Henry Milner: A long, cold, hard winter

Henry Milner is co-publisher of Inroads.

The focus of this editorial has evolved over several drafts. It began before the election with trying to explain why half of American voters were ready to vote for Donald Trump, shifted immediately afterward to analyzing the consequences of the voters’ mandate, and then to analyzing his appointments once his cabinet nominations were made public. I begin with a brief portrait of the man.

Trump is not a fascist as he has been called: that requires an ideology. Trump’s only ideology is to serve the interests and indulge the passions of Donald Trump. Among those interests and passions, one priority is getting even with his “enemies”; a second is rewarding his sycophants. Fortunately (sic), unlike other psychopaths who have achieved and maintained power through force, and for whom he has great respect, he is ruthless but not fearless: indeed, he is more of a coward. What he says can and will differ from what he does. But the greater difference is between what he says and what is true. He simply has no concept of objective truth. His thousands of false claims as President began the day of his inauguration, when he insisted in January 2017 on there being three times as many spectators as there actually were.

Human beings are not perfect; that’s why we have laws and courts and jails. But beyond this, for democracy to survive, those we put in power need to be not so different from the rest of us; they need to have an ethical line that they will not cross, even if they can get away with it. There is no such line with psychopaths like Trump: no conscience, only external constraints. Only now these constraints are about to be severely tested.

It is not as if Americans, including some of his supporters, are unaware of this. As Larry Diamond pointed out in Foreign Affairs on November 8, “Among the majority of all voters who said Trump lacked the moral character to be president, one in ten voted for him anyway. And of the near majority of voters who said they were ‘very concerned’ that a Trump presidency would ‘bring the U.S. closer to authoritarianism,’ a tenth of them also voted for him anyway.”

Many knew the book written by his niece, Mary Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. They may have heard that in 2019 Mary Trump secretly recorded federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry – her aunt, Donald Trump’s sister – saying, “All he wants to do is appeal to his base. He has no principles – none.” Some would have heard about the recent film The Apprentice, which depicts his deeply troubled older brother coming to him just to be sent away, and how Trump was just too busy to visit his mentor, Roy Cohn, as Cohn lay dying.

As portrayed at the end of the film, Trump contemplates entering politics. The motivation is less an interest in public policy or public service than a way to regain public attention after having been a media celebrity with his reality TV show. So he starts at the highly visible pinnacle, entering primaries for the Republican nomination for president, without any apparent prospect, or indeed expectation, of actually being nominated or – even less likely – defeating Hillary Clinton in the general election.

Trump’s unexpected and undeserved victory in 2016 was due basically to his being the opposition candidate in a two-party system at a time when a sufficient number of voters were ready for change, with a bit of sexism thrown in. Because he was so new on the political scene, it was reasonable for traditional Republican voters to assume that he cared about the trappings of office and would leave the legislative decisions to experienced congressional Republicans.

Indeed, when he found himself in office in 2016 having few personal backers with real political experience, he appointed some competent people in certain policy areas, mainly areas he cared little about. Incapable of playing the sycophantic role expected of them, most were gone by the time of the midterm elections. By then, fortunately, Trump was soon to be restrained by a Democratic Congress.

After he lost the 2020 election, the gloves came off. He refused to accept the decision and summoned a mob to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021, a set of events investigated publicly by a House committee. Leading Republican legislators kept their distance. It seemed, as it had with the revelations of his treatment of women, that there was no way Trump could reemerge triumphantly from disgrace.

It took four years, but on November 5 he did. And he hasn’t forgotten for a moment those who contributed to his humiliation.

The information gap

This time there will be no silver lining to Trump’s taking office. He and his collaborators had four years to get ready and they have majorities in both houses of Congress, along with a sympathetic Supreme Court majority.

Useful insight into how he will govern is provided by Maggie Haberman, senior political reporter at the New York Times and author of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. As she noted in an October 25 interview in the Times,

Trump doesn’t especially like the work of governing, didn’t when he was in the White House. But he likes power, and he likes being praised, and politics combines both of those things. He really wants to, in his mind, avenge the loss in 2020, which he still won’t admit was a loss, that would be proof that he didn’t really lose … He wants to exact payback on people who he thinks deserve it. He’s been quite clear about that … He just wants certain things done, and whatever it looks like to get that done is how he does it. He has no use for democratic norms. He has no use for Washington process. He has no use for the way good governance works or the way the transparency rules are supposed to work.

In November, half of Americans gave this psychopath something as close to absolute power as you can have in a democratic country. This time the institutional checks and balances that James Madison had enshrined in the U.S. Constitution effectively failed. Trump’s party controls all political institutions, with the exception of some state governments.

Much ink has been spilled trying to understand how this could happen. The standard explanation, based on the polls, is “the economy.” Typical was a Washington Post poll taken a few weeks before the election: in the swing states, 86 per cent of definite Trump voters and 74 per cent of probable Trump voters told pollsters that the American economy was getting worse. In fact, there is more to it. Writing in October in Fortune magazine, economists Kaushik Basu and Robert Lynch elaborated on the contrast between macroeconomic realities and polls:

By most objective measures, U.S. economic performance under the Biden-Harris administration has been superior to that under the Trump administration, and a vast majority of Americans report satisfaction with their own economic situation. And yet, most Americans believe the economy is faring poorly … Consistent with these economic facts, the Federal Reserve’s 2023 annual survey found that 72% of Americans said they were doing fine financially. However, in a striking inconsistency, only 22% thought the national economy was doing well.

Poll results – surprise, surprise – suddenly changed after the election. Philip Bump noted in the Washington Post on November 21, “Since 2022, more than half of Republicans have said their economic situations have declined over the past year. But suddenly, over the last month, that’s shifted. Among Democrats, views of how they fare now relative to a year ago haven’t changed much in the past month. Among Republicans, though, there’s been a 16-point drop in the percentage saying that they were doing worse than a year ago.”

The low level of knowledge in the United States about economic and political reality – something I have explored in my earlier research – played a part. According to a poll from the group Data for Progress, Harris won among voters who said they paid attention to the news “a great deal” or “a lot,” while Trump won by decisive margins among those who paid attention “a moderate amount”, “a little” or “not at all.”

As the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin noted, Trump’s margin of victory was greatest among those who “know shockingly little about government, policy and their fellow Americans … Moreover, political reporters and pundits … consistently overestimate voters’ knowledge. They nag politicians (as they did with Vice President Kamala Harris) to provide reams of policy detail that these voters never hear – or care to learn about.” She cited an article by Matt Robison in the Washington Monthly: “The share of Americans who say they are following any kind of news closely dropped 13 points in the past eight years to just over one-third … According to studies conducted by pollster Ian Smith, up until a couple of months before an election, ‘people spend as little as ten minutes a week absorbing political news.’”

With Trump I’m a somebody

Still, given the amount of effort by the Democrats to inform voters in the seven swing states, the fact that Trump still was able to win all seven tells us that, unlike in 2016, there is more to it this time than political ignorance. When Trump voters told pollsters that things were better under him, it reflected something beyond their own economic circumstances. It reflected their perceived place in society as interpreted for them by right-wing media1: “With Trump I feel like I’m a somebody.” In their rhetoric – though not in their policies in office – the Trumpites’ message has been clear: Trump is there for me, while the Democrats are there for those who don’t look like me and look down on people like me.

Other cultural factors that used to count don’t any more, making it easier to turn the feeling of being treated like a nobody into supporting Trump. In 2011, 70 per cent of Americans polled by the Brookings Institute said that a candidate’s immorality in their private life should matter in voting. After Trump was nominated, only 30 per cent agreed. Before 2016, half of Republicans favoured welcoming immigrants; by 2020 favourable attitudes were down to a third. So it becomes easier to cast a vote for Trump as a protest against a system he tells them is rigged against them, and to ignore how much he lies or what corrupt things he has done, let alone what the Democrats actually accomplished in office or what Harris was promising.

The Republicans implicitly charged that the Democrats, in choosing a non-White woman as their candidate, are not there for White working-class people who “look like me.” The charge was largely left unsaid in public: it is much more socially acceptable to cite inflation. Working-class males – including Latino working-class males, some of whom had voted for Biden in 2020 – had difficulty voting for a woman, let alone a non-White one. This factor may help explain why polls underestimated Trump’s vote: knowing who he was, some of those polled identified themselves as undecided rather than telling a pollster that they were ready to vote for such a man.

But this is hindsight, which is always 20/20. If this is the crucial factor, it means that to defeat Trump the Democratic Party would have had to consider excluding non-White and/or women candidates – something it could not even suggest. Rather than accept this self-evident reality, some Democratic insiders find it easier to blame the campaign strategy, on what Harris did and did not do or say rather than on who she is. We need to remember that voters’ lack of exposure to actual news, as noted by Jennifer Rubin above, would limit the impact of what Harris did and said. We also need to remember that Trump only won the popular vote by 1.5 per cent, the smallest margin since the Bush-Gore nailbiter in 2000.

Ultimately, though, the fact that it was Trump rather than some other conservative Republican male on the ballot means that limited political knowledge is an insufficient explanation. Unlike in 2016, this time voters knew enough about Trump – especially in the swing states where they were reminded constantly. Nevertheless, half of American voters, overlooking his obvious flaws and potential threat, were ready if not eager to hand him the levers of power that go with being the most salient actor on the world stage.

All of this must be placed in the context of America’s unique political institutions. Other democratic countries have extremist parties like Trump’s GOP, but nowhere do they exercise power, let alone exercise it on their own. Only in America do voters have only one alternative if they do not want to support the party in power or throw away their vote. Taking on Trump in the years ahead must take place within these institutions,2 assuming Trump leaves them in place. From what we see taking place in the transition up to this point, it seems that Trump’s people are not (yet?) violating the letter of the legal and constitutional safeguards, but certainly they are discussing whether it is a good idea to violate constitutional conventions.

What now?

We should not attempt to sugarcoat the implications of the decision the people of the United States made. As David Remnick concluded,

There is no longer any excuse for failing to see what a second Trump Administration may bring: The mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. A federal government stocked with mediocrities whose highest qualification is fealty to the Great Leader. A contempt for climate policy, human rights, and gun control. A weakening of NATO. An even more reactionary Supreme Court and federal judiciary. An assault on the press. These are not the imaginings of a paranoiac. These are campaign promises announced from the podium.

While someone else in Trump’s position might seek some middle ground on which to approach the 50 per cent who did not vote for him, as well as to the many democratic leaders in other countries whose preference for Biden was unmistakable, there is no reason whatsoever to expect this from Trump.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent has reminded us, “Trump has loudly called for the indictment of members of the congressional committee that investigated his January 6, 2021, insurrection attempt. He has mused aloud that he might send the military into Democratic-run cities … He has openly suggested he would use state power to persecute domestic enemies he describes as ‘vermin.’” And as Larry Diamond notes,

When voters elect authoritarian-minded leaders for instrumental reasons, they typically get the baggage of revenge, intimidation, and lust for power that accompanies their candidates’ policy promises. Over the course of an increasingly dark 2024 campaign, Trump promised to unleash presidential power on the Justice Department, other federal agencies, and even the military, to persecute his critics, punish unfriendly media, purge and politicize the civil service … Candidates who borrow the language of fascists and strongmen to denounce their opponents as “vermin” and “the enemy within” do not suddenly evince the democratic virtues of compromise and moderation when they take office.

During the campaign, Stephen Miller, whom Trump has appointed deputy chief of staff, said that the military would be used to build “vast holding facilities” for migrants as their cases progressed. In mid-November Trump confirmed that he intended to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to assist in his plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without new legislation from Congress. And spokespersons have revealed plans to reclassify more than 50,000 civil servants as political appointees, so that they can be replaced by loyal Trumpites.

In the words of Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman,

The American military, the country’s leading universities, the Federal Reserve, the justice system, the free press, the scientific establishment, even the health of American citizens are all at risk. The president-elect has nominated vengeful crackpots to key positions and promised to let ideologues like Robert F Kennedy Jr (Trump’s choice for health and human services secretary)“go wild”. The damage that Trump’s policies could inflict on America will delight the country’s real enemies in Moscow and Beijing.

In the foreign policy sphere, the damage Trump will inflict on democracy will be less via action than by moving out of the way of bad actors doing bad things. In his first term, he sought to weaken multilateral cooperation and the rules-based international order and undermine international organizations such as the World Health Organization and UNESCO, as well as the UN’s attempts to reach an agreement on handling migration and refugees.

Other Western democracies will have to step in. Ukraine will be a test case. Western democracies have achieved a remarkable level of solidarity in defending Ukraine: Europe’s combined military and financial aid to Ukraine now exceeds that of the United States. The Europeans will need to maintain and even step up their efforts.

There is little improvement to expect in prospects for any sort of just peace in the Middle East. Biden may try desperately to get a Gaza deal during his last months in office. But Netanyahu has every interest in continuing to stall, awaiting Trump’s inauguration.

