Moral Combat, Messianism, and the No-State Solution

Part 4 of attempting to make sense of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

In Part 3 of our series, we addressed the explosion of anti-Semitism observed since the October 7th pogrom by reference to the history of Leftist anti-Semitism, the influence of postmodern relativism on Leftist justifications for massacres of “oppressors”, and the pivotal role of the Soviets in shaping Islamist fundamentalism and Palestinian terrorism. A central theme of Part 3 was the deagentification of the Palestinians by Western Leftists, which views the Palestinians only through the prism of victimhood and “oppression”, and therefore justifies and absolves responsibility for any actions taken on behalf of the Palestinians, no matter how horrific. This naivety and ignorance, the “anti-imperialism of idiots”, has seen Western Leftists align with and excuse the most odious, murderous regimes and movements, from Stalin’s gulags to the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, and now to Hamas in 2023.

However, we also referenced a distinct neoconservative “Hawkisk” view of the Middle East and Palestinians, which shrugs its shoulders at the fate of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation, waves off any mention of settlement expansion in the West Bank, and tacitly views the Palestinians, and indeed Arabs generally, as pathologically incapable of self-governance. This is not unique to the Palestinian question; after America's calamitous withdrawal from Kabul and defeat to the Taliban, the Hawks were out to blame the debacle not on 20 years of failure in U.S. strategy and policy, but instead on the Afghans for not being “capable” of McDonaldisation. That could be somewhat expected; Americans, at the level of the national psyche, don’t do introspection. But Israel is not America, and any study of Israel since its foundation reveals a deeply introspective country, one in which the moral cost of the occupation, the tensions between secular and religious Zionism, and tension between the vision of a democratic state with a Jewish majority or a messianic and religiously extreme society, have long been debated. Importantly, support for Palestinian self-determination has permeated throughout Israeli Left Zionism.

The “Defenders of the West”, as the Hawk’s self-aggrandising rhetoric portrays themselves, either ignore or are more likely unaware of this ongoing dialectic within Israel and within the very conception of Zionism itself. They are content only to hold the Palestinians’ feet to the fire and take little to no interest in the actual cost of the status quo of occupation to Israel as a democracy; the choice between preserving a Jewish state and democracy, or slipping further down the path of religious-ethnonationalism and militarisation. Their sophistry has been on display since October 7th, with a rhetoric of “proportionality”, “military necessity”, and a hard full-stop after “Israel has the right to defend itself”, an end in itself justifying all means. If this Right-neoconservative view seems analogous to the Leftist anti-imperialism of fools, it is because it is the obverse of the coin; call it “the Westernism of fools”, one which cloaks itself in a veneer of “Western” values and principles only to falsify its commitment to those ideals whenever it is convenient. And there is no region of the world where it has been more convenient to do so than the Middle East, from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the invasion of Iraq. The unifying problem is that both the Right-neoconservative “Westernism of fools” and the Leftist “anti-imperialism of fools” are cut from a similar cloth; the Western gaze on a conflict they pay little attention to outside of major periodic conflict flare-ups.

In this part, we’re going to focus more on this Hawkish sophistry, explore the questions of both legal and moral warfare in the context of the prosecution of the current war, and shift the lens to the costs of the occupation and Palestinian aspirations for an independent state. As always, I would encourage you to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, before coming on to this essay. While they are distinct, they do build loosely on each other in a way that renders a sequential reading most informative and contextual.

Sophistry and the Perils of “Hawkism”

Two respective narratives tend to dominate the Western gaze on the Israel-Palestine conflict. One sees Israel as a “settler-colonialist” and “oppressor” state and places the Palestinians as perpetually “oppressed” victims lacking meaningful agency (for more thorough ventilation, read Part 3). The other sees Israel as a beacon of democracy and civil liberties in a region defined by despotism and repression, thus legitimised in any actions deemed necessary to “defend itself”, and places the Palestinians as little more than a justifiable cost of that overall defence. Both narrative viewpoints contain combinations of rebuttable presumptions and half-truths (see Part 2 and Part 3 for more on the former), or where verging on accuracy requires additional context. For present purposes, we’re concerned with the latter.

Hawkish foreign policy rhetoric has always been high on a moral high ground of freedom, independence, and democracy, but primarily applies its principles to Western freedoms (including Ukraine, more West than East since the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution). Democracy and freedoms in the rest of the world have primarily been conditional on Western interests. Where national independence movements have looked to other political systems or were geopolitically inconvenient to Western interests, the principles of freedom and independence have often been conveniently scrapped. In the aftermath of the First World War, for example, then President Wilson sacrificed Montenegrin independence to placate Serbia and provide Serbia with a corridor to the Adriatic Sea. The Vietnam War provides perhaps the most egregious 20th Century example, in terms of human cost, of the “Westernism of fools”; a complete failure of American intelligence and diplomacy in separating a pan-Asian nationalist movement for unification and independence from the spread of international Communism. The Iraq War, based on fabricated pretences, produced calamity from a noxious brew of ignorance, incompetence, and malevolence, and the destabilisation of the war allowed Iran to cement itself as the regional hegemon and benefactor of Islamist terrorism.

As an ideological descendent of the so-called Wilsonian Order (see Part 2), neoconservative Hawks espouse ideals that render them acutely susceptible to sophistry and hypocrisy. The first is that the legitimacy of a state or government is judged by reference to adherence to Western political and socio-economic norms. The implication of this view is a belief that conflicts can be resolved if a country (or people) simply adopts democracy (and markets), a belief held so sincerely that it has self-justified the use of force to achieve that end. The Middle East bears unfortunate testament to this folly of this worldview, most recently in Iraq; that once the tanks rolled in and toppled Saddam, all that needed to be done was to pop a government in place and fly in the McDonalds to let the Iraqis know how good freedom tastes.

