What to Make of Gaza

This past Tuesday, the United Nations released a lengthy, critical report on last winter’s three-week Gaza War. Unfortunately, the report contains evidence supporting the claim that both the Palestinian and Israeli delegations involved in the conflict committed war crimes and, according to The New York Times, “possibly crimes against humanity.”

On the Palestinian side, the report holds that rockets were unjustly fired from Gaza into several civilian areas in Southern Israel and, on the Israeli side, that Palestinian civilian communities within Gaza were cruelly mistreated, terrorized, and, in some cases, executed. As is typical of these reports, Israel received the harshest tone of condemnation and was also reprimanded for its use of weapons such as white phosphorus and its failure to preserve intact the local Gaza communities, while the Palestinians were criticized largely for their internecine conflicts.

Both sides have rejected the report, both sides have claimed that they acted purely out of self-defense, and both sides are, presumably, still seething. Thus the report and U.N. actions following its release have served merely to amplify rather than mitigate the eternal Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The U.N. threatens that these war crimes could eventually be brought before the organization’s International Criminal Court in The Hague if each party does not launch private investigations into their own actions within the next six months. But the U.N. should be less naive in its threats—as the United States sits on the Security Council, which decides whether certain cases will be brought to the world court, it would strongly hesitate to consent to a case against Israel. This case, then, is not something that would likely ever be brought to international trial, and threatening such grave consequences is extremely counterproductive when the issues at hand deserve much more rationality.

To be sure, we would prefer to see both sides cooperate with the U.N. investigation rather than dispute the findings of the report. The constant—and often violent—struggle between Israel and the Palestinian territories is one of the major sources of stress for the entire world, not merely the U.S. But since both sides will likely continue to insist upon their own innocence, we may as well hope, in the admirable spirit of U.N. naivete, for a much larger step toward peace.

Rather than focusing on the specifics of this report, it would be wonderful to see Israelis and the Palestinians find a stable resolution to their conflict. We are of course aware that such a resolution may be far off, but in the wake of the tragedies in Gaza, we can only hope that it will be reached.