Juan Cole
Informed Comment / November 2, 2024
Ann Arbor – Bill Clinton is a Rhodes scholar and a voracious reader. He is not a stupid man. He is, however, morally stupid. I’m not referring to his personal life but to his remarks on Israel’s behaviour in its total war on little Gaza.
Clinton came to Michigan and said,
“I understand why young Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan think too many people have died, I get that.”
“But if you lived in one of those kibbutzim in Israel, right next to Gaza, where the people there were the most pro-friendship with Palestine, most pro-two state solution of any of the Israeli communities … and Hamas butchered them.”
He said, he’d been asked, “Yeah but look how many people you’ve killed in retaliation, so how many people is enough to kill to punish them for the terrible things they did?”
“Well, you’ll have to forgive me, I’m not keeping score that way. It isn’t how many we’ve had to kill. Because Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded by civilians, they’ll force you to kill civilians if you want to defend yourself.”
Clinton’s callous and morally stupid words explain how a majority of Americans can close their eyes to a year of Israeli genocide. He, and they, should read my new book, Gaza yet Stands. Clinton makes it sound as though the Palestinians have no legitimate grievances, even though 70 percent of families in Gaza had been driven out of their homes by the Israelis and made penniless refugees, while Israelis stole all their land and property.
The argument Clinton made is that the killing of hundreds of civilians by al-Qassam Brigades cadres on October 7, 2023, justifies the high rate of civilian deaths in Israel’s war on the people of Gaza. Indeed, October 7 is fetishized so that it authorizes anything and everything.
That assertion is not true. For a non-state actor like the paramilitary of Hamas to kill civilians for political purposes is terrorism. It is an ugly crime that certainly merits punishment. Moreover, Clinton’s assumption that Israeli actions in Gaza are mainly directed at Hamas militants is not in evidence.
United Nations officials have their hair on fire, shouting at the top of their lungs that the entire population of Gaza is at risk of death. That is over 2 million people on the verge of extinction, as though everyone in Houston, Texas, were to be killed. Mass death on that scale is not and cannot be a war aim. Public health specialists are saying that when it is all over as many as 300,000 people in Gaza will have been killed by the Israelis. Now the UN officials are saying it could be seven times that.
There is nothing in International Humanitarian Law that authorizes a disproportionate military response just because the enemy killed civilians. Ironically, it was Judaism that most famously enshrined the principle of proportionality, in Exodus 21:23–25. Although “an eye for an eye” sounds brutal today, the prescription was intended to forestall victims from taking two eyes for one eye. The God of Exodus would frown on taking 150,000 eyes for 550.
The denial of the applicability of the principle of proportionality on the emotional grounds that civilians were killed who were nice people is, to put it bluntly, the first step toward justifying genocide.
The Rome Statute makes it clear, drawing on the Geneva Conventions enacted after World War II, that you can’t kill large number of civilians with no legitimate military purpose, and you can’t destroy civilian infrastructure (“objects”) not connected to a military objective. The response has to be proportional to the initial attack.
Clinton’s glib repetition of the canard that Israel is only trying to kill Hamas militants and can’t get at them except by killing tens of thousands of civilians fails on many grounds. Clinton assumes that all Israeli military actions in Gaza have been legitimate and directed at fighting Hamas. But UN investigations have brought into question whether some of the large numbers of 2,000 pound bombs Israel dropped on Gaza, obliterating entire apartment buildings and neighbourhoods, had any discernible military targets.
The physicians who served in Gaza as volunteers maintain that Israeli soldiers deliberately shot children. American surgeon Mark Perlmutter saw children shot twice. “No child,” he observes, “gets shot twice by mistake.”
Even the announced Israeli goal of killing all 37,000 militants in Gaza is not a normal military objective. Typically you try to defeat the enemy and take the rest captive or drive them to demobilize, not kill them all. The October 7 operation involved 4,000 cadres, not 37,000. It was a tightly held secret except among those who actually launched it. The other 33,000 people Israel is trying to kill may not even have known about it in advance, much less participated in it.
Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevy announced in October that Hamas has been defeated.
Ordinarily, such a pronouncement by the army chief of staff would indicate that the war is over, not that hundreds of civilians should continue to be killed every week.
Some 18 million men served in the German army of the Nazi government. Between 4 and 5 million were killed by the Allies. The victors didn’t make it a goal to kill all 18 million. Prominent West Germans such as Nobel-prize-winning author Günter Grass had been enlisted men in the Nazi army. In 1957, 77 percent of the senior officials in the West German Ministry of Justice were former members of the National Socialist Party. The Nazi military personnel were much, much worse than Hamas, and even they were not dealt with as Israel says it wants to deal with the Hamas paramilitary.
The “human shield” argument also holds no water. The high civilian death toll doesn’t come from killing shields. Israeli rules of engagement allow 15 to 20 civilian deaths per militant killed. Israel uses a computer program to track suspected militants, droning them to death only when they go home at night, making sure to kill their family members, friends and neighbours. The militants could have been killed out in the open. Their families were not shielding them. The families were deliberately targeted along with the militants.
Those are not the rules of engagement of a civilized country. NATO has cut off military cooperation with Israel during this past year because NATO rules of engagement, like those of the US military, require the minimization of civilian casualties, an endeavour in which the current Israeli authorities have no interest.
The point is not that anyone is, in Clinton’s horrid phrase, “keeping score.” It is that a disproportionate military response that kills 38 of the enemy for every one of your deaths is unethical and illegal. Generals were tried at Nuremberg and executed for that sort of thing.
We don’t have to guess whether Israeli officials and officers are ordering a disproportionate response in places like Lebanon. They have a whole military doctrine mandating it.
Ultimately, Clinton’s remarks are a form of unfaced racism on his part. Israeli kibbutzim are white people, whose deaths are to be mourned. The 42,000 dead Palestinians are brown people, mere statistics, whose deaths, while unfortunate, are necessary so that white people can feel safe — which is what really matters. It is the same logic Clinton used, as president in 1996, when he spoke of African-American “super-predators.
And no, no one “has to forgive” him, and they won’t. I’m not a political scientist or an Americanist, and I have no idea whatsoever what will happen in Michigan –with its large Arab and Muslim American population — next Tuesday on election day. But Clinton seems to me to be trying to lose it for the Democrats. Worse than their electoral impact, those words from a former president point to a deep malaise in the American soul, an inability to feel viscerally the deaths of 17,000 brown children, a classification of them not as people with mothers, fathers, siblings and futures, but as an inconvenience to be swept under the rug.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
