The Case Against a Military Intervention to Stop the Gaza Genocide
The Case Against a Military Intervention to Stop the Gaza Genocide
Have you read “The Case for Military Intervention to Stop the Gaza Genocide“? I don’t mind promoting it to you, since I agree with most of it (and also consider most of it to do absolutely nothing to advance any case for military intervention to stop the Gaza genocide).
The enormous problem we face is not the people who care enough and are desperate enough to make this misguided proposal. The enormous problem is the usual one: corrupt, evil, malfunctioning, and sadistic governments abetted by great masses of people too busy, distracted, ignorant, or uncaring to try anything at all.
The first eight pages of 23 in the document linked above simply tell us that there is a genocide happening and that nothing thus far has worked to stop it. On this there can be no dispute, and anyone unaware or unengaged should immediately read those eight pages five times.
The next two pages claim that a “military intervention” would be legal. While I think the rule of law is extremely valuable, and while I believe there is nothing doing more to tear down and degrade the rule of law than this livestreamed genocide, let me be the first to admit that I would be happy to back a strategically wise proposal to end the genocide regardless of whether it were legal or not. That being said, these two pages do not make a serious case for the legality of military action — much less the strategic wisdom of it.
There are three legalistic claims made. One is that the Genocide Convention obliges national governments to act to prevent genocide. Agreed, but it directs those governments to the United Nations and to the International Court of Justice. Those institutions have, of course, miserably failed to halt the genocide, but they are the only recourses to be found in the words of the Genocide Convention.
The second claim is that the Responsibility to Protect doctrine envisions military intervention. Yes, well, television pundits also envision military interventions all the time. That does not make them legal. The notion that the United Nations can create a “doctrine” in gross violation of the United Nations Charter and thereby legalize wars in places like Libya or Syria was once roundly condemned by many of the very same people now making that very claim in this document. They were right the first time and are now strengthening an extremely dangerous idea that they will come to regret.
The third claim is on behalf of “customary international law and interpretations of humanitarian intervention” — in other words, what governments have done and gotten away with. The paper sends you to an end note for examples, but when you get there, you merely find this: ” See historical precedents where states intervened despite Security Council deadlock, citing practice supporting moral–legal duties to stop mass atrocities.” Yes, well, I came to the end notes to see those and there were none there, possibly because such “interventions” in places like Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and so on by the dozens have been consistent disasters and moral outrages.
Later, there’s a FAQ concluding the paper where the authors claim that a “military intervention” is not a war and therefore not a problem for all the laws — such as the UN Charter — that forbid war. This strict agreement with Pentagon propaganda is a recipe for countless wars by another name.
On the next page, the case for militarism authors lay out what they hope to accomplish — but not why armed conflict is the most likely way to accomplish any of it. Then they turn, in fact in the main text of the document, to examples of what they have in mind. The examples are: the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, NATO’s war on Kosovo, a French operation in Rwanda, the Gulf War, the war in Bosnia, and the war on Libya. Seriously? Even if the point is a technical one (there have been lots of these wars, so let’s have another and it will be totally different from these other ones) shouldn’t we notice what universally accepted disasters most or all of these have been — or at least disasters recognized by most of the people most concerned and active to halt the genocide in Palestine? It’s one thing to note that NATO claimed to be acting on humanitarian grounds in Kosovo. It’s quite another to omit what NATO actually did in Kosovo: bombed civilians, created ethnic cleansing, established a permanent occupation and training ground, and created a propaganda precedent for lots more “interventions.”
Next we get a couple of more pages on the indisputable need to do something, and three pages quoting a handful of people who support the proposal or something similar — or maybe they don’t actually support it. Some of the quotes support “an independent protection mechanism” or “a protective presence” etc., which may or may not mean the same thing as “military intervention”. Some of the quotes use the phrase “protection force,” but one of the people quoted saying that has told me explicitly and repeatedly that he in fact takes no position at all on whether a “protection force” should be armed or not. Yet here he is in a quote taking up a quarter of a page supposedly making the case for militarism.
So, there is very little of a case for anything made in this paper. If there were, it would be for something arguably illegal and hugely damaging to the rule of law. If it were legal, it would remain an extremely dangerous precedent, and would also be likely to result in catastrophic failure. Going to war with Israel — and you do not “enforce a no-fly zone over Gaza” without going to war with Israel (and you do not wage war in 2025 without slaughtering all types of people in the area) means going to war with (and possibly as) a nuclear-armed military, a military under a prime minister already inclined toward escalation and wider war if anyone can help him get it, and — in addition — Israel’s red, white, and blue sugar daddy across the Atlantic. This has the potential to slide Palestine ahead of Ukraine as the leading risk of swift planetary apocalypse.
But here’s the key question. What the bloody hell would I recommend instead? I would recommend two types of things, both difficult and with no guarantee of success, but with a significant chance of success. One type of thing is stuff that has not been tried yet. The other is vastly more of stuff that has been tried for years now. The war-as-last-resort crowd always rely on the notion that even a token effort, much less a major one, at something other than war makes war the only option. We’re about to hear, for example, that peace negotiations have been tried and failed for Ukraine, even as neither side proposed to ever compromise in the slightest and the neutral arbiter in the White House promised to keep the weapons flowing to one side. People have made heroic efforts for peace in Gaza. People are exhausted from all those efforts. But some of those efforts have worked and could be multiplied a-thousand-fold. Countries and companies have been forced to divest and to stop arming Israel, and more could be. Media outlets have been forced to convey bits of reality, and public opinion has swung dramatically. These facts do not make up a rosy, happy, hopeful picture. They’re sad little semi-wins for a team having a record-bad season. But they are what you can build on. If one dock can block shipments, all docks can. If one pundit can recognize a genocide years too late, all can. If one government can BDS Israel and its suppliers, all can. If a few aid ships can be sent, hundreds can. If some governments can commit to arresting Netanyahu, more can. Nobody’s proposing we give up on the climate struggle and join the people shooting guns at storms; and that struggle has been going a lot longer than this one.
But what hasn’t been tried yet? Of the thousands of tactics of nonviolent activism, most have of course not been tried. But the key tool especially relevant here is UNARMED civilian defense. Here is a leading expert proposing just that. Please read his proposal carefully. One minor point: he quotes Francesca Albanese at greater length than does the pro-militarism paper discussed above, which claims without evidence that she supports “military intervention.”
Has exactly what is needed here been done before with Unarmed Civilian Defense? No. But it has not yet been tried here either. War is NOT the last resort. Unarmed action builds on a stronger success record than armed “interventions” or armed “peacekeeping.” It also has the following interesting advantage over “military intervention.” The more we put into unarmed civilian defense, the more likely it is to succeed (right up to the extreme in which millions of people are involved and success is guaranteed), whereas the more we put into escalating the war with an “intervention,” the more likely the war is to do more damage (right up to the extreme of killing all life on Earth).
1 thought on “The Case Against a Military Intervention to Stop the Gaza Genocide”
https://davidswanson.org/the-case-against-a-military-intervention-to-stop-the-gaza-genocide/
Applause!