When Israeli civilians die, human rights norms disappear

People making this third claim aren’t introducing a serious claim. They are making a semi-sarcastic riposte to Israeli claims that Hamas embeds its armed forces in civilian areas. Denuded of the phoney legal argument, all that is left of the third claim is essentially just a restatement of the second claim – that Israeli actions in Gaza mean that Israelis had no real standing to complain about civilian harm in the Iranian war on Israel.

If we dismiss the third claim as unserious, we are still left with two substantive claims that are marshalled to explain the indifference to, and occasional mocking pleasure of, human rights activists to Iranian attacks on Israeli civilians.

The consequential claim asks to consider a chain of events leading to a missile being fired on an Israeli city, not just the Iranian officer who gives an order or the Iranian soldier who actually fires the missile. It was the Israelis, after all, who launched this war, and in every Israeli gaming of the war they launched, they assumed that Iran would fire missiles at their cities. If the Israelis don’t want missiles landing on their cities, this line of reasoning goes, then they shouldn’t start a war with Iran where this is the only plausible outcome.

The hypocrisy claim asks us to husband our sympathies for those who deserve it, and apply our moral rules to those we have approved as accepting them upon themselves. Perhaps in an ideal world, the argument goes, the Israelis could be entitled to our support and our outrage at the missiles being lobbed at their cities and hospitals. But it’s hard to have sympathy for Israelis under fire when their own army is conducting a war we so strongly oppose.

Leaving aside the gaping hole in the argument that says that ordinary Israeli civilians need to be accountable for actions of their government which they might not even support, this argument suffers from the same problem as the previous one, namely that it would necessarily apply to the Palestinians in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre – but manifestly did not.

No human rights organisation, no professor of international law, no outraged cultural figure signing tendentious statements for publication in this or that Review of Books thought that the arguments about consequence or hypocrisy had any bearing on their principles when it came to Gazans.

Not only was it irrelevant that the war was launched by Gazans on October 7 or that the Palestinian public overwhelmingly supported the massacre (no protests were registered anywhere in the Palestinian Territories or, for that matter, anywhere in the Arab World as a whole), but the lack of consequentialist thinking held for the duration of the war. None of the humanitarians who vociferously oppose the Israeli blockade demand, say, the immediate and unconditional release of the Israeli hostages as a way of ending it. And no western “international law expert” wags their finger at Palestinians suffering in Gaza and says, “Oh now you don’t like civilian casualties? You felt otherwise on the Seventh.”

The hospital version of this argument shows just how problematic the whole claim is. The IDF operated around (and under) hospitals where Hamas militants were hiding, holding hostages, storing weapons, and directing offensive operations. The Iranian missile that fell on Soroka hospital fell on a building treating patients. No matter. The Israelis have no moral standing to be upset about an attack on their hospital when they have attacked Palestinian hospitals.

There’s just one problem with this argument – that is, one problem beside the overall moral obscenity of it. The first hospital to be attacked in the October 7 War was attacked on October 7, and it was not in Gaza, but rather the Barzilai hospital in Ashkelon, which was hit by a rocket during the initial assault that started the whole war. And among the first targets to be hit in the kibbutzim that were invaded that deadly morning were the ambulances that otherwise would have evacuated some of the wounded.

These facts never factored into the condemnations of Israeli military action around Gaza hospitals. Which is entirely understandable as, unlike Hamas’ use of those hospitals for military ends, it has no bearing on the justice or injustice of any IDF operation. On the contrary. It is safe to assume that the self-appointed arbiters of human rights would be appalled if one of their own mocked pictures of a damaged hospital in Gaza with a reference to the Barzilai rocket attacks and a tweet about how “finally Gazans found a hospital bombing they oppose,” though versions of this were the basis for numerous clever posts and a punchline on Radio 4’s Friday Night Comedy.

A moral economy that allots all the outrage for the Israelis who were the targets of a murderous attack and leaves none leftover for those, whether Iranian, Palestinian, or Lebanese, who attacked them, cannot be the basis for global norms in war or in peace.

Shany Mor is a lecturer in political thought at Reichman University and a senior research associate at Bicom