The second is the geopolitical implication of the first; a Manichean view that divides the world into “good” and “bad” states and regimes. The implication of this view is, as Professor Stephen Walt articulated in Foreign Policy, a dangerous conviction that “swimming with the tides of history” against perceived evil provides little reason to act with restraint (see: dropping >2 million tons of ordnance on Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War).

The third and final flows from the level of conviction that one is acting from higher, purer ideals. The implication of this view is a myopic and blinkered view of a situation that has little regard for what Karl Rove famously derided as “the reality-based community”. The implication is the invention of realities, impervious to the facts on the ground, which are secondary to the supposed principles upon which action is being taken. As with Iraq and Afghanistan, these ideals and their implications create a one-dimensional short-termism with little to no cohesive long-term strategy and no workable ideas or solutions for the critical question that they never even ask: What comes next?

Legal and Moral Combat

The Hawkish worldview is once again on display and under test in Gaza. Of course, to everyone except Western Leftist academics, TikTok zoomers, and jihadis, Hamas are easily designated as evil, and the slaughter on October 7th was sadistic. It was also a use of force by Hamas that provided Israel with a legal justification for going to war under the principle of resort to force, known by the Latin legal maxim of jus ad bellum. While technically under international law this is limited to inter-state conflict, and Hamas are a non-state actor, the right to self-defence is generally considered to extend to non-state actors given the nature of modern warfare (i.e., inter-state wars of conventional militaries, such as the Russo-Ukraine war, are rarer now than when international humanitarian law emerged from the Second World War). The conduct of conflict once underway is, however, governed by a separate maxim: jus in bello, or just conduct in war. This maxim seeks to balance the necessities of war with humanitarian considerations by limiting the conduct of military operations, in particular concerning non-combatants. The operating principles of each maxim are necessity and proportionality for jus ad bellum and military necessity and proportionality for jus in bello. It is important to note that the distinction between just ad bellum and jus in bello is not merely academic, but serves legal and humanitarian purposes, i.e., a state may have the right to go to war but that does not provide a right to unrestricted and indiscriminate waging of war.

In recent weeks, many an armchair Hawk in the lay press and online has grasped at the language of international humanitarian law, of “proportionality” and “military necessity”, as if merely setting out the definitions for these concepts constitutes sufficient justification for the conduct of the current war. Yet it is the applicable facts that allow for any such determination to be made. A primary consideration in international humanitarian law is the principle of distinction, i.e., distinguishing combatants from non-combatants and prohibiting attacks on non-combatants without justification under the proportionality principle. In a war between two conventional armies, like the Russo-Ukraine War, this is more easily discerned. In a war against a paramilitary group that is part of the civilian population, this concept becomes significantly more difficult in application. Nevertheless, such difficulty is not itself a justification for non-combatant deaths, as the armchair Hawks seem to believe. For example, a common Hawkish claim is to point to Hamas’ use of Palestinian civilians as “human shields”. While this is true, it is not a justification in itself because it does not relieve the attacker of their duty to adhere to the parameters of international law. The concept of proportionality is “based on the fundamental principle that belligerents do not enjoy an unlimited choice of means to inflict damage on the enemy”.¹

The challenge of distinction is expressed by the principle of “proportionality”, i.e., that the civilian deaths and damage are proportional to the military advantage to be gained by the attack. The Hawks are quick to point to the fact that the IDF has issued warnings to the population in Gaza to move south or to “safe zones”, but this alone is not sufficient to absolve the IDF of its obligations in subsequent air strikes: those obligations remain. The IDF hasn’t helped its perception of adherence to these obligations by the repeated instances where “safe zones” that civilians were told to relocate to have subsequently been hit by strikes. The principle of distinction has been challenged since the outbreak of the war, given the level of bombardment in Gaza; 29,000 bombs over the 6 weeks of the war, which is comparable to the amount dropped by the U.S. over the entire of Iraq in the first year of the war. The choice of weapons deployed has also drawn criticism, particularly the use of unguided and 2,000-pound bombs by a sophisticated military capable of exercising greater precision. There is also a question over whether targeting Hamas’ political leadership satisfies the necessity that a target has military necessity.

Israel has not publicly helped its case in the current war. In the first week of the war the IDF spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, was quoted as saying that “while balancing accuracy with the scope of damage, right now we’re focused on what causes maximum damage”. The reasons for such a focus on “maximum damage” may be gleaned from a recent paper by two retired IDF officers (now security consultants), Amos Yadlin and Udi Evental, which stated that the goal of the Israeli government and the IDF is to “...yield an unbearable cost for the country’s adversaries...” None of this is to argue that international humanitarian law has been breached as a matter of law; the laws of war are sufficiently broad (and opaque) to tolerate vast scales of death and destruction. But there is an argument that within that broad scope, the IDF has applied a very loose interpretation and willingness to accept extremely high civilian casualties for what may be military targets of questionable value relative to the casualties inflicted. “Israel has the right to defend itself”, the hawks will say with a full stop. But this is not an unqualified right, for Israel or any country. This is why the language of international humanitarian law is often little more than euphemistic in practical terms; it fails to capture the fact that the scale of death of non-combatant Palestinians is a humanitarian tragedy.

Hamas knows it can never militarily defeat Israel, which is why it aims to pull the cameras of the world onto Gaza as Israel reigns down an inordinate level of destruction, gaining sympathy and support both from Useful Idiots in the West and in material terms from other Islamist terrorist groups and sponsors. This is emphasised in the context of the current war against the media-savvy Hamas, whose primary aim is delegitimising and discrediting Israel in the eyes of the world. Merely draping the death and destruction in Gaza in the euphemistic language of “proportionality” and “military necessity” is insufficient, independent of whether it is legally accurate, to consider the ramifications of the war. A 2010 paper by Condra et al. that analysed insurgent violence in Afghanistan found that local exposure to civilian casualties was the strongest predictor of long-term trends in future insurgent violence and recruitment into insurgent groups, what the researchers termed the “revenge effect”. The fact that these results were related to long-term violence, but not short-term effects, provides evidence of the detriment of blinkered and flippant thinking on the effects of civilian casualties. 14-year-old boys in Gaza right now are not scratching their heads wondering if the air strike on their apartment block satisfied the test of “proportionality” because some mid-level Hamas hack lived on the fourth floor.

