Among the many themes common to each of the Abrahamic
faiths, found in the holy books of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, is the
principle of proportional justice, enshrined in the ancient phrase, “An eye for
an eye.”
اضافة اعلان
It is a principle that appears to have been discarded
by Israel as it ignores all calls for restraint in its determination to destroy
all traces of Hamas, no matter the cost in innocent lives.
Rabbinic, Islamic, and Christian scholars argue among
themselves to this day about the correct interpretation of an admonition first
set down, literally in stone, in an Akkadian legal text written between 1792
and 1750 BCE.
Code of
HammurabiThis is the
Code of Hammurabi, a king of Babylon whose
laws were etched in cuneiform onto a basalt stele, or stone column, which today
can be seen in the Louvre in Paris.
Hammurabi, by all accounts one of the more excessive
of the extremely brutal rulers of ancient Mesopotamia, would have been puzzled
by the modern queasiness occasioned by a legal code that could be described as
harsh, but fair.
The Code of Hammurabi left no one in his time in any
doubt about the consequences for a range of acts deemed over 3,800 years ago to
be serious social transgressions.
“If a son strike his father, his hands shall be hewn
off.” “If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.” “If
a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his teeth shall be knocked out.” And so
on.
A word that appears
often in the code is “death,” a penalty handed out for
offenses including robbery, burglary, rape and, of course, death, no matter how
caused.
To modern sensibilities, weighing the value of human
lives like fruit on a scale seems abhorrent – until one considers the appalling
alternative.
In tragic
recent history
In tragic recent history, that alternative was
embraced by the United States following the 9/11 attacks, in which 2,977 were
killed. According to the
Costs of War project at Brown University’s
Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, at last count, America’s
post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the lives of 14,490 US
military personnel and civilian contractors.
But even that exercise in disproportionality pales
against the grotesque price extracted in Iraq and Afghanistan, where more than
350,000 national military, police, and civilians have paid with their lives for
the carnage wrought in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia on September 11,
2001, by 19 Al Qaeda killers.
Israel, bent it seems not on justice but on revenge
for the 1,400 victims of the Hamas attack on October 7, has taken the same
bloody, unconscionable path in Gaza.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says that more than
8,000 civilians, mostly women and children, have been killed by Israeli bombs
and bullets since October 7. The figure is, of course, disputed. But whether
it’s 8,000 or 4,000, the point remains – the loss of innocent Israeli lives is
being avenged by a wholly disproportionate and indiscriminate massacre of
innocent Palestinians.
The truth that ought to shock the international
community is that such disproportionate slaughter is nothing more than business
as usual for a state that prides itself on being “
a light unto the world.” Instead, the world
has been, and continues to be, complicit in outrageous Israeli acts carried out
in the name of self-defense.
According to OCHA, the United
Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, between January 1,
2008, and the end of September this year, 177 Israeli citizens were killed, and 4,735
were wounded, by Palestinian armed groups and civilians.
152,000 were wounded
Over the same period, 3,754 Palestinian civilians
were killed by Israeli forces or settlers, and more than 152,000 were wounded. It
is already clear that, when finally collated and confirmed, the figures from
the current disaster will only add to this imbalance.
This is not justice. This is unbridled, unrestrained
vengeance.
Since the establishment of Israel in 1948 in the wake
of the Second World War, many nations, tiptoeing around the elephant in the
room that is the Holocaust, have turned a blind eye to Israel’s excesses in its
relationship with the Palestinians. In doing so, Israel’s friends have let it
down.
It’s a central article of Judaism that the Jews are
“the chosen people,” charged by God with the task of leading the world on the
path of morality.
David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel and its first
prime minister, spoke and wrote frequently of Israel’s responsibility to be an
ethical and moral beacon – the “light unto the nations” referred to in the
Hebrew Bible’s Book of Isaiah.
This conceit of Israel as the moral light of the
world has been passed down from leader to leader, including Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu.
In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 19, 2017, on the eve of the Jewish new year, Netanyahu invoked the
words of the Prophet and said that Israel’s “light is shining across the
continents, bringing hope and salvation to the ends of the Earth.”
But not, it seems, to its immediate neighbors in
Palestine.
A nation that cannot see the grotesque disparity in
the scale of the death tolls in Israel and the Palestinian territories has not
only lost sight of the ancient principle of an eye for an eye but has also
forfeited its claim to being the world’s beacon of morality.
Jonathan Gornall is a
British journalist, formerly with The Times, who has lived and worked in the
Middle East and is now based in the UK.
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