Ukraine, Gaza, starvation as warfare, and the “rules-based international order”
International diplomacy runs to a considerable extent on hypocrisy.
But Patrick Wintour warns that even the usual diplomatic hypocrisy has its limits:
… Joe Biden’s decision to defend Israel’s methods in Gaza so soon after, in a different context, condemning Russia’s in Ukraine, is not just an occasion for hand wringing from liberals and lawyers.
It is already having a real-world impact on relations between the global north and south, and west and east, creating consequences that could reverberate for decades.
The Biden administration, reluctant to change course, may say the parallels between Gaza and Ukraine are far from exact, but it also seems to know it is gradually losing diplomatic support.1 [my emphasis]
Daniel Larison stresses how critical the situation in Gaza has become, thanks to policies of Bibi Netanyahu’s authoritarian government which are backed with no meaningful criticism or restraint. He cites a New York Times article with the hair-raising title, “Children eat rotten food, adults hunt cats: famine is coming for Gaza: Bombing has displaced more than a million in Gaza — but none of them are safe from hunger.”
According to the report, food is so scarce that people are reduced to eating whatever they can find, even if it has spoiled. What little food that does exist is prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of people. Nursing mothers cannot produce milk for their babies. In just under three months, a population of more than two million people has been driven to the brink by the deliberate Israeli use of starvation as a weapon. The people of Gaza have been subjected to one of the most monstrous policies of collective punishment in recent memory. There is good reason to fear that a large percentage of the population will perish if conditions remain like this or worsen.2
The UN was warning about this starvation crisis before Christmas of 2023, citing a report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC):
At least one in four households (more than half a million people) in the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic acute food insecurity conditions (IPC Phase 5 – Catastrophe), characterized by extreme food gaps and collapse of their livelihood. About 80% of the population in Gaza Strip are in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) or Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5). The entire population can be considered classified in IPC Phase 3 and above (Crisis or worse) during the projection period starting in the second week of December. Furthermore, the situation is deteriorating rapidly. ...
Conditions are likely to continue to sharply deteriorate for as long as hostilities continue, and humanitarian access is significantly restricted. Of the 150-180 food trucks typically entering daily pre-escalation, only about 30 food trucks have entered the Gaza Strip on a daily basis since the end of the humanitarian pause on 30 November 2023. Even optimistic estimates of the potential kilocalories delivered in these shipments indicate that this level of food supply is far below the nutritional requirements of the whole population. We also note that there is an unequal distribution of trucks across the Gaza Strip, and almost no shipments have reached the northern governorates since 28 November 2023.3
International law is obviously far from being as effective as it should be. But it does set universal standards of conduct, however much those are also influenced by Western and great-power interests.
Yet as Telford Taylor, one of the American prosecutors at the Nuremberg war crimes trials wrote in 1970, the laws of war have real and very important value:
The first is strictly pragmatic: They work. Violated or ignored as they often are, enough of the rules are observed enough of the time so that mankind is very much better off with them than without them. The rules for the treatment of civilian populations in occupied countries are not as susceptible to technological change as rules regarding the use of weapons in combat. If it were not regarded as wrong to bomb military hospitals, they would be bombed all of the time instead of some of the time.4 [my emphasis]
As anyone following the news from Israel’s war in Gaza here at the beginning of 2024 is very aware, it is not only military hospitals that are sometimes bombed in violation of the laws of war.
Taylor continues:
Another and, to my mind, even more important basis of the laws of war is that they are necessary to diminish the corrosive effect of mortal combat on the participants. War does not confer a license to kill for personal reasons-to gratify perverse impulses, or to put out of the way anyone who appears obnoxious, or to whose welfare the soldier is indifferent. War is not a license at all, but an obligation to kill for reasons of state; it does not countenance the infliction of suffering for its own sake or for revenge.
