The main focus of the international laws of war is to protect civilians. The IDF is fighting this war according to the international laws of war, often going above and beyond what is required to avoid civilian casualties.
When I was studying ethics of war in the overseas, at a university not known for being sympathetic to Israel, many of my professors, including some who were pacifists often cited examples from the IDF in explaining how an ethical army should operate within the laws of war. I'm not saying the IDF is perfect, no human army is, but they are doing far more to protect civilians than any other military I've studied.
Under international law Hamas is responsible for all the civilians killed, wounded and otherwise harmed by its policy of willfully, intentionally embedding itself among civilians and civilian infrastructure, all of which is contrary to the laws of war, which also include for example the requirement for militaries to clearly identify themselves with uniforms or other insignia to distinguish themselves from the surrounding civilian population of non-combatants. Hamas consistently finds ways to breach these laws over and over again, that is its doctrine.
International law does not give Hamas a free pass because its fighters embed themselves among the civilian population and intentionally build tunnels, weapons depots and bases under and in the middle of civilian neighbourhoods and infrastructure, hospitals, schools, mosques.
To hold Israel culpable for civilian casualties under such circumstances would be to encourage the increased deliberate endangering of civilians as a tactic.
It would also be immoral and unethical to allow Hamas to commit atrocities and then let them claim immunity by taking refuge among civilians.
The implication of such criticism of Israel is that Israeli civilian lives do not merit being protected and that Israel should allow the continued massacre of its civilian population rather than endanger the lives of Palestinians being used a human shields by Hamas. That Palestinian lives must be protected at all costs, while Israelis should be allowed to be killed with impunity because Hamas hides behind Palestinian civilians and should therefore be untouchable. This equation is unethical and immoral.
Hamas breached the existing ceasefire with the invasion of October 7th. It could end this war any time it chooses by releasing all the hostages and surrendering its forces.
Thursday, October 12, 2023
Life
People have been asking me how in the middle of all this horror people in Israel are having weddings, why people in Israel are having weddings this week, what's the deal with all the social media posts about weddings in the middle of our shock and mourning.
But that is exactly it. Life is a core Jewish value, even in the midst of the terrible massacre of so many of our brothers and sisters this week we choose to cling on to life, we find hope in building new families and celebrating new life.
This is how we honour the memories of the hundreds and hundreds murdered this week, by pledging that the Jewish people we continue to live on and keep their memories alive.
This is our way of life, this is the world we seek to create, one that is focused on creating life, family, love and hope. This is our response to the barbaric terrorists who committed heinous atrocities against our people this week. They want only death for the Jewish people but we will continue to choose life.
That is why in the middle of this nightmare couples are continuing to marry. They have had to cancel their plans for large celebrations, for hundreds of guests, for celebrating their wedding close to their homes in the war torn south-west, but in Jewish tradition we do not postpone weddings if we can at all help it, we cherish life too much.
So these couples have had smaller weddings, in synagogues, in shelters, in remote communities far from the fighting, anywhere they can, anything to ensure that life continues in Israel even as we bury and mourn our dead.
Am Yisrael Hai.
But that is exactly it. Life is a core Jewish value, even in the midst of the terrible massacre of so many of our brothers and sisters this week we choose to cling on to life, we find hope in building new families and celebrating new life.
This is how we honour the memories of the hundreds and hundreds murdered this week, by pledging that the Jewish people we continue to live on and keep their memories alive.
This is our way of life, this is the world we seek to create, one that is focused on creating life, family, love and hope. This is our response to the barbaric terrorists who committed heinous atrocities against our people this week. They want only death for the Jewish people but we will continue to choose life.
That is why in the middle of this nightmare couples are continuing to marry. They have had to cancel their plans for large celebrations, for hundreds of guests, for celebrating their wedding close to their homes in the war torn south-west, but in Jewish tradition we do not postpone weddings if we can at all help it, we cherish life too much.
So these couples have had smaller weddings, in synagogues, in shelters, in remote communities far from the fighting, anywhere they can, anything to ensure that life continues in Israel even as we bury and mourn our dead.
Am Yisrael Hai.
Tuesday, October 10, 2023
Nightmare
Content warning: I'm sorry, this is not going to be pleasant reading.
I just want to say thank you for the many many kind and thoughtful people who have reached out to me. In this horrific situation your words mean so much. What we are living through right now is a horror story. I keep starting to post something, then stopping because it's just so terrible, but I wanted to answer all your concerned messages.
We are safe and in an area considered safe.
