Amid the plethora of public utterances on the wrongs and rights of Israel’s military action in Gaza, those of several key Vatican officials and spokesmen, including Pope Francis, along with the comments of their neighbour, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo di Segni, have featured prominently in the Catholic Herald. Finding myself invited to supplement this distinguished company and continue their dialogue is a sobering privilege.
My first instinct is not to rush to present judgement, but to seek some kind of foundation grounded both in personal memories of wartime and in wider historical awareness.
I was born in London in April 1938. My earliest memories of events therefore involve World War II, especially the latter stages, not least as reported in the daily News Chronicle – four pages in one mega-sheet – a British daily newspaper that in 1960 was absorbed into the Daily Mail.
I dimly recall as a kind of slogan the principle of Unconditional Surrender by the Axis powers – agreed by Roosevelt and Churchill at their Casablanca meeting in 1943. I doubt whether they then gave much thought to the doctrine of proportionality (even though it dates from the Hague Conventions of 1907), let alone to collateral damage such as the death of innocent or anti-Nazi residents of Germany.
Even post-war, moreover, controversy about the bombing raids on Germany questioned only the extent of their contribution to ultimate victory, relative to the loss of allied Bomber Command aircrew. Attempts to put a different focus on the extreme destruction of Dresden in February 1945 stemmed largely not from reputable professionals, but from the now notorious Holocaust denier David Irving.
There has been much to criticise in Israeli policies towards the Occupied West Bank in particular. But how does one apply the proportionality doctrine or minimise collateral hurt in circumstances like those of Gaza today, a strip of land with 2 million inhabitants, ruled by an organisation like Hamas which has sited its command structures and weaponry beneath medical facilities, places of worship and other quintessentially civilian centres?
Naturally Hamas’s purpose was to paralyse or at least handicap the Israeli military, and equally naturally the Israelis have endeavoured to warn inhabitants of impending strikes in specific locations. The question is what benefit such warnings bring when refuge is all but unavailable – and whose fault is that?
International law has also moved on. At much the same moment as Roosevelt and Churchill were defining Allied war aims, a Polish-Jewish lawyer called Raphael Lemkin was coining the term genocide. While sometimes misused as a propaganda term for widespread violence, its proper meaning is the extermination of some social, ethnic or religious collectivity – such as the obliteration of the state of Israel aspired to in the Hamas Covenant.
More limited or lesser offences in the same general bracket include war crimes and crimes against humanity. The major precedent of an international tribunal to try offences of this type was the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-46, which tried some 20 surviving Nazi leaders.
The term genocide, incidentally, did not feature in the indictments, partly because it was not specified as a crime until the United Nations General Assembly in December 1946; and partly also because the Nuremberg proceedings focussed on Nazi Germany’s international acts, whereas the killing of Jews and others – the incurably ill, homosexuals, etc. – began with its own citizens.
Subsequent declared identifications of genocide, with the big exception of the Cambodian killing fields in the1970s, all post-date the Cold War – surely not by coincidence, but that question is beyond the scope of this article. They include in the 1990s the cases in Bosnia and Rwanda; and, after 2000, in Darfur and in the so-called Islamic State (Syria and its environs, where the victims were Yazidi, Christians and Shia Muslims).
Talk of non-genocidal war crimes or crimes against humanity has reached new levels in 2024 – mainly because of Russia’s conduct under Mr. Putin. This covers both the “Special Military Operation” against Ukraine and the murderous suppression of internal political opponents, culminating in that of Alexei Navalny. In this instance, talk of international tribunals is plainly futile. The only possibilities are (military and other) aid to Ukraine, and hope – as in past times – that Russian society may find its way to less brutal internal politics.
The broader lesson is that international legal proceedings are only partly about law. They have at best a limited degree of independence from political objectives and political motivation. The Nuremberg trials were arguably a just victors’ justice. South Africa’s prosecution of Israel in the ICJ was not some disinterested act of legal professionalism. It was a piece of self-advertisement and a somewhat inchoate quest for approval from the likes of Iran, China and perhaps others.
Similarly, does the Vatican really suppose that its simplistic verbal interventions will accelerate progress towards justice and peace in the Middle East – or is it rather concerned to underline its own authority as a guiding light and moral arbiter for Catholics?
Pope Francis and his colleagues would do well to recall the tightrope walked by his predecessor of the mid-20th century, Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII). Anxiety to retain the sympathy of Germany as a bulwark against Communism compromised his moral standing vis-à-vis Nazism. It required a Giovanni XXIII to initiate a new era in Vatican-Jewish relations.
How then is the Jewish community affected by present disagreements or divergences? Verbal skirmishes with the Vatican are not centre-stage. What leaves the community both baffled and alarmed is the realisation that the world’s oldest prejudice, which they had thought on the verge of extinction, is alive and well and living in a street near them.
In the current climate of wokery and anti-wokery, of critical race theory, anticolonialism and all that, Jews are seen as the embodiment of whatever is causing problems – and therefore as legitimate targets of abuse, mostly verbal but occasionally physical, a convenient simplification to make the world a less frustrating place.
Individuals deal with that in different ways. Some conceal visible signs of Jewish identity, such as skull caps or six-pointed stars. Depending (as they say) on context, others may actually do the opposite. One of my grand-daughters at her university makes a point of wearing a prominent star of David – inducing people, in her words, to think twice before making antisemitic remarks.
To revert to the Church, it is heartening to learn through the Catholic Herald of the friendship between Cardinal Dolan (Archbishop of New York) and the late Dr. Henry Kissinger. On the latter’s death last November at the age of 100, Dolan said “I thank God for his efforts at peace, and was inspired by his profound appreciation of the indispensable role of history, culture and religion in world affairs.”
I confess to being moved by that; my mother’s maiden name was Kissinger, and I happen to be a distant relative.
Peter Oppenheimer is a retired Oxford academic who until 2000 taught economics and thereafter was until 2008 President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. His college is Christ Church.
Photo: A Palestinian man walks amid the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in the Rafah refugee camp in the south of the Gaza Strip, 16 October 2023. Israel declared war on the Islamist group Hamas on October 8, a day after waves of its fighters broke through the heavily fortified border and killed more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians. The relentless Israeli bombings in the week since have flattened neighbourhoods and left at least 2,670 people dead in the Gaza Strip, the majority ordinary Palestinians. (Photo by MOHAMMED ABED/AFP via Getty Images.)
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