This was written eighteen months ago; I’m republishing it because there are a lot of new subscribers, and about 10,000 times as many dead civilians since it first appeared. The argument, however, still seems sound.
Every day I check the usual British papers, and three American ones – the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. A huge gap has opened across the Atlantic as the Gaza war has ground on. The US papers downplay Palestinian casualties to an extent that is difficult to imagine even among the pro-Israeli broadsheets here. A recent [January 2024] New York Times headline describing the death of 24 Israeli soldiers as “the bloodiest day of the Gaza War” was the most egregious example, but it was all of a piece with the rest of the coverage.
This is disgusting on professional grounds. It’s also worrying as the citizen of a client state of the empire. It reminds me of a similar conspiracy of silence after the fall of Baghdad, when the fact of an inevitable American defeat and retreat was impossible to recognise if you relied on the American press, and impossible to avoid if you did not. As subjects of the empire, we need the people taking its decisions to be well informed, and they won’t be if they are dependent on American media.
The US media managed to conceal from the American public the fact that the Iraq war was being lost for four or five years after this was obvious to any outside observer. That was bad for America and its clients as well as very much worse for Iraq.
Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza; some elements of Israeli opinion do advocate genocide with relish. The truth of these statements is not in the least diminished by the fact that Hamas is itself a genocidal organisation; nor by the fact that Assad has done things just as wicked in his civil war; nor by the war crimes of the Saudis in Yemen. There are atrocities everywhere you look and they are all atrocious. None cancel out any of the others.
But I write this from the safety of a neutral country far away. In the middle of a war atrocities do seem to cancel each other out: “see what they did to us, or wanted to do to us – we must return the horror, but a hundred times worse”. It takes exceptional moral courage and clarity to stand against that rage and hatred from the inside. Newspapers must assume their readers are such paragons. I’m much less sure on my own account.
A quick glance at the history of the Allied “strategic” bombing campaign against civilians in Germany should remind us that our parents and grandparents were happy to behave towards their enemies as the Israelis do to theirs; a quick glance at the polls should show that a large part of civilised Western European opinion would be happy for all the inhabitants of Gaza to be drowned, starved, or blown to bits if the only alternative were for them to come here. A German Jew, writing in the Atlantic recently, proposed magnanimously that the Egyptians resettle them in the Sinai desert but it turns out the Egyptians feel the same way too. Humanity is universal, you see.
Compared to the human suffering, the damage to our faith in the liberal order can seem trivial; but it matters too. The war in Gaza has been destructive of the construction of war crimes. It reveals a contradiction at the heart of the idea.
The kinds of actions we’re dealing with, from torture up to genocide, are all morally abominable and in fact evil, if the word means anything. They are wrong in themselves. But whether they are crimes as well depends on the observer. There are no war crimes in the Bible. There are numerous slaughters, tortures, and even genocides, but all are approved by God, either as a reward for following him or as a punishment for failing to do so.
It turns out that the existence of war crimes is itself the product of war crimes and not just in the obvious sense that there wouldn’t be any if nations did not commit them; nor even in the slightly less obvious sense that unless you have a law saying something is a crime, it can’t be one. This is because laws or resolutions on their own are not enough to make a crime. There must be convictions and punishments, and in most cases trials, too. Laws that are not enforced are in some ways worse than laws which don’t exist at all, for they throw into doubt those laws which we do intend to enforce. The law has to stand above everyone whom it judges.
International law, then, has to stand above every nation and every nation’s interests – because of course it will always be in someone’s interests in some circumstances to break the law. The rule of the law rests on everyone accepting that it’s not “different when I do it”. International law presupposes some supernational authority that can identify international criminals, prosecute and punish them. That's inherent in the nature of a crime. Otherwise we are left with a naked atrocity. But the term for an authority more powerful than any individual state is “Empire”.
For a while, it looked as if we had such an imperium – at least if you were looking from inside liberal opinion in a Western country. It seemed to be part of the natural order of things. But it wasn’t, of course. Like everything else in history it was contingent and ultimately transient.
More worryingly, it was contingent on crimes that it would itself condemn. Hitler could not have been defeated without Stalin. This isn’t a nihilistic moral equivalence. The right side won in World War 2. The right side won in the Cold War too. But the means by which it won were often, by its – by our – own standards, criminal.
The unattractive moral is that an empire can only come into existence as a result of actions which it must judge retrospectively as war crimes. Possibly it can only defend itself against other, contending, imperia by means of further crimes. That would be the logic of Bertrand Russell’s infamous suggestion in the years between Hiroshima and the Russian bomb, that the US use the atomic bomb to disarm Russia and prevent nuclear proliferation.
If colonialism and imperialism are inherently criminal, as people nowadays seem to believe, they can only be recognised as criminal by the beneficiaries of their success. There will always be atrocities, but without some supranational authority, nations cannot be judged. This authority can’t be voluntary, as it is under the present system, or else it is binding only on the weak, and even then only when this is convenient to the strong. But any international system powerful enough to coerce a nuclear-armed state is going to be indistinguishable from an empire. It could only come into being as the result of a successful imperial project.
To that extent all justice is victors’ justice and therefore very much less than perfect. But if there are no victors, there can be no justice done at all.
The argument that international humanitarian law can only be established by institutions which arise as a result of breaching these laws can be assimilated to a belief in progress, if you think that we learn from the past. Something like that is inherent in the grand narrative of Christianity: Christ is descended from both King David and from Cain, neither of whom were exactly Christlike.
But we, like Augustine, live in a time when progress is peeling away like soggy wallpaper, and all that still stands are the bricks of brute power. In such a world there are no crimes, only atrocities, some of which are also mistakes. It's hard to believe that there is any justification for history.