Most worrisome in the long term is Trump’s probable second withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate accord, which he calls “a hoax.” Over the past four years, the Biden administration reversed course, invested heavily in renewable energy and sought to limit oil and gas production. At the end of the hottest year in recorded history, Trump in office again will expand oil and gas production, roll back pollution controls and eliminate federal incentives that promote renewable energy and electric vehicles – though an exception may be made for Elon Musk, who will end up even richer with the blocking of competition from China.

Turning to domestic policy, the states run by Democrats will have to use their limited powers to play a role similar to that of Western democracies; so will the courts. A legal test will come when Trump attempts to carry out his promise to expel millions of illegal immigrants. Apart from the human cost, this very costly action, combined with high tariffs, will likely hurt the economy.

So will the effect of his appointing to the cabinet, with few exceptions, inexperienced and ideology-driven sycophants. Jim McGovern (D – Massachusetts), Ranking Member of the House Rules Committee, described some of these appointments as “beyond insane (including) someone who sucks up to foreign dictators and has attracted major concern that they can’t be trusted to protect America’s secrets from our adversaries … Someone who says that tap water turns kids gay?”

Then there are the really dangerous appointments. The worst was Matt Gaetz as chief law enforcer, a man despised by his congressional colleagues on both sides of the aisle and accused of multiple acts of immorality. The withdrawal of his nomination showed that there may remain some limit to what the Senate will swallow. We will see. The nomination of Kash Patel, a “firebrand loyalist,” to head the FBI is only a marginal improvement. And Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for defense secretary, has run into numerous allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety and personal misconduct.

But as Susan Glasser has written in the New Yorker, personal misconduct is only part of the story. The appointment of Hegseth and Patel reflect Trump’s plan for “a radical reimagining of our national-security institutions”:

This is why Hegseth’s recent book, “The War on Warriors,” published in June, focusses so much on an array of “woke” generals and other “domestic enemies” seeking to undermine the Pentagon from within in their ongoing “cultural Marxist revolution.” It’s why Patel’s 2023 book, “Government Gangsters: the Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy,” has an appendix that names no fewer than sixty “deep state” enemies from the executive branch to be targeted, including many Republican appointees of Trump’s first term, such as his Attorney General, Bill Barr, and his White House counsel, Pat Cipollone … They are reflecting the boss’s own radicalization over these past few years … The single most worrisome – and revealing – Trump statement of the entire 2024 campaign … came in a mid-October interview on Fox News, when Trump said, “We have two enemies – we have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.”

Surviving the bad times

In and beyond the United States, the defenders of liberal democracy will have to come together and develop a common defensive strategy. The House Republicans, with a tiny majority and a weak leader, will ensure that Congress will have little influence over decisions taken over the next two years. Its primary role will be as a public forum: right-wing Republicans will push using House committees to attack and even punish their “enemies.” The Senate minority will try to draw attention to what the administration is doing and threaten to invoke the filibuster. But this will be a sideshow. The Supreme Court majority, out of either ideology or expediency, will likely get out of Trump’s way – and he will appoint two even more conservative judges to replace the two expected to retire. The serious mass media will pull their punches. They will be financially squeezed and likely threatened with investigation, denounced by the Trumpites as the enemy.

Federalism will provide some protection from Trump’s revenge against his Democratic opponents, at least in the near half of states – including such large states as California, New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois – led by Democrats, and perhaps a few led by non-Trumpite Republicans. Moreover, state courts will be a factor: liberal judges did well in elections for positions in state supreme courts even in a few red states.

The final source of hope is Trump himself: that he will so screw up that the Democrats take over Congress in two years. Like most of his appointees, he is not especially competent and can’t be bothered with the details of complex decisions. His first priority will be to implement his extremely costly and ultimately impossible plan to deport millions of illegals. Beyond that, he will concentrate on using his power to punish his enemies and reward his friends. Less than competent people will be running the country. Few of his appointees have anything close to the necessary experience for the jobs he has given them; none will in any way inhibit his whims.

This leaves Musk, the only appointee with some leeway. Whether he likes it or not, Musk has become a politician and will run up against real internal opposition with his layoffs and other cost-cutting initiatives. To get anything meaningful done, he will have to make politically motivated concessions to others in Trump’s orbit – something, to say the least, that doesn’t come naturally to him. He probably won’t stay all that long.

Beyond the institutions of government, informal networks will arise to keep channels of communication open and the spirit of resistance alive. The Democrats in Congress need to set up a structure modelled on opposition parties in parliamentary systems, for example designating a senator or member of Congress as spokesperson/critic on a particular area. This would allow the party to speak coherently with one voice, concentrating scarce resources and media attention. As the awfulness of Trump’s awful appointees emerges, his opponents should engage some of his less-than-wholehearted supporters in an “I didn’t vote for this” campaign.

All of this presumes that Democrats, from moderates to Bernie’s buddies, will prove able to end recriminations and put factionalism aside. And let us be clear. Even with the above, these next two years will be among the worst in the lifetimes of Americans, worse probably than the days of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. January 20, 2025, will mark the onset of a long, cold, hard winter in America, with much of the world not far behind.

Notes

¹Michael Tomasky in the New Republic sets out the media environment in which this transformation has been taking place: “The right-wing media – Fox News (and the entire News Corp), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more – sets the news agenda in this country.”

²To change the institutions underlying this dilemma would require a constitutional amendment, something extremely difficult to do. Congress must pass an amendment by a two-thirds vote and three quarters of the states must ratify it. Alternatively, two thirds of the states must call a constitutional convention where three quarters of the states must approve any amendments – which has never happened and is unlikely in any foreseeable time.

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Anne Michèle Meggs: Survival values

Anne Michèle Meggs is a former Quebec senior civil servant and a member of the Inroads editorial board.

Much of the analysis of the American election results has centred on the Democrats’ failure to relate well to the “working class” or the “non college-educated.” What we’re really talking about here are the poor – about people who are literally having trouble surviving on low-paying jobs, and the socioeconomic inequalities that Bernie Sanders has been rightly ranting about for years. The famous 99 per cent is real and consequential.

What we haven’t looked at closely is the impact of these inequalities on values. The World Values Survey (WVS) has been analyzing values in different countries for decades with a common questionnaire. This extensive international research project has offered up important observations in shifts in values over time and their causes. In particular, it provides important insight into the types of values associated with survival mode.

The project has established a “cultural map” that groups certain sets of values along two axes: an axis of traditional versus secular-rational values and one of survival versus self-expression values. These groupings are roughly defined on the WVS site as follows:

• Traditional valuesemphasize the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family. People who embrace these values reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide. These societies have high levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook.
• Secular-rational values indicate the opposite preferences. These societies place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority. Divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide are seen as relatively acceptable. (Suicide is not necessarily more common.)
• Survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security. They are linked with a relatively ethnocentric outlook and low levels of trust and tolerance.
• Self-expression values give high priority to environmental protection, gender equality, growing tolerance of foreigners, gays and lesbians, and rising demands for participation in decision-making in economic and political life.

It is not difficult to see that traditional/survival values resemble much of what we hear about Trump voters and secular-rational/self-expression values line up with much of the Democrats’ electorate. Research shows essentially that as a country moves through industrialization to become a postindustrial knowledge society, the increase in its standard of living leads to a shift in values along both axes. Its place on the cultural map moves diagonally from the lower left corner (poor) to the upper right corner (rich), indicating a transit from traditional to secular-rational values and from survival to self-expression values. There are also clearly other factors that influence a country’s position on the map, notably religion and colonial histories.

We seem to be seeing that economic policies which consistently serve the one per cent are leading to half of American society exhibiting the same kind of values as those manifested in some of the poorest countries in the world. Democracy is less of a priority when survival is uncertain.

Donald Trump instinctively gets this message. In his first campaign he boasted about how he “loves the poorly educated”; he plays on the distrust of government (“deep state”) and the mainstream news media; he emboldens intolerance. Project 2025, a clue to Trump’s intentions, proposes to eliminate the Education Department. His gut tells him that it is clearly in his interest to keep as many people as possible in a state of poverty.

Democrats will have to grasp exactly how seriously economic inequalities may be changing “what it means to be an American.” Trump voters are not “deplorables”; they are in survival mode and exhibiting survival values.

There are surely lessons here for Canada as well. Leaders should be encouraging trust in government and reliable news sources, furthering tolerance of immigrants and trans people and, once in power, putting in place policies that reduce economic inequalities. If we allow people to fall into survival mode, we will soon no longer recognize “what it means to be a Canadian” either.

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Reg Whitaker: 2024 or 1933?

Reg Whitaker is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at York University and an Inroads political columnist and editorial board member.

On November 5, 2024, Americans voted. The next morning many might have wondered if they had not got that date wrong. It seemed more like it was January 30, 1933, the day that Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. The day democracy died in Weimar Germany. The day fascism triumphed.

No, what follows Donald Trump’s return to the White House will not be a repeat of Nazi Germany, swastikas waving, straight-arm salutes, stormtroopers marching in jackboots, gas chambers fired up for industrial-scale genocide. Not exactly.

Trump is a generic Hitler, his personality protofascist, if we see fascism not as a specific historically rooted ideology (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain), but as a state of mind, a way of imposing the personal will of the Leader on the country and the world. The fascist state of mind celebrates the hegemony of the strong over the weak; the monolithic will of the majority (the “People”) embodied, encoded, in the will of the Leader; the exclusion, even the elimination, of minorities; demand for the submission of all to the Leader, without qualification; celebration of the self-serving lie over facts, along with the assertion that “truth” is what serves the Leader, no more, no less.

All these are present in Trump – in his successful campaign and in what will follow once he resumes office. He is much else, of course: a monstrous egomaniac utterly lacking in empathy for others (a trait shared by the worst dictators of the 20th century); a greedy, corrupt con man and tax evader; a sexual harasser and rapist; a convicted felon; a man manifestly unfit, in terms of character and personal morals, for the highest office in the land, indeed for any office at any level. But let’s focus on those elements of his personality that impact most on how he will govern over the next four years – and how he may change a democratic country into a self-perpetuating autocracy.

American government was designed, at least in part, to insulate the political sphere from being captured by a single-minded faction or by a demagogue or scoundrel intent on seizing power. Federalism divides powers and responsibilities between national and state jurisdictions. Government is divided between the legislative arm in Congress and the executive arm in the president (mirrored at the state level with the separation of power between the state legislature and the governor). The judicial branch is supposed to be independent of both Congress and president. There are vetoes and overrides between president and Congress. All this brings an elaborate institutionalized set of checks and balances to ensure that no one part of government can dominate the other parts, permanently at least.

This might seem an impressive barricade against the assumption of one-person rule. The reality of the Trump victory casts a harsh light on this assurance. As I have argued before, the American Constitution has a serious flaw in its design of the office of the president, who is both head of state and head of government, combining in one office what the parliamentary system and most republics carefully divide into two separate functions fulfilled by separate individuals, elected or appointed separately. The president’s direct democratic mandate stems from all of the voters, as opposed to the geographically partial mandates bestowed on individual members of Congress and senators. The inflated “imperial presidency” arising out of world wars, cold wars and the finger on the nuclear trigger is further boosted by the president’s role as commander in chief of the armed services.

Republicans – a party that under Trump has become an abject invertebrate tool of its boss (bye bye Dick and Liz Cheney) – now control both houses of Congress. Having packed the Supreme Court and other key courts around the country with partisans and ideologues posing as jurists, Trump can now safely ignore the threat of judicial review interfering with his agenda. The Supreme Court has become another conservative Republican partisan tool, one that has already granted him preemptive immunity from legal accountability for anything he does as president. Blue states like California will try to limit the Trump autocracy, but they are few and relatively weak in legal and political resources for a fight like this.

Forget checks and balances and constitutional guardrails. Upon inauguration in January 2025 Trump will step into an office that rivals the office given Hitler in 1933 for unlimited autocratic power. He has already promised his first day back in power will be a day of “dictatorship.” Believe him.

It may begin with revenge charges and legal harassment against anyone who challenged Trump in his many court cases, with threats and intimidation of journalists and federal fiscal punishment of resistant blue states. With each successful act of intimidation, as the Jeff Bezoses of the media world continue to slink away from criticism into sycophancy, Trump’s authoritarian appetite and reckless pursuit of unchecked power will grow. And if any guardrails of the old constitutional order manage to retain some restraining force, Trump will always have the sinister, looming threat of unleashing against his enemies his equivalent of the Nazi SA and SS: the rabid mobs inflamed by Fox News and Elon Musk’s antisocial media, like those that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, but this time with full official blessing.

The radicalization of mainstream conservatism that Trump has both accelerated and promoted since he first ran for the Republican presidential nomination has two faces: policy but also process.

What policies Trump will follow is uncertain. Rhetorically he has called for drastic, unprecedented moves such as the mass deportation of more than 11 million undocumented aliens. Fear about illegal immigration was one of the two leading issues driving the Trump vote, the other being inflation. If he really follows through on mass deportation, it will require very large investment in the necessary administrative infrastructure, including the construction of holding or concentration camps on a large scale. This will look much like the path Nazi Germany followed from ad hoc camps to house Communists and Social Democrats rounded up in the Nazi regime’s early days to the extermination camps like Auschwitz. But mass deportation can only be carried out at huge cost to American capitalism, dependent on undocumented labour that can now be paid less, without benefits, than American workers. It will penalize the same business owners who backed Trump’s campaign financially.

