Unpacking the Absurdities used to justify Israel's 2023 siege on Gaza

In this post, I’ll examine some of the arguments I’ve heard that are used often in concert to justify Israel’s siege in Gaza. Before we dive in, I want to add a very important framing disclaimer, and this is a subjective one: I consider human life to hold sacred value. I’m deconstructing fallacious arguments here to correct the record as I see it, not because I think any of these arguments, even if true, would justify the mass murder and carnage we’re seeing.

Even if you believe that every adult in Gaza is a terrorist, it would still be indefensible to indiscriminately destroy every living thing there because Gaza is also home to children and animals. There were 1.1 million children there, many of them under the age of 10. In many Western countries, we have Child Protective Services that remove children from their parents when their safety is sufficiently compromised. We don’t typically take the line that “if your parent is bad, bad luck, you can die” – though that is often what happens in practice, we at least make an effort. It’s really baffling to humanitarians to see that this value for human life evaporates when our political leaders and pro-war people talk about Gaza – now every baby, toddler, child, teenager is fair game for “collateral damage”. The only reason I can think of to justify the level of child death we’re seeing is if you believe the children are terrorists too. It’s a new level of absurdity to believe a newborn in an incubator is a terrorist, so I’m not going to try to reason with those who make that one.

Because of the false binary discourse around this heated topic, I have to say this: I don’t need any convincing on the horrors of October 7 – it was a tragedy. I value ALL human life and want safety for everyone. My disagreement lies on Israel’s strategy leading up to it and after October 7. I reject the false binary that either you think October 7 was horrible or everything after it is horrible. It is ALL horrible. The current course of this genocidal war makes everyone of every faith or non-faith less safe.

I am outraged and so some anger may shine through my words. If you feel heated reading it, please pause for yourself to catch a breath, and then pause for me – to consider that perhaps rage is an appropriate response when bombs rain down on children. Because even if you don’t care about those children, I am among the millions of mothers who do.

So with that in mind, let’s take a look at three arguments I’ve commonly heard and unpack them a bit.

Absurd Argument 1: Gaza could have been like Singapore

Counterpoint: It’s really hard to have a trade-based economy when you’re under a land, sea, air blockade for 16 years

I’m not defending Hamas as being good governance. They are awful. But I want to call out how unrealistic it would be for any governing entity to build an economic powerhouse like Singapore under a land, sea and air blockade which Gaza has been under since 2007, imposed by Israel and Egypt. I accept the argument that the blockade may not have been implemented in the first place if Hamas wasn’t in power, but I’ve seen this “Singapore” argument be made in the context of historical reality, which is that there was Hamas and there has been a blockade.

Singapore is an International trade center. It has one of the highest ratios of Trade-to-GDP (336% in 2021) of any country in the world (the US trade-to-GDP ratio is 26%, this isn’t in a sign of lower economic power, just that we have a big domestic market). The point is Singapore’s economy is largely based on trade. It has a very busy port. According the Maritime Port Authority of Singapore, in November 2023 alone, 3.35 Million TEUs, that’s the 20 foot long shipping containers, were passed through Singapore. Meanwhile, Palestinian fishermen were not allowed to fish more than 6 nautical miles off their own coast.

Here’s an excerpt directly from Btselem, the Israeli Human Rights organization, from 2020:

“Israel has arrested fishermen and seized their boats, banned the import of raw materials used for repairs, and fired at boats that it claimed sailed beyond the permitted range. To date, Israeli gunfire has killed seven fishermen and wounded hundreds. The restrictions have led to the near-collapse of the Gazan fishing industry: there are currently less than 4,000 fishermen, as opposed to 10,000 or so 20 years ago. Those remaining suffer from perilous working conditions imposed by Israel and live with their families in abject poverty.”

Expecting a group of people who can barely feed themselves to have a surplus of anything to export abroad is ludicrous on multiple levels: even if they could magically establish an industry using only the resources available in the 6 miles x 25 miles Gaza strip that they have access to, they weren’t allowed to trade anything.

