The Atrocity Exhibition

How the West allowed 'the most moral army in the world' to kill who it wants, when it wants

During the Siege of Atlanta in 1864, the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman ordered the forced evacuation of the entire population of Atlanta. When the mayor of Atlanta, James Calhoun, criticized these orders on humanitarian grounds, Sherman testily replied that his orders were ‘not designed to meet the humanities of the case’, famously adding that ‘You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.’

Over the centuries, the world has often struggled to ‘refine’ war. From the 1027 ‘Truce of God’ to the Hague and Geneva Conventions, states have moved slowly and often inconsistently, and with many relapses and reversals, towards general agreement on laws and ‘customs’ of war that limit its destructive impact on civilians and non-combatants, ensure the humane treatment of prisoners and the wounded, and so on.

There have always been unresolved questions at the heart of this process. Do attempts to limit the ‘severity’ - as the German military used to put it - of war actually extend the duration of armed conflicts, therefore undermining the humanitarian intentions behind such limitations? If war, as Clausewitz once defined it, is ‘an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will’, then why should any army imposes limits on the force that it uses in order to achieve this outcome? If civilians are part of the war effort, either morally or materially, then why should they not be attacked, if that is what it takes to ‘compel the enemy to do our will?’

When Sherman ordered the evacuation of Atlanta, he removed a population that he saw as a threat to the security of his armies, and a drain on his resources. He acted in accordance with the doctrine of ‘military necessity’, defined in the 1863 Lieber Code that regulated the behaviour of Union armies in the American Civil War. Article 14 of the Code defined military necessity as ‘measures which are indispensable for securing the ends of the war, and which are lawful according to the modern law and usages of war.’ Article 16 qualified this further:

Military necessity does not admit of cruelty —that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions. It does not admit of the use of poison in any way, nor of the wanton devastation of a district.

There have been many wars and armed conflicts in which these rules have not been observed. Some armies have no interest in humanitarian rules and limits regardless of the situation. In other cases, the judgment of what constitutes ‘military necessity’ is made by individual commanders in relation to particular circumstances.

Today, most of the states that constitute the ‘international community’ accept what the International Committee of the Red Cross calls ‘ a balance between military necessity and humanitarian exigencies.’ These ‘exigencies’ have been conspicuously absent from Gaza, ever since Israel began its devastating retaliation for the October 7 Hamas raid.

Watching this savagery unfold, it’s been clear again and again, that Israel has welded 21st century technology to a form of warfare that is closer to the Old Testament war against the Amalekites, where God orders the Israelites to ‘ blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven’ as retribution for attacks carried out by the Amelekites against the Israelites leaving Egypt.

On October 28 last year Netanyahu told a press conference ‘Remember what Amalek did to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.’ Netanyahu subsequently denied that this reference amounted to an invitation to genocide, but the ongoing obliteration of the Gaza Strip suggests otherwise.

Why is this happening? This answer is partly due to the way the war has been fought, and the loose rules of engagement that have widened the scope of permissible destruction. Israel has been relying on the AI ‘Lavender’ system to define its targets, which defines some 37,000 people as Hamas members, and allows for a wide margin of error in how significant these targets are. According to +972 Magazine, Israeli commanders have given themselves extraordinarily wide latitude in how many civilians can be killed in order to hit their selected targets:

for every Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander

Such procedures certainly push the boundaries of military necessity. To kill Ahmed Andor, Hamas’s northern Gaza brigade commander, on November 16, Israel destroyed an entire neighbourhood and may have killed 250 civilians, in addition to three Israeli hostages. When Israeli troops opened fire on Palestinians rushing a food aid convoy and killed 100 people, security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir gave his ‘total support’ to soldiers who had ‘acted excellently against a Gazan mob that tried to harm them’.

Israel has also divided Gaza into ‘kill zones’ in which according to Ha’aretz, ‘As soon as people enter [a zone], mainly adult males, orders are to shoot and kill, even if that person is unarmed.’ This promiscuous destruction is not entirely new in Israel’s Gaza wars: there has always been a discrepancy between what Israel tells the world it is doing, and what it actually does. As Neve Gordon, Israeli professor of International Law at Queen Mary College, observed last October

The irony is that Israel actually uses the laws of war to portray itself as the moral actor. As it has done earlier this week, in 2014, the Israeli army instructed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to leave their homes and travel to the south knowing full well that among those living in the area are thousands of elderly and sick people and that the time it gave them to vacate the area was not sufficient.

Gordon attributed such actions to ‘Israel’s incredibly savvy manipulation of the laws of war that has successfully helped to frame Israeli violence as ethical’, and also

Alongside this legal discourse, Israel also circulates a colonial narrative that presents the Palestinians as “human animals” that do not understand the laws of war. By combining these colonial tropes and “legalese”, it frames Palestinians as immoral barbarians who “deserve to die”. This rhetorical move, in turn, construes Israeli soldiers as the opposite, namely, the “civilised” and moral “fighters”.

These ‘colonial tropes’ are crucial to understanding the ongoing destruction of Gazan society, and the acquiescence of so many Western governments in this process. As a result of Hamas’s real and fictitious atrocities, Gazans have been framed either as immoral barbarians who are complicit in October 7, or as worthless people whose lives are expendable in the pursuit of legitimate military targets.

This distinction between real and fictitious is important, even if few of Israel’s supporters have shown much interest in exploring it. I recently watched the documentary on the events of that day by Al Jazeera’s Investigations team. It’s a very careful piece of work, and certainly more thorough and comprehensive than anything I have seen or heard anywhere else.