In 2016, Trump had promised a Wall along the entire Mexican border that he would make the Mexicans pay for. After four years in office, little more than 130 kilometres of new fencing had actually been constructed. Yet who talks any more about the Mexican Wall? Mass deportation got Trump reelected: that may well prove to be its definitive contribution. The hard and expensive and economically dangerous task of actually bringing about mass deportation may well mean that the realization of that promise will go the way of the promised Wall.

The same fate may well await Trump’s promise of tariffs on everything entering the United States. It’s a great electoral sound bite, but putting it into practice may exceed Trump’s capacity to overcome business opposition and hard economic realities, not to say his own brutally short attention span. Trump’s radical conservatism lives mostly in the realm of rhetoric and marketing, sound bites and photo ops.

The great dictators of the 20th century, Hitler but also Stalin and Mao, were each in their own ways prisoners of their ideologies. Faith in Aryan racial supremacy led Hitler into the abyss of war with both the West and the Soviet Union, and into Nazism’s self-destruction. Ideological zealotry drove Stalin and Mao into forced collectivization of agricultural production and mass famines that killed tens of millions. Trump’s only zealous faith is in himself, his sole reference point for humanity and the world. Just as he can throw followers and flunkies under the bus for the slightest offence to his narcissism (and has done so repeatedly), so too he can pick up and drop policy promises remorselessly. Since he cares about them as ideas not a whit, why stick with them if they’re hard to implement?

Process is a different matter. Trump’s radicalized conservatives want to run roughshod over institutions, checks and balances and the rule of law. All of these are seen as impediments to the will of the people, which boils down in practice to the will of the Leader, as authoritarian populism blurs into fascism. Trump inciting the insurrectionary mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6 to overturn a democratic election he had just lost embodies perfectly his contempt for the Constitution, due process, the rule of law and democracy whenever he finds himself in the minority. One of his first acts as president will be to pardon all these insurrectionists convicted by the courts.

Hitler used the power of his streetfighters to leverage access to office, and then to consolidate his totalitarian rule. Here Trump is at one with his predecessor. When it comes to the process of government, there is a nihilism in Trump’s dark vision, a nihilism alarmingly prevalent among the Trump faithful. No wonder the tech bros like Elon Musk staked their fortunes on Trump’s election: the watchword of the tech bros has always been the sinister slogan “Move fast and break things.” Amid the wreckage of liberal democratic governance there will be profits to scavenge and power to grasp.

If Trump is indeed an autocrat in waiting, one might legitimately ask why he failed so badly to set that course in his first term. One response is that a characteristic feature of Trump’s presidential style is sheer incompetence. Everything else aside, Trump was simply a lazy, incompetent chief executive who made a mess of everything to which he turned his erratic attention.

Take the COVID pandemic. Trump stumbled and bumbled his way through, regularly denouncing the chief health officer Dr. Fauci but not replacing him, casting aspersions on the vaccine program, advising people to drink bleach and take horse medicine instead, but letting the vaccine program go ahead at less than full steam. The result was disastrous: Americans died from COVID at two and a half times the per capita rate at which Canadians died.

If an aspiring autocrat with a brain had landed in the White House and begun planning a coup against the Constitution, would he not have assiduously cultivated the heads of the military and the security and intelligence and policing agencies, whose support for a takeover would be essential? You would think so. But instead Trump set about systematically alienating and insulting these very people, with the result that executives of the CIA, FBI and NSA and the top generals came to loathe and detest him. His former chief of the general staff has publicly described him as a fascist and Nazi. His acolytes spoke darkly about a “deep state” that was determined to thwart the will of the people.

The second coming may be different. He now has the deep state alarmists surrounding him as strategists, and appears to have plans to take more effective control. There may be purges at the top of the military and intelligence agencies, with professionals replaced by Trump loyalists and flacks. Already he has named:

• a Fox News host as his Secretary of Defense;
• a former far-right Texas congressman as Director of the CIA;
• the preposterous Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence (with not one minute of experience in the intelligence world, but described by intelligence professionals as one of Putin’s “Russian assets”); and
• a rabid deep state alarmist as Director of the FBI (who has previously called for a cleaning out of the entire top management of the FBI and setting it to investigate and prosecute liberal and leftist enemies of Trump).

That may just ignite guerrilla warfare and sabotage from within, as the agencies strive to maintain their identity and integrity. After all, the deep state goes deep. The result will likely be a further weakening of American capacities and effectiveness on the world stage. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the lower ranks of the military and the rank and file of police across the United States contain many Trump loyalists and MAGA sympathizers, ready to spring into action on behalf of their hero and against the Constitution.

Yet even if the deep state manages in the end to maintain its grip, more or less, there is serious turbulence ahead. Apocalyptic visions of civil war would have been more likely realized had Harris won the election, with mini–January 6’s reproduced all across the country. But the relative calm that descended after Trump won a majority both in the Electoral College and in the popular vote is a misleading guide to the future.

Trump may not quite be another Hitler, however much he tries to be. But one deeply troubling aspect of 2024 is more worrying than 1933. There is a persistent myth that the German people voted Hitler into office, thus voting out their own 14-year-old democracy. Untrue. The Nazis never achieved a majority in a free election, and indeed they failed to do so in the election after they had taken power and were waging open war on the opposition. In the last free election to the Reichstag in 1932, the Nazis actually lost more than two million votes and began suffering internal splits. Hitler was called to the Chancellery not by the voters but by scheming right-wing politicians who managed to manipulate an aged and senescent President into compliance.

On November 5, 2024, the American people did the German people of 1933 one worse. They voted in their near-majority (just a shade under 50%, but a clear plurality) for a man who would, if he could, end their two-and-a-half-century-old democracy.

To their eternal shame.

Image: children in Gaza, via Motaz Azaiza.

The Inroads listserv began in 1997 as a means to link Inroads readers and others interested in policy discussion. With more than 100 subscribers, it offers one of the few chances for people of diverse views to grapple with social and political issues in depth. To subscribe, write to Inroads at inroadsjournal@gmail.com and we will add your name to the list.

Contributors to the Inroads listserv have engaged many topics since last October: Ukraine, immigration, housing prices, Donald Trump, the deaths of Henry Kissinger and Brian Mulroney, identity politics and others. But sooner or later they have kept coming back to the war in the Middle East.

We have already featured highlights from two exchanges on the war: one on self-defence and proportionality in late October and another on the International Court of Justice ruling on the plausibility of Israeli genocide in January. Here we present excerpts from three of the many other listserv exchanges that have explored aspects of the war.

November

November 27

REG WHITAKER

Speaking a few weeks ago, prior to the temporary hostage-exchange truce in Gaza, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that “the price of justice cannot be the continued suffering of all Palestinian civilians. Even wars have rules. All innocent life is equal in worth, Israeli and Palestinian. I urge the government of Israel to exercise maximum restraint. The world is witnessing this, the killing of women and children, of babies. This has to stop.”

These were relatively critical words from an ally of Israel. Not surprisingly there was reaction to his statement, from all sides. Little reaction could be described as civil or restrained.

First, from the street: protesters chanting “ceasefire now” stormed into a Vancouver restaurant where Trudeau was dining later the same day, accusing him of “killing kids” since he had stopped short of asking for a ceasefire.

Second, in what amounts to an official Israeli response, on X-Twitter Benjamin Netanyahu angrily rejected Trudeau’s advice: “It is not Israel that is deliberately targeting civilians but Hamas that beheaded, burned and massacred civilians in the worst horrors perpetrated on Jews since the Holocaust.”

So street protesters are accusing the Canadian prime minister of complicity in the slaughter of innocent children in Gaza while the Israeli prime minister is in effect accusing him of complicity in a new Holocaust.

The conflict in Gaza is ghastly: the New York Times points out that more women and children have been killed in Gaza in two weeks than have perished in two years of the Russia-Ukraine war. But the so-called “debate” about Gaza is almost as ghastly, with antisemitic and Islamophobic hate speech and physical attacks matched by baseless accusations of antisemitism and Islamophobia designed to discredit pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian arguments with racist smears.

Obviously emotions run perilously high on both sides when what amounts to an anti-Jewish pogrom by Hamas on October 7 is followed by a lethal assault on the Palestinian civilian population by Israel. But does this explain the extremist rhetoric of so many not directly tied to either Israel or Palestine?

Looking at the roots of this frenzy of rhetorical extremism, one fundamental confusion can be discerned. Israel is a state which, though reasonably claiming to be the Jewish homeland, can be entirely identified neither with Judaism as a religion nor with the Jewish people as a whole. States may claim a close connection with particular nations or peoples (we speak of “nation-states”) but the two are never one in reality, as opposed to self-serving nationalist state rhetoric. Not all Jews are citizens of Israel and indeed many Jews are critics of Israeli state policies, especially of the Israeli state’s treatment of Palestinians. This does not make Jewish critics of Israel antisemites, nor does it make non-Jewish critics of Israeli state policies antisemites. Unfortunately, the Israeli government and Israeli lobbyists abroad have all too often adopted precisely that canard to stifle legitimate criticism, whipping out the antisemitism card every time a critical voice is raised.

Some critics of Israel are indeed antisemites, just as some supporters of Israel are Islamophobic. But hatemongers attaching themselves to a legitimate movement do nothing to discredit the larger body. It is not antisemitic to be critical of Israeli policy, but it is antisemitic to blame Jews, rather than the Israeli state, for the unrestrained assault on Gaza. On the other side of the barricades, Hamas, like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, is not representative of all Muslims.

Blood feuds have no logical end, save the total eradication of one side by the other. Hamas and some reckless pro-Palestinian protesters flaunt the slogan “from the river to the sea,” taken by many to indicate a (totally unrealistic) war aim of eradicating Israel. “From the river to the sea” has also been flaunted by Netanyahu and indeed appears in the founding constitution of his Likud party, indicating the ultimate aim of a Greater Israel that would deny any statehood or other form of national self-determination for the Palestinian people.

It is the unwillingness or incapacity of too many participants in the wider debate over the Gaza catastrophe to make the necessary, if difficult, distinctions between Jews and the Israeli state and between Hamas and the Palestinian people that has helped poison the debate so virulently. It must be said that in the Western world there is no genuine equivalency in the position of the two sides. Because of the memory of the Holocaust, Israel assumes a position of privilege that in effect preempts much official sympathy for the plight of the stateless Palestinians and too readily credits Israeli state’s self-serving claims that not only criticism of Israel but even recognition of Palestinian rights or mention of their subordination under Israeli occupation is evidence of antisemitism.

Germany, which has accomplished a remarkable coming to terms with its dreadful historical role in the Holocaust, has taken hypersensitivity to signs of renascent antisemitism to an unconscionable extreme, criminalizing public display of Palestinian symbols and public advocacy of Palestinian rights as unacceptable manifestations of antisemitism – simply because they challenge the Israeli state. But surely the Holocaust is not a perpetual Get Out of Jail Free card for a state which, after all, postdates the Holocaust and has engaged in some questionable activities of its own, including conquest, occupation and settlement of Palestinian land.

Official Canada, like the United States, is not exempt from this instinctive pro–Israeli state bias. But in both countries it is apparent that a younger generation, including many younger Jews, are not so readily convinced that the fight for Palestinian rights is just another chapter in recurrent antisemitism. Unfortunately too many of these protesters have been as careless in making fundamental distinctions as their pro-Israeli opponents, and sometimes actions have been taken that demonstrate a lack of sensitivity to legitimate Jewish concerns.

When I heard that pro-Palestinian protesters had infiltrated and then disrupted the Giller Prize for Fiction event (allegedly in protest over investment by the prize’s sponsor, Scotiabank, in Israel), I was dismayed by targeting of a cultural event with no direct connection to Gaza. Dismay deepened with the news that the Giller 2023 winner being honoured was a young writer named Sarah Bernstein: the optics were appalling. Interestingly, however, Ms. Bernstein later appeared as a signatory to a letter from a number of writers asking that criminal charges be dropped against the protesters, in the name of free expression. Nothing is simple in this most complicated matter.

Just how messy this can become is illustrated by the hate speech charges being brought by Toronto police against a group of protesters who defaced an Indigo bookstore with red paint and posters targeting Indigo CEO Heather Reisman for her support of the Gaza invasion. To the police it is simple: Reisman is Jewish; hence this was an antisemitic hate crime. To protesters, Reisman is the most prominent face of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), the leading force in the Canadian Israeli lobby. CIJA, as its name implies, makes no distinctions between the Israeli state and the Jewish community: to CIJA they are one and the same. I am not privy to the minds of the protesters and cannot be sure that Ms. Reisman was being targeted solely because of her Israeli advocacy, but surely there must be a space where a public personality can be legitimately criticized for her advocacy on behalf of a foreign state without her religious/ethnic identity being deployed to block criticism.