Not only were they under a severe economic, food and water blockade, Gazans also dealt with violence every day long before October 7 (it’s now stepped up to an apocalyptic level, of course). The bleak, hopeless nature of life in Gaza is alluded to in the below clip by Abby Martin. Abby Martin made the documentary “Gaza fights for freedom” covering the largely peaceful March of Return that was attempted by Palestinians in 2018 as an act of resistance, and was met with Israeli bullets. “Israeli soldiers shot unarmed protesters, bystanders, journalists and medical staff approximately 150-400m from the fence, where they did not pose any threat”, observes Amnesty International. One might conclude building a Singapore under these conditions of violence and deprivation would be kind of a miracle.

Abby Martin on Joe Rogan talking about the “Gaza fights for freedom” documentary released back in 2018, and this video was uploaded on YouTube in 2019

You can watch the “Gaza fights for freedom” documentary for free in multiple languages on https://gazafightsforfreedom.com/.

Absurd Argument 2: This is not a genocide

Counterargument: We can call it whatever other word you want, but when tens of thousands of people are violently maimed or killed, it’s BAD

I’ve seen people really be tripped up on semantics on this one. First of all, the leading scholar on Holocaust and Genocide studies, Professor Raz Seagall called this a “Textbook case of Genocide” in his eponymous article in the Jewish currents, and in the LA Times. Then of course, a bunch of readers from LA times wrote in saying that they, Joe Schmoe, disagreed with him that this meets the criteria. So there’s the leading scholars on the topic, and then a bunch of people who find it inconvenient or uncomfortable to confront that the country they identify so strongly with might be committing genocide. You pick who you trust.

Why is this so important to people? “Genocide” is an emotionally charged word. I get that. And earlier in the debates, I didn’t use it for that reason. But is death and destruction excusable when it’s not meeting the bar for ‘genocide’ and then becomes bad when it crosses that threshold? To be arguing over the word is to miss the key point that thousands of people have lost their lives, limbs, family members, homes, livelihoods. This is suffering at an enormous scale, whatever we may want to call it.

In this hard-hitting interview with Piers Morgan, Dr Norman Finkelstein, who has been studying Gaza for 40 years in excruciating detail (you can check out his book: Gaza, an inquest into its martyrdom), says:

“…what is the consequence of denying a civilian population all water, all food, all fuel, all electricity. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that that is a recipe for genocide “
– Dr Norman Finkelstein in this interview “Norman Finkelstein vs Alan Dershowitz On Israel-Palestine War With Piers Morgan | The Full Debate. Quote starts around 4 mins 30 seconds, though I highly recommend watching the whole interview!

Apparently, many people need to go back to elementary school and retake biology lessons or do a little experiment like skipping meals for a day to realize that all living organisms need food to survive. The cutting of food, water, electricity, communications is not accidental. It’s not like someone tripped and hit those switches on a switchboard and now we can’t figure out why kids are dying of dehydration, diseases are spreading and there’s no medical supplies. These were intentional choices that Israel made, knowing that they would lead to this much civilian suffering, disease and death.

I’ve seen similar semantic arguments on “Apartheid”. People seem to have an allergic reaction to this word, and hence an allergic reaction to reality. The fact is that Palestinians and Israelis have different rights. As a Palestinian in the West Bank you have to go through several checkpoints to travel a few miles. Nimrod Novik, former senior policy advisor to Shimon Peres, described The West Bank as a “cheesecake”, there’s so many checkpoints restricting the movement of Palestinians.

This chart below also shows just a few of the differences in what Palestinians and Israelis can do. Human Rights Watch, and several other organizations have called Israel an “Apartheid state”. So you can disagree with them, and give it another word. But if it looks like apartheid and it acts like apartheid, why not just call it that? Why do you want to make debates inconvenient and force people to use long-winded sentences to describe what is going on, which is “Apartheid”.

Visualizing Palestine has so many informative and well sourced graphics.

