April 14, 2009
Israel Commits War Crime in Gaza
Author:
Daniel C. Maguire
Professor
of
Moral Theology and Ethics at Marquette University in Milwaukee
In
its attack on the Gaza ghetto, Israel committed a war crime by any
definition,
and violated all six requirements of what Jonathan Schell
calls "the Catholic
just war theory." Failure to pass even one of the
criteria for "just
war" means that the violence is state sponsored
murder.
The United
Nations special rapporteur reported that of the 1,434
Palestinians killed in
the Gaza invasion, 960 were civilians, including
288 women and 121 children.
(Pregnant women were among the women
killed.......war as abortifacient.) Many
of the children killed were
already emaciated by Israeli embargoes. Last year
General Gadi
Eisenkot, head of Israel's northern command said of possible future
conflicts
with Palestinians, "We will wield disproportionate power
against every
village from which shots are fired on Israel and cause
immense damage and destruction."
Run that and the fatality statistics
through the "just war theory."
If the pope were to go to Gaza---something I do not expect---it would
be
symbol, a symbol worth a million words spoken in the land of the unjust
aggressor.
If the pope were to go there, walk through the rubble of
destroyed hospitals
and schools, hold bereaved Palestinian children in
his arms, what a Christlike
prophetic message it would send to Israel and
its enabling American arms supplier.
But then, if pope Pius XII had gone
to the Stazione Termini in Rome as the
Germans carted away Rome's Jews,
what a true expression it would have been
of his professed "burning
sorrow."
At any rate, a fine text
for the papal mission to Israel would be Jer.
3:12: "Acknowledge your
guilt!"
Come to think of it, that Jeremiah text would be perfect
on those
occasions when the United States gathers at the National Cathedral
to
worship itself with hymns of America the Beautiful.