Gaza embodies Hegel’s thought that the essence of tragedy is the war of right against right. It would be sad indeed if the debate over Gaza turned out to be the war of farce against farce.

STEPHEN NEWMAN

Reg,

I agree with everything you say, with the exception of the last bit. First, you misstate the facts. Toronto police have not accused the 11 people who vandalized the Indigo bookstore at Bloor and Bay of hate speech. They have been charged with “mischief and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence,” the indictable offence being the aforementioned mischief. I looked up the criminal offence of mischief. It is defined by the Criminal Code as “the wilful destruction of property,” which pretty much describes the act of vandalism.

But the police also commented on the motive of the perpetrators. They said that the offence was “hate-motivated.” Toronto police define a hate crime as “a criminal offence committed against a person or property that is based solely upon the victim’s race, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender or disability.” In short, the police believe the vandalism at Indigo was motivated by Jew hatred. I think that this will be difficult to prove. But I also won’t be surprised to hear the defendants and their supporters claim that the charges are an attempt to stifle freedom of expression. This “defence” is risible. No one can plausibly argue that the defendants had no means of expressing their opposition to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza other than to vandalize the Indigo bookstore in downtown Toronto. One of the accused is a well-known professor of sociology at York and surely enjoys access to numerous public forums.

I also want to quibble with you on the subject of antisemitism. I agree entirely that politicians like Netanyahu cynically use accusations of antisemitism in an attempt to discredit their critics. That said, antisemitism is all too real. In my lifetime antisemitic talk has pretty much disappeared from polite society. When I was growing up this was not at all the case. As a public high school student it was not uncommon for me to hear antisemitic comments expressed in a very casual way by my non-Jewish classmates. After all, antisemitism has been built into Western culture for over two thousand years. It was preached from the pulpit. It made its way into classic literature (e.g. Shakespeare) and popular culture (Agatha Christie). People I met in rural Wisconsin, where I held my first teaching position in the 1980s, still used the phrase “Jew you down” to describe bargaining over the price of items for sale.

I tell you these anecdotes to convey a sense of why Jews are very sensitive on the subject. Overt antisemitic comments might no longer be acceptable in polite society, but we Jews cannot help suspecting that they are still there, just beneath the surface. And when push comes to shove, it doesn’t take much to bring out submerged antisemitic attitudes.

Which brings me back to the vandalism at Indigo. You don’t see it as being in the least way antisemitic. I have my doubts. As I said, the perpetrators included a distinguished professor of sociology. As it happens, her specialty is protest movements. I would expect someone like that to be sensitive to the symbolic meaning of action. I certainly wouldn’t expect her to be surprised that many in the Jewish community saw in her targeting of Heather Reisman an echo of past antisemitic acts targeting Jewish store owners in Germany and other European states in the last century. A sociologist ought to know the role historical memory plays in shaping a community’s identity.

In short, I think she knew very well how her act of protest would be understood by Ms. Reisman and by the Jewish community. She knew, or ought to have known, that it would be interpreted as a threat. If her genuine purpose was to protest the death and destruction in Gaza, she could have chosen a different way to communicate her opposition to Israel’s war against Hamas. Of course I do not know for certain what she or the others who were with her that night were thinking; still, I cannot help suspecting that reenacting a frightening scenario etched into the communal memory was deliberate. And to me, that carries the odor of antisemitism, even if the perpetrators were not consciously motivated by antisemitism.

November 28

ARTHUR MILNER

I agree with Stephen Newman about a lot: I, too, liked Reg’s article, but the end raised a flag. It seemed to me that the vandalism at Indigo went beyond legitimate protest – though I wouldn’t call it antisemitic.

I would ask, “Do non-Jews have an obligation to be sensitive to many Jews’ sensitivities?” They should be, of course, as a matter of common courtesy and also tactically, but is it an obligation?

Recently, someone named Josh Gilman wrote an article (posted to Facebook) titled “Why you might have lost all your Jewish friends this week and didn’t even know it.” He wrote, ”When you are Jewish, you are always aware that there is a large population in the world that wants to kill you,” and “(There is) a category of friend that every Jewish person has in their mind. Who would I run to? Who would hide me (from the Nazis)?”

Let me say, briefly, that this is the opposite of my experience. Since the age of 18 I have lived almost entirely outside a Jewish community and I have not once experienced antisemitism.

So what do we do about (perfectly understandable) Jewish hypersensitivity?

I don’t know. I would say, in Jews and in Palestinians, we have two populations suffering from PTSD. The causes (the Nazis for the former and Zionists/Israelis for the latter) are real.

It doesn’t augur well for a “negotiated settlement.”

December

December 22

CRAIG JONES

Strange as it seems to us, Hamas (and ISIS, and Hezbollah, and the Houthis) are fixated on the next world – not this one. Their struggle is existential – as they understand it – not about this world, but about eternity. And God is on their side – of that they have no doubt.

The same is true of the extreme right in Israel. They have long memories of their treatment in Europe and Russia – and they have nowhere else to go (like the Palestinians who are despised by the rest of the Arab world).

There is no resolution absent a fundamental reordering of their base reality.

LANA BATEMAN

The Palestinians are despised by the rest of the Arab world, is that right? Is that why there have been massive worldwide protests in support of the Palestinians?

December 24

CRAIG JONES

My deepest fear is that the Israelis will give the Palestinians the war that Hamas wants – and that appears to be what is happening.

But from the standpoint of Israeli survival, the destruction of Hamas is imperative or October 7 will be repeated until hell freezes over. And from the standpoint of Hamas (ISIS, Hezbollah, and the Houthis) the destruction of Israel – and every living Jew on Planet Earth – is nonnegotiable.

I wish there were more outrage over Hamas’s diversion of billions of dollars of humanitarian aid into tunnels for the conduct of war. What has Hamas – the governing entity of Gaza – done to protect the Palestinian people from the IDF? Nothing.

The hardest thing for us Enlightenment products to get our collective heads around is that Hamas and the extreme Orthodox Israeli right are acting out a script that dates – at least – to the Babylonian captivity (c. 600 BCE), and perhaps earlier. It is an extremely complex history, but it casts a long and very dark shadow.

We should suffer no illusions: if Hamas gets its way, it will mean the ultimate extermination of Israel and every living Jew. And the Israelis know this.

Lana asks “why there have been massive worldwide protests in support of the Palestinians.”

Because judgement is easy while deep understanding of history is hard: most people are clueless about the long and extremely complex history of this region and its multiple ancient and overlapping conflicts. That’s why.

The Palestinians are victims, to be sure, of ancient and recent history, of venal leadership, of toxic religious orthodoxy, of Arab tribalism, of Israeli occupation, of European colonists, of – you name it.

RONALD BEINER

As regards the following: “We should suffer no illusions: if Hamas gets its way, it will mean the ultimate extermination of Israel and every living Jew. And the Israelis know this.”

Yet Netanyahu persuaded the Likud to boost Hamas and feed it resources! (On a smaller scale, he also cultivated ties with false friends like Orban and Putin.) How could this not be suicidal? How could the Israeli public not hold him directly responsible for this devastating recklessness and lack of basic prudence?

LANA BATEMAN

Craig, you’re the one who said the Palestinians are despised by the rest of the Arab world. I asked why then are there worldwide protests in support. Your conclusion seems to be that the only reason someone would protest mass slaughter is that they’re too quick to judgement and on the whole naive/clueless about this overly complex issue.

To throw up one’s hands and judge this issue too complex in the face of 8,000 dead children is a coward’s argument.

CRAIG JONES

Lana,

You ask “why there have been massive worldwide protests in support of the Palestinians.”

Sadly, tragically, the answer is antisemitism.

Understand: I do not condone the actions of any side. There are no clean hands in this part of the world.

The origins of this conflict – the wellsprings of this animosity – originate outside our understanding of history, rationality, logic. If you want a villain, blame religion. That’s the one thing that all sides have in common: all believe that God is on their side and that God will ensure their victory.

December 25

LANA BATEMAN

You can attribute mass worldwide support of the Palestinians to antisemitism if you like. I’m more inclined to believe it’s the live-streamed ethnic cleansing.

The underlying issues of this war are not all otherworldly and religious. In fact, I don’t even find it overly helpful to frame this conflict in terms of religion. My in-laws are Christian Palestinians – it hasn’t protected them over there. You don’t have to be Muslim to take issue with the use of military explosives on an enclosed area full of children. And certainly not every Jewish person agrees with Israel’s actions – in fact many of them are right there at the protests, side by side with the Palestinians and everyone else who cares about this issue.

Israel wants the Palestinians’ land. And they’re using every opportunity they have to ethnically cleanse those regions that remain to them – whether by outright murder or by destroying every last bit of the infrastructure that makes life livable, to the point that the Palestinians will have no choice but to leave. That’s why they’re targeting hospitals, schools, homes, churches, refugee camps, food sources and water supplies. They have not exactly been quiet about their intentions.

Likewise, I am tired of reading discourse on the Palestinian people that seeks to paint them as extremists by nature; a barbaric bunch motivated only by their raging antisemitism, despised even by the rest of the Arab world. (I happen to have lived with one for ten years, and our occasional spats have yet to result in a single rocket attack or human shield.)

RONALD BEINER

Dear Lana,

I certainly don’t believe that everyone participating in pro-Palestinian protests is an antisemite. And I certainly don’t believe that every Palestinian is an extremist. I do believe that Palestinians are right to have felt horribly mistreated by the Israelis even before this awful war started (a war provoked by Hamas). And I would be thrilled to see the Palestinians obtain their long-overdue state, reuniting the West Bank and Gaza under genuine Palestinian sovereignty when (if) it proves possible to remove Hamas from power in Gaza.

Still, there is a puzzle about the global anti-Israeli protests being debated by you and Craig that is deserving of reflection. It is widely reported that there have been up to 400,000 deaths in Yemen’s civil war since 2015, due both to direct military action and to the resulting humanitarian crisis. Obviously, many of these are civilians, including perhaps 11,000 children. If every human life is equally valuable (which I believe is true), shouldn’t there be protests of equal scale, or in fact on a much larger scale, protesting all these tragic deaths in Yemen? Have there been any such protests? I struggle to find an answer to this puzzle other than the following: that the two conflicts are viewed on the basis of an ideological narrative according to which the Israeli killing of Gazans is morally outrageous in a way that the killing of Yemenis by Saudis isn’t. If you can supply an alternative interpretation, I’d be happy to hear it.

LANA BATEMAN

I cannot speak to the intentions of every protester. As to myself, I care deeply about this conflict because it impacts people who are close to me. I think one thing that makes this unique is the live-streamed nature of it. For so long we in the West have had the comfort of seeing casualty numbers only in the abstract, with just the occasional image of devastation making it through to the news. Not so here. On Twitter and Instagram and TikTok anyone with a passing interest in the subject is sure to come across images daily that will shake them to their core. (Just yesterday I saw a young child bleed out in his parents’ arms after being hit in the neck by shrapnel.) Add to that this basic fact: in the West our leadership is not only failing to take a stand against Israeli war crimes but is actively providing the money, weapons and political cover to facilitate them.

REG WHITAKER

Of course the war in Yemen and the war in Gaza are both conflicts in which large numbers of civilians have been victimized. But counterposing Yemen to Gaza for purposes of argument about Gaza is a dodgy business, redolent of the “whataboutism” that deflects arguments that are specific to one situation by referencing something else somewhere in the world for the purpose of undermining one’s opponents’ argument. Critics of the BDS campaign against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank ask, “What about Chinese treatment of the Uighurs or Tibetans? Why aren’t you protesting these occupations?” Which makes as much sense as if the campaigners to “free Soviet Jewry” back in the 1980s were countered by “What about the Blacks under the apartheid regime in South Africa?”

In any event, there is a simple reason why Gaza stands out for Canadians in a way that Yemen does not: the longstanding Jewish community in Canada has lobbied successfully to make support for Israel a keystone of Canadian foreign policy. There is nothing inherently wrong in this, of course, but today there is a growing number of people of Muslim, Palestinian and Arab background who see the conflict in Israel in a different light and are making their views known. Moreover, since the Israel/Palestine issue has been made so central to Canada’s role in the world, many, many Canadians who are not directly connected to either community have formed strong views about what Canadian policy on Israel/Palestine should be and what it should not be. It’s just a reality that Yemen, however terrible its condition, does not have these close ties touching deep chords here.

December 26

RONALD BEINER

Reg,

The point was not about why Canada in particular cares about Israel/Gaza. Rather, the point was that the whole world is up in arms about Israel and makes not a peep about equally bad stuff going on elsewhere.

None of this is to apologize for the brutality of Israel’s response (which Hamas anticipated and in fact hoped for). But it is indeed a case of selective outrage – which seems pretty obvious.

March

March 24

HENRY MILNER

Arthur,

As I understand it, your position is that there is one strong bad guy and one weak good guy. The only resolution that could help the good guy would be from a stronger (international) intervenor forcing it. In the meantime there is nothing to be done, since the bad guy cannot be expected to accept that all fault lies with him.

