for action. It's how the US ended up with the PATRIOT Act and Guantanamo, how Hosni Mubarak justifies imprisoning and torturing his own citizens, and how Israel is rationalizing an avalanche of military force against Gaza. While Benjamin Franklin criticizes those who would give up liberties for security, the issue also goes deeper. How many other rights can be trampled on in the name of security? When did that right become the single consideration that trumps all others? There have been times in the United States that I have thought that I would accept less nebulous "guarantees" of my security in exchange for rights of privacy, due process, and even just not having to take my shoes off in the airport (I assure you, there are plenty of such places where people keep their shoes on during security that are not bombed on a daily basis).

As the Red Crescent reports of half-starved children huddled next to the dead bodies of their mothers - 200 meters from an Israeli army checkpoint - and recovering survivors and decomposing corpses from rubble that it was denied access to for days, I wonder how much longer the world will tolerate Israel's inhumane and grotesque treatment of Gazans in the name of its own "self defense." At what point does someone (the UN ideally, but I'm not holding out hope) step in and defend the Palestinians? Will anyone say the because Israel has veritably imprisoned hundreds of thousands off people, and cut off their access to food, water, cooking oil, and medicine, its claim to a "right of self defense" is null and void. Rights are always in conflict, and these competing loyalties have been the subject of philosophers and ethics scholars for ages. But at some point, the world must realize that to bank everything on "security" is both cowardly and ineffective. There must be another way, and Israel, as the Goliath of the situation, must have the courage to seek it.