That explosion at the hospital in Gaza has inspired a contentious debate about who is responsible and I don’t think people are going to be persuaded either way if it violates their priors. However, I think that spending too much time pointing fingers on that single incident is really counterproductive for both Israeli people and Palestinian people caught in the crossfire. There is much more at stake.
Here’s Eric Levitz at NY Magazine:
An explosive fell on the parking lot of a hospital in Gaza City Tuesday, killing a large number of Palestinians. Hamas attributed the blast to the Israeli military. Many news organizations and critics of Israel attributed the catastrophe to the Israeli military.
This presumption of Israeli responsibility was not unfounded. Israel had struck the hospital just days earlier, according to video footage obtained by the New York Times. The Israeli military had ordered the evacuation of 22 hospitals in northern Gaza last week, according to the World Health Organization. And Israel had dropped more than 6,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip since Hamas’s attack on October 7. The Israeli Defense Forces denied responsibility for the strike on the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, attributing it to a misfired rocket by the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad. Yet Israel had attempted to frame Islamic Jihad for its own air strikes against civilians in the past.
Nevertheless, presenting Israel’s responsibility for the al-Ahli hospital as a proven fact was journalistically irresponsible. And this irresponsibility became more apparent on Wednesday, when new information cast doubt on early narratives about the attack. For example, there was a widespread sense Tuesday that the explosion had destroyed the hospital. This suggested that the blast was of a magnitude far larger than an Islamic Jihad rocket was capable of generating. In the light of Wednesday morning, however, a photo published by a Palestinian news source, and verified by the Times, indicated that the hospital was intact, as the explosion’s direct impact was concentrated on the parking lot. The crater left by the explosive appears quite small. U.S. intelligence claims that multiple strands of evidence indicate Islamic Jihad’s responsibility, including infrared satellite data. As of this writing, no independent news outlet has verified this conclusion.
The rush to judgment has costs. Initial reports of Israeli responsibility derailed President Biden’s planned summit with the leaders of Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority, which might have helped to spur a faster humanitarian response to conditions in Gaza. Still, for those seeking to advance a particular political narrative about Israel, the risks of epistemic immodesty may seem to pale in comparison with the potential benefits. In this view, one little (potential) lie can serve to promote a larger truth.
But I think this is a mistake, particularly in the present context. The case for a ceasefire in Gaza does not rest on Israel’s culpability for any single air strike. The undisputed facts are more than enough to indicate that Israel’s campaign against Hamas has featured a callous disregard for civilian suffering. We don’t need to rely on Hamas to know that Israel has cut off food, fuel, electricity, and water to much of Gaza’s population. Israel’s own government has told us that. Similarly, data from the Gaza Health Ministry is not our only indication that there have been massive civilian casualties in Gaza. The U.N. tells us that Gaza is running out of body bags, while photos published by the IDF portray the large-scale decimation of civilian infrastructure.
Virtually every war entails some number of civilian casualties. But in its previous campaigns against Gaza, Israel has shown a distinctive indifference toward civilian life. The IDF will attribute this reality to Hamas’s habit of embedding its military installations into civilian infrastructure. But it does not follow that Israel has no responsibility to give weight to Palestinian life.
More fundamentally, Israel wields de facto control over Gazans’ conditions of daily life. In a meaningful sense, Israel is the state that rules them. And Gazans are denied a voice in that state on the basis of their national and ethnic identities. It is true that, in surveys, Gazans express little interest in living in a single, binational democratic state from the river to the sea. But it is unclear whether this would be the case in a world where such a state were not such a far-fetched hypothetical. In any event, the fact that Gazans live under the subjugation of the Israeli state, rather than under the auspices of their own independent state, makes Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza all the more obscene.
Meanwhile, it is far from clear that the present campaign will be effective in ensuring Israelis’ long-term security interests. Already, the campaign has generated such enmity in the Arab world as to jeopardize Israel’s normalized relations with its neighbors. At the same time, the unprecedented scale of death within Gaza is all but certain to radicalize countless young people, minting the next generation of violent extremists.
Israel cannot tolerate Hamas attacks. But it is not clear that it couldn’t more effectively protect Israelis by simultaneously increasing its defensive capacities on the Gaza border, targeting some high-ranking Hamas militants, and addressing the Palestinians’ political grievances. For example, by abandoning its illegal settlement project in the West Bank, Israel could free up more troops for guarding its border with Hamas. At the same time, an Israeli government that made genuine concessions to Palestinian rights might eat into Hamas’s appeal in Gaza. Among the other merits of this approach, it seems likelier to bring about the safe return of the Israeli hostages still living in Gaza.
For all these reasons, the case for an immediate ceasefire — and durable end to a mode of warfare that takes mass Palestinian death as its acceptable price — is strong. And the question of whether Israel was responsible for the calamity at al-Ahli Hospital has essentially no bearing on that case. There is simply no reason for advocates of the Palestinian cause to dig in on a factual debate about a single incident, rather than focusing on making their moral case against the present war.
This is not the first time in this conflict that people have missed the forest for contested trees. In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attack, there were reports that militants beheaded babies and raped Israeli women on a massive scale. As of this writing, such reports remain unconfirmed. I was among those who initially gave undue credence to such reports. Yet those, like myself, who wished to emphasize the barbarity of Hamas’s attack had no reason to quibble over these details. The undisputed facts were more than enough to establish the monstrosity of Hamas’s actions. It is not meaningfully worse to behead a baby than to burn one alive, as images released by the IDF suggest that Hamas did when it set houses on fire. The killing of 1,400 Israeli Jews was a historic crime, irrespective of whether it featured the decapitation of babies or rape at a mass scale. Insisting on the veracity of those contested details only served to deflect attention away from the horror of what was known.
Thus, it is not just irresponsible but also bad political practice, to wager one’s credibility on disputed, inessential details. The case against Israel’s campaign does not rest on its culpability for any single explosion, and the Palestinians’ allies do them no favors by acting as though it does.
Agreed. Once again, cooler heads need to prevail in a situation like this.
