GOMORRAH

I’ve been shocked by the response to Israel’s declaration of war and actions in Gaza. Of course, I’m not talking about the masses making noise on their favourite social media site but what amounts to an exclusionary exegesis from journalists, public officials, and experts. I cannot wrap my head around what most folks think is happening, what they believe precipitated it, or who they feel is involved. Harder to understand is how half the planet, seemingly, is just now discovering what war is.

The most frequent demand I'm still hearing, to my dismay, is that the perpetrators of fantastic violence (and those calling for more of it) are justified in their atrocities, have no obligations of any kind, and must also be, in their righteousness, immune any repercussions of any kind. And it's not that demands of this flavour so often arrive from the same voices who argue that "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences" — in which it is felt that saying or thinking or being presumed to have thought (or even merely observing) something truly benign should probably experience life deranging impacts hand-delivered by a mob. That would be bad enough. The problem here, and it shouldn't need stating, is that this thinking is, very obviously, a recipe for unimaginable violence in every corner of the planet — particularly for those peoples and places those offering such assurances of immunity appear to feel they're supporting and not condemning with such affirmations. It’s almost as if offerings of this kind come with a prerequisite pledge that one has never and will never look into the past…

Yes, obviously, I’m preferring to assume folks have received a poor education and paired that with no interest in the world, and are not using their positions and platforms to deliberately mislead everyone they possibly can with every speech and post. But, alas, you may be correct, this is beginning to feel like ignorance on my end.

If these city councillors and e-protesters don’t go that far (what amounts to: anyone is both justified and not responsible for doing anything at all to anyone they like), they appear to demand that war be devoid of negative impacts (negative as perceived by them and not necessarily those being shot in the face.) Urban warfare, they demand, must be impossibly clean, non-disruptive, and most definitely uninvolving, even tacitly, of any civilians or civilian infrastructure. This peremptory insistence comes despite the world having documented for decades the use of civilians and civilian infrastructure as a Palestinian weapon of war. With this knowledge, and with international humanitarian law at their fingertips, they insist that any harm to a parking lot or place of worship is, by definition, a war crime. (Which does little more than exposes one's friends as volunteers in the lawfare efforts and related propaganda campaigns of numerous terrorist organizations.) Naturally, along with that, so much of the postings and writings and podcastinations [the requisite prognostications of podcasters and their guests] appear astonishingly unaware of even the very general and recent history of conflict (like somehow they’ve missed what feels to me like every other book and television series, film and documentary, investigative report and news article of the last 70 years…) and what I believed we all knew to be true about the enduring Arab-Israeli conflict.

Most shocking is that they pretend to know nothing of recent years in Nigeria, Sudan, or Yemen or even details of the conflict between, say, Iraq and Iran. They simulate awareness of the history of the Middle East and beyond in this way while seemingly unaware (or at least carefully withholding acknowledgement) of the mass enslavement, crucifixions and beheadings, mass nerve gassing, and of the tradition of folks using own children as mine-clearing devices and bombs — the reporting of which has been as high profile as possible and arriving in a steady stream my entire life. Of course there were no months-long protests or university sit-ins or pronouncements from city hall when we learned of thousands of Yazidi women and children being abducted and bought and sold as slaves throughout the region.

Their eyes swell in pain at the sight of a Palestinian child being pulled from the rubble of a building (with the strategically omitted detail that the home was minutes earlier being used as a sniper nest or, just as likely, unaware that the image they had shared with them and they passed along was from an entirely different conflict in another land years prior.) Just one instance of this sort is enough to cause them to rally their friends and colleagues to head into the streets, crying for a ceasefire. Still, they seem both unaware and unable to muster any emotion toward five-year-olds bought as slaves and left chained in the sun to die for the crime of wetting the bed. Not a tear for any of the more than 300,000 Nigerian children under age five killed by folks subscribed to, espousing, and enacting the same ideology as the Iraqi slave traders or their friends Hamas and their millions of supporters. Even knowing this, still they cannot gather the energy to call for just one person to be sanctioned or fired or taken to court. Where are the global divestment and boycott campaigns?