On the other hand, if you start from the position that there is fault on both sides, however unequal, then you have a chance at getting the stronger guy to negotiate.

ARTHUR MILNER

Bad? Good?

There is fault on both sides, everywhere, always. All armies at war rape and torture, no? What do you expect from young men, armed to the teeth and hired to kill?

But what we know about Israel is that it will never give up the occupied territories unless forced. It might agree to, as it did, more or less, in Oslo, but it will never follow through. That time they assassinated the Prime Minister to put an end to the foolishness.

As for the Palestinians, the central government is too weak to adequately enforce control, so one faction or another will always disrupt any attempt to negotiate a settlement.

Given all that, both sides must be forced to accept a settlement that will have to look much like the Arab Peace Initiative. And given the mutual hostility, foreign troops will be required. That is a long shot, but anything else is a waste of time.

What possible reason does Henry have to believe that Israel will agree and follow through this time, under any circumstances?

But Israel is endangering the world; it must be forced. And we now have an opportunity.

March 25

GEOFF WHITE

A major international intervention, as compelling as the argument for it may sound, would be fraught with all manner of difficulties and the usual unintended consequences, including some truly horrendous ones. Such an operation would be bound to result in direct military conflict with Israel, not to mention Hamas and some Arab states and Iran, with terrible losses of lives on all sides.

United Nations enforcement operations have been rare and produced ambivalent results. The most important of these was the Korean War, and despite years of peace and prosperity for South Korea, North Korea poses one of the greatest threats to international security today. We might make reference to the first Persian Gulf War, the NATO intervention in the Balkan states leading to the Dayton Accords, and the war in Kosovo which did not quite win UN approval. The outcomes of these have been less than optimal. (The first Persian Gulf War might have been an exception but for the terrible decision of the United States and United Kingdom to double down 13 years later to unseat Sadam Hussein.)

But were there an unlikely decision by leading powers to enforce militarily a settlement in Israel and Palestine, which would likely not receive the support of Russia and China, how would they summon the vast resources to make this work, especially in light of the ongoing war in Ukraine which is already stretching national budgets? We must bear in mind also the U.K.’s incapacity around the time of the founding of Israel to foster a peaceful transition in accordance with the international consensus at the time. The U.K. withdrew to allow the matter to be settled militarily between the Zionists and the Arabs. (The case of Afghanistan casts a grim shadow.)

All countries will have their own interests to consider in joining an international military effort to enforce a two-state solution. Would Canada be part of such an effort when our armed forces are already understaffed and our matériel wanting? Would Canadian men and women wish to attach themselves to such an operation so distant from our shores? The politics of our Jewish and Muslim communities would make such commitment particularly difficult.

In the face of these challenges, I extend my best wishes to President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken who are trying to defuse the crisis. I hope that, in the coming years, diplomacy will be able to bring some semblance of peace – even to revert to the status quo ante of unsatisfying and unresolved conflict. That situation would at least be a better starting point than where we are now.

LANA BATEMAN

In my eyes it’s not about good and bad. It’s about what human beings are capable of when they have absolute power over another group and no consequences for their actions. When you have soldiers brazenly filming their own war crimes and posting them to TikTok, what conclusion can one take away but that they fully expect their abuses will continue to be treated with impunity?

I find myself with little patience for reading justifications that prop up this idea that Israel is powerlessly playing into the hands of Hamas, who’ve sadly left them no choice but to commit genocide. It’s the cliché of the abusive husband – look what you made us do.

If people continue to kid themselves about Israel’s intentions, their actions will continue to baffle.

March 26

ARTHUR MILNER

Thank you, Geoff. It’s hard to disagree with anything you say. A major international intervention would be both highly unlikely and fraught. Large-scale boycotts, divestments and sanctions – not the formal BDS, but limited to ending the occupation – could work, but are unlikely.

But it’s worth noting I’m not the only dreamer. This is from Jim Zogby of the Arab American Institute:

(The early Zionists) believed that the colony they would build would be a “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”

This deeply racist mindset found its best expression in the 1960 film Exodus that transposed the American “cowboys and Indians” storyline onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – with Israelis as pioneers seeking freedom for themselves and their families, facing hordes of savages who sought only to kill them. The conflict was thus reduced to “Israeli humanity versus the Palestinian problem.” And what was needed was a way to defeat, subdue, or solve the “problem” so that Israeli humanity could realize their dreams …

If (the White House) saw Palestinians as equal human beings, they would tell the Israelis to stop bombing. They would remove the block on UNRWA. They would support a UN resolution that would send international forces into Gaza and the West Bank, ending the illegal Israeli occupation of both. And they would set up an international relief and reconstruction effort not only to rebuild Gaza, but also to send in teams of doctors to address the physical and psychological wounds of this war.

March 27

GEOFF WHITE

Thank you, Arthur. I noted in the link you copied the reference to the 1960 film Exodus, starring Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint and a lineup of American and British stars of the day, and based on the novel of the same name by Leon Uris. I can think of no clearer examples of the exercise of “soft power” than these “blockbuster” works. I believe Jim Zogby is right to have identified these as having set the attitudes of so many involved in setting policy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – even up to today. I can attest to how reading that robustly written novel influenced my own initial views of the conflict in the 1960s, and – truth be told – I still savour, in remembrance of things past (and I deliberately use the Proustian phrase), the feelings it inspired in me at the time.

For someone working in the cultural sector as you do, it may as inspiring as it is appalling in this case that a work of art can have such a profound impact on the state of public and official opinion – even over decades. The more so when the work is of independent, rather than state-sponsored, origin. No deliberate Israeli government campaign of cultural diplomacy could have done a better job. Exodus, the novel and the film, would make a great subject of historical and cultural investigation and analysis.

ANDRÉ BINETTE

The Ten Commandments is being shown on television this week. Another example of religious soft power by Hollywood which had a bearing on Western public perception of Israel as land rightfully belonging to Zionists. What a Hollywood film will never show is the call to genocide that follows the Moses-led return to the Holy Land in the Bible. The foundational book of Judeo-Christian civilization is full of blood and slaughter. The Middle East right now is following a script that was written a long time ago. Wide-scale horror is its deep-seated psychological and cultural DNA. It always has been an epicentre of hate with dreadful consequences for humanity.

Via Motaz_Azaiza on instagram.

The Inroads listserv began in 1997 as a means to link Inroads readers and others interested in policy discussion. With more than 100 subscribers, it offers one of the few chances for people of diverse views to grapple with social and political issues in depth. To subscribe, write to Inroads at inroadsjournal@gmail.com and we will add your name to the list.

 The war between Israel and Hamas has been a frequent topic of discussion on the Inroads listserv. The most recent issue of Inroads (Winter/Spring 2024) carried highlights of an exchange on Israel’s right of self-defence and the meaning of proportionality in war. Another intense discussion followed the International Court of Justice’s January 26 interim ruling in South Africa’s proceedings against Israel alleging violations of the Genocide Convention. An edited version of this discussion is presented in this special.

January 27

JOHN RICHARDS

I have not read ICJ decisions other than the recent provisional decision on South Africa’s prosecution of Israel. I invite those among us with more legal knowledge than I to discuss.

The provisional decision is lengthy. It contains 86 carefully drafted sections. To give a feel for the qualified prose, I quote section 54, which refers to “plausible” claims by South Africa, and section 64, in which the court refers to the Israeli denial of an “imminent risk of irreparable prejudice.”

Section 54:

In the Court’s view, the facts and circumstances … claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection are plausible. This is the case with respect to the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts identified in Article III, and the right of South Africa to seek Israel’s compliance with the latter’s obligations under the Convention.

Section 64:

Israel denies that there exists a real and imminent risk of irreparable prejudice in the present case. It contends that it has taken – and continues to take – concrete measures aimed specifically at recognizing and ensuring the right of the Palestinian civilians in Gaza to exist and has facilitated th provision of humanitarian assistance throughout the Gaza Strip. In this regard, the Respondent observes that, with the assistance of the World Food Programme, a dozen bakeries have recently reopened with the capacity to produce more than 2 million breads a day …

BOB CHODOS

I can’t claim more legal knowledge than John has. Nevertheless, I would like to comment briefly.

To me the big question was whether the Court would call for an immediate ceasefire. It didn’t. In other words, it indicated implicitly that Israel’s military action could continue.

Of the six “provisional measures” indicated by the court, two (preventing public incitement to genocide and enabling the provision of humanitarian aid) passed by a vote of 16-1 and the other four passed by a vote of 15-2. One maverick judge, Julia Sebutinde of Uganda, voted against all six, while the Israeli ad hoc judge, Aharon Barak, voted against four. The other 15 judges – from the United States, Germany, Russia, China, Somalia, Lebanon and other countries – agreed on all six measures – as well as on a decision that did not include a call for a ceasefire. Achieving such a consensus would have necessitated the highly nuanced and balanced language exemplified by the sections John quotes.

ANDRÉ BINETTE

I cannot claim to be an expert in international law but I have some passing knowledge of the jurisprudence of the ICJ, enough to make a few observations.

The ICJ was created under the League of Nations after World War I. It is older than the United Nations but became part of its institutional system in 1945. It can only judge states for violations of international law. It cannot judge Hamas or Palestine since they are not states.

The international crime of genocide was created after the Holocaust and World War II.

More recently, in 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) was created. The ICC is a permanent tribunal for the prosecution of individuals for war crimes and genocide. Before that, there were only ad hoc tribunals for the prosecution of individuals under international criminal law, the first being the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals after World War II. There were also ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia created in the 1990s where the issue of genocide could be raised.

The ICC has been somewhat effective in condemning former African dictators, but has also been criticized. Mexico and Chile have taken Israel to the ICC for war crimes in Gaza. This may in the long run prove more effective than the South African case before the ICJ.

There are normally 15 judges at the ICJ, elected by the General Assembly of the UN for renewable terms. There is one judge per country and there must be equitable geographic distribution. Ad hoc judges can be added when a state involved in a case is not already represented on the court. The Israeli dissenting judge is an ad hoc judge only for this case.

The current president of the Court is an American female jurist; a Russian judge is vice-president. The Russian and Chinese judges both supported the majority position. The Chinese judge, also female, explained her position separately.

As William Schabas and other experts have stated, the law of genocide is uncertain. Proof of state intent is usually difficult. State intent, where it exists, would normally not be public. The Holocaust was a secret official policy of Nazi Germany that could be proven from written records recovered after World War II. In this case, there exist public statements by Israeli government officials, including the President of Israel, which have been quoted by the Court to support its preliminary finding that the issue of genocide is plausible and can be rationally argued.

This preliminary finding is significant and a little surprising. A more conservative view of the law of genocide could have dismissed the case outright. This preliminary opinion may announce a strengthening of the interpretation of genocide or the ICJ may back off from a definitive finding of genocide one or two years down the road. My view is that such a retreat remains more likely, and that this provisional decision, which is balanced and satisfactory from a legal standpoint, is as far as the ICJ will go.

On the matter of a ceasefire, I am not aware of any ceasefire ever being ordered by the ICJ. Even though it probably has the power to do so, the Court would be acutely aware of the limits of respect for its decisions. States sometimes ignore the ICJ when it suits their interests, a recent example being China’s refusal to accept a ruling on maritime borders in the South China Sea. Also, the implicit judicial policy of the ICJ may be to defer political or military matters such as ceasefires to the UN Security Council.

It is an important civilizational achievement for the world in its present state to even have the ICJ and the ICC; it will take decades for them to be more effective. Those who regret that the ICJ will not have an impact on the ground in Gaza should remember that the pace of international law has been glacial in history, although it accelerated considerably in the 20th century in response to unprecedented human suffering.

MARK CRAWFORD

I agree with André – it is perhaps significant that, with the Court’s recognition of the “plausibility” of the allegation, a step has been taken away from the narrow definition of genocide and exacting standard of proof we saw in its earlier decisions. I wonder if there are lesser included offences, for surely Israel is guilty of some sort of war crime.

ANDRÉ BINETTE

I believe there are allegations by South Africa of lesser offences of war crimes. The ICJ may go in that direction but detailed investigation and proof are required, which may be suppressed or nonexistent.

January 28

BILL SCHABAS

The International Court’s order delivered on Friday provides confirmation that the South African application based upon a claim that Israel has violated the Genocide Convention is “plausible.” Several Western governments, including Canada’s, had been dismissive of the South African application, suggesting it was frivolous. Israeli politicians even called it a “blood libel” and claimed it was driven by antisemitism. On Friday morning, just before the Court delivered its order, an Israeli government spokesman said they expected the case to be thrown out.

Now, 15 of the world’s greatest international legal experts, judges of its highest court who are elected by both the Security Council and the General Assembly, have confirmed that South Africa has a serious case.

