From Dr Jonathan Chaplin
Sir, — Two correspondents last week trenchantly exposed the weakness of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s responses to the Israeli government’s retaliatory assault on Gaza (Letters, 3 November). Since they wrote, the House of Bishops has now put its collective name to an equally inadequate statement, issued on 31 October (News, 3 November).
Rightly, the statement begins by emphatically “condemning” Hamas’s horrendous terrorist attack on Israel. Rightly, it “condemns” the surge in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the UK. But all that it can say about Israel’s counter-attack is that we must “reflect on” it.
The Bishops’ reflection suffers from three grave deficiencies. First, the “huge number of civilians killed in three weeks of bombardment” — by the time this letter appears the number will have exceeded 10,000, including 4000 children — is not a “humanitarian catastrophe”. It is a war crime.
International humanitarian law emphatically excludes the kind of disproportionate and indiscriminate bombardment of civilian populations, including hospitals and schools, that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) are daily engaging in, not to speak of its cutting off of essential supplies to civilians and its attempt to force the removal of half of Gaza’s population to the south while continuing to bombard that area indiscriminately as well. Five hundred and eighty-seven senior British lawyers have asserted as much in a letter to the UK Government on 26 October. Why can’t our Bishops?
Hamas’s barbaric policy of using civilians as human shields is, of course, a war crime. But, as the lawyers’ letter makes clear, “the commission by one party to a conflict — including an armed group — of serious violations of international humanitarian law does not . . . justify their commission by another party.” Compelling evidence of the IDF’s war crimes is now vastly more abundant than that of Hamas’s. The IDF are bound by law to find other ways to take out Hamas’s military and political structures, even as they rightly seek to recover Israeli hostages.
The Bishops’ failure to charge Israel explicitly with breaking international humanitarian law in specific, indictable ways is a chronic failure of truthful moral description. This omission is even more egregious since the IDF’s acts clearly violate fundamental just-war principles to which the Church of England is itself officially committed.
Second, as the UN Secretary General said on 24 October, the assault on Gaza “did not happen in a vacuum”: “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” The Bishops’ statement says not a single word about this, divorcing these events from the longstanding and complex context from which they emerged and which is essential for their larger moral assessment.
Third, the Bishops affirm “absolutely” Israel’s right to defend itself, but are wholly silent on the Palestinians’ right of resistance against illegal occupation, also affirmed in international law (which is not remotely to imply that Hamas’s attack was any part of such legitimate resistance). Do they affirm that principle of international law as well, or not?
I take no pleasure in saying that these failings will be long remembered by Palestinians, especially by Palestinian Christians, many of whom are Anglicans. It is, perhaps, not yet too late to correct them.
JONATHAN CHAPLIN
19 Coles Lane, Oakington
Cambridge CB24 3AF