We are definitely not OK, but we are safe and well considering.
Friday night we went to the festive synagogue services to dance and sing with the Torah scrolls, throw sweets and treats to the community's kids and then enjoyed a family dinner at home.
We woke early Saturday morning to the ominous thud, thud, thud, boom of rockets. We're in the centre of this small country, sound carries far, and we could hear rockets on all sides, volley after volley after volley, thousands of rockets for hours on end fired at towns, villages and major cities in much of the country: Beer Sheva, Jerusalem, the densely populated Tel Aviv area and its many suburbs, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Rehovot, Rishon Letzion...
We decided to go to synagogue for morning services, a short walk away, there is a big shelter there, we hoped to get a better idea of what was happening.
The streets were eerily quiet, the sky was a criss cross of rocket contrails, straight lines for launches from Gaza, loops and swirls for the Iron Dome interception system that hopefully stops them.
A car stopped us in the street, the driver leaned out the window "You know that we're at war?" And we started to learn just how horrific the situation really was.
Life since then is a blur, time has stopped, there are just updates and more updates, and each seems worse than the one before.
The death toll is now more than 1000 Israelis dead, most of them civilians massacred in that initial assault on Israeli rural border villages and towns on Saturday morning, a nightmare killing spree that wiped out entire families, entire communities, babies, children, women, men, young old. Thousands more are wounded, many in serious condition. Thousands more are wounded, many in serious condition.
Among the dead are medics and ambulance crews murdered as they tried to save lives, some ambulances looted and taken as spoils.
The horror is unspeakable.
Women raped, homes set alight and families burnt alive in them, young, old, children and grandparents gunned down in the streets, while trying to hide in their houses, in vehicles trying to escape.
Hamas terrorists went door to door in sleepy small kibbutz villages and towns killing or kidnapping civilians.
A music festival turned in to a killing field.
Young women taken as "trophies" back to Gaza to be paraded in the streets.
Civilians, including children and babies, kidnapped from their homes and taken as hostages to Gaza.
A friend's son was murdered in his kibbutz home. He was an academic, and like many on the kibbutzim, a peace activist. He was murdered trying to protect a neighbour's family with his body as Hamas gunmen fired in to the kibbutz houses, going house to house murdering the residents.
A bartender at a music venue in my area was one of those gunned down at the Nova music festival. A young guy, full of life and optimism, someone I had met a few times, was familiar enough to recognise his smiling face on yet another death notice.
There is almost no one in Israel who hasn't lost someone themselves or knows someone who has. The foodtruck sausage guy we vaguely know lost his friend who borrowed the truck to attend the music festival. The high school on our street has lost a few graduates, students of a friend. A close friend's nephew saw a friend gunned down in cold blood at the music festival but survived by a miracle.
Another friend's son is fighting for his life, critically wounded trying to defend a different kibbutz from the marauders.
A teacher friend's colleague is still missing, fate unknown.
Social media is a constant stream of photos of the missing, family desperate to know if loved ones are alive, dead or kidnapped. Hundreds are still unaccounted for.
There are so many massacre victims that burial teams are still combing the streets, fields, houses, orchards and ditches looking for all the bodies, to ensure that everyone receives a dignified burial. A family friend risked her life driving down to one of the devastated towns to help evacuate people and said that as of yesterday there were still shot up and burnt out vehicles with bodies in them on the streets.
Several friend's children serve with the volunteer Zaka organisation which identifies disaster victims, others are serving with the army chaplaincy. Over the last few days they have spent day and night gathering the bodies for burial, often under fire.
Another friend's son is an army chaplain, part of a team of chaplains trying to find every last massacre victim and bring them to their families for burial. Like the Zaka volunteers he has been working round the clock, many times under rocket and mortar fire.
There are so many dead that high school kids, 14, 15, 16 year-olds, are digging graves because the burial societies can't cope.
Days later they are still finding more bodies of victims strewn in the fields, roadsides, homes that were boobytrapped by the terrorists so that they had to wait until the army could come and defuse the grenades and bombs before searching more homes for corpses of those massacred.
Communal kibbutz dining halls are acting as makeshift morgues and truck after truck goes out from the Gaza border area taking bodies for burial in safer areas of the country.
We don't know what tomorrow will bring. We haven't had any air raid sirens since Saturday but several times a day and night our windows shake with the boom and thud of distant and not so distant rockets.
Most are intercepted, some have scored direct hits on apartment buildings and homes in other towns and yet more civilians injured.