Israel has often rejected criticism at the international level claiming that it is directed from organs that are biased against it, like the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly. On the other hand, critics of Israel point out that if Israel gets a rough ride in those bodies, it gets a soft one in the Security Council, where it is protected by powerful allies. But it is harder to reject the International Court of Justice, which is broadly representative and has judges from all parts of the world, several of them nationals of states that are very friendly to Israel.

The merits of the charge are to be determined much later, perhaps in three or four years. But what government in the world would want to live with the stigma that there is a plausible case for its having committed genocide? In a podcast on Friday, Jeffrey Sachs described the order as “devastating” for Israel and I agree with him.

The order has some real teeth, including the demand that Israel “shall take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” The words immediate and effective underscore the importance of concrete steps to address what the Court called a “catastrophic humanitarian situation” that is “at serious risk of deteriorating further.”

Usually, a provisional measures order is negative in focus, aimed at halting or preventing certain acts. This one stands out in imposing a positive duty. Israel must report on what it has done to comply with this order in one month.

It is unfortunate that the Court did not explain why it declined to order a halt to Israel’s military activity in the Gaza Strip. Some supporters of Israel have pointed to this to put a brave face on what was a stinging rebuke.

The rationale for the failure to order a ceasefire may be that only one of the parties to the armed conflict was before the Court. Getting to a near-unanimous decision no doubt required some compromise. Maybe the ceasefire order was the deal-breaker. Imagine getting 15 of your friends, colleagues and acquaintances in one room and trying to agree on anything to do with the Middle East.

In the end, the Court’s order stays clearly within the frame of the Genocide Convention. Should Israel implement the order in good faith, dramatic changes to its military activity will be necessary. It has become increasingly clear that Israel’s attacks are not actually directed at either destroying Hamas or freeing the hostages, the two proclaimed objectives. At both, they have evidently failed. Rather, its weapons are aimed at the Palestinian people who, once again, find themselves displaced, their homes and livelihoods destroyed.

Do you remember Prime Minister Trudeau saying it was “absolutely right” to use the term genocide to describe Russian conduct in Ukraine? At the time, in early April 2002, there had been perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 civilian deaths in a country with a population that is 20 times that of Gaza. Of course, we expect double standards in the political realm. Sometimes, though, they succumb to legal principles.

In November 2023, Canada and several western European states, all of them great friends of Israel, intervened in the Gambia v. Myanmar case which is also before the International Court of Justice. They urged the Court to adopt a more liberal and broad approach to the definition of genocide than it has done in the past. With an eye to the atrocities directed at the Rohingya, they specifically urged the Court to consider “forced displacement” in assessing genocidal conduct. No doubt some of the clever government lawyers who drafted the intervention now regret their words. Should the Court follow the approach to genocide that Canada et al. now advocate, it will not go well for either Myanmar or Israel.

HENRY MILNER

Dear Bill,

As always, I appreciate your insightful analysis. I wonder, however, if you are being atypically vague in this statement: “Israeli attacks are not actually directed at either destroying Hamas or freeing the hostages, the two proclaimed objectives. At both, they have failed evidently. Rather, its weapons are aimed at the Palestinian people.”

Perhaps you could elaborate on this either/or.

BILL SCHABAS

Dear Henry,

On January 1, 2024, the Times of Israel reported that 170 IDF soldiers had been killed since the ground campaign began in October. That’s fewer than the average of Palestinian deaths on every single day of the conflict. There are other estimates of IDF deaths but they seem to be in the low hundreds.

I believe this shows that the IDF soldiers remain inside their tanks and armored vehicles, protected by armor while they unleash hellfire on easy targets like homes, hospitals and other buildings in the Gaza Strip. If they were seriously engaging with Hamas fighters, there would be much higher casualties. They would have to go down into the tunnels, where the battles would be more symmetrical, and fight one on one. As for the hostages, I think the IDF have rescued one person so far. Notoriously, three other hostages were murdered because the soldiers thought they were Palestinians trying to surrender. The rest of the hostages who have been freed were the subject of negotiations and exchanges.

It recalls the logic of the Americans in August 1945. They explained the use of the atomic bomb as a measure to shorten the war and avoid the inevitable military casualties that would result from a land invasion. A poor justification. Under international humanitarian law, you cannot kill civilians to save lives of your soldiers.

But it is different here. In 1945, the Americans were not trying to drive the Japanese from their islands – merely to provoke their hasty surrender.

In Gaza, if they are not making any progress in actually finding and liberating hostages, and if they are failing to engage in the sort of hand-to-hand combat that is necessary to take on an irregular force like Hamas, then what is their real purpose?

This morning I heard a relative of one of the hostages being interviewed on the BBC. She insisted that because the IDF were not able to free hostages or defeat Hamas they should stop the war and try something else. I suspect a lot of Israelis feel the same way.

But the longer those who are currently running things in Israel persist in this hugely destructive lethal activity that is neither freeing hostages nor defeating Hamas, the more plausible becomes the hypothesis that they can only have another purpose.

HENRY MILNER

Dear Bill,

I think you are expecting of the IDF what no army would ever expect its soldiers to do (short of Japanese kamikaze). Hamas fighters are waiting, highly armed, hidden in tunnels that are booby trapped with explosives and the entrances to which are concealed under highly populated encampments, hospitals and other civilian structures.

BILL SCHABAS

Dear Henry,

It seems then that we agree. They are not really fighting Hamas. On the pretext of fighting Hamas, they are attacking the civilian population. That’s my point.

ARTHUR MILNER

Bill doesn’t need my help, but …

It’s not about expectations of the IDF. It’s that “if they are not making any progress in actually finding and liberating hostages, and if they are failing to engage in the sort of hand-to-hand combat that is necessary to take on an irregular force like Hamas … should stop the war and try something else.”

Killing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure is not a legal alternative.

HENRY MILNER

They have been gathering information on the basis of which they are assessing how long it will take them to slowly and painstakingly do the job. We are in no position to second-guess them.

BOB CHODOS

There are several other plausible explanations for the failure of the IDF’s offensive to attain its stated goals. Here are two: (1) There is the old journalistic adage “Never ascribe to conspiracy what can reasonably be explained by incompetence.” (2) Netanyahu’s main goal is to prolong the war so that he can stay in office and avoid getting sent to jail on corruption charges. A drawn-out, inconclusive campaign suits his purpose perfectly.

January 29

LANA BATEMAN

With regard to the ICJ not directly calling for a ceasefire, I’d like to share the following tweet from Abdallah Fayyad: “Yes, the court did not demand a ceasefire, but there is no way Israel can guarantee that it meets these obligations without one. Any act taken by other nations that enables Israel to continue killing civilians will be aiding a potential genocide. International pressure will grow.”

The obligations the Court imposes on Israel include taking “all measures within its power to prevent the commission” of such acts as “(a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” In addition, the Court notes, “Israel must ensure with immediate effect that its military forces do not commit any of the above described acts.”

ANDRÉ BINETTE

Israel has undoubtedly committed war crimes in Gaza in my view, as has Russia in Ukraine. The problem is that war crimes are rarely prosecuted and difficult to prove. After World War II, there were serious allegations of war crimes on both sides, including the execution of prisoners, the firebombing of major cities and the dropping of atomic bombs.

An interesting and little-known current process is the prosecution of war crimes committed by Kosovo. This is done by an international court under the odd name of Kosovo specialist chambers. According to Wikipedia,

The court is currently set up for (conducting) the trials of the crimes committed by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an ethnic-Albanian paramilitary organisation which sought the separation of Kosovo from Yugoslavia during the 1990s and the eventual creation of a Greater Albania. The alleged crimes concern the period 1998–2000, during and at the end of the Kosovo war and directed afterwards against “ethnic minorities and political opponents”. The court was formally established in 2016.

Among the people charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity are Kosovo former president Hashim Thaçi and senior Kosovar politician Kadri Veseli. On 15 September 2021 the court’s first trial opened, the case against Salih Mustafa.

Kosovo has cooperated in this process. Wikipedia adds,

Unlike many other non-Dutch judicial institutions in The Hague, the Kosovo Relocated Specialist Judicial Institution isn’t an international court, but a court constituted through Kosovan legislation. To provide a proper legal basis for the court, Kosovo’s constitution was amended (amendment 24) and Law No.05/L-053 on specialist chambers and specialist prosecutor’s office was approved.

The court will be staffed by EU personnel and will have international judges only. The costs of the court will be borne by the EU as part of its Common Foreign and Security Policy. 

All three specialist prosecutors have been American, notably Jack Smith, who was there from 2018 to November 2022, when he was appointed by President Biden to serve as special prosecutor against Donald Trump.

It would be good to see Israel cooperate in a similar process. I won’t bet on it.

Still, this Kosovo court is part of a new and encouraging trend in international criminal law. The United States has an ambiguous position. On the one hand, it cooperates with such judicial institutions. On the other, it refuses to subject its own armed forces to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

Whether war crimes against Israel are prosecuted or not, what is at stake here is its moral authority derived from the Holocaust, Western guilt, the major contribution of Judaism to Western civilization and the fact that it is the only democracy in the Middle East. Without this moral authority, which has been undermined by decades of oppression of the Palestinian people, Israel’s right to exist is the same as, and no more than, Russia’s, Syria’s or Iran’s.

Israel’s forfeit of the moral and spiritual dimension of its right to exist is a major tragedy for the world. To this non-Jewish observer, this is not “tikkun olam” intended to repair the world. Once a beacon of hope for many, Israel has become a major problem for humanity and has sunk to a moral low point reminiscent of dark episodes of the Bible.

I have just read Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. I was fascinated to find in it at this time a prediction by the character of a Hasidic Tzaddik that disaster would come from a state founded by Jewish nonbelievers. Potok, who died in 2002, did not live to see the lethal combination of Jewish messianism and Israeli nationalism. I wonder what he would have made of it. In my humble view, it is highly pathological.

CRAIG JONES

Tell us more about “Jewish messianism.” I’m of the view that both sides are enacting a script from prehistory. The upshot is that there is no resolution in “this world” because both sides are playing for eternity.

ANDRÉ BINETTE

Jewish messianism seems to me to be the mirror image of both Islamic fanaticism and extreme Christian eschatology that informs evangelical support for Trump. They are three-pronged manifestations of collective psychosis that threaten the stability of the world. Narendra Modi’s gigantic new temple in India built on the ruins of a mosque is another form of disastrous religious nationalism.

ARTHUR MILNER

It’s too easy to say “both sides are enacting a script from prehistory,” and therefore “there is no resolution in ‘this world’ because both sides are playing for eternity.” The question is, what part of the population are religious fanatics and what influence do they have?

My conclusion is (and has been since 2004) that the fanatics on both sides are such that the parties can never negotiate a viable agreement. Minorities can prevent or wreck an agreement by, for example, executing a prime minister. But that doesn’t mean a viable agreement cannot be imposed on the parties. There can be a resolution in “this world.”

ANDRÉ BINETTE

We live in a time where religious fanatics have outsize influence. It happens periodically when humanity gets a fever as the history of Jewish persecution in Europe will attest. The execution of an Israeli prime minister by a Jewish extremist parallels the assassination of Gandhi by a nationalist Hindu or the assassination of Martin Luther King.

I do believe in a solution in this world but it is many years away.

PHILIP RESNICK

A Beacon unto the Nations
(for André Binette)

In the electronic salon
which Inroads at its better moments
aspires to become
le thème du jour for months
has become the confrontation
between Israel and Hamas. 

The ICJ judgment,
in Solomonic fashion,
gave comfort to each side,
though saddling Israel with the obligation
to not take out on Palestinian civilians
retribution for what Hamas had inflicted. 

In the court of world opinion,
Israel, once seen as a beacon unto the nations,
now stands in judgment,
and even diasporic Judaism
finds itself generationally shattered
when it comes to perceptions of the Jewish state. 

Israel, through the irony of history,
has become what some had wished
and others dreaded,
a normal state,
no different from the others,
able to hold its own
when it comes to self-defence
and to inflict untold hardship on its opponents. 

Welcome to the club,
some would boast,
where national interest rules the day
and religion serves as a handmaiden
to secular power. 

The prophets had their say millennia ago,
they would add,
and as for the messianic promise
it can await a future age,
perhaps before the climate
finally does our species in.

For the moment,
they would conclude,
the race remains to the swift and bold,
where realpolitik continues to impose
an imprint that has stood the test of time
on an imperfect world.

Image: a young girl stuck under the rubble of a house at Al Nusairat Refugee Camp in Gaza, where as of date of publication (Jan 2024) Israeli forces have killed over 20,000 people, including over 8,000 children, 6,200 women, 310 medical personnel, and 97 journalists. Via Motaz_Azaiza on instagram.

The Inroads listserv began in 1997 as a means to link Inroads readers and others interested in policy discussion. With more than 100 subscribers, it offers one of the few chances for people of diverse views to grapple with social and political issues in depth. To subscribe, write to Inroads at inroadsjournal@gmail.com and we will add your name to the list.

At the time of writing (mid-November), the war between Israel and Hamas rages on. It will no doubt continue to be discussed on the Inroads listserv. In the meantime, an exchange in the last days of October on Israel’s right of self-defence and the meaning of proportionality in war was self-contained (although not without a few tangents). Highlights are presented here.