With Palestinian deaths >24,000 at the time of publishing², an estimated ~70% of which are women and children and thus clearly designated as non-combatants, global opinion is convinced that Netanyahu’s Right-wing government are committing “genocide” in Gaza. This question is now before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) with a case of “genocide” brought by South Africa against Israel. Genocide is a separate legal concept from the laws of war, and requires that acts are “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a particular group based on nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion. What genocide is not is a simple calculation of the death toll, as many social media activists seem to think. It requires proof of intent, and it further requires that the victims have been targeted as a group based on the aforementioned characteristics, not as individuals.³ While the death toll in Gaza is horrifying, South Africa’s case appears deficient as a matter of law and falls far short of producing any level of cogent evidence that is sufficient to discharge the burden of proof to establish, prima facie, that the requirement of “intent” has been satisfied such that the ICJ should further investigate any such acts of genocide.⁴ Nevertheless, in the eyes of much of the world the bringing of the application is in itself confirmatory of the allegations.

The Israeli government and military must realise, as America failed to realise in Iraq and Afghanistan, that three wars are being fought at once; one currently against the combatants of the opposing force, another in the future from the mobilisation of Palestinian men out of the death and destruction of this war, and a war of public relations in the court of international opinion. Just three months into the current war we can already conclude that Netanyahu’s government has lost two out of three of these wars, and the one it will win - destroying Hamas’ military capabilities - was never in doubt given the magnitude of the military advantage that Israel has and the scale of destruction the IDF is capable of, and is currently wreaking in Gaza. There is a Hawkish view that the sadistic horrors of the October 7th pogrom justify the scale of death and destruction in the current war, but this view is incorrect as a matter of law; jus ad bellum is distinct from jus in bello and military necessity of the former does lift the restrictions of the latter. Whether the scale of death and destruction in Gaza may be justified as a matter of law, independent of the moral implications, will be dependent on whether the Israeli government and the IDF can demonstrate that the war is being prosecuted within the parameters of international humanitarian law.

There are important reasons to act with restraint in prosecuting the war against Hamas in Gaza. “Restraint” in this context does not mean compromising on legitimate war aims, such as the rescue of the hostages, and destruction of Hamas’ tunnel infrastructure and above-ground assets (e.g., arms depots and combatants). It means prosecuting the war having regard to the realities of fighting a paramilitary organisation operating from within a civilian populace and knowing that in purely military terms a “victory”, i.e., achieving war arms, is inevitable given the strength of the IDF compared to Hamas. Viewing the war purely as “defeat Hamas” evinces the one-dimensional thinking that has plagued conventional military engagements with non-state actors and terrorist organisations, as Iraq and Afghanistan have recently demonstrated at enormous cost to America. Since the Second World War, this particular military scenario has been difficult for conventional militaries to accomplish, whether the British Army in Northern Ireland or America in Iraq/Afghanistan. The former was ultimately resolved through a political process of peacemaking; the latter resulted in another American military defeat, following Vietnam, to a motivated paramilitary that proved impossible to fully vanquish. Restraint in the current context also means keeping a lid on the outbreaks of settler violence in the West Bank since October 7th, on the continued displacement of Palestinians from their lands in the West Bank, and on excess civilian deaths from military operations in that territory.

No less important than the legal considerations, the language of international humanitarian law also fails to capture the reality that there is a moral content to war. The “moral combat” of this essay’s title is borrowed from the historian Michael Burleigh’s book of the same name, which explored divergent moral universes in which the Allies, Nazis, and Imperial Japanese, operated during the Second World War. One example of such a moral dilemma may be seen in the decision by the British and American airforces to bomb German cities, where the civilian cost was known to both the Allied command, the airmen, and the government. The bombing of Dresden in February 1945 resulted in 25-30,000 German civilians killed in a firestorm from incendiary bombs. Targeting Dresden was justified by the Allies primarily because it was used as a hub for transporting German troops to the Eastern Front, but the military and strategic value of Dresden as a target is debatable (the attack was acknowledged at the time as having little strategic value). Winston Churchill brandished the bombing as “an act of terror and wanton destruction”, while the Nazis deliberately inflated the casualties to ~250,000 for propaganda purposes, a myth that was sustained for decades after the War. This inflated figure was then deployed during the Nuremberg Trials in what became known as “the Dresden Defence”, where Nazi war criminals sought to draw a moral equivalence between their slaughter of Jews and other civilians and the Allied bombing of Dresden. This defence was rejected by distinguishing between the deliberate and systematic killing of civilians and civilians that are killed undesirably and unavoidably in the prosecution of war.

The armchair hawks have been keen to cite this distinction in the context of the Israeli offensive in Gaza. To an extent, the distinction is valid; there is little moral equivalence between the deliberate and purposeful killing of Israeli citizens by Hamas on October 7th and the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza if we assume those deaths are entirely unavoidable and only incidental to the war against Hamas. However, this is where the cold moral reasoning of Dresden falls short. In the first instance, there are valid questions about whether Palestinian civilian deaths could have been avoided with, for example, greater use of precision and guided weaponry. More particularly, it fails to distinguish between the moral justification of going to war and the moral conduct of that war; the Allies were morally justified in going to war to defeat Nazi Germany, but they were not morally justified in bombing Dresden as a means to that end. When Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, invoked the scale of German civilian deaths from Allied bombing as sufficiently justified to defeat Nazi Germany, she demonstrated a lack of moral clarity on that crucial distinction; she attempted to reverse-engineer the “Dresden Defence” in Israel’s favour. Israel was certainly justified in going to war in response to the October 7th pogrom by Hamas; but how the war is conducted, beyond the parameters of international humanitarian law, will entail a moral content upon which the actions of the IDF will be judged. It is how events like 7th October are responded to that define the value proposition of decent societies, and distinguish those from the backward barbarism of an ideology like Islamist fundamentalism.

