Sermon on 6 Months of the Israel-Hamas War (5th April 2024)

Truth is very difficult to determine, especially during war, and especially six months into a war. What we know from the beginning of the Israel-Hamas War is that Israel deliberately restricting aid into Gaza helped lead to many Hamas fighters surrendering as they ran out of food. The limitation of aid was therefore considered by Israel to be an appropriate tactic of war because it led to fewer enemy combatants which, in turn, would shorten the conflict and ultimately save lives. Six months into the war, though, the lack of food in Gaza has had a different effect, and now famine is setting in among the civilian population. There’s no doubt that Israel did restrict aid into Gaza in the first few weeks of the war. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said two days after the monstrous terror attack that there would be “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed.” That and similar statements were said at the very beginning of the war, though, and within a couple of weeks, food aid did start entering Gaza.

Back in January, Israel said that it was supplying 28 million liters of water daily to Gaza, had at that point let in 126,000 tons of aid since the war started and increased the number of trucks carrying food from around 70 a day before the war to 109 daily. Humanitarian organizations, however, tell a different tale. They say that before the war, about 500 trucks entered Gaza a day, while by February, fewer than 100 entered a day and there were some days in March when the number of trucks entering Gaza was in the single digits.

The reduced number of trucks being allowed into Gaza isn’t the only reason that famine is setting in, though. Humanitarian organizations say that Israel’s inspection process for food deliveries is random and confusing – they claim that aid would sometimes be approved but then later turned away by Israeli troops because of unspecified suspicions about the packages. Added to that, humanitarian organizations say that Israel has been deliberately targeting Gazan police who were protecting the aid missions. In response, Israel says that it is not limiting aid into Gaza at all and blames the United Nations for not distributing the food that they allow in or, worse, for they blame the UN relief agencies for giving the aid to Hamas.

Even when Israel opened new crossings, for example, the second border crossing between southern Israel and Gaza at Kerem Shalom in December, aid packages containing generators, tent poles and pipes were often blocked since these items are considered to be “dual use” objects by Israel which fears that these things may be used to aid Hamas’ war effort. Things become even more complicated because even when the IDF approves humanitarian aid, sometimes it’s even stopped by others outside of their control. For example, many claim that Israeli protestors sometimes block the Kerem Shalom crossing because their communities are still suffering from the October 7th attack on their homes and farms, and they don’t want aid going to people that may include those who came into their homes and murdered their friends and family members. Under international pressure, Israel is certainly easing restrictions so more aid can come in but there’s no question that Gaza is also going through a humanitarian disaster.

Even once aid is approved, there remains the problem of delivering it in a war zone. Israeli airstrikes keep killing Gazan police officers accompanying aid trucks because they are usually identified as assisting Hamas. Those attacks meant that other police officers chose to stop protecting the convoys, which led to them being raided by starving people or by organized criminal gangs who would attack trucks, beat the drivers, steal the aid and then sell it on at exorbitant prices. There is no question that Hamas itself is hijacking over half the aid trucks entering Gaza, with Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar putting the figure as high as 60%. Added to all of that, roads are also often impassable because they have been bombed, making it even more difficult to get aid to those who need it. And any vehicle in a war zone, even an aid truck, runs the risk of being attacked. On February 5th, a UN aid convoy was accidentally hit by Israeli naval forces off the coast. Earlier this week, three clearly marked aid trucks from World Central Kitchen that had been given specific permission by Israel to deliver aid were bombed by a drone and more aid workers were killed. Despite the assertion of some that this was a deliberate attack, it seems clear now that this was another terrible accident of war, the likes of which we keep seeing. In December, three Israeli hostages freed themselves, wrote banners saying “Help 3 hostages” and “SOS” but when the IDF found them, they were suspected of being terrorists and were killed by the very people trying to save them. Only today, we learned that some of the hostages who were taken on October 7th were likely killed on that day by an Israeli helicopter attacking the vehicles of their captors. To be clear, Israel isn’t the only country to have killed the wrong people in conflict. Back in October 2015, for example, the US military bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan killing 42 people including doctors and volunteers. It’s not the only country to have accidentally killed its own people in war, as the US did in Iraq. War is terrible and mistakes happen in war but, as Jodi Rudoren writes in the Forward this week, “the scale, nature and length of this war has made such “grave mistakes” inevitable.” In other words, the longer this war - now six months old - goes on, the more of these terrible accidents will happen.
This war is unprecedented in human history. Never has one side of a conflict fought another side that so openly wants its own civilians to die in order that they be martyred. Never has one side of a conflict done more to protect the civilians on the other side of war by literally telling them where and when bombs will be dropped and where IDF troops will be fighting. All that is definitely true. This war is also unprecedented in how AI is being used more than ever before, through Israel’s Lavender system and Gospel system, to determine which individuals and which buildings are viable military targets. This, we are now learning, is potentially very problematic, though, when Israel’s definition of who is an enemy combatant conflicts with most other people’s definitions. As an example, a Gazan police officer who is accompanying aid trucks is technically an armed Palestinian who works for Hamas but is not necessarily a threat to Israeli troops and therefore is not someone whom other armed forces might consider to be a viable military target. The same applies to buildings, which is why around 45% of buildings in Gaza have been destroyed while Israel simultaneously states that it only bombs military targets. Both of those things are true, it just depends on how you define a military target. We are now also learning that it’s simultaneously true that while Israel has been only targeting individuals who it considers to be military targets, it recognizes that attacking them when they’re at home leads to a far higher success rate, which leads to a disproportionate number of civilian deaths because of their family members in the same home. In other words, homes become military targets because they contain military personnel at the time of the strike. So, the world says Israel is bombing civilians while Israel says it is bombing military targets, and horrifyingly, both of those things are simultaneously true. This makes it easier to understand the debate about whether or not war crimes have been committed by Israel, because international law is clear that if you intend to attack a military target and kill civilians in the process, that is not a war crime.

