Point / Counterpoint: Understanding the 'war crimes' accusations

Counterpoint to:

Israeli attacks on Gaza are war crimes
"Why is the Israeli cause so exceptional that war crimes, committed every day, are routinely forgiven, and even applauded, in the West? Can the reason be racist? Or religious"

Bob Ellis
The Canberra Times (Australia)
January 15, 2009

Bob Ellis, writing in Australia's Canberra Times, believes that Israel is guilty of war crimes and its leaders should be tried by an international tribunal. Ellis predicts that "Tzipi Livni will stand trial soon on a charge at least of collusive multiple manslaughter and will end her days in a fairly comfortable air-conditioned cell in The Hague." Personally, I very much doubt that that will happen, but Ellis is certainly entitled to unleash his imagination.

Why are Ellis's opinions, voiced in an obscure journal that only recently had to formally apologize for slandering American Jewish historian Daniel Pipes, worthy of a response? Well first, because he asks his readers to explain to him why he is wrong, and second because his is not the only voice enthusiastically calling for war crime indictments against Israel - there have been similar opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal, The Independent (UK) and even in Germany's Der Spiegel which carried a discussion of the merits of the polemic.

It is unnecessary to explain here why Ellis is wrong - Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has already done that quite well. But the general practice of accusing Israel of war crimes is a curious phenomenon, particularly since the Jewish state is nowhere near the top of the list of international offenders (if we assume it is an offender) though it does appear to be at the very top of the list of the internationally accused.

The Jewish people are probably the most prominent victims of war crimes in recent history. In fact, for many people, any talk of war crimes immediately conjures up pictures of the Nuremberg Nazi war crime tribunals. For several decades the horrors of the Holocaust generated feelings of guilt and shame throughout Western Europe (even in countries that were not direct perpetrators), which, in the aftermath of World War II, resulted in a significant drop in anti-semitism to the extent that people really began to believe that this centuries old racist scourge was over.

But as the Holocaust began to fade from the collective European memory and a new generation of leaders arose, Europeans began struggling to shake free of any vestige of guilt over the horrors committed by the generation that preceded them. For example, Ellis sardonically states: "Because of their special history its people have special rights, Israel asserts."

Obviously Israel never asserted anything of the kind, but there was such a perception in the West, especially in Europe, and Ellis, like many others, is now questioning its validity. And as a result, not only are Jews no longer perceived as victims of European racism, some took a step beyond and began thrusting the Jews back into their historic role of evildoers, by accusing the Jewish state of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The taboo was even lifted from comparisons between the Jewish state and Nazi Germany, with frequent comparisons of Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto, and various other even more extreme accusations.

This is not a unique phenomenon. There is something grotesquely gratifying about placing the victim in the dock. This twisted drive to replace the offender with the victim is particularly strong among those with acute feelings of guilt for the victim’s suffering. The act of seeing the victim accused of the exact same crimes as the offender serves as a cleansing agent for any sense of guilt, no matter how slight.

A version of this phenomenon on an individual level, called DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender), is explained by Oregon University Professor of psychology Jennifer Freyd:

Actual abusers threaten, bully and make a nightmare for anyone who holds them accountable or asks them to change their abusive behavior. This attack, intended to chill and terrify, typically includes threats of law suits... The offender is on the offense and the person attempting to hold the offender accountable is put on the defense."

When adapted from the individual to the national level, it is amazing how appropriately Freyd’s analysis describes European attitudes towards Israel today (at least in some circles).  It is these attitudes that help justify a condescending approach, explained by social historian Peter Gay as "the operation of expelling feelings or wishes the individual finds wholly unacceptable - too shameful, too obscene, too dangerous - by attributing them to another."

But calls for war crimes tribunals are not confined solely to Europeans. Parts of the Islamic world, especially the Arab states, are using the international legal system as a weapon of war against Israel (this is called lawfare) and are in overdrive, trying to spark investigations by the International Criminal Court, the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and even those individual European states that have adopted laws permitting them to try foreign nationals.

Most of these accusers are certainly not liberal or progressive societies, and they do not exactly excel in areas of human rights or adherence to international law. Respected sociologist, Theodor Adorno, one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers in social theory, has explained: 

It is one of the most outstanding characteristics of fascists and anti-Semitic propagandists that they blame their victims in an almost compulsory way for exactly the things that they are doing or hope to do. ...It is a pattern through which psychological 'projection' makes itself felt throughout fascist ideology. "

Freyd's and Adorno's theories may help us understand the contemporary attitudes of some elements of Western society towards Israel, but by no means all of it. After all, there is still significant support for Israel, not just in Europe, but throughout the rest of the Western world too.

But it would be unwise to ignore the growing bands on both the left and right fringes of Western society where hostility is growing, and where Freyd's and Adorno's theories are probably most applicable. It is a trend that requires a firm response, not only from Israel, but from mainstream Judaism in general.