Additionally, the rhetoric of international humanitarian law also misses the point that there are implications of the conduct of war and civilian casualties beyond legalities, that extend to the nature of the enemy one is seeking to defeat - a non-state terrorist group adherent to virulent Islamism - and the long-term impacts on a population that will remain forever on Israel’s border. The paper by Yadlin and Evental stated that Israeli military policy debates on how “victory” against non-state terrorist groups could be defined acknowledged that while the Islamist ideology of jihad will persist, dismantling the military capabilities of Hamas is the priority. Yet this overlooks that in the technological age, military capabilities for terrorist groups are relatively inexpensive and can be relatively easily replenished (e.g., drones from Iran). It overlooks that for the doctrine of jihad, “capabilities” include creating a new generation of young men ready and willing for martyrdom. Hamas’ main goal on October 7th was to incite an unrestrained response from Israel, and the response itself shows that Israel took the bait; seldom is anyone even discussing Hamas or the hostages in Gaza anymore, all eyes instead are on Instagram Reels of rubble, dead Palestinian children, and the ICJ. In short, Hamas has already achieved its war aims.

Can Israel achieve its own? There is no doubt that Israel will succeed in dismantling Hamas’ military capabilities, at least temporarily, given the force that the IDF can project in Gaza. The IDF is in control of that outcome. But to think that outcome is the only endpoint of this war is to fall into one-dimensional thinking that grossly miscalculates the consequences of civilian casualties for the two other wars Israel is fighting; one is the war yet to come from a new generation of shahid with nothing to live for except killing Jews and their own martyrdom, the other the public relations war for Israel’s legitimacy. With the former, Israel and her allies should not lose sight of the fact that it doesn’t matter if an eventual independent Palestinian state chooses to be an Islamist theocracy; all that matters is that the rockets stop being fired into Israel and let Israel live in peace. Egypt and Jordan managed to do this; there is no reason the Palestinians cannot. They can have whatever despotic regime they like as long as the death cult of violence against Israel is renounced. Yet the current war all but guarantees that violence will not be renounced, and as the Iraq and Afghanistan insurgencies showed, future violence is currently being incubated in the rubble of Gaza.

With the war for Israel’s legitimacy (see Part 2), this does not necessarily mean Western Useful Idiots parroting the propaganda of Iran. Rather, the more pressing conflict here is the one for Israel’s soul, what the great scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned in the aftermath of the Six-Day War as the moral cost of the strong exercising power and dominion over the weak. Liebowitz was not the first to note the price that a society may ultimately pay in this regard. Writing in 1905 in the immediate aftermath of the brutal Second Boer War, the British author J.G. Godard encapsulated this moral cost:

“Yet…despite this grim catalogue of horrors, we were told on all hands that never was a war waged with greater humanity! … There was no hypocrisy in the case; the people did believe the war had been conducted with humanity, and probably still believe it; and it is this conviction which is the evidence of their demoralisation.”⁵

Palestinian Sufferance and the Cost of Occupation

The scale of the Israeli victory in the 1967 War, evident in the name “Six-Day War”,  was overwhelming. The sweeping success of the IDF’s counteroffensives resulted in both Gaza and the West Bank, which were then under the jurisdictions of Egypt and Jordan, respectively, being captured by the Israeli military (along with the Sinai and the Golan). The ensuing occupation has defined the Israel-Palestine conflict ever since and shaped domestic affairs both within Israel and within the Palestinian leadership. Liebowitz articulated Israel’s dilemma⁶:

“The most fateful day in Israel's history was the seventh day, by which I mean the day after the Six Day War (of 1967). On that day, we had to decide if the war was a war of defence or of conquest.”

Under international law, military occupation (termed “belligerent occupation”) is permitted on condition that an occupation is temporary, and justified by military necessity of the occupying power. A belligerent occupation exists where a state that is “not the recognised sovereign of the territory” exercises “effective control” over the territory by force. The military necessity element is important; under international law, occupation is considered a method of warfare. The implication is that land annexed under military occupation is land acquired by force, the prohibition of which is a peremptory norm (i.e., mandatory and universally accepted) under international law. International law thus distinguishes between military occupation and annexation, the latter of which occurs when a state proclaims sovereignty over lands previously beyond its recognised territories.

Immediately after the end of the Six-Day War, the United Nations (UN) issued Resolution 242 which required the withdrawal of the Israeli military from the occupied territories. However, typical of the UN, sitting on a high horse does not guarantee good vision. In the first instance, this was the third time in twenty years that two neighbouring countries, Egypt and Jordan, had sought war with Israel. The West Bank in particular provided a strategic buffer against potential future Jordanian aggression, and the lands captured from Egypt ultimately would serve as the bait to normalise a future peace with Israel. As we noted in Part 1, neither Egypt nor Jordan has cared much for the plight of Palestinians in the occupied territories since the Six-Day War, and between 1948 and 1967 both Egypt and Jordan administered Gaza and the West Bank as occupiers.⁷ Thus, based on the repeated aggression from Egypt and Jordan in inter-state conflicts with Israel over this period, the initial occupation of the territories by Israel would have found justifications under international law (although the UN argues that Israel preemptively struck at Egypt and that the occupation was immediately illegal, the UN are blind to any facts that might support Israel in any forum, in particular, the mobilisation of Egyptian forces in the Sinai, dismissal of UN peacekeepers from the Israeli-Gaza border, and maritime blockade Israel's port at Eilat).

