Do you condemn Hamas?
What does it mean to ‘condemn’ or ‘condone’ in the struggle for Palestinian freedom?
In the Yiddish version of his Holocaust memoir, Night, Ellie Wiesel describes young Jewish men, after their liberation from the camps, descending on German cities in order to acquire much needed food and clothing. And to rape German women. Why this detail is left out of later translations into other languages is obvious: the book on how the Holocaust would be remembered was still being written, and Wiesel found himself one of its writers. The embers of Auschwitz’s furnaces were still warm, and those who were spared them were thereby thrust into the unfair position of having to fill the role of legitimizing their own suffering to the world. In the struggle to write this narrative some things, for the time being, would have to be forgotten. People wouldn’t understand. They weren’t there.
It would be callous of us to condone these actions. But can you condemn them?
We in the West are often told of the barbarous behaviour of the Red Army as it advanced into Germany. Seldom is it discussed what transpired first, certainly not in the detail it deserves, though some facts may be familiar to viewers of the 1985 Soviet film Come and See: in some villages, adults were herded into buildings and burned alive, sometimes forced to watch their children killed first or vice versa, the children in one account being torn apart by hungry dogs. Himmler’s Generalplan Ost had called for the ‘removal’ of 30 million people from Poland and the Soviet Union so that the land could be resettled by ethnic Germans. Surviving Slavs would become slaves, and most of them would be intentionally worked to death. To put the Nazi perspective on this in Himmler’s own words:
[W]hether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian women fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.
By the end of the war, over 17 million Soviet civilians were dead, not counting military losses. Up to 20 percent of the nation, one in five, would be dead at war’s end.
Consider the perspective of a soldier in the Red Army. In all likelihood, the Nazi advance has taken almost everything from you. As the Nazi tide was beaten back, some of these soldiers would find themselves arriving to towns they once called home, many of them now smouldering ruins, and in these ruins they would sometimes find the unrecognizable remains of what could have once been their family, disposed of in means not suited even to livestock. Charred corpses with their clothes melted into their flesh, their agony captured in their twisted frames. Fragments of children’s small bodies strewn across fields. Take a second to really try to conceptualize this. Consider the children in your own life. Now consider their faces unrecognizably lacerated, crushed, burned. Now imagine that there are so many of them that you can’t count them all, mangled and dismembered bodies so entangled you can’t tell where one begins and another ends, a twisted optical illusion of human gore. Does this description seem gratuitous to you? It could never be gratuitous enough, because no matter how explicit the description, no matter what images you may see, you will never be able to conceive of it, because you weren’t there. It wasn’t your family. If it was, and you found yourself on the doorstep of those who did it, can you say for certain what you would do? It would be callous of us to condone some of what these soldiers are alleged to have done, but we will never understand the circumstances that drove them to do it.
In 1968, photojournalist Eddie Addams famously documented the summary execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Viet Cong officer, capturing the instant of the man’s death. The photograph was immensely incendiary, becoming one of the most notable (and graphic) images to come out of the war, and it’s easy to see why. On a semiotic level, it appears to say everything about the conflict that you need to know at first glance. Lém is dressed in plain clothes; his executioner, a police chief, wears a military jacket and stands next to a soldier in full gear, displaying the asymmetry of the conflict and the ad hoc nature of the desperate Viet Cong. In the moment of his death, Lém’s face looks to the viewer with a near pleading expression, while his executioner stands with his back to the camera, indifferent to the documentation of the cruel act. His pose is casual, his face in profile indifferent as he takes a man’s life. Many would argue, however, that the photo obscures context: Lém had participated in the Tet Offensive, during which the Viet Cong had killed thousands of civilians, mostly intentionally. The Viet Cong had been provided a blacklist of targets to take out, and it is alleged—though his executioner probably did not know of this allegation at the time of the photo—that Lém had that day killed one of these targets, as well as the target’s wife, children, and mother.
But consider what happened in South Vietnam in the leadup to this incident. The target Lém allegedly assassinated was a colonial collaborator with a war criminal regime responsible for the murder, starvation, and near-enslavement of countless of Lém’s countrymen, aided by the most powerful war machine on earth. The members of the target’s family were witnesses, and had Lém been truly responsible and kept them alive while surviving the Offensive himself, their eyewitness testimony would have been used to identify him. Without a doubt his own family could have been slaughtered. Regardless of who actually carried out these killings, it would be callous of us to condone the killing of children. But it would, in this case, be just as callous to condemn it. We cannot possibly understand the level of desperation felt by the Viet Cong and by Lém in particular.
