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W H Auden put it best when speaking of a cruel and inescapable aspect of military conflict. On the eve of the Second World War, he wrote:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn:
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Anybody thinking about the Israel-Palestinian war in and around Gaza today should keep these lines in mind when answering two questions.
Was it a war crime for Hamas gunmen to massacre Israeli men, women and children when they burst out of Gaza on 7 October? The answer is undoubtedly yes, it was a war crime.
Is it a war crime when Israeli planes bombard Gaza, killing 500 children and 267 women according to the local health authorities? The answer is that this is also a war crime and it does not cease to be one or is somehow excused because of the mass murders committed by Hamas.
Mass bombing
It is this spiral of war crimes which is about to intensify as the Israel Defence Forces demand that 1.1 million Palestinians evacuate in 24 hours the northern section of the tiny Gaza Strip – as if it was the size of Florida and the southern end of it is safe, even if it can be reached down rubble strewn streets.
What we are witnessing is an act of communal punishment of Palestinians in which trained and organised Hamas members will be the least affected.
All air forces, and not just that of Israel, lie about the murderous nature of mass bombing campaigns. They claim to hit targets with precision, but do not admit that this is irrelevant if they do not know where the enemy is located so they hit everything.
Israel says that its planes and artillery have hit 500 Hamas and Islamic Jihad related targets, absurdly claiming to have precise information on the whereabouts of the enemy, though we know that a week ago this same Israeli intelligence failed to spot preparations for a massive Hamas offensive.
Palestinians in Gaza are now likely to share the fate of civilians trapped in Mosul in northern Iraq in 2016/17 when the Iraqi army, supported by the US air power, attacked the city, which was held by Isis. I was in touch with half a dozen or so civilians inside the Old City of Mosul by mobile phone during the siege, but when I tried to find them after it was over, I found that they were all dead.
Collateral damage
As is habitual in such occasions, the US Air Force stressed the great care it had taken to avoid civilian loss of life, but for once the lie was exposed by an on-the-ground investigation by The New York Times.
The investigators found that in one residential area called Qaiyara, near Mosul, the US-led coalition claimed its airstrikes had killed only one civilian, but a study of the evidence revealed that there had been 40 air strikes on the area which killed 43 civilians, of whom 19 were men, eight were women and 16 were children aged 14 or younger.
In about a third of the fatal strikes, Isis had been in proximity to the civilians, but in half of them there was no discernible sign of Isis presence.
Civilian casualties in Gaza are likely to be similarly horrendous – and will likewise be minimised or justified as unfortunate but necessary collateral damage by those responsible for the deaths of thousands.
All wars are inevitably propaganda wars, something that has been the case since the time of the Pharaohs. It stands to reason that people who are trying to kill each other will not hesitate to tell lies. Such is the muddle and fast pace of military conflict that the fabricators usually get away with fake or exaggerated stories which, at crucial moments, dominate the news agenda.
Propagandist defence
Systematic lies are told to conceal the fact that targets are routinely misidentified. During the US bombing of Baghdad in 1991, I visited a baby milk factory on the outskirts of the city which Washington claimed was producing biological weapons. I had no doubt it had been producing baby milk because I found letters in a shattered desk about the plant’s parlous financial state. Nevertheless, the Pentagon accused anybody who failed to confirm their biological weapons story as a creature of Saddam Hussein. Only years later did the CIA admit that the wrong target had been hit.
During the same bombing campaign, an air strike hit the Amiriyah bomb shelter in Baghdad killing 408 civilians, mostly women and children, having misidentified the place as a military headquarters.
I am not particularly shocked by propagandist defence of military mistakes and atrocities because that is the nature of war. More culpable are the governments and media outlets that push these lies, even when there are quite enough real atrocities to go around without inventing them.
Yet it is not “fake facts” that are the biggest distorting mirror when it comes to giving an objective picture of what is happening in a war. Selectivity in the news reported, either through partisan choice of stories or through unequal access to the facts, is most likely to give a false impression that one side in a war is committing all the atrocities and the other is squeaky clean. For purposes of simplicity, governments, media and the public would much prefer wars to be fought by good guys and bad.