Nevertheless, UN bias aside, that the endurance of the West Bank occupation⁸ is illegal under international law is a matter of fact, as a military necessity for the basis of ongoing occupation is no longer justifiable for several reasons. In the first instance, peace treaties have been signed with both former belligerents to the interstate conflicts in which the occupations initially arose, Jordan and Egypt. But more importantly in the context of the law of belligerent occupation, the occupier is to minimally interfere with the local civilian population, govern in the interests of the population under its control and is prohibited from taking steps that would interfere with the future ability of the territory to return to its sovereign status, including a prohibition on an occupier transferring its population into the territory it occupies. Thus, independent of any arguments that may arise concerning the “military necessity” of the occupation justified by reference to security interests against terrorism, the settlement expansions render the occupation illegal irrespective of such factors. Further, the administration of the occupation is no longer solely within the remit of the military. Legislation passed in the Knesset directly applies to Israeli citizens in the West Bank, while judicial decisions by the Supreme Court determine the legality of settlements under Israeli law. Thus, both the shift in the demographic characteristics of the West Bank from settler influxes, itself a reflection of government and judicially sanctioned policies, negate the claim of military necessity and stand in contravention of international law.

For Palestinians in the West Bank, the day-to-day realities of the occupation are one of deprival of civil rights and liberties, violent attacks from religious extremist Israeli settlers and forced dispossession from their lands; often abandoning villages because of such violence, violence which is undertaken with both implicit and explicit IDF support. A separate road network has been constructed across the West Bank for the sole use of Israeli settlers, and from which Palestinians are prohibited from using. The roads Palestinians can use are choked with IDF roadblocks and checkpoints that serve as a constant source of harassment and danger. Under military administration, arbitrary arrests and detentions, curfews and road closures, and house demolitions under specious pretexts, all occur outside the jurisdiction of the Israeli government for the Palestinians, who lack political representation in Israel (while Israeli settlers in the West Bank are afforded all the rights and liberties that living in Israel would bestow). The unlawful killing of non-combatants is a regular occurrence. The Israeli Supreme Court has, at times, curtailed the excesses of the administration of the occupied territories, but on the whole, has done more to cement the status quo of curtailed rights of the Palestinians under occupation.

To bring up the realities and legalities of the occupation is to meet with the predictable justification: security against the threat of terrorism. Yet while the issue of security must certainly be weighed up, this case is all too conveniently overstated; sheepherders in the South Hebron hills being tormented off their land by armed settlers and the IDF are hardly a threat justifying any such behaviour toward these communities. To assume that all daily humiliation, degradation, and brutalisation experienced by ordinary Palestinians living under the occupation is justified on security grounds is to deprive ordinary Palestinians of their basic humanity. It is also legally untenable; the actions go beyond occupation for military necessity and constitute de facto annexation of the West Bank. The assumption that the occupation, or any occupation, is justified by security reasons is fraught with causal issues.⁹ The trends and practices of military occupation are largely replicable in history; almost all military occupations in history have, eventually, been resisted.¹⁰ One lesson from the Northern Ireland “Troubles” is particularly analogous to Israel-Palestine: neither military nor terrorist force will bring about solutions to political and ideological problems.

Tony Klug, whose doctoral thesis in the early 1970s was on the occupation of the West Bank, has noted that the first decade of the occupation after the Six-Day War was relatively benign; movement was unrestricted, there were few settlements and little to no terrorism. Klug described the situation as relatively benign, insofar as occupations can be. However, the decision not only to maintain the occupation, but to expand within the occupied territories, set the course for the inevitable collision that characterises occupations throughout history: the occupied people agitate for independence and, reciprocally, the occupying power must increasingly suppress those aspirations and agitations.¹¹ The reciprocal cycle has perpetuated itself for the past half-century, progressively worsening over time. If those nascent years of the occupation were relatively benign, forces were at work within Israeli domestic politics and society that would profoundly shape the direction and characteristics of the occupation, going to the heart of the definition of Israel as a territory. An essay¹² by Profs. Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak of the Hebrew University illustrated this dialectic:

“The operative agreement on the territorial boundaries of the Zionist enterprise, established implicitly in 1948 but never grounded in a fundamental ideological consensus, now broke down. After the 1967 war, the ideological demands for the incorporation of the occupied territories into a Greater Israel, on the one hand, and for territorial compromise, on the other, again emerged in full force.

Moreover, ideological polarization increased after the Six Day War as the weakening Labour-led elite faced the emergent - and largely extremist - elites of the oppositionist right-wing and religious sectors. These ideological militants based their appeal on ethnocentric symbols, with heavy emphasis on historic Jewish rights to ancestral lands, while tending to demonize Israel’s enemies and to portray their political rivals as defeatist or worse.”

The ideological polarisation within the conception of Zionism was, and remains, crucial to the course of the occupation. It is important to distinguish Zionism as a national idea and messianic (religious) Zionism, and their respective relationships with the state of Israel.¹³ Zionism as a national idea, the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homelands, was achieved with the establishment of Israel as a political entity, a Jewish nation-state founded on secular principles. The Haredi (i.e., ultra-Orthodox) Jews, however, have long exhibited different attitudes, and indeed opposition, to the secular conception of Zionism. On one end of the ideological spectrum, extending back into the 19th Century is an anti-Zionist religious worldview which denies the legitimacy of the Jewish state as “an anti-messianic act”¹⁴, i.e., the work of man, rather than by waiting upon the return of the Messiah and redemption in Israel. On the other end, however, was a particular interpretation of the national idea of Zionism and the establishment of the nation-state of Israel as itself a messianic act. In this respect, Jewish political independence in the state of Israel was “…intrinsically sanctified because they embody a human response to a divine call.”¹⁵

