One's First Inclination Shouldn't Be To Support Killing Children

The sick, twisted team sports politics of Israel Palestine

Arguing about any topic related to Israel Palestine is a largely fruitless endeavor. There are, of course, many worthwhile conversations that could be had. But the only thing partisans on both sides ever seem to want to talk about is who has mostly been at fault. Discussions of, for example, whether Israel should stop its siege become derailed with lengthy debates about whether Israel was to blame in 1948, and whether Palestinians were the primary obstructionist party in the Camp David negotiations. People act as though the fact that the other side is generally in the right justifies whatever their side is doing, however many innocent people end up dying.

This is a totally ridiculous way to argue about the topic. Changing one’s mind comes in stages—it comes by analyzing lots of little topics and finding a common pattern among the truth. Having every debate be about contentious macro issues—who is usually at fault—is a good way for neither side to ever change their mind and for both sides to support whatever their side is doing, thinking that the fact that their side is generally in the right justifies whatever brutality they are doing.

Since the start of the most recent war, about 7,000 Palestinians have been killed, with around 3,000 of them being children. B’Tselem notes:

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has promised that sites where Hamas makes preparations or hides will be turned to rubble and told Gaza residents: “Get out now. We will be everywhere and with all our might,” while the IDF Spokesperson stressed: “The emphasis is on damage, not accuracy.”

The results are horrifying. There is nowhere to hide in Gaza, and local residents have no way to protect themselves. There are no bomb shelters, no safe rooms, no safe spaces. There are no alarms that warn them to escape. All they can do is wait in fear and terror and hope they won’t get hit. Hundreds of thousands have already left their homes in a desperate attempt to protect themselves and their families, and still, nowhere in Gaza is safe. People have been killed while fleeing. They have been killed in the places they fled to, where they have found refuge.

You can read the stories from people on the ground, compiled by B’Tselem. You can read about stories like Olfat al'-Kurd’s:

I’ve already lost more than 16 relatives in this war - uncles and cousins.  I’m in shock and can’t even cry. I feel emotionally disconnected. I try to put on a brave front for the family, but it’s very difficult. We have no idea how this will end and what will happen to us. These could be our final days.

or Abul al-Majid:

Children here are getting sick because it’s impossible to maintain hygiene, and maybe because of the poor quality of the water we buy. A lot of people are suffering from stomach aches and diarrhea.

or Muhammad a-Najar:

We were given food and water for the first time after about three days. We stand in long lines every day to get two small pitas, half a tin of canned meat and some water for the day. The queues are rough and exhausting. I could barely get us blankets.

or Sa’id Nassar:

When the hunger gets intolerable, we ask our neighbors for food. If we eat breakfast, we don’t eat for the rest of the day. ‘Udai stays hungry because our kitchen is just empty. There’s no food. I dream of a day when I can provide normal meals to my family, that we can eat at least two meals a day. We also don’t have money for diapers, so I have to ask my friends for them. .

This is just a small sample. And these people are the lucky ones—the people who are still alive. Israel’s bombing has now killed more children than Hamas killed total people on October 7th. The people of Gaza do not deserve this—they do not deserve to be systematically starved, deprived of electricity, and bombed almost indiscriminately, where even the Israeli government admits “the emphasis is on damage, not accuracy.”

Lots of people seem to be broadly supportive of what Israel is doing. They’ll often ask what Israel should do, if not this? If not reducing huge swathes of Gaza to smithereens, what should they do? If not leaving kids to starve, what are they to do?

Beauchamp gives a very solid answer in his piece for Vox. The solution is targeted operations rather than indiscriminate bombings. Escalated targeted killings of Hamas leadership combined with various other targeted operations. Bombing Gaza back to the stone age and murdering thousands of children achieves nothing; suppose Hamas is removed, what comes next? Israel can’t install a puppet regime successfully, and an indefinite reoccupation would be disastrous.

Beauchamp argues convincingly that the only way to end this crisis is with broader solutions—things that make Gazans less poor and miserable, and consequently less likely to turn to Hamas. Special operations are what the U.S. should have pursued in the wake of 9/11, and similarly are what Israel should do. Targeting high-level officials has a proven track record, while carpet bombing does not and only fuels more terrorism. After consulting many experts on the topic, Beauchamp summarizes:

The answer that emerged was deceptively simple: make the right choice where America made the wrong one. Israel should launch a targeted counterrorism operation aimed at Hamas leadership and the fighters directly involved in the October 7 attack, one that focuses on minimizing both civilian casualties and the scope of ground operations in Gaza.

“Go in for a few weeks or less, trying to find Hamas leaders and destroying tunnels, weapons caches, etc,” says Dan Byman, a professor at Georgetown who studies Israeli counterterrorism.

But this counterterrorism approach must be paired with a broader political outreach designed to address the root causes of Hamas’ support.

In her book How Terrorism Ends, Carnegie Mellon professor Audrey Kurth Cronin examined roughly 460 terrorist groups to figure out what caused their collapse. She found that pure repression — trying to crush them with military force — rarely works. And in the few cases that it does, like in Sri Lanka’s long campaign against the Tamil Tigers, it tends to require an unthinkable level of sustained and indiscriminate violence.

Beauchamp’s entire piece is very worth reading. He marshals lots of considerations to argue that a targeted approach would not only save thousands of lives but would be more effective at quelling terrorism and making sure nothing like the events that occurred on October 7th ever happens again.

Unfortunately, with the fervor surrounding this issue, where every criticism of Israel’s action becomes a referendum on everything it’s ever done, pro-Israel partisans rush to defend Israel’s actions without seriously investigating them. Similarly, pro-Palestinian partisans defend the brutal attack of Hamas because of a deep unwillingness to condemn what they perceive to be their own side.

What should Israel do is often asked as more of a gotcha than anything else. Many who ask it did not start by examining the possible actions that Israel could take before concluding that this one would work. Instead, based on other facts, they concluded that Israel was good and rushed to defend Israel’s actions, acting as soldiers rather than scouts.

This is beyond sick. One’s first reaction to a 9/11’s worth of deaths inflicted against children should be to see whether it was avoidable. Killing three and a half times as many Palestinians as Israelis were killed on October 7th is a policy of last resort. There may be times when it is appropriate—if the alternative were, for example, the wholesale destruction of Israel. But it shows how deeply perverse the team sports aspect of politics is, when the first inclination of huge numbers of people to the mass murder of children is to defend it, because it was done by people they perceive as the good guys.