October 27

REG WHITAKER

As the horrors of the Gaza conflict unfold, as the bodies pile up higher, one reliable mantra keeps being chanted by all Western leaders and politicians like a magic incantation: “Israel has the right to defend itself.” In the course of declaring that Hamas must be “eliminated,” just as the ancient Roman senator Cato the Elder closed every speech on every subject with “Carthago delenda est” or “Carthage must be destroyed” (it was – totally), Canadian Defence Minister Bill Blair reiterated Israel’s right to defend itself to explain his divergence from the Liberal government’s slightly more complex position, which condemned Hamas while worrying about Palestinian civilian lives.

We have heard about this “right” from Trudeau, Biden, Sunak, an entire chorus of EU leaders and more. But hang on: what exactly are we talking about with this rights language in this context?

On the face of it, that a state will defend itself is a kind of truism, largely devoid of specific meaning in any particular situation. Of course states will defend themselves. The essential definition of a state, as enunciated by Max Weber, is the organization that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Any state that is unwilling or unable to respond with force to a violent challenge to its monopoly, whether from within or from without, is a state that is about to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

This is a description of fact. But it is commonly enunciated as a “right.” I am not sure there is any good reason to do so, but for argument’s sake, let’s go along with the rights language to see where it leads.

What rights talk enthusiasts tend too often to ignore or downplay is that the assertion of any right must be matched by the acknowledgment of a corresponding obligation. Nor can one person’s right trump another person’s right.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms enunciates the right of French or English minorities to an education in their own language. But for that right to be effective, there is an obligation to pay the taxes that support the schools, in both languages.

My exercise of my freedom can extend only to the point where it harms others. I am free to refuse vaccination against a contagious virus, but I am rightly restricted in my right to endanger the health and lives of others. The Freedom Convoy people asserted their own freedom while ignoring its negative effects on the freedom of the inhabitants of occupied Ottawa. In consequence, their freedom was rightly curtailed, in the interest of those they were harming.

The idea that states have rights like individuals is contentious. Collective rights claims by powerful entities like states are inherently suspicious. Often, they have been employed as self-serving justifications for the denial and repression of minorities within. Under international law and multilateral treaties, states can claim certain rights, such as the defence of territorial sovereignty. But to reiterate, the rights of one state cannot trump the rights of other states or parties. Nor can rights be separated from their corresponding obligations. The invocation of a state’s right to defend itself must be matched by its responsibility to follow international law and acceptable practices of conduct in warfare.

For a state to claim a right to self-defence, it has to acknowledge limits set upon its response by the same international standards that grant the right. First is proportionality of response. Hamas took the lives of some 1,300 Israelis and took 200 or so as hostage. By this Thursday (October 26) the civilian body count in Gaza was 7,000 – and counting. In past Israeli responses to rocket attacks from Gaza and other terrorist provocations, the ratio of Palestinian deaths to Israeli deaths has been at least ten to one. By the time this war is concluded the ratio may well be much worse.

It would be foolish to insist upon a strict equation of casualties. And yes, targeting a terrorist group entrenched in a densely packed urban area like Gaza poses extremely difficult tactical issues if protection of civilian lives is an important criterion. But where do you draw the line between inevitable collateral damage and inexcusable excess? If 7,000 dead is acceptable, is 17,000, or 70,000? The Hamas atrocities, however appalling, never seriously challenged the fundamental security of Israeli society as a whole. The Israeli response threatens the destruction of Gaza itself.

When Israeli leaders directing the response demonstrate again and again utter indifference to the suffering they are inflicting on the civilians of Gaza, when a substantial proportion of the Israeli population supports retribution without limit for October 7, we can gauge that proportionality of response is not a determining factor, perhaps not a factor at all. Even old-fashioned retributive justice is distorted here. It’s no longer an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – it’s ten Palestinian eyes for one Jewish eye.

This leads to a second flaw in the claim of the right to self-defence. The right to strike back at a state or a nonstate actor like Hamas that has carried out a terrorist attack cannot extend to the collective punishment of the entire population that the offending state or nonstate actor claims to represent. Even though the Israelis deny they are engaged in inflicting collective punishment, everything they have done is indistinguishable in practice from a deliberate policy of collective punishment. They would, they indicated, provide advance notice before striking a particular structure so that civilians could flee. But flee to where? Indeed the entire civilian population of northern Gaza was told to flee southward, yet they could not leave Gaza since its borders were sealed. Gas, electricity, fuel and food supplies have been shut off. Hospitals will shortly lose all power and patients will die as life-saving equipment fails. How can this not be labelled as collective punishment?

Without in any way minimizing the horrific nature of the Hamas attack or the practical difficulties of finding an appropriate response, let us at least acknowledge that we are no longer in the territory of the lawful exercise of legitimate national rights. The next time you hear a Western politician or leader trot out Israel’s right to defend itself as a carte blanche for whatever Israel does in retaliation, treat it for what it is: not a principle but a diversion. Israel-Palestine is a problem not of international law but of the Hobbesian state of nature.

STEPHEN NEWMAN

So, what would be “an appropriate response” on Israel’s part? Bury the innocents massacred by Hamas and improve border security so that future incursions by Hamas might kill fewer victims? Because Hamas will try again. Although hailed as offering “resistance” to colonialist Israel by all too many so-called progressives on Canadian and American campuses, Hamas is a religiously inspired terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel and the murder of Jews. Say what you will about the injustice of the occupation and the settlements, Israel has a right to exist – yes, a right – and the wanton murder of Jews simply because they are Jews is a moral abomination. When Israel claims a right to defend itself it is talking about defending its very existence against an enemy that seeks to destroy it.

I honestly don’t understand Reg’s rant against the very idea of a national right to self-defence, unless of course he simply wants to disarm Israel of that justification for striking back at Hamas. Since he admits the possibility of an “appropriate response,” even if he does not know what form that response should take, he cannot object to Israel’s need to do something. Were Israel to do nothing, it would only encourage Hamas to attack again, believing that Israel has no recourse unless it is willing to inflict death and destruction on the population of Gaza. That’s why Hamas “soldiers” hide among civilians and store weapons in and around hospitals, places of worship and civilian residences. The idea is to present Israel with an impossible choice: (A) retaliate knowing that innocent Palestinians will die alongside Hamas terrorists, or (B) do nothing and allow Hamas to murder Israeli civilians with impunity. A nation of pacifists somewhere might choose option B; Israel is not that nation.

Is Israel exercising due care to minimize casualties among noncombatants? Reg looks at the death toll and concludes: obviously not. Frankly, I’m inclined to agree. But neither Reg nor I is in a position to know what orders were given to Israeli forces or what measures those forces have taken to reduce civilian casualties. Unless your position is that no nation is ever justified in causing civilian casualties, you can’t condemn Israel for responding militarily to armed aggression in circumstances where civilian casualties are unavoidable.

Must we tolerate any number of civilian casualties, no matter how high? No. Assuming that we accept the inevitability of some civilian casualties as an irreducible consequence of war, we are still right to balk as the numbers soar. The proportionality principle holds. Sadly, its application is not precise. Israel’s war planners presumably do not see things the same way as their critics in other countries. Outside observers may differ among themselves. Still, as the fighting drags on and the death toll continues to mount, I suspect there will at some point be agreement among observers that proportionality has been breached. If Reg’s post is any indication, we might be fast approaching that point, if we are not there already.

It might be that there was another, more appropriate response to the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, one that did not entail bombing or invading Gaza, one that did not put Palestinian civilians at risk. But I don’t know. None of us do.

October 28

REG WHITAKER

I am sorry that Steve has taken my argument as a one-sided dismissal of Israel and of the grief and anger of Israelis at the Hamas slaughter of innocents. In fact, I said nothing that offered any justification or rationale for Hamas, nor any reason to doubt that an Israeli response was both inevitable and morally justifiable. I must object, however, to my argument being described as a “rant against the very idea of a national right to self-defence, unless of course he simply wants to disarm Israel of that justification for striking back at Hamas.” That’s just unfair, but it is sadly typical of the way all attempts to debate rationally about this ghastly conflict seem to break down quickly into accusations of bias or worse.

My point was not to deny the right to national self-defence, which I explicitly accept, both as a truism (all viable states will defend themselves) and as a right recognized under international law. What I object to is the assertion, contrary to international law, of the right as a trump, that in this case Israel’s rights claim can be taken as a blank cheque, where the price exacted on Hamas, and on Gaza, is without limit. Here I simply invoked the proportionality limitation on the right to self-defence. Steve actually accepts this but he appears to take the blurred line between proportionate and disproportionate response as reason to condemn my concern as anti-Israeli. I didn’t invent or fabricate the 10-to-1 ratio of Palestinian to Israeli casualties in past confrontations, or the present body counts. I take these facts as grounds for legitimate concern that the Israeli response will be disproportionate.

In trying to parse what possible rational objectives Hamas may have had in launching its October 7 assault (aside from sheer ideological zealotry and bloody-mindedness), two possibilities stand out. The first, already achieved, is to put the Palestinian question back on the Arab agenda and stop the slide of the Saudis, Emiratis and other Sunni Muslim countries into normalizing relations with Israel at the cost of putting the Palestinians out of sight, out of mind. The second may have been the utterly cynical and callous calculation that Israel would respond with such disproportionate fury against the Palestinian population as to turn the Islamic and Arab world, and indeed wider global opinion even in the West, against Israel. In other words, this is a trap, which Israel and its Western state backers may be drawn into.

The choice was never between doing nothing and doing everything. It was between balance and imbalance. That finding balance in Israel-Palestine relations, or indeed in the Middle East generally, is devilishly difficult (see the fable of the frog and the scorpion) doesn’t mean that searching for it isn’t the responsible way to go.

RONALD BEINER

Reg writes, “I didn’t invent or fabricate … the present body counts.” Honest question: Is there a source for these present body counts apart from claims from the Gaza Ministry of Health (i.e., Hamas)?

STEPHEN NEWMAN

It is possible I didn’t grasp the full subtlety of Reg’s argument concerning the right to national self-defence. I would dispute his claim that Israel is using the right as a trump or blank cheque “where the price exacted on Hamas, and on Gaza, is without limit.” I say this while acknowledging that the rising number of civilian casualties is reason enough for me to hope that Israel’s leaders will rethink their approach to eradicating Hamas. That Hamas needs to be eradicated is something I don’t question. Degrading its capacity to carry out operations like the October 7 massacre is a second-best solution, but one that Israel might be wise to settle for, to spare Gaza any further misery.

A technical point: A friend wrote me after my first post appeared on this listserv to question my understanding of proportionality. He said that it was a misapplication of the principle to look at gross casualty figures or to compare casualty rates, as I do and as Reg does in his postings. Rather, he insisted, the principle of proportionality applies to individual military operations and requires parties to the conflict to ascertain, as best they can, whether the military significance of the chosen target outweighs the likely damage to civilian lives and property incidental to the attack.

I take him to mean that when Israel bombs a structure in Gaza it has an obligation to be reasonably certain that the structure houses a valid military target of sufficient consequence to justify the attack. Further, it must take into account the likelihood of civilian casualties and take steps to mitigate these (e.g., warning civilians to vacate the target area and/or employing “precision bombing techniques” or specialized munitions). This calculus must be performed for each sortie.

I did a little reading about the subject online. Anaïs Maroonian, who wrote about proportionality in international law in an online journal published by the U.S. Military Academy, states that proportionality “governs the protection of civilians and civilian objects in the conduct of hostilities. It has a limiting role that impacts targeting, including in the choice of weapons used, the precautionary measures required to be taken, and the anticipated incidental civilian harm, which must not be disproportionate to the expected military advantage.”¹ So it seems my friend was right to question my application of the principle.

Do gross figures matter? Does Israel stand condemned by its own actions if it inflicts ten times more casualties on Palestinians than it suffers at the hands of Hamas terrorists? If my new understanding of proportionality is correct, both Reg and I are wrong to conclude that the numbers alone, however disturbing, demonstrate a violation of the law of war. But I don’t think the real issue here is whether or not Israel can be found guilty of violating the proportionality principle. What will upset any compassionate person is the infliction of so much death and suffering on innocent civilians caught up in the war.

I agree with Reg’s surmise as to what Hamas’s leadership was thinking when it undertook its murderous rampage on October 7. I don’t agree that a normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbours would necessarily push the Palestinians out of sight and out of mind. The price exacted by the Saudis for normalizing relations with Israel might be progress toward a two-state solution. On the other hand, the notion that Hamas counted on an over-the-top Israeli response to its raid hoping that this would turn the Arab street and world opinion against Israel strikes me as entirely plausible.