Our apartment, like most Israeli apartments built since the 1990s, has a reenforced concrete shelter room. It's small though and we have family staying with us, it isn't simple to squeeze nine of us in to that small space.
People are volunteering wherever they can - driving supplies to survivors evacuated from their towns and kibbutzim with nothing but the shirts on their backs, buying and packing care packages, hosting those who have had to flee their homes, donating blood, staffing hospitals overwhelmed with mass casualties, helping families who's fathers, mothers, adult children have received emergency call-ups as army reservists, cooking and baking for families in need. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people have volunteered to deliver supplies around the country and transport evacuees, ordinary civilians just volunteering themselves and their vehicle, including driving in to harm's way to rescue people or deliver much needed humanitarian aid.
Through all the horror, mourning and devastation Israelis come together and take care of each other, whether it's random people standing by the motorway handing out water to soldiers or entire Druze villages mobilising to provide meals to those evacuated from frontline communities, and opening up their homes to the refugees.
Israelis know how to unite and offer assistance, support each other, risk their lives for one another. The profound human kindness, human decency we are experiencing from our fellow Israelis is our comfort and our strength.
I just want to say thank you for the many many kind and thoughtful people who have reached out to me. In this horrific situation your words mean so much. What we are living through right now is a horror story. I keep starting to post something, then stopping because it's just so terrible, but I wanted to answer all your concerned messages.
We are safe and in an area considered safe.
We are definitely not OK, but we are safe and well considering.
Friday night we went to the festive synagogue services to dance and sing with the Torah scrolls, throw sweets and treats to the community's kids and then enjoyed a family dinner at home.
We woke early Saturday morning to the ominous thud, thud, thud, boom of rockets. We're in the centre of this small country, sound carries far, and we could hear rockets on all sides, volley after volley after volley, thousands of rockets for hours on end fired at towns, villages and major cities in much of the country: Beer Sheva, Jerusalem, the densely populated Tel Aviv area and its many suburbs, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Rehovot, Rishon Letzion...
We decided to go to synagogue for morning services, a short walk away, there is a big shelter there, we hoped to get a better idea of what was happening.
The streets were eerily quiet, the sky was a criss cross of rocket contrails, straight lines for launches from Gaza, loops and swirls for the Iron Dome interception system that hopefully stops them.
A car stopped us in the street, the driver leaned out the window "You know that we're at war?" And we started to learn just how horrific the situation really was.
Life since then is a blur, time has stopped, there are just updates and more updates, and each seems worse than the one before.
The death toll is now more than 1000 Israelis dead, most of them civilians massacred in that initial assault on Israeli rural border villages and towns on Saturday morning, a nightmare killing spree that wiped out entire families, entire communities, babies, children, women, men, young old. Thousands more are wounded, many in serious condition. Thousands more are wounded, many in serious condition.
Among the dead are medics and ambulance crews murdered as they tried to save lives, some ambulances looted and taken as spoils.
The horror is unspeakable.
Women raped, homes set alight and families burnt alive in them, young, old, children and grandparents gunned down in the streets, while trying to hide in their houses, in vehicles trying to escape.
Hamas terrorists went door to door in sleepy small kibbutz villages and towns killing or kidnapping civilians.
A music festival turned in to a killing field.
Young women taken as "trophies" back to Gaza to be paraded in the streets.
Civilians, including children and babies, kidnapped from their homes and taken as hostages to Gaza.
A friend's son was murdered in his kibbutz home. He was an academic, and like many on the kibbutzim, a peace activist. He was murdered trying to protect a neighbour's family with his body as Hamas gunmen fired in to the kibbutz houses, going house to house murdering the residents.
A bartender at a music venue in my area was one of those gunned down at the Nova music festival. A young guy, full of life and optimism, someone I had met a few times, was familiar enough to recognise his smiling face on yet another death notice.
There is almost no one in Israel who hasn't lost someone themselves or knows someone who has. The foodtruck sausage guy we vaguely know lost his friend who borrowed the truck to attend the music festival. The high school on our street has lost a few graduates, students of a friend. A close friend's nephew saw a friend gunned down in cold blood at the music festival but survived by a miracle.
Another friend's son is fighting for his life, critically wounded trying to defend a different kibbutz from the marauders.
A teacher friend's colleague is still missing, fate unknown.
Social media is a constant stream of photos of the missing, family desperate to know if loved ones are alive, dead or kidnapped. Hundreds are still unaccounted for.