Their now-religious marches, weekly in every major city of the Western world, cry in horror at the momentary hunger of hundreds of thousands in Gaza; but not a word or a sign or a post over years about the "catastrophic hunger" facing 18 million Sudanese (a figure that recently doubled while these highly attuned part-time and full-time humanitarians and activists slept.) Now, unsurprisingly, the same crowd musters support, and full-on celebration, of Houthi war crimes in their every-week protests.

And with that, as you would expect, protesters register no recognition that Palestinian leadership, and the overwhelming majority of the population that endorses them and their worst actions, has spelled out their expectation (every day for twenty years) that every civilian life be sacrificed for the cause of Jewish genocide. And they gladly ignore the leadership's delighted enforcement of the cosmic ordinance to sacrifice any unwilling man, woman, or child. As these vocal Westerners perform this unknowing, they feign ignorance about the indoctrination to martyrdom and Judeophobia and that it has not merely arrived via religious leaders and government but on children's television and even in the learning materials of the UNRWA school curriculum. While rejecting all of the above, these activists also appear to enjoy contradicting the Geneva Conventions — even as they pretend to reference the Geneva Conventions. So when someone mentions "violations of international humanitarian law" all you have to do is ask "what violation of which law?" and the conversation ends. Alternatively, if you wish to get yourself blocked and put on a list, you only have to cite a pertinent section of the conventions, Articles 23 or 19 for example. The flargrancy, velocity, and virulence of this celebration toward collective unknowing is just dizzying.

Even just consider the apparent shock at the level of devastation across the Strip and at the numbers of dead. In the most serious tone, they talk of Gaza being the most densely populated place on earth; of months of unrelenting shelling and bombing and missile attacks from land, sea, and air; of the attack being worse than those of WWII, even a campaign that now “sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.” Simultaneously, they reference 15,000 or 30,000 combatants and non-combatants killed “in just one hundred days!” This is said to be both “an incredible number of civilian casualties” and incredibly fast. They say all of this is not only unbelievably indiscriminate violence but clearly, on their face, a whole vile congregation of war crimes, evidence of nothing less than the enactment of genocidal intent.

THE PAST

I’m not sure what planet these people are living on. What coordinated, collective misreading of everything we know could yield such evaluations? How can you reject all of what we know has transpired on the ground, the past and present assertions of Palestinian leadership and their rejections of ceasefire offers, Israel’s stated war aims, the contents of the Geneva Conventions, and, in effect, all of human history all in one fell swoop?

Just imagine comparing any part of the Second World War to what's happening in Gaza. You only have to pick up a history book to know how silly this is. But you don't have to absorb an entire, years-long global armed conflict. You can merely contrast the present with a single Allied attack (that few who are not history buffs even seem to be aware of) to be sure this evaluation is absurd. Just consider the example of Hamburg and Operation Gomorrah.

The plan for Hamburg, the industrial centre in the north of Germany and the Reich's second largest city, was not just to eliminate their substantial manufacturing capacity but to terrorize the German public, weaken their resolve, and put pressure on the German leadership to end their hostilities. To accomplish this, the aim was to unleash previously unseen volumes of incendiary munitions and a calculated number of timed high-explosives — explosives that would detonate after the arrival of fire-fighting crews, crater roads, and blow out windows, making firefighting impossible and maximize these conflagrations. Hence the operation was named after the city of Gomorrah, whose destruction is recorded in the Bible as a God-sent rain of fire and brimstone. However, knowing these details alone illuminates none of what took place.

Late into the war, in the summer of 1943, Allied commanders waited for a period of particularly warm and dry weather to unleash their Hell. On the 24th of July, the conditions were just right. Around midnight, 791 British, Canadian (Including Squadron 420, the Snowy Owls), Australian, and Polish bombers attacked the sleeping city of Hamburg. Survivors reported violent shaking prior to the dropping of any bombs and due only to the size and numbers of aircraft alone — aircraft flying at 20,000ft. Needless to say, the attack was terrible. And, as only 12 bombers were lost during this initial raid, the raids continued. A daylight raid including 323 US bombers followed immediately after on the 25th. Half of those bombers targeted the Blohm and Voss shipyard and Klöckner engine factory while the rest attacked the city. Those same aircraft returned to hit the same targets on the following day as well. On the night of the 27th, the British-led formation returned to Hamburg once again, this time with 787 bombers targeting the densest residential districts. And then on the evening of the 29th another attack was launched, with 707 bombers once again flying back to Hamburg for another area bombing with still more fire in their bellies. In all, around 3,000 sorties dropped 9,000 tons of bombs. The result was the destruction of almost 200 large factories, 4,000 smaller factories, and 250,000 homes (or roughly 75% of the city). As happens so often in war, we don’t know how many civilians were harmed or killed; but it is now speculated civilian injuries numbered around 150,000 while deaths are agreed to be as high as 40,000.

