On Monday, a plastic water bottle washed up on a beach in Gaza, half filled with red lentils. Nestled among the pulses was a handwritten note which read: “Forgive us, dear brothers. This is all we are able to do.”
The bottle likely originated in Egypt, where scores of families have poured dried foods into empty containers and launched them into the Mediterranean, in a bid to symbolically pierce Israel’s monthslong blockade of vital aid into Gaza.
The simplicity of the gesture—a small quantity of grain dispatched in the most rudimentary of vessels—draws a contrast with the technologically dominant Israeli state, a U.S.-backed nuclear power deploying the most advanced weaponry against a weak and captive population, nearly half of whom are children. Moreover, the sender’s expression of both solidarity and helplessness captures well the mood of an outraged regional and global public, reckoning with its powerlessness in the face of the accumulating moral depravity in Gaza.
The injustice in Gaza has taken on the shape of Matryoshka dolls. In the context of an unprecedented military campaign widely accepted as amounting to genocide, itself nested within a brutalizing and unlawful 75-year occupation, encased within a larger ideology of racial superiority, Israel has now systematically weaponized hunger against 2.2 million civilians. In July, 63 people died from Israel’s enforced starvation. Alongside, more than 1,000 men, women, and children have been shot dead by Israeli forces while seeking food at the few remaining aid sites.
Fresh out of reasoned arguments, Israeli leaders are left invoking Hamas‘ attack on October 7 as justification for their own crimes. On Tuesday, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar insisted that Israel was not to blame for what he would only concede were “tough conditions” in Gaza. “Who is responsible for this war?” he put to a roomful of journalists. “Hamas. Hamas initiated the war with its October 7th massacre. Hamas is responsible for the war’s continuation.”
Similarly, when the Likud official Michael Kleiner was pressed about Israel’s bombardment and blockade, he said, “My complaint is against people in Europe who don’t support us and don’t put their finger on the real party to blame, the one who started the war. [Without] October 7th, not one single baby in Gaza would have been harmed.”
But this position is morally and legally indefensible. In international law, as in the just war traditions of almost all civilizations, there is a clear separation between the legality of going to war in the first place (jus ad bellum), and the legality of how a war is conducted once it starts (jus in bello). Even if Israel’s long occupation is bracketed and it is accepted that Hamas began the war on October 7, that reality should have no bearing whatsoever on how Israel can prosecute its response. The purpose of jus in bello, or international humanitarian law, is to limit the suffering in war, no matter who started it.
Moreover, summoning the horrors of October 7 only brings into sharper focus the scale of Israel’s atrocities. It is precisely because October 7 was so terrible that what Israel has wrought in Gaza is intolerable. The murder of 1,200 people, including 36 children, in a surprise attack by a terrorist group was an abominable crime. By extension, the slaughter of 60,000 people, including at least 14,000 children, and the imposition of manmade famine, in a pre-meditated campaign by a US-allied democracy, is many more times as criminal.
After 21 months of medieval destruction in Gaza, and after the worst-case scenario of famine has already been realized, the international community is finally groping for a response. The European Commission has proposed to partially suspend Israel from its flagship research funding initiative. Brazil has withdrawn from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. For G7 states like Britain and France, the central line of effort is promising to officially recognize a Palestinian state at the U.N. in September.
Acknowledging Palestinian self-determination is an overdue and essential symbolic step. However, it is unclear how the lightening rod of Palestinian statehood will end the daily massacres in Gaza or reverse the ongoing famine, particularly as Israel remains both defiant and cosseted by the U.S. Alone, the recognition of Palestinian sovereignty will surely represent cold comfort to the mothers rendered bystanders as their infants waste from hunger, to the famished civilians who will be shot by Israeli snipers while queuing for food, or to the children who will be murdered, maimed, or orphaned by Israeli bombs in the coming hours, days, and weeks.
The celebrated Lebanese composer and playwright Ziad Rahbani, son of the iconic singer Fairuz, died suddenly on July 26. Among his most famous lines, from the play Bennesba Libukra Chou, is the urgent question: “They say tomorrow will be better. But what about today?”
Dr. Alia Brahimi is a non-resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs and the author of Jihad and Just War in the War on Terror (Oxford University Press).
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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