There are so many massacre victims that burial teams are still combing the streets, fields, houses, orchards and ditches looking for all the bodies, to ensure that everyone receives a dignified burial. A family friend risked her life driving down to one of the devastated towns to help evacuate people and said that as of yesterday there were still shot up and burnt out vehicles with bodies in them on the streets.
Several friend's children serve with the volunteer Zaka organisation which identifies disaster victims, others are serving with the army chaplaincy. Over the last few days they have spent day and night gathering the bodies for burial, often under fire.
Another friend's son is an army chaplain, part of a team of chaplains trying to find every last massacre victim and bring them to their families for burial. Like the Zaka volunteers he has been working round the clock, many times under rocket and mortar fire.
There are so many dead that high school kids, 14, 15, 16 year-olds, are digging graves because the burial societies can't cope.
Days later they are still finding more bodies of victims strewn in the fields, roadsides, homes that were boobytrapped by the terrorists so that they had to wait until the army could come and defuse the grenades and bombs before searching more homes for corpses of those massacred.
Communal kibbutz dining halls are acting as makeshift morgues and truck after truck goes out from the Gaza border area taking bodies for burial in safer areas of the country.
We don't know what tomorrow will bring. We haven't had any air raid sirens since Saturday but several times a day and night our windows shake with the boom and thud of distant and not so distant rockets.
Most are intercepted, some have scored direct hits on apartment buildings and homes in other towns and yet more civilians injured.
Our apartment, like most Israeli apartments built since the 1990s, has a reenforced concrete shelter room. It's small though and we have family staying with us, it isn't simple to squeeze nine of us in to that small space.
People are volunteering wherever they can - driving supplies to survivors evacuated from their towns and kibbutzim with nothing but the shirts on their backs, buying and packing care packages, hosting those who have had to flee their homes, donating blood, staffing hospitals overwhelmed with mass casualties, helping families who's fathers, mothers, adult children have received emergency call-ups as army reservists, cooking and baking for families in need. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people have volunteered to deliver supplies around the country and transport evacuees, ordinary civilians just volunteering themselves and their vehicle, including driving in to harm's way to rescue people or deliver much needed humanitarian aid.
Through all the horror, mourning and devastation Israelis come together and take care of each other, whether it's random people standing by the motorway handing out water to soldiers or entire Druze villages mobilising to provide meals to those evacuated from frontline communities, and opening up their homes to the refugees.
Israelis know how to unite and offer assistance, support each other, risk their lives for one another. The profound human kindness, human decency we are experiencing from our fellow Israelis is our comfort and our strength.
Sunday, October 08, 2023
How do we mourn over 700 murdered Israelis? One by one, story by story. If you can only hold one or two photos in your mind, take this one to symbolise the utter barbarism of the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians.
This entire family was wiped out by Hamas terrorists who attacked their home on kibbutz Nir Oz. Mother Tamari, father Jonathan and three young children: 6 year-old twins Shahar and Arbel and 4 year-old Omer cut down in cold blood just because they were Israelis.
And like them hundreds more Israelis. They were not "collateral damage" in a strike on a military target, they were the target, the object of this Hamas attack was the wholesale massacre of Israeli civilians.
This entire family was wiped out by Hamas terrorists who attacked their home on kibbutz Nir Oz. Mother Tamari, father Jonathan and three young children: 6 year-old twins Shahar and Arbel and 4 year-old Omer cut down in cold blood just because they were Israelis.
And like them hundreds more Israelis. They were not "collateral damage" in a strike on a military target, they were the target, the object of this Hamas attack was the wholesale massacre of Israeli civilians.
Sunday, October 01, 2023
New fruit
Sukkot is known as the holiday of joy, referred to in the Bible simply by the Hebrew name "haag", which just means "holiday". One of the ways many people traditionally enhance the enjoyment of meals on Sukkot is by adding new fruits over which one can say the blessing on new things. It can be a new fruit that you've never had or just a new fruit of the season, but it symbolises happiness and blessing, especially on this harvest festival.