It was this latter conception that linked messianism with political Zionism that emerged as a social force in Israel following the Six-Day War and accelerated after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Such historical events were interpreted through a messianic perspective; the territory captured from Jordan was not an occupied “West Bank”, but a liberated “Judea and Samaria”. Victory in the war was thus sanctified. Religious Zionism asserted itself against a more state-limited form of political, secular Zionism, and found expression in a movement known as the Gush Emunim. Before Menachem Begin’s Likud election win in 1977, Gush Emunim had begun to establish Jewish settlements in the West Bank (and Gaza), “…in defiance of government policy but legitimized under the dictates of messianism.”¹⁶ This latter point is important; while the messianism of Gush Emunim acknowledged the legitimacy of the political entity of Israel, ultimately the political power of the state remained the lesser power to that of God. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook, the spiritual leader of Gush Emunim, articulated the messianic view of the acquired territories:

“Our reality is a messianic reality… The true redemption is revealed in the settlement of the Land and the rebirth of Israel in it.”¹⁷

The expansion of the settlements led by Gush Emunim also served as a precedent, “the first time in Jewish history that messianism was utilized as a legitimation for action in defiance of a democratically-elected autonomous Jewish government.”¹⁸ Under this form of messianism, it was their religious duty to establish Jewish sovereignty over the entirety of ‘Eretz Israel’, the historical lands of Israel, and this included the West Bank specifically given its biblical importance to the religious Zionists. The distinctions between political and religious Zionism would become somewhat dissolved with the eventual seismic shift of Israeli domestic politics to the Right (see Part 1) under Begin and Likud from 1977, and the tacit policy of settlement expansion which reflected the messianic belief that the territory was rightly part of Eretz Israel. Before Likud’s 1977 election win, there were a mere ~4,400 Israeli settlers in the West Bank.¹⁹ However, Likud’s electoral victory brought politics and messianic settlement together; lacking any significant settlement movement of its own, Likud mobilised Gush Eminum as the vehicle to implement its settlement policy.²⁰ What the settlements accomplished through the late 1970s and early 1980s was not necessarily rapid demographic change, but strategic colonisation of the West Bank, located on mountainous heights and distributed between Palestinian towns and villages. Adopting such strategic settlement locations was deliberate; it allowed Gus Emunim to circumnavigate demographics in the West Bank by fracturing Palestinian contiguity on the land, and thus the possibility of any future territorial partition between the West Bank and Israel proper.²¹

In this respect, to view the occupation only through the lens of international law is to miss the ideological underpinnings of the settlements, and to mischaracterise the nature of the occupation. From the messianic perspective, it is not a military endeavour; it is the “true redemption, revealed in the settlement of the Land.” Under this messianic interpretation, no Israeli government has the right to give away this land as a political compromise; these lands are not governed by the laws of man. This tension will not dissipate anytime soon. With the challenge of building a society with secular and religiously observant groups, Israel has operated an independent school system for the Ultra-Orthodox, which has been increasing in the proportion of students attending Haredi schools, and the Ultra-Orthodox have one of the highest birthrates in Israel. The West Bank is where this veritable “fifth column” ultimately becomes most visible; expanding a semi-autonomous state under the protection of military administration, outside the realm of the official political entity of Israel, where the religious extremists act with impunity. Over time, however, the distinctly messianic elements of certain strands of religious Zionism have blended with secular nationalists to form the political base of the contemporary Israeli Right. A better term to describe this blend, as proposed by the historian Sara Hirschhorn, is “ultra-nationalism”. Collectively, they desire a maintenance of control over the West Bank, whether for messianic reasons or nationalist reasons unrelated to religion or messianism.

Yet at what cost? As we noted in Part 2, maintaining that Israel is a liberal democracy committed to human rights and the rule of law requires that the West Bank is viewed as entirely separate, as something outside of Israel. This is an untenable proposition, not least because as a matter of law, Israel maintains “effective control” over the West Bank as administrator and belligerent occupier. Liebowitz, among many others at the time, saw the impending paradox and moral dilemma, the fork in the road that the Six-Day War presented:

“These are life and death questions for the state of Israel. We must liberate ourselves from the occupied territories.”

The choice of language is instructive; leaving the occupied territories was to liberate Israel from the moral burden of shifting from defender to conqueror, from victim to perpetrator. It meant creating an untenable paradox that all liberal democracies face when they become an occupying power: operating two regimes. Including the West Bank, Israel operates two regimes: one in which human rights and the rule of law are respected, and one in which they are routinely violated. One in which Arabs are citizens and participate at all levels of society; one in which Arabs are deprived of the very meaning of society. It means one regime where Israel can say it is not a colonising power, established by international law, and one in it is a colonising power on account of prolonged military occupation and settlement expansion²². It means one regime where the right of the Jewish people to self-determination has been achieved and recognised and one in which that very same right is purposefully and forcefully denied to another people with a claim on the same land. Maintaining these distinctions, emphasising only the parts that apply within the recognised political boundaries of Israel, requires a society-wide cognitive dissonance to sustain, of which Left-Zionists in Israel have always been aware. And there is a toll to be paid for society; the mental and physical costs on young men and women in military service, the financial costs to the state (at the expense of education and other public services), the cost to democracy and the rule of law, and the cost to Israel’s moral centre.