Because this conflict is unique in that it’s difficult to agree on who is and who isn’t a viable military target since one side embeds itself amongst its own civilian population, all moral discussions about the war have now become extremely difficult. Six painful months on, the IDF has killed at least 12,000 Hamas militants in Gaza, including top commanders Marwan Issa, the No. 3 terrorist leader in the enclave; the head of Hamas’s aerial division; two battalion commanders; a brigade commander; and a deputy brigade commander. It has also dismantled 20 of 24 Hamas battalions, and rendered inoperable up to 40% of Hamas’ estimated 300-mile tunnel network. It has not destroyed Hamas, but it has crippled it. And it has also killed around 20,000 civilians. Israel has clearly demonstrated how it has attempted to avoid civilian casualties by providing regular information as to where military strikes will take place. And at the same time, we now know that all too often some of the information that was disseminated was inaccurate, including sometimes even accidentally steering people toward conflict instead of away from it.

At the start of the war, the moral case was clear to world leaders and to most people – Hamas had to be destroyed. Six months on, though, while huge progress has been made toward that goal, the moral case has become more complicated. Now, over a million people face famine. Rabbi Lionel Blue, of blessed memory, wrote an abridged Grace After Meals, which says, “We have eaten and been satisfied. May we not turn aside from the needs of others, nor ignore their cry for food. Open our eyes and our hearts and our hands so that we may share your gifts, and help to remove hunger and want from our world.” We would be within our rights to say, “This is Hamas’ fault. They started this war, they could have ended it at any time by returning the hostages or by surrendering. They embedded themselves amongst the civilian population and stole their aid.” That’s true. It’s also true that, to quote Jodi Rudoren again, that “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peacemaking and have few prospects for responsible, nonviolent leadership.” That’s all true. And at the same time, we also must acknowledge that some of the way that Israel has chosen to fight this war, such as the way that it has limited aid, and the way that it has targeted military figures in their homes, has also contributed enormously to the suffering of Gazan civilians. José Andrés, the founder of World Central Kitchen whose aid convoy was bombed, said this week: “Israel is better than the way this war is being waged.” We should be able to say that as Jews, too. That doesn’t mean condemning the war, but it does mean not giving Israel a totally free pass, too. It must be possible to always oppose Hamas, to call out their monstrous war crimes and barbarity, to want them to be destroyed so that they never again pose a significant threat to Jewish lives while simultaneously criticizing some of Israel’s decisions in how it has fought this war. And it must be possible to do so without being accused by right-wing Jews of being pro-Hamas.

The moral case now is different to the moral case six months ago - it’s far more complicated now. Now we have not just a moral imperative to save Israelis from the threat of violence but also to save Palestinians from the threat of starvation. The problem is how? How to do so without feeding the enemy and therefore extending the conflict which in turn leads to more civilian deaths? This is one of the worst ethical dilemmas of our time and only contributes further to the existential crisis that has been facing the Jewish community around the world for the last half a year. At the very least, we can “not ignore their cry for food.” We can at the very least not be callous to the enormity of suffering to which both Hamas and Israel have clearly contributed, albeit in very different ways. Perhaps part of the answer is to determine the end goal of the war. If Israel goes into Rafah to destroy the last remnants of Hamas, if it attacks a place where it specifically told a million people to flee, the world will stop supplying Israel with arms forever and then it will not have made itself safer from future attack. Had this war been fought differently, Israel might have been able to destroy Hamas entirely. Now it is clear that the world will not allow that to happen. And that means that Israel will have to make some very painful choices in terms of how to end this war. If the aim of the war is to protect Jewish lives in the future, what will lead to that? From our couches, from the comfort of our homes thousands of miles away, without access to top secret military information, it is impossible for any of us to know the answer to that question. Anything we say will be mere conjecture. We are helpless. So, perhaps the very least we can do now is to openly discuss our pain at the enormity of the suffering in Gaza alongside the suffering in Israel, which is still also profound and real, albeit in a very different way.

I still hold that the only path to peace is the mutual recognition of pain on both sides and the desire and appropriate action to remove as much pain as possible from both sides. So, may we see the complexity, the terrible moral and ethical dilemmas of this war, and not reduce them to absurdly simplistic statements that bring us comfort. May we not turn aside from the needs of others. May we open our eyes then our hearts then our hands to work for peace. May God help us in that endeavor, and let us say, Amen.