Part of the joy of Sukkot is also to host in one's sukkah hut, hospitality is a huge aspect of the holiday, there is even a mystical tradition of "ushpizin", "guests" from biblical tradition, one of whom is said to visit the sukkah on each night of the holiday - Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, David. This custom is there to highlight the importance of hosting - including new guests in one's holiday celebration each day if possible, widening the circle of joy and hospitality even during a week when we symbolically leave our homes and camp out in a makeshift hut in the garden or balcony or in homes with neither maybe in the street or building parking area. "Hosting" new fruits feeds in to this concept, enhancing holiday joy, welcoming new guests. :-) I am a sucker for new fruits. I'm like a magpie when I hear about a farmer who's working with a well known local agricultural research centre trying new fruits that will grow well in our climate and soil, fruits from around the world that may be hardier in low water conditions or flourish with recycled water or in extreme heat or sandy soil - all sorts of projects to diversify what is grown in our region. So there are all kinds of farm growing small trial quantities of fruits that many of us have never seen or heard of before. Sometimes they succeed and that fruit becomes a commercial success, grown in large quantities and sold widely in markets and supermarkets, sometimes it remains a niche acquired taste or too delicate to mass market and you just have to know where to look for it at certain farm markets or certain online produce sellers or market stalls who work with these growers. So this Sukkot dinner our "new fruit guests" included ambarella fruit, about which I'm still making up my mind, though certainly different and peanut butter fruit, which is, well, a small reddish fruit that tastes uncannily like peanut butter, everyone really liked it for the surprising flavour, the fruit's appearance and texture gave no hint of what to expect, so much fun!Friday, March 31, 2023
The caring of doing
Our community has been reeling from the tragic loss of a young boy from a very rare cancer. On Friday hundreds, maybe more, turned out to his funeral on a glorious spring day, flocks of migrating storks, pelicans and kites high above escorting him on his final journey. His parents are some of the most dignified and noble people, turning this heartbreaking occasion in to a celebration of a short but beautiful life. So much laughter through the tears.
I guess cooking itself is a life affirming activity and it was good to be together in the kitchen, even if we were throwing together our Shabbat meal on autopilot. DH made a chulent with kishke from the freezer seasoned with half a jar of tandoori paste he found in the fridge and a copious amount of fresh spring garlic from the garden.
I grabbed some chicken drumsticks from the freezer and turned them in to a riff on doro wat, subbing potato chunks for the boiled eggs as we were out of eggs, inhaling the warm vibrant fragrance of the berbere seasoning mix and the coconut oil based (non-dairy) niter kibbeh blend. Put some aside in the freezer to take to the mourners later in the week.
DH put up a pot of basmati to go with the saucy stew and warmed a pot of vegetable rich turkey neck soup from the freezer with extra to take over to a family who's mother has just had major surgery. Found tinned pumpkin puree and condensed (non-dairy) coconut cream this week, so also threw together a couple of quick pumpkin pies to take round as well.
Even when you feel totally drained Friday is Friday and there are Shabbat meals to prepare and errands to be done. The immediate family the mourners, they are the only ones who step back, take a week out of time to focus on their grief and loss. The rest of the community keeps up the rhythm of life for them, tries to offer consolation just by being there. I don't think that anyone knows how to comfort a family facing such a loss, the doing is there perhaps to give the wider community a way to care when there are no words.
Thursday, March 30, 2023
Swallows and swifts
The Twins stood for quite some time motionless among the tall meadows of wild mustard and barley, transfixed by the aerial display above, around and in front of them.
Throngs of scimitar winged swallows and alpine swifts wheeled and darted through the air beneath overcast skies. Were they busy hunting flying insects on the wing or playing an immense game of tag? Or maybe both?
The Twins thought it one of the most incredible sights they had ever seen as the stunningly agile birds swooped so close to us we could feel their wings rushing by our faces and a couple of times their tiny clawed feet came close enough to barely brush my head.
The swallows kept close to the tops of the vegetation, the swifts preferred to be slightly higher up, but both were low enough that we could make out the texture of their beautiful plumage, variations of colour, the subtle differences between the shape of the swifts and the swallows, the details of their tiny faces. So intent were they on the aerial chase they didn't seem to mind the three humans standing there in the meadow.
Twin Q was fascinated, studying the avian airshow, loving every time they banked and turned with effortless grace, the way the long tails of the swallows billowed out like streamers.
"Look Imma, I can see the red on the swallows' faces and their little beaks, how bright and shiny their colours are. The swifts have more boring colours but they fly faster."
Twin H was practically melting with joy and love. He adores cute creatures of all kinds and these charming birds had him firmly under their spell. His hands squeezed together in glee he stood there with a silly grin plastered on his face, eyes shining.
"They are so cute Imma, I love their little faces. I'm going to give them names. That one is Snuni (from snunit, Hebrew for swallow), that one is Nuni and that smaller one is just so cute I think I will call him Awww, because I'm just awwing at how cute he is"
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