This moral centre has long found expression in a specific articulation common among the early Zionists, that “Zionism has no meaning if it cannot justify itself by moral standards rooted in the Jewish tradition.”²³ Those moral standards are the true cost of occupation. This was what the early Zionists understood; that the pain and humiliation of exile and persecution had engendered in the Jewish tradition a contempt for injustice and oppression. Thus, they emphasised that:

“…the moral force of Zionism was derived from its positive, different, moral standards of behaviour for military struggle… Uncontrolled use of violence would necessarily lead to the moral corruption of those who practice it and consequently it would completely undermine the foundations of Zionism.”²⁴

While legal scholars like Theodor Meron advised the Israeli government in 1967 of the illegality of settlements in the occupied territories, other early Zionists such as David Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson saw the use of military force to sustain the occupation as contrary to the moral standards of Zionism. It was Liebowitz who saw that for those early Zionists in the days before 1948, it was easy to espouse lofty moral ideals when it did not come with the responsibility of exercising political and military power that establishing Israel entailed: “from now on our values are tested not only through suffering, but also through our actions.”²⁵ He saw that the exercise of moral standards while holding political and military power constituted “the essential element of the moral and religious meaning of our political revival.”²⁶ This is why he articulated withdrawing from the occupation as liberating Israel; it meant meeting that test, of congruence with the moral imperative of Zionism.

The No-State Solution

The impetus of the settlement project is crucial to understanding why continued talk of the “two-state solution” is now little more than political jargon that the Israeli Right feeds Western governments to appease them back into their Middle East delusions.

However, the alternative prospect may be a road to Israel’s ruin, ironically on the back of Right-wing secular and religious nationalists. The trends and trajectories of Israeli politics point strongly in either of these directions. One alternative that has long been mooted, including by Menachem Begin’s government, was to proceed with annexation of the West Bank and extend Israeli citizenship to all Palestinian Arabs, such as Arab-Israelis already enjoy. But this would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish nation based purely on demographics; Jews would become a minority in Israel, defeating the primary purpose of Jewish national self-determination.

The other alternative is, ultimately, the most likely: preserve the status quo of belligerent occupation, continued settlement expansion, and continued seizing of Palestinian lands. This is the long game that would have Palestinians abandon their villages, perhaps leave for Jordan, or be increasingly confined to specific areas of the West Bank and deprived of civic and human rights, while Israeli settlers enjoy freedom of movement and the benefits of Israeli citizenship. But this would spell the end of Israel as a liberal democracy; to indefinitely sustain the occupation will require an increasingly autocratic, quasi-theocracy where religious interests hold primacy over the state. To indefinitely sustain the occupation will also falsify all defences currently available to Israeli liberals against charges that Israel is a country committed to human rights and the rule of law.

There is a potential “third way”, however, which is for a resurgent Left-Zionism to reassert itself politically in response to the calamitous past years of Netanyahu’s chaos. Assuming for one hopeful minute that such a resurgence was possible (and Israel’s parliamentary system does make it possible), any Left-Zionist movement would have to grapple with the reality that has evaded all previous attempts at a “two-state solution”: that the core differences between Israel and Palestine that underpin the dispute on territory are ideological in nature. Political compromise will require addressing those ideological differences first, rather than assuming compromise can come politically from fiddling with a map. The partition of Ireland, for example, did not eradicate ideological differences between republicans and unionists on either side of the border.

The Israel-Palestine territorial issues are fundamentally ideological; Israel is now in thrall to a more Right-wing vision of Greater Israel, while the Palestinians have never been willing to accept the 1949 armistice borders (the “Green line”) and a truncated state with what they view as theirs: all of the historic region of Palestine. To achieve two separate, independent states would require Israel to commit to the “Green line” and no further, including a full unilateral withdrawal of the West Bank settlements, and for the Palestinians to agree to truncated national borders. The present realities place us far away from this as any sort of ideological or political reality, which has consequences: “…alternative Palestinian and Israeli visions of the homeland that are less conducive to a peaceful resolution of the conflict between them are likely to become more prominent.”²⁷

That was written in 2010; thirteen years later it is clear that such alternative visions of what a homeland for Jews and a homeland for Palestinians are not only more prominent, but dominant. Ultimately, when the dust settles in Gaza, more than likely we’ll be left with the status quo ante. To borrow the analogy used in Part 2, we’ll realise the clock is still stuck at five minutes to midnight.

1. Gardam, J. Proportionality and Force in International Law. Am J Int Law. 1993 Jul;87(3):391-413.

2. It is acknowledged that the accuracy of the estimates is influenced by multiple factors, including the fact that it is Hamas as the governing body that issues the estimates, which do not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and also that bodies under rubble may not yet (or ever) be recovered. Nevertheless, women and children constitute an imperfect proxy for non-combatants, and the overwhelming majority of deaths thus far are thus likely to be non-combatants.

3. The distinction between groups and individuals provides the theoretical and legal distinction between genocide and crimes against humanity, respectively. Crimes against humanity encompass the systematic killing of large numbers of individuals, while genocide places the individual within the group.

4. It is important to note that the matter currently before the ICJ is not to decide whether genocidal acts have taken place as a matter of fact, but that the requirement of “intent” has been satisfied such that the ICJ should further investigate to determine whether genocide has in fact taken place. As a matter of law, the evidence produced by South Africa falls far short of meeting that merits test. It relies on only a single precedent in the jurisprudence on genocide, draws on dated reports, and relies heavily on unhinged quotes from Israeli far-Right religious extremist politicians. There is a relatively low burden on Israel to disprove the charge of intent, e.g., the implementation of evacuation orders in Gaza.

However, the war cabinet is appointed by a national security council, and the war aims and policy are produced by those bodies, not any sole individual. Thus, it is the conduct and policy of those whole bodies, and of the IDF, that is relevant to determine “intent”. Importantly, most of these outrageous comments have come from people who are not involved in either body. However, as a matter of law the most important distinction, and Israel’s primary defence, is that civilian deaths are occurring in the context of pursuing war aims, i.e., “military necessity”, the legality of which is determined by the test of “proportionality”. If the principle of proportionality has been violated and it could be determined that the IDF have taken liberties with otherwise avoidable civilian casualties, this would constitute a war crime, not genocide, as they are distinct legal concepts under international law.