Amnesty International’s 2022 report on the topic is very extensive (280 pages, read the exec summary!), but just to quote a sliver from its summary:

“Palestinian citizens of Israel, who comprise about 19% of the population, face many forms of institutionalized discrimination. In 2018, discrimination against Palestinians was crystallized in a constitutional law which, for the first time, enshrined Israel exclusively as the “nation state of the Jewish people”. The law also promotes the building of Jewish settlements and downgrades Arabic’s status as an official language. The report documents how Palestinians are effectively blocked from leasing on 80% of Israel’s state land, as a result of racist land seizures and a web of discriminatory laws on land allocation, planning and zoning.”

Absurd Argument 3: If the damage is unintentional, it’s ok. Intent is key.

Counterargument: Would you rather someone intentionally give you a paper cut or accidentally blew your arm off?

I wouldn’t want to be friends with the person who intentionally gave me the paper-cut, but I’d pick the paper-cut over losing an arm. Real physical outcomes matter, not just intent.

Of course there’s major factual error here in asserting that there isn’t intent – there’s numerous statements by Israeli politicians outlining their intent to “make Gaza inhabitable” and that Palestinians are “human animals” – just go back to Raz Seagall’s article on genocide for that. Furthermore, it’s obvious from the death toll, which benchmarks as a higher ratio of killed people to survivors (1 in 200 killed on just day 70), than World War Two. There’s nothing accidental or unintentional about the damage. You’d have to believe that war technology has gotten a lot less precise with technological advancement since 1945 to believe that this level of damage was inevitable. Other evidence points in the same direction that there is an intent to kill civilians: IDF soldiers fatally shot three unarmed shirtless Israeli hostages waving the white flag of surrender, and shot two Christian women who were leaving a Church to go to the bathroom.

I’d be remiss not to talk at least a bit about the fallback argument – it’s all Hamas. Which has been the most overused and absurdly overused argument throughout. Hamas was hiding in every bakery, every school, every hospital, and the women shot near the Church were Hamas operatives. Pope Francis called the killings of the two Christian women “terrorism”, so he’s a Hamas operative too. So if it is true that these were all legitimate targets for bombing and shooting because of the presence or connection to Hamas, you can’t then argue that bombing or shooting is accidental. It can’t be both targeted and unintentional. So which one is it: are you grossly incompetent accidentally killing all these people you didn’t intend to, OR are you grossly malevolent painting thousands of innocent civilians as terrorists or ‘human shields’ and intentionally killing them? Either way Israel needs to be stopped! I can see someone making a third case: it’s targeted but we accept that a hundred innocent people will die painful deaths for every terrorist killed. Ok, that can be your position, but at least say it clearly like that and then we, the humanitarian camp, can tell you we subjectively disagree. I wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice someone I love in a package deal to get rid of a terrorist, so I wouldn’t make that decision for someone else’s family either, let alone for a hundred other families. And how is it logical to call someone a “human shield” if you kill them anyways – they’re not even a shield if they don’t afford any protection.

Now even if you believe, against all evidence, that the death toll is mostly accidental damage – it’s been thousands upon thousands of mistakes, you still have to accept that incompetence kills. If I was a bad driver and hit people left, right and center as I drove, I’d likely get my license revoked. We could argue in court that I didn’t intend to hit those people, but the fact that I did means I shouldn’t be on the road. If the IDF is not intending to harm civilians but are causing harm at this level, they need to be stopped. The case for a Ceasefire rests on the undeniable real physical damage inflicted on real human bodies.

Ultimately, we have to answer: Are we the type of people who would save a child if we could? Or are we the type who would need to have context, lengthy debate, discourse, and ultimately need to know the religion or ethnicity or skin color of the child? Many people have sadly revealed that they need to know more to ‘know how to feel’. And I’ve provided a tiny bit of it above in my unpacking of common arguments to justify what’s going on. But for those of us centered in our humanity, we didn’t need it anyways, because we agree with what Aida Touma-Sliman, a Palestian former Knesset member in Israel, said before she was cancelled by the Israeli Government: “A child is a child is a child”. And by extension, ultimately, a human is a human is a human, and suffering is suffering is suffering. I hope some day everyone can see that.