A month after Hamas\u2019s terrorist attacks on 7 October, in which 1400 Israeli civilians were brutally murdered, the world\u2019s worst fears have been confirmed about the response they would provoke: an estimated 10 thousand Palestinians killed by Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip, nearly half of whom are children.<\/p>\n
The numbers speak for themselves. On both sides of this war, any standards of bellum justum<\/em> are not worth the paper they are written on.<\/p>\n For all the moral rhetoric, the suffering and senseless destruction is being unleashed for reasons of political self-interest: Hamas, to bolster waning support in Palestine and beyond for a backward theocracy based on a nihilistic cult of martyrdom; Israel, to lock a heavily polarised population into the hyper-nationalistic politics of recent years.<\/p>\n Every state has a right to defend itself. But Israeli politics under Netanyahu have made a blatant mockery of any responsible, far-sighted attempt at solving the problem of peaceful co-existence. Not to mention the politics of Hamas, whose ideology is openly genocidal and has nothing to do with the secular, republican politics of anti-imperialism. Under these circumstances, yet more violence lies ahead.<\/p>\n But although \u2018escalation is a fundamental feature of any war,\u2019 writes James Dodd<\/a> in Public Seminar, \u2018<\/em>it should not be taken to be some determining factor rigidly fixing a causal chain of events. Violence has no intrinsic logic, it dictates no necessity; this means that any given escalation of violence, as Carl von Clausewitz argued, is at its root a question of politics. We enter wars for political reasons, and we only resolve them with political means.\u2019<\/p>\n A ceasefire is not a solution, of course. But it is the only humane option at this point.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.eurozine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/Screenshot-2023-11-09-at-13.09.50.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n