‘The vilest action’
In Gaza in the coming days, we are likely to see a replay of all the air campaigns we have witnessed in the Middle East over the past half century. Whether it was the Israelis’ bombing of Beirut in 1982, the Americans doing the same in Iraq in 1991 and in 2003, and in Afghanistan for two decades, or a Saudi-led coalition bombing Houthi rebels in Yemen after 2015, the result has been much the same. Great numbers of civilians are killed and guerrilla groups generally survive to fight another day.
In war time, even more than in times of peace, it is worth keeping in mind the advice of a Guardian correspondent called Robert Doll to a fellow journalist given soon after the Munich Agreement in 1938. He said that the quickest way to get a scoop was to think of “the vilest action” governments could take and sit down at one’s typewriter and write an article saying they had done just that. “You can’t miss,” said Doll. “Your news will be denied two hours after it is published and confirmed after 24.”
Such cynical advice is particularly appropriate today when governments across the world are claiming that they did not foresee, and could not have done anything to avert, the eminently predictable crisis now engulfing the Middle East.
I wrote last December that “if a prize was to be awarded for the most important yet least reported story in the media in 2022, it might well go to the news outlets that failed to report on the escalating violence between Israelis and Palestinians, which is now combining with the likely impact of the incoming far-right government in Israel”.
W H Auden’s public and schoolchildren could have forecast what was going to happen, but governments failed to do so.
Further Thoughts
A repeated feature of modern warfare is that new arms and innovative tactics for attack or defence are always over-sold by those who introduce them as having permanent magical properties that will win wars or, at the very least, tip the military balance away from the enemy.
This was the initial promise of such weapons as poison gas, the tank, the V-1 flying bombs, the V-2 rocket, the precision guided missile and the drone. Often the promises are at first fulfilled, but they have a short sell-by date as those on the receiving end of these new armaments think ways of countering them or rendering them less effective.
This is one of the lessons of the Ukraine war where the great weakness of armies equipped with high-tech weapons has turned out to be a shortage of well-trained infantry whose numbers have been run down because vastly expensive aircraft and missile were expected to replace the soldiers on the battlefield.
In the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American and British armies never found a way of dealing with old-fashioned explosives buried under the road and detonated by command wire controlled by somebody a few hundred yards off.
Despite billions of dollars of electronic equipment installed by the Israel Defence Force (IDF) to monitor and protect their defensive structures used to seal off Gaza and guard against an attack, Hamas was easily able to penetrate it at dozens of points. Israeli generals’ reliance on remote control devices was so extreme that they had not noted the vulnerability of the system – which was that it could be destroyed remotely, as the New York Times has revealed.
The paper reports that Hamas took advantage of this weakness “by sending aerial drones to attack the cellular towers that transmitted signals to and from the surveillance system… Without cellular signals, the system was useless. Soldiers stationed in control rooms behind the front lines did not receive alarms that the fence separating Gaza and Israel had been breached, and could not watch video showing them the Hamas attackers bulldozing the barricades.”
Many of these soldiers were shot dead in their beds when Hamas gunmen overran their headquarters and burst into their barracks.
This self-inflicted disaster reminded me of a political rather than a military analogy. I remembered Hillary Clinton’s shock defeat by Donald Trump in the US presidential election in 2016 when she and her campaign manager put their faith in an algorithm called Ada that they believed would tell them where and where to campaign. In the event, Ada gave dreadful advice, telling Clinton not to campaign much in key states like Wisconsin which she then lost by a whisker.
Of course, it did not help Israel that of the three battalions stationed around Gaza, two had been sent to the West Bank, leaving just one with 800 Israeli soldiers to withstand the attack.
Beneath the Radar
I am struck by the complete lack of interest on the part of the Western media in the detention and indictment of Pakistan’s democratically elected prime minister Imran Khan, compared, let us say, to opposition leader Viktor Navalny in Russia. I do not want for one moment to disparage the unjustly imprisoned and brave Navalny, but rather to point to the hypocrisy of highlighting his case and ignore than of Imran Khan.
Cockburn’s Picks
The most trenchant reporting on the situation on the West Bank comes from Israeli journalists and human rights organisations. Here is a telling report from B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, which helps explain the background to the present conflict.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