The programme is clearly sympathetic to the Palestinians, and some might argue that it does Hamas more favours than it deserves. Nevertheless, it is clear, despite Hamas’s repeated denials, that its fighters murdered unarmed civilians, including young people at a music festival.

But the programme also shows that some of the worst atrocities were entirely made up. Babies were not tied up, decapitated, or put in ovens. Women did not have their breasts cut off. Though there may have been incidents of rape, Israel has not provided evidence that it was systematic - despite its ‘Believe Israeli women’ pseudo-feminist publicity campaign. Children who were supposed to have been burned alive turn out not to have been in the kibbutz where they were allegedly killed. Houses destroyed by Hamas were clearly blown up by Israeli tanks, for the simple reason that Hamas’s fighters had no heavy weapons, and Israelis were killed by shrapnel or by ‘friendly fire.’

Nor is it clear whether the war crimes that clearly did take place were the result of indiscipline and the absence of any obvious command structure, or whether Hamas fighters were following orders, in doing what they did. The documentary suggests that both Hamas fighters and the leadership were surprised at the ease with which they broke through the Gaza wall and met no opposition.

Bassem Nain, a member of the Hamas political bureau, claims that the attacks were carried out in order to prevent the world from bypassing and marginalizing the Palestinians. He reminds viewers of the 2018 ‘March of Return’ protests, when hundreds of unarmed Palestinians were killed and wounded:

We went peacefully in thousands. But what was the response of the international community? Nothing. In this context we have discussed many times, many sessions, what can we do? Generally, there was a sense in the political bureau that we have to move, we have to take action. If we don’t do it, Palestine will be forgotten, will be totally deleted from the map.

This sounds like a plausible explanation for the October 7 raid. But then a Ha’aretz article (paywalled) recently interviewed Gazan Palestinians in Egypt, who escaped Gaza before the war reached the south. Some interviewees claimed that the dominant Yahya Sinwar faction in Hamas saw ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ as the beginning of the divinely-ordained reconquest of Palestine, and believed in it so strongly that they had actually started ‘dividing Israel into cantons’. One old Fatah friend of the Ha’aretz journalist told him:

It was hard for us to grasp that they believed that with 3,000, 5,000 or even 10,000 armed militants they would conquer Israel. That's insane. But when you believe that God is sending you to do his bidding, there's no one to argue with. The signs were out there.

According to Ha’aretz, the Hamas leadership had been ‘talking about implementing "the last promise" (alwaed al'akhir) – a divine promise regarding the end of days, when all human beings will accept Islam’. Ha’aretz claimed that a conference on ‘The Promise of the Hereafter’, held in the Commodore Hotel in Gaza on September 30, 2021, ‘discussed in great detail the deployment ahead of the future management of the State of Palestine, following its "liberation" from Israel.’

These claims require a pinch of salt. Most of Ha’aretz’s contacts in this article are from Fatah, and have no reason to speak well of Hamas. The chaotic mayhem and ad hoc operations depicted in Al Jazeera’s documentary do not suggest that Hamas fighters seriously expected to ‘conquer Israel’, or even hold any positions.

Whatever the motivations for the raid, it’s organisers must have known that it would place the civilian population of Gaza directly in the firing line of Israel’s inevitable retribution. ‘The price paid by the Palestinians is terrible, it’s true,’ admits the Palestinian-Jordanian writer and activist Azzam Tamimi in the documentary, with remarkable equanimity. ‘It’s hefty. But pinpoint to me a liberation struggle in which there was no costly price.’

The Palestinians were never given the chance to decide if they wanted to pay that price, and those who survive this massacre will decide whether they thought it was a price worth paying, as they struggle to survive in the ruins of Gaza, trapped between Israeli bombs and the gangs and clans that are now emerging from the wreckage of their society.

Incredibly, according to the Independent, Israel is actually encouraging some of these ‘militias’ as an alternative to Hamas to fill the ‘security vacuum.’ Anyone who thinks this will make Gaza secure for anyone is dreaming. Israel was not obliged to do any of this. Its response to October 7 was a political and military choice, legitimised by atrocities that were deliberately exaggerated in order to create the impression of a uniquely monstrous enemy with genocidal intentions, to whom anything could be done with impunity.

We have been here many times before, in many other wars and conflicts. Yet politicians, gullible journalists and wilful propagandists alike - you know who they are - joined in, allowing themselves to be led through atrocity sites without asking any of the basic questions that Al Jazeera asked in this documentary.

Too many people were willing to believe that Hamas and the Gazan Palestinians would perpetrate these astonishingly monstrous acts of cruelty because they already believed that Palestinians and Arabs in general have some kind of natural proclivity to such behaviour, and that Gazan Palestinians in particular are motivated by fanaticism and cruelty.

Too many believed that Israel is always David fighting Goliath. Too many were incapable of seeing Hamas as a political actor, no matter how flawed, with political aims and a political context. Too many uncritically accept the ‘terrorist’ anathema which blots out any understanding of what Hamas is, what it represents, and what it does. Faced with angry Israeli spokespeople constantly evoking non-existent murdered babies, Israel was given carte blanche to whatever was supposedly required to eliminate Hamas and anyone who got in the way.

This is what atrocity propaganda is intended to do. It’s only now that some of these governments are beginning to realize their cowardice and folly in allowing Israel to pursue a war with no rules, no limits, and no endgame, and which has already unleashed levels of destruction and carnage that go beyond any notion of military necessity.