Written by by Conor Gearty in THE TABLET 11 November 2023
A human rights lawyer argues that its uncritical support for Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza for the crimes of Hamas reveals the Global North’s descent into moral vandalism.
On Sunday, 10 minutes early for Mass, my five-year-old asked to light a candle. With this dangerous manoeuvre completed, this normally sceptical child (she had informed me on the way to church that she believed in Jesus “as a cloud”) knelt and prayed for “the children of Gaza”. I was touched and sad – she had picked up on the horrors being done far from home, and believed without prompting in the possibility of prayer. The Mass that followed was suffused with awareness of the tragedy in the Holy Land: prayers sent to us from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; a homily on Yocheved Lifshitz, the released Israeli hostage who wished peace (“Shalom”) on her captors; 15-minute exposure of the Blessed Sacrament for private prayer after Mass. We all knelt as silently as we could – all classes, all nationalities, all colours – united in a collective act of spiritual solidarity for those trapped in the hell that Gaza has become.
This, I thought to myself, is my Church. Liberalism no longer is. That creed’s commitment has long been to free markets on the one hand and to democracy, human rights and the rule of law on the other. But liberalism has always had a chink in its moral armour, the suspicion that these supposedly universal, global values are mere devices for the imposition of the American/Global North mentalité on the rest of us. The post-war order that embraced human rights and the rule of law was largely designed by the United States. But in the decades that followed, these ideas had managed to escape their origins and become rallying cries for progressive forces everywhere. Authoritarian regimes were exposed to their power while the liberal democracies, even when pursuing their selfish interests, felt obliged to dress themselves up in the language of international law: speaking of “weapons of mass destruction” and “revived” UN resolutions.
In the past even Israel used the language of international and humanitarian law when laying occasional waste to its neighbours, as in Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 or in Gaza since Hamas took over in 2007 (so routinely that its strategists described it as “mowing the grass”). No more. It has been coming for a while, propelled by the conflict- and climate-driven mass movement of peoples from South to North. “Populists” everywhere have been preaching that some people are “different”, that some people are more “valuable” than others, with growing electoral success. Under Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has taken a decisive lurch in this direction. The pressure generated by Hamas’ brutal attack on 7 October has confirmed the shift. Israeli ministers and their supporters are saying the previously unsayable: the Palestinians are sub-human, animals that need to be culled or sent to an Egyptian desert to rot away, forgotten, in vast refugee camps. The military executes the plan without their political leaders making even a nod in the direction of liberal pieties. Sure, we are assured every now and again that this or that embarrassingly murderous attack on transparently innocent people was a regrettable consequence of Hamas’s bloody provocations. Thousands of civilians, including children, are dying. And criticism of Israel’s flagrant breaches of international law is dismissed as “antisemitism”.
Meanwhile, the states of the Global North go along with it, their leaders falling over themselves to guarantee Israel’s carte blanche for its transparent ethnic cleansing. (With a thrill of pride I note my home country’s resistance here – but then Ireland is that rare thing, a country of white people who have a memory of what centuries of occupation feels like.) Let no supporter of the Israeli action in Gaza ever again speak with civilised smugness of “the rule of law” and “universal human rights”. Let no “liberal democracy” that is supporting or enabling Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza ever again presume to be a defender of the dignity or the innate value of every human person. Let us refuse to celebrate any brief pause in the relentless destruction of Gaza brokered by this or that US diplomat or the arrival of a lorry or two of aid or the release of this or that foreign passport holder from the clutches of Hamas.
When the Catholic Church wielded temporal power it was a cruel beast: all those Crusades and pogroms against infidels (especially, of course, the Jews). But with the loss of its physical power has come a spiritual strength, a power of critique that transcends the ideology of the day, whether it be nationalism, communism or (to the point at the present moment) liberalism. The Church’s engagement with liberalism has seemed at times frustratingly inward looking, crudely chauvinist and misogynist. Since the Second Vatican Council, liberalism’s commitment to universal human dignity while respecting individual autonomy in spheres of private morality has come to seem attractive. But whose side should we be on when the liberal democracies fail to act to stop the killing of the innocent – their supposed “culpability” lying only in their misfortune in being different – as a deliberate act of policy? Do we stand with Israel because its army includes women and gay people – or recoil in horror at the civilisational war that is turning liberalism into a monster?
Israel’s razing of Gaza is an inflection point in history. It builds on a violence that has been seeping into our culture and prepares us for far more. So does the decision by the Global North’s leading powers to support the Israeli government’s actions force us into a choice between “us” and “them”? We must fight to prevent it becoming so, not with weapons but with words, with peaceful protest and with collective acts of solidarity. Those who disown the moral vandalism they see around them – including many brave voices within Israel – must build alliances with each other and reach out to those afflicted by the violence of the Global North.
The UN has not been silent, and nor have those responsible for holding war criminals to account. The international human rights community has become a truly cosmopolitan force for good. Liberalism has run out of steam. For all its failings and fractures, the Church – led, of course, by a Pope from the Global South – can forge a new role, taking its place as the moral guardian of the equal rights and equal dignity of all the peoples of the world, reaching across all divides – religious and political – to embrace and protect all those who suffer. Let’s not let universalism disappear without lighting a candle.
Conor Gearty is professor of human rights law at the London School of Economics. His next book, Homeland Insecurity: The Rise and Rise of Global Anti-Terrorism Law will be published by Polity Press in 2024.
Sunday Mass: Saturday 4pm, Sunday 10am 