In fact, depending on the ability to acquire supporting evidence, a legally stronger case could arguably be made that the proportionality principle has been violated. The failure by South Africa to distinguish this relatively obvious point, if they are truly interested in justice under international law, further serves to reveal their application as a political stunt by a country that has been busy cosying up to Iran and Russia.

Moreover, by bringing the application South Africa has created a lose-lose scenario for the ICJ. If the ICJ rules in South Africa’s favour based on a legally frivolous application, it would undermine the legitimacy of the court and the UN and confirm that they are unable to stand as an independent adjudicator of Israel. If the application is unsuccessful, whether it was a legally correct decision will mean nothing to Israel’s detractors, who expect the purpose of the proceedings is to satisfy their sense of moral outrage. In either scenario, the legitimacy of the ICJ loses.

5. Godard, J.G. Racial Superiority. London: Simpson, Marshall & Co., Ltd., 1905, p.14.

Perhaps prophetically for the optimists of the Israel-Palestine conflict, Godard wrote (pp.14-15):

“The good, however, we are told, is to come. Order will evolve out of chaos; Briton and Boer will eventually settle down in life-long amity; and peace, prosperity, and contentment will once more abound. Yes, we are all of us familiar with the Jesuitital plea; but the answer to it, in a word, is that it is not true.”

6. Leibowitz, Y. Egan, J.P. Liberating Israel from the Occupied Territories. JPS. 1986 Winter;15(2):102-108.

7. The fact that the West Bank was annexed by Jordan in 1950 has served as Israel’s primary legal defence to the claim that it is an occupying power under international law, which Israel has always denied. The defence centres on the fact that, as an annexed and occupied territory of Jordan, the West Bank was not properly within Jordanian sovereignty and therefore no sovereign state has been ousted from the West Bank. This has always been flawed legal reasoning, as international law clearly states that who the occupied territory was taken from is not relevant; the relevant question is whether the occupying power is the recognized sovereign of that territory. As Israel was never the recognised sovereign over the West Bank based on either UN Resolution 181 that brought Israel into or on the 1949 “Green Line” after the War of Independence, the argument regarding the specifics of Jordanian sovereignty over the territory is moot.

8. An occupation may be considered ongoing by reference to the exercise of “effective control” over the territories. This has led to some debate over the status of Gaza, and it remains common to hear claims that Israel is the “occupier” of Gaza despite Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, including uprooting all Jewish settlements (see Part 1). Although Israel has maintained a blockade of Gaza, reflecting both the perpetual threat of Hamas' terrorism and Iranian sponsorship of Hamas’ terrorist activities, Hamas has been the governing authority exercising control over Gaza (including the billions of aid money which the Strip receives). Thus, the question of “effective control” over Gaza is debatable, but the operation of daily life since 2007 has been within the more direct control of Hamas.

9. When the Troubles were brewing in Northern Ireland, the deployment of the British Army was initially met with cups of tea for British soldiers on the doorsteps of Catholic households, as the Catholic community saw the arrival of the army as relief from the corrupt and tormenting, and exclusively Protestant, Royal Ulster Constabulary (i.e., the police force). This reaction was short-lived. The British Army quickly became seen as part of the apparatus of state repression, and did precisely what occupying military powers do: use excessive force against a civilian populace under the pretext of counter-terrorism. Of those killed by the British Army during the Northern Ireland deployment, ~60% were civilians (of which ~86% were Catholics), and 722 British military personnel were killed by paramilitaries between 1969 and 2007. The cycle of violence, hostility, and mistrust would perpetuate itself for nearly 40 years.

10. Irish resistance to the English crown may arguably be one of the longest continuing in history from ~1169 to 1922 - a total of ~753 years - albeit under various iterations as the English crown became the British crown, and as the British became an Empire. Other examples of note would include Spanish resistance to Napoleonic occupation between 1808 to 1814, rendered notorious by the savage putdown of the Madrid uprising, immortalised by Goya's painting ‘The Third of May 1808’, to Chinese resistance against Japan’s appalling occupation from 1931 to 1945. The two examples of relatively peaceful military administrative occupations are Germany and Japan’s post-Second World War occupations, respectively. These required the total devastation of both nations nor were the occupying powers interested in permanent occupation, Soviet Russia excepted. However, these occupations were primarily in the context of establishing political solutions to a political problem. It should also be noted that “resistance” may be defined broadly and does not imply solely violent resistance but may extend to, e.g., withdrawal of labour, civil demonstrations, hunger strikes, and political mobilisation. Northern Ireland again serves as a case in point here, as the Catholic civil rights movement began as a non-sectarian peaceful protest movement before, eventually, violence subsumed the divisions.

11. Klug, T. ‘Occupation, Human Rights, and the Quest for Peace’, in Karpf, E et al. (ed.) A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism, and Jewish Identity. London: Verso, 2008, pp.27-31.

12. Horowitz, D. Lissak, M. ‘The State of Israel at Forty’, in Medding, P.Y. (ed.) Israel: State and Society, 1948-1988. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp.3-25.

13. Ravitzky, A. ‘Exile in the Holy Land: The Dilemma of Haredi Jewry’, in Medding, P.Y. (ed.) Israel State and Society: 1948-1988. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp.89-125.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Waxman, C.I. Messianism, Zionism, and the State of Israel. Modern Judaism. 1987 May;7(2):175–92.

17. Ravitzky (note 13).

18. Waxman (note 16).

19. Shafir, G. A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017, p.58.

20. Ibid., p.59.

21. Ibid.

22. This is not using the word “colonising” as some postmodern Leftist punchline; it is an accurate description of the reality on the ground.

23. Luz, E. The Moral Price of Sovereignty: The Dispute about the Use of Military Power within Zionism. Modern Judaism. 1987 Feb;7(1):51-98.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. Shelef, N.G. Evolving Nationalism: Homeland, Identity, and Religion in Israel, 1925-2005. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010, p.209.