BOB CHODOS

New York Times columnist David French, a lawyer who served as a judge advocate general with the U.S. Army in Iraq, wrote about the concept of proportionality in his October 12 column. Here is what he had to say:

As the war continues and as the destruction mounts, you will hear a number of voices condemn Israel for a disproportionate response, but many of these critics fundamentally misunderstand what proportionality means in the law of war. The U.S. Army’s “Law of Land Warfare” field manual – which is deeply grounded in the international law of armed conflict and governed our urban operations in Iraq and Afghanistan – defines the legal obligation of proportionality as requiring “commanders to refrain from attacks in which the expected loss or injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects incidental to such attacks would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected to be gained.” It also requires that commanders “take feasible precautions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians, other protected persons and civilian objects.”

Proportionality does not require the Israel Defense Forces to respond with the same degree of force or take the same proportion of casualties as Hamas. In addition, as the manual states, “the proportionality standard does not require that no incidental harm results from attacks.” If you’re a soldier on patrol and someone fires at you with a rifle, you don’t have to respond with a rifle. You can use a tank round or a missile in response, unless you have reason to believe the tank round or missile will cause extraordinary collateral damage. But if you’re taking fire from a single house, proportionality prohibits you from destroying the entire block. Throughout the war on terrorism, American forces used powerful, longer-range weapons to attack individual targets. That does not violate the laws of war.

In reality, inflicting disproportionate casualties can be one of the goals of a fighting force. Ukraine appears to have inflicted substantially greater casualties on Russia than the Russian Army has inflicted on Ukraine. That doesn’t mean Ukraine’s response was disproportionate under the law of armed conflict. In every fight, the goal is to inflict as many losses as possible on your opponent while taking as few losses as possible.²

REG WHITAKER

Thanks to Steve and Bob for the interesting material on proportionality in the international law on warfare. Points taken. I would still maintain, however, that when a state invokes the right of national self-defence to justify armed response, it surely cannot be open-ended, or – to use my earlier metaphor – a blank cheque. Some broad idea of proportionality of the response to the threat must be considered.

Whether this conforms to the strict terms of proportionality in the law of warfare or not, it will certainly affect public approval. Comparative casualty figures do matter perceptually. Granted that, as I have said before, it is devilishly difficult to combat terrorists embedded in the world’s most densely packed urban agglomeration without inflicting severe civilian damage; one can even sympathize with the IDF’s conundrums when faced with such complexity. But there comes a point where the body count, not of Hamas fighters but of women, children and the elderly, mounts to the point where Israel loses the sympathies of those who initially were in full support – where the blank cheques issued by Israel’s allies are withdrawn.

Urging Israel to undertake a proportionate response to Hamas is not anti-Israeli; it might even be pro-Israeli. Pessimism about the likelihood of Israel heeding such advice is unfortunately realism born out of experience. That’s sad, perhaps even tragic, for everybody concerned, especially Israelis and the Palestinians of Gaza. As the scorpion said to the frog halfway across the Jordan River after the frog asked why the scorpion had stung him so that both would die: “What do you expect? This is the Middle East.”

October 29

WILLIAM SCHABAS

May I try to shine a bit of light on this discussion about self-defence and the use of force?

There is much talk of Israel’s inherent right to self-defence. It is enshrined in article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations. Like self-defence in domestic law, a right all of us can invoke if we use force to repel an attacker, it must be exercised “proportionately.” You don’t normally reply to a slap on the face with a baseball bat. So it is in international law. A state cannot use a nuclear weapon to defend itself against a minor border incursion. Ruling against the United States in 1986, the International Court of Justice referred to a “specific rule whereby self-defence would warrant only measures which are proportional to the armed attack and necessary to respond to it, a rule well established in customary international law.”

For many years, Israel has endured Hamas rockets. Its Iron Dome defence system appears to have been fairly effective. Casualties have been very slight, a combination of Iron Dome and the ineffective targeting of the rockets. It seems likely that the rockets were not the main cause of deaths in Israel resulting from the October 7 attacks. As for the infiltration of Palestinian fighters into Israel, the significant casualties will be stopped in the future by better border defences and better military intelligence. In other words, the best “self-defence” for Israel calls for changes and improvements within Israel. The destruction of Gaza appears to go well beyond self-defence.

The final paragraph in Bob Chodos’s post, a quote from an American military lawyer, says that “inflicting disproportionate casualties can be one of the goals of a fighting force.” This is a confusing statement because it is not about proportionality in the exercise of self-defence. But in the context of the post, it seems to be suggesting that a state acting in self-defence can respond in a disproportionate manner. That is wrong.

Proportionality in the exercise of self-defence is not the same as proportionality in the conduct of hostilities. Proportionality in the conduct of hostilities is a different issue altogether. It applies to both sides, the side acting in self-defence and the aggressor. But the confusion in the final paragraph of Bob’s post is aggravated by the fact that in discussing the objective of inflicting disproportionate casualties on the opponent another fundamental principle, that of distinction, gets lost.

The principle of distinction means that noncombatants and civilian objects should not be targeted. Some civilian objects, like hospitals and schools, are singled out in this respect for special protection. But they are actually nothing more than examples of a general rule. Any disproportionality in the amount of force used can never be invoked to justify attacking civilian objects. The reference to “inflicting disproportionate casualties” in Bob’s post refers to killing and wounding of combatants and has nothing to do with civilians or civilian objects.

Proportionality in the conduct of hostilities refers mainly to the killing and wounding of noncombatants and the destruction of civilian objects to the extent that this is a consequence of a lawful attack on military objectives. Disproportionate attacks on lawful targets, that is military objectives, aimed at causing disproportionate damage to an enemy must still endeavour to minimize the collateral damage to noncombatants and civilian objects.

Caution should be exercised in taking guidance from the United States military on the lawful conduct of hostilities. It has a bad track record, going back at least to August 6, 1945 – not to mention the war in Vietnam, where there were about 60,000 American deaths and about three million Vietnamese deaths, the majority of them of noncombatants.

STEPHEN NEWMAN

I’m sorry, Bill, but I want to be sure I understand you correctly. Are you saying that, because the rockets Hamas has fired at Israel have succeeded in killing relatively few people, Israel has a (legal? moral?) obligation to ignore them? To me that’s like saying I should ignore the man firing an assault rifle in my direction because his aim is bad. You observe that Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system has proven very effective and suggest that this, too, is reason for Israel not to make a forceful response to Hamas’s rocket attacks. To me this is like saying I should ignore the man firing at me with an assault rifle because I’m wearing a bulletproof vest.

Again, I want to make sure I understand you. You say that the appropriate response to the infiltration of Hamas fighters into Israel is a better border defence. You do not mention that the “fighters” who infiltrated into Israel butchered some 1,200 civilians. Is building a better defence the only appropriate response in your view? To me that would be like saying the only appropriate response to a home invasion that took the lives of several members of my family is to replace the shattered front door with a stronger one. Here in Canada I would call the police in the expectation that the coercive power of the law enforcement establishment would be brought to bear on the perpetrators. But that option is not available to states, which must deal with external aggression on their own.

You begin your post by saying that a person slapped on the face is not entitled to respond by slugging his attacker with a baseball bat. By analogy, a state “cannot use a nuclear weapon to defend itself against a minor border incursion.” Again, I’m inclined to call you out for describing the brutal murder of more than a thousand people and the kidnapping of another two hundred or so as a “minor border incursion” and likening the atrocities committed by Hamas to a slap in the face. If I am violently assaulted by a man who has attacked me in the past and who has made known to one and all his intention to kill me, I would think I am entitled to use whatever degree of force I deem necessary to preserve my life.

Perhaps a better analogy than the one you use is this: a man comes at me with a baseball bat and I am armed with gun. Am I forbidden by proportionality from shooting him? I would think not. A baseball bat is a deadly weapon. I am not required by any principle of morality or law to throw away my pistol and look for a baseball bat with which to defend myself so that my assailant and I are equally matched.

I think you misunderstand David French, the New York Times columnist and military lawyer Bob quoted in his post. When French says that armies seek to impose disproportionate casualties on the enemy he is stating a truth about war fighting. There are no rules of war that limit how many enemy combatants you may kill. There are no rules of law that say if a combatant fires at you with an assault rifle you may not return fire with a rocket launcher.

There are rules about killing noncombatants, as French points out. Basically, a soldier is never justified in deliberately targeting a noncombatant. Things get complicated when a combatant fires at you from a position where you cannot return fire without putting noncombatants in jeopardy. Here, according to French, is where proportionality comes into play. A soldier is allowed to return fire in the situation just described when on balance the military objective outweighs the risk to civilian life and property. In short, far from being in disagreement with French, you agree with him on the meaning and implementation of the principles of proportionality and distinction in combat situations.

Finally, you appear to put great emphasis on the numbers of casualties suffered by each side in a conflict. It is not entirely clear whether you have in mind all casualties or only civilian casualties. You point to American and Vietnamese losses in the Vietnam War and note that the majority of Vietnamese dead were civilians; however, the figures you give are for total casualties (combatant and noncombatant combined).

You also make reference to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by the United States. It is the deliberate killing of civilians rather than the staggering number of civilians killed that makes the bombing of Hiroshima problematic (to say the least). That a single bomb killed so many and in such gruesome ways commands our attention. It horrifies us. But strictly speaking, proportionality is beside the point in this instance. The wrong is the deliberate targeting of civilians. I would say the same thing about Vietnam. The wrong done is not the killing of three million people; the wrong done is the deliberate killing of noncombatants in violation of the principle of distinction. The killings would not have been any less wrong if fewer Vietnamese noncombatants had been killed.

If Israel is eventually judged to have done wrong in bombing Gaza in its effort to eradicate Hamas, it will not be because Israel ought to have regarded Hamas as a minor nuisance or because x thousand Gazans died or were injured in the bombing. It judged to have done wrong if noncombatants were deliberately targeted. The deliberate targeting of noncombatants has been alleged by Israel’s critics, but is not yet proven. The lack of proof, I suspect, is why Israel’s critics have thus far focused on the number of casualties, as if the number of dead and wounded offers proof of guilty intent. It doesn’t. We await future inquires to learn the truth.

ARTHUR MILNER

I’m not sure this discussion of the legality of appropriate response is useful. Israel’s allies don’t care about legalities and will see that Israel appears before no court and that no Israeli ministers’ bank accounts are frozen. But “appropriate response” also has a common-sense meaning. Israel is losing badly in the court of public opinion. Eventually Western governments may respond to their publics – and to decades of instability that Israel has caused. And that day is, one hopes, coming closer as we speak.

No strong military response would be “appropriate” to those who distrust Israel, which includes me. It is widely accepted that Israel intentionally promoted Hamas to undermine the Palestinian Authority and the demand for a Palestinian state.⁴ Now, because of Israel’s stupid and dangerous tactics and its obsession with an Israel from the river to the sea, 1,200 Israelis are dead. How many Palestinian civilians is it appropriate to kill in response?

This is what I would consider an appropriate response: Israel should renounce its claim to the territories (Gaza and West Bank, including East Jerusalem), announce the Green Line as Israel’s international border, beg the U.S., the UN, the EU, and everyone else to send in peacekeepers to force its settlers and soldiers out of the territories, and beg the peacekeepers to stand on the Green Line to protect Israel from Palestinians and Palestinians from Israel. Beg them. Do it today.

MARK CRAWFORD

All sounds good to me, Arthur! The amount of land needed to build a corridor to Gaza could be transferred to Palestine so that the Palestinians could have room for their airport expansion.Presumably this would also include some land from the post-1967 settlements, which should make such an agreement a bit more acceptable. A Palestinian state comprising half of the former Palestine should be big enough to resettle Palestinian refugees in the remaining areas, which is what some Mapai (Labour) politicians were thinking prior to 1967, I believe. Yes, the UN, U.K. and U.S. should act to prevent further bloodshed. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is already underway.

JOHN RICHARDS

For what it’s worth, I am with Arthur. I see no reasonable option in the short run. I want rid of Netanyahu; I want rid of Hamas. I want to minimize deaths among Gaza civilians. I want an independent Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank with territory at least as large as at the 1967 war. None of this is in view. The one consolation of this awful month is that the idea of two states has been resurrected.

BOB CHODOS

Arthur, these are all good suggestions, but having done all that, Israel will still be faced with a religiously inspired terror group on its borders that will be building its capacity for the next attack. And what you’re talking about are not peacekeepers but combat troops. “Peacekeepers” are useless when there’s no peace to keep.

ARTHUR MILNER

I don’t pretend to know what the IDF can do in Gaza that is humane and effective. Here’s a guideline. What would the IDF do were Hamas’s terrorists and their hostages hidden in tunnels deep under Tel Aviv?

October 30

WILLIAM SCHABAS

Proportionality is a principle. It is the same principle regardless of the status of those involved. It is assessed on a case-by-case basis, bearing in mind the reality of the threat posed by the attacker. The Charter of the United Nations does not suggest that the right of self-defence is in some way dependent upon the status of the perpetrator of the attack. As for the principles of proportionality and distinction in the conduct of hostilities, these are above all focused on the protection of noncombatants. But even Hamas and ISIS fighters are entitled to humane treatment if they are captured, and to protection against summary execution or gratuitous attacks on their lives that are not required by military necessity.

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