This month marked the anniversary of October 7, which was solemnly acknowledged in Parliament with the expected rehashed condemnations of Hamas that this country has seen countless times already, trotted out by every major party, with the usual pattern of some condemnations of Hamas being accused of just not being unequivocable enough. The dust has still not settled on October 7 and there are many conflicting reports of what did and did not take place, but let us for the sake of argument take the reports of Hamas’s alleged acts at face value. Does it not stand to reason that Israel, by the logic formulated above, would find itself in the position of being beyond condemnation for the crimes it commits? It would not. Just why it is that this circumstance differs relies on a moral calculus that takes into consideration three principle contextual elements: proportionality, asymmetry, and justifiability. Proportionality refers to the scale of the alleged acts compared to prior ones, and whether or not a given side provoked the situation; who shot first and where did it land. Asymmetry refers to the relative balance between sides in a conflict with regard to power and resources, as asymmetrical warfare often leads to less central control over the actions of the participants on the weaker side while also increasing the desperation of the kinds of acts partaken, and justifiability refers not to whether the act itself was justifiable but whether or not the cause represented by a given side in the conflict is a justifiable one irrespective of the acts. Justifiability is paramount, it must be accounted for, followed by proportionality and then asymmetry.
The aforementioned acts committed by Holocaust survivors and the Viet Cong, for instance, check all three boxes, whereas the Red Army soldiers check all but asymmetry (both sides in that conflict were powerful nations with powerful armies). By this logic, all three are beyond the scope of reasonable ‘condemnation,’ whereas reprisals against any of the three are explicitly not and can be reasonably openly condemned. In another circumstance, the Contras in Nicaragua were arguably engaged in an asymmetrical conflict (one may complicate this estimation when one considers their support from the United States), but their acts were by no means proportional and by no means justifiable.
After decades of merciless slaughter, there is little Hamas could possibly do that could not be considered proportional. It is undeniable, also, that the conflict is asymmetrical, and the lack of centrality that comes with that means that much of what is done by soldiers fighting for Hamas is done outside Hamas’s oversight. Whether Hamas’s cause is justifiable, meanwhile, should at this point be obvious to just about everyone—the ending of a genocidal apartheid ethnostate is an undeniably just cause. But does any of this calculus really matter? Does what we think or say have any real impact materially in the world? If it wasn’t the case, then Israel wouldn’t spend millions of dollars to ensure that people in other countries support its actions. Our hearts and minds are a battleground and the prize is consent for the actions of our government and the governments it supports. They know that there is no way for them to prevent condemnation of Israel’s actions, but what they may succeed at instead is getting us to condemn their adversaries in turn. By obfuscating the dialogue with purported nuance, demands and action are confused. If you condemn Israel and yet also condemn Hamas, the ambiguities obscure the goals, even if one is condemned more roundly than the other. The situation becomes too complicated, the actors are in a bind, the circumstances and how to ameliorate them become foggy, a suggestion emerges that “something” has to be done about Hamas, the just party which is fighting the unjust one. But when considered with the proper ethical calculus, the objectives become clearer: the Holocaust had to end. The Nazis had to be stopped. South Vietnam had to fall. If the pattern becomes clear, you can fill in the blanks. You don’t have to condone certain actions Hamas is alleged to have committed, but that doesn’t mean you should condemn them, not merely because it is beyond our understanding but also because the political value of that condemnation tips the scales in Israel’s favour as the stronger party to the asymmetrical conflict. Though of course the question remains: what has Hamas actually done?
There were claims that Hamas had beheaded babies. That turned out to be a lie. Israel is also once again claiming, as they often do, that their enemies are using “human shields,” a claim which has been debunked in previous conflicts they have participated in again and again while Israel itself has been proven to use Palestinians as human shields on numerous occasions. There have been several claims by Israel of instances of systematic sexual violence committed by Hamas, but Israel’s picking and choosing of which international bodies it allows to assess the findings and how the findings are framed introduces quite a bit of concern. Even the question of just how many people were killed by Hamas is unclear as there have now been countless reports of the IDF being responsible for a not insignificant number of their own casualties.
Evidently, there isn’t a single claim Israel can make that we shouldn’t immediately be skeptical about, whereas Israel’s own actions may be witnessed constantly and directly as the entire genocide is effectively being live-streamed. This is not to say that Hamas fighters haven’t done anything wrong—it’s unreasonable to imagine it isn’t the case that fighters in their position very well may do something, especially as we consider the examples above of analogous circumstances, and many war correspondents have been quick to point out that such acts play out in every conflict zone you can imagine—although it’s worth remembering that those fighting for Hamas are also aware that they are fighting a PR war, and that their every misstep may be used to target their own loved ones, something which may very well be a mitigating factor in all of this. But even if they have, the question that must be raised is not do you condemn Hamas—but can you?
Jack Daniel Christie is a writer and artist of Anishinaabe descent, splitting his time between Toronto and Montréal. His poetry and prose has appeared in Commo, Bad Nudes, and Calliope, to name a few. He was shortlisted for the Irving Layton Award in Fiction, and is the editor-in-chief of the poetry zine press and event series Discordia Review, which you can follow at @discordia.review on Instagram, and its associated blog.