Of course, all of that is the sanitized textbook accounting and gives little sense of the horror that transpired. We know that, by design, tornadoes of fire across the city were so intense that they are believed to have generated winds of 240km/h, consuming so much oxygen that many victims likely did not die from the impact of exploding bombs or burns from the resulting fires but rather suffocation. The heat alone from these sustained fires, said to have reached 1,000°C, melted the glass and metal in people’s homes. Bricks and mortar deformed or turned to ash. The asphalt on the streets liquified. 

Kate Hoffmeister, aged 19 at the time, recalled being unable to run against the terrible winds whipped up by the fires and of seeing people flee into the streets for safety only to become trapped. She recounted the bodies in the streets and her neighbours like them getting their feet stuck in the molten road. Reaching down to try and release their burning feet would inevitably fail and they would be left, Kate tells us, “on their hands and knees screaming.”

The fires were so intense, so large and climbing so high into the sky, bomber pilots reported not needing pathfinder guidance as the inferno could be clearly seen from all around and even far over the North Sea. Bomber crews even noted the terrible up-drafts of heat and roaring of the fires heard from far above. Buildings that remained standing were hollowed out, appearing as giant chimneys or ovens. And that they were. The occupants of the worker's apartment blocks were not merely charred or disfigured or even unrecoverable but entirely undiscoverable, estimated only by the numbers of reported missing and in the volumes of ash found in the basements of the husks of buildings in a city-turned-crematorium.

Worse, in a recent documentary, a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot is presented retelling his experience of the attack. Particularly poignant is his description of intelligence arriving in the aftermath of their initial raids on Hamburg. He cites his commander reporting survivors huddling in the town’s main church and the orders being for him and his crew to return to the city to strike their sanctuary. Of course, as the crew’s obligation and not something anyone would wish to force upon anyone else by refusing, the pilot and his crew followed orders.

It should be of no surprise that this is actually identical reasoning we heard from Germans about how so many perfectly normal people justified committing their own atrocities. And, similarly, historians record that even those not eager to bring such horrors to their enemy rarely withheld their participation, convinced such shows of overwhelming force and savagery would in fact save lives by compelling the enemy to relent and thus shortening the war...

Interestingly, it was actually the desire to reduce the horrors of war, specifically the slow, grinding brutality of the trench warfare experienced by so many just two decades earlier, that is said to have resulted in the invention of firestorms. And, from there, the pure horror of firestorms is partly how we justified the comparatively "humane" evil of the atomic bomb. This kind of reasoning is what Hardcore History creator Dan Carlin calls “logical insanity”. You can imagine that after years of total war, enduring the terror of enemy bombing raids, terrible violence and previously unimaginable losses, horrors you thought you'd never see and more, terrible retaliations become conceivable and even, seemingly at least, necessary. And, then, willing participants are not hard to find, either. Of course, with a foe such as Germany's National Socialists, taking a neutral stance and accepting what was coming would have been more grave, and for the whole world, than responding to force with worse force.

But now consider that, despite the severity of Operation Gomorrah, later called “Germany’s Nagasaki”, it was just one of many times the city of Hamburg was attacked during the war. And notice that the same storm of hellfire and death was delivered to the German city of Dresden, only not extended over a week but in just a single night’s raid. It’s worth noting that the number of civilians German authorities claimed were killed in the firebombing of Dresden sat at around 200,000. It wasn't until modern revisionist historians investigated that the number was revised down closer to something more accurate: roughly 10% of the original claim. That's around the deaths many suggest Gaza has seen over four months of “unprecedented" and "indiscriminate" bombing of “the most densely populated place on earth.” Historians also record that devastating attacks of this sort took place all across Germany, particularly near the end of the war.

