Finding Moral Light Through The Tangle
Those of us who oppose Israel’s attack on Hamas in Gaza, who are revolted by the pictures and reports of the mangled bodies and miseries of Palestinian children, dare not let Hamas off the hook because the residents of Gaza are victims. Don’t forget what Hamas professes and what it does. Many things are true about Hamas even if you don’t like the people who say them. Keep all this in your mind.
For example, here’s a clip of Hamas MP Fathi Hammad on Al-Aqsa TV, Feb. 29, 2008, bragging about Hamas using women and children, among others, as human shields:
[The enemies of Allah] do not know that the Palestinian people has developed its [methods] of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahedeen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahedeen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: “We desire death like you desire life.”I checked out the translation with two Arabic speakers, who confirm that it is accurate. Hussein Ibish, Executive Director of the Foundation for Arab-American Leadership and a Senior Fellow of the American Task Force on Palestine, e-mails me that “such declarations are in keeping with a good deal of the rhetoric of Hamas and some of its supporters.”
Consider also these words of Hamas leader Nizzim Rayyam, interviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg two years before he was killed, along with two of his wives and several of his children, by an Israeli air attack last week:
Israel is an impossibility. It is an offense against God… You [Jews] are murderers of the prophets and you have closed your ears to the Messenger of Allah…. Jews tried to kill the Prophet, peace be unto him. All throughout history, you have stood in opposition to the word of God.If we want to argue that Israel will have to deal with Hamas, cannot pulverize it at gunpoint, cannot “eliminate” it, and indeed heightens its prestige by piling up the bodies of civilians whether they are deliberately targeted or not–and I don’t know any alternative in the real world to dealing with them as a political force–we mustn’t think we can win the argument cheaply by pretending that it will be easy. It will not be easy. It’s only necessary.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government claims that it was justifiable to restrict foreign journalists because Hamas gunmen have used journalists’ vests. It also defends firing on ambulances because, it says, Hamas has used ambulances. YouTube indeed has a video that seems to show a UN ambulance being used by Hamas gunmen. It is certainly then understandable that the IDF would take exquisite precautions. But to say understandable isn’t to say that it’s morally defensible to open fire at will. Israel claims to operate under a principle of “purity of arms”: “The soldier shall not employ his weaponry and power in order to harm non-combatants or prisoners of war, and shall do all he can to avoid harming their lives, body, honor and property.” I’m a literalist about “all that he can.” “All” is all.
The fact that representatives of Hamas deceive, even brag about deceiving, cannot justify the shooting of ambulances and the killing of children.
Todd Gitlin
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/09/finding_moral_light/#more