Unless troops are trained and required to draw the distinction between military and nonmilitary killings, and to retain such respect for the value of life that unnecessary death and destruction will continue to repel them, they may lose the sense for that distinction for the rest of their lives. The consequence would be that many returning soldiers would be potential murderers. [my emphasis]
Yes, those laws of war apply to the United States. And to Russia. And to Israel.
This is also why the Biden Administration’s continual evoking of the “rules-based international order” instead of international law is very problematic. As Wintour writes:
In a context in which many rising nations anyway viewed the “international rules based order” with scepticism, the script for Sergei Lavrov, the veteran Russian foreign minister, writes itself. Speaking at the Doha Forum in December, Lavrov complained: “The rules were never published, were never even announced by anyone to anyone, and they are being applied depending on what exactly the west needs at a particular moment of modern history.”
It’s very important that the US government and the American press give careful attention to the expressed intentions of senior Israeli officials5:
The horrific war Israel is waging against civilians in Gaza with effectively full support from the US, the Biden Administration, and essentially the entire Republican Party has broader consequences for US diplomacy. Wintour:
If the US defence of Israel continues to go wrong, one or two outcomes are likely. The trend to shifting transactional non-ideological alliances will grow. Forum shopping by countries or strategic hedging, requiring active portfolio management like financial hedging, will become even more the norm. Alternatively, America could find itself confronting larger and more assertive alternative blocs, whether it is an expanded BRICS, led this year by Putin, or other Chinese-led alliances.
Six short months ago it looked so different. After a period of so-called westlessness – code for the division and malaise fed by a Trump presidency – the west in 2022 rediscovered itself and was proud it responded to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine with unprecedented solidarity. Not afraid of war, or of losing Russian energy sources.
… The liberal order, tattered by Iraq and defeated in Afghanistan, had revived itself.
Those shifting possibilities Wintour describes there are not mainly caused by Bibi Netanyahu’s conduct in the Gaza war. They are a normal result of the evolution of a world that is no longer the “unipolar” one with the US as a sole superpower as it was in the decades after 1991. Near the end, Wintour mentions “the pre-existing trends towards a … more multi-polar, yet less multilateral world.”
But the relationship the US has with Israel - often a very dysfunctional one from the standpoint of US national interests - is providing one of the most dramatic catalysts for such changes at the current moment. Even major trends are made up of individual events. Foreign policy wonks are already arguing over the point at which the “unipolar moment” ended: 2014? (Russia seizing Crimea) 2016? (Trump’s election on a nationalistic MAGA pitch) 2022? (Russia’s larger invasion of Ukraine in February) 2023? (The Israel-Gaza War)
It may sound a bit pompous in this context. But it’s worth recalling Hegel’s invoction of the Owl of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, on major transition points in history: "When philosophy paints its gray on gray, then a form of life has grown old, and with gray on gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known; the Owl of Minerva first takes flight with twilight closing in."6
Wintour, Patrick (2023): Why US double standards on Israel and Russia play into a dangerous game. The Guardian 12/26/2023. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/26/why-us-double-standards-on-israel-and-russia-play-into-a-dangerous-game> (Accessed: 2023-30-12).
Larison, Daniel (2024): Famine Is Devouring the People of Gaza. Eunomia 01/02/224. <https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/israel-gaza-war-famine-news-update-ckjntk93j> (Accessed: 2024-03-01).
IPC-Integrated Food Security Phase Classification-Conclusions and Recommendations 12/212023), 1-2. <https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/gaza-strip-famine-review-ipc-analysis-conclusions-and-recommendations> (Accessed: 2024-03-01.
Taylor, Telford (1970): Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy, 39-40. New York: Bantam Books.
'100-200,000, Not Two Million': Israel's Finance Minister Envisions Depopulated Gaza. Haaretz 12/31/2023. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-31/ty-article/100-200-000-not-two-million-israels-finance-minister-envisions-depopulated-gaza/0000018c-bfe8-d6c4-ab8d-fffc0b910000> (Accessed: 2024-03-01).
Hegel, G.W.F. Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 14, 16. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. ("Preface" to Philosophy of Right) My translation from German.