Yet, amazingly, and perhaps most tragically, all of that was nearly pointless. These thousands of hellish sorties of fiery terror appear to have done little to crush German will, which was their stated aim. They didn't even significantly reduce industrial production. Imagine. After all that. It's been said that within mere months of Operation Gomorrah, for example, industrial capacity in Hamburg returned to 80%. In fact, as a result, Hamburg was bombed another 69 times before the end of the war! Can you even imagine?

So, you can see that what was accomplished was little more than an enduring example for our capacity for the most terrible and indiscriminate murder of civilians: with perhaps as many as 600,000 German civilians killed by Allied terror bombing over the course of the war. And, of course, no one was tried for war crimes or genocide for planning, ordering, or executing these or so many other outrageous attacks (against an enemy who struck first and so many felt needed to be stopped at any cost.)

Oh, speaking of this, what is often cited as precipitating Allied implementation of these terror attacks on German cities and the civilians therein? The Blitz: those Nazi nighttime air raids against UK cities between September of 1940 and May of 1941, killing around 43,000 civilians. Folks should absolutely consider this and all the above when talking about precedent, retaliation, and proportionality in armed conflict. Or, at least, I’m not sure how we institutionally disregard all of it while claiming no response is the best response.

All of this is to say that it’s impossible to understand how four months in Gaza is anything like just four days in Hamburg or even 24 hours in Dresden. Those were single, brief operations carried out against individual cities (and against a foe that did not want to die); so, evaluations painting the months-long conflict we’ve seen across a number of towns and cities as anything approximating the violence and destruction commonly endured during WWII, and here with people violating and weaponizing every norm and law that exists, seems at best a conspicuous admission of one’s lack of the most basic and abundantly available historical information.

MORE RECENT HISTORY

Or you can forget all that. If WWII feels like ancient history and you still need examples and evidence of what the determination to kill looks like then just turn to the worst 100 days in Indonesia or Rwanda. With no battleships or jets or tanks, no atomic or conventional bombs, no anti-personnel mines, grenade launchers, or machine guns — and with violence often carried out by children — these countries each saw many hundreds of thousands (perhaps a million) executed by hand (to say nothing of the astonishing, industrial-scale volumes of dismemberments and other mutilations and obscenities.) Just reading the details, that we do not need to get into here, is literally breathtaking.

All the above examples from around the globe, and there are others like them everywhere and across time, are far worse than anything happening anywhere at present. And these are not “far worse” by some crude calculation or subjective, personal assessment. Nor am I making some elaborate philosophical argument. You don’t even need basic ethics. Unless you’re a jihadist who celebrates your own and other’s death as a gift, all you need is an awareness of the details and your lizard-brain instinct to self-preservation. From there, forced to choose between being on the receiving end of one of these events, no one would ever fail to select Gaza over Indonesia or Rwanda; just as they would never choose to put themselves in Hamburg or Dresden for just one night.

More than that, and relevant at the moment, Indonesia and Rwanda are among the precedents we have for what genocidal intent and genocidal action look like. To understand present events and consider historical context, ask yourself how those events look if you merely swap the names around. Pretend:

• the Hutu hosted and provided sanctuary for millions of Tutsi and Twa

• the Tutsi and Twa were armed to the teeth and had first carried out the most brutal coordinated attacks against Hutu civilians and foreign nationals and did so throughout Rwanda

• the Hutu declared war and spelled out specific war aims before delivering a response

• the Hutu assault was conducted only by their military forces, in uniform

• their most significant attacks had their time and location flagged for the entire world, enemy and civilian alike

• they appear to have observed the Geneva Conventions (especially in instances academics, government officials, journalists, and concerned citizens alike relentlessly demanded they were not doing so)

• and they killed thousands over months rather than closer to a million, despite having the recognized capacity to eliminate the whole population (and at no cost of any kind) in one afternoon or in a single strike if they so desired

Is there any chance we’d be talking about Rwandan genocide in the above scenario? I don't see how. And, of course, this ignores the fact that the force Israel is up against insists, ad nauseam, that they don't merely celebrate death but seek it for everyone including themselves and their own. If you don't accept or fully appreciate that, especially how an orientation of this sort confounds all our laws and norms and almost any reasonable response to those conscripted into such a death cult, then (in addition to knowing nothing about past conflicts) you've failed to consider effectively anything about what is taking place at present.

FOR MORE INFORMATION SEE:

The Act of Killing - Joshua Oppenheimer

Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan - A. C. Grayling