Mike Huckabee: right by accident, wrong intentionally

There are some remarkable characters in the gang surrounding Donald Trump. Most recently, I’ve found it fascinating to catch up on Mike Huckabee. 

Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel
Innovator in his approach to diplomacy

Huckabee used to be governor of Arkansas, a post to which his daughter has now ascended. One of the great things about republics as opposed to monarchies, is that they pass on power by election rather than by inheritance. The US is a case in point, as long as you ignore such presidential cases as the George H.W. Bush-George W. Bush father-son pair or, rather earlier, the William Henry Harrison-Benjamin Harrison grandfather-grandson pair and the even earlier John Adams-John Quincy Adams father-son pair.

The Huckabees are at least progressive, in that they’ve allowed the father's inheritance to pass to a daughter rather than insisting that it go to a son.

In any case, Huckabee continues to occupy a key position on the political stage, nearly twenty years after ending his time as state governor. Today he’s the US Ambassador to Israel. Now rather a lot of people – a growing number – around the world are becoming increasingly upset at the behaviour of Israel in Gaza. 

Why, some have gone so far as to talk about genocide.

Huckabee, though, has the answer to all that. He seems to have been annoyed, in particular, by the decision of the UK government to recognise Palestine as a state. On social media, Huckabee told the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer where to get off. In no uncertain terms:

So Israel is expected to surrender to Hamas & feed them even though Israeli hostages are being starved. Did UK surrender to Nazis and drop food to them? Ever heard of Dresden, PM Starmer? That wasn’t food you dropped. If you had been PM then UK would be speaking German!

Is it just me or is there a bit of what-aboutery there? You know, as in, ‘hey, you want to criticise what Israel’s doing in Gaza? You want to have a go at Israeli forces killing civilians? What about what you did to Dresden?’

Still, he clearly thinks that the fire-bombing of Dresden was a good thing, not a bad one, presumably including the fact that it caused a firestorm so intense that it sucked the oxygen out of the air and many people died of suffocation. And what he’s doing is drawing a parallel between that atrocity and what’s happening in Gaza. Which, presumably, he regards as equally justified.

I wouldn’t disagree. It seems to me that it’s precisely as justified to do what the Israeli military is doing in Gaza as it was to set fire to Dresden. I suppose it’s helpful of him to highlight the equivalence. Mind you, I don’t think that he’d agree with my view that the Dresden raids constituted a major, unacknowledged and unprosecuted war crime, and Israel’s violence in Gaza and starvation of its population is another. The parallel he draws has merit, but not the way he meant. He’s got it right, but only by accident.

But are the two atrocities really equivalent? The four raids on Dresden may have been ghastly but at least they only lasted from 13 to 15 February 1945. The Gaza incursion has lasted 22 months and shows no sign of ending anytime soon. Unsurprisingly, it has caused more deaths: the best estimate for Gaza is some 60,000 and rising, while most commentators agree that the Dresden raids killed around 25,000. But, worse than that, the Gaza action is threatening an entire population, believed to be about 2.1 million today. 

Israel is targeting an entire people, and that whole people is in danger of death. Mostly by starvation, though Israeli Defence Forces are helping the process along by bombing or firing on people, in particular when they come looking for food. War on a people is pretty much a textbook definition of genocide.

It's never been really clear to me where to draw the line between a war crime and a crime against humanity. However, I can’t help feeling that it’s somewhere between Dresden and Gaza. That, though, isn’t anything Huckabee’s ever going to admit.

And if he’s right, without meaning to be, to categorise Gaza and Dresden as similar events, he’s wrong to draw a veil over the difference in scale and in genocidal intent between them. What he got right, as I suggested before, he got right by accident. What he’s getting wrong, I suspect, he’s getting wrong on purpose.

The hallmark of the Trump regime.

A young girl measures human progress

A picture in today’s Guardian caught my attention. 

From the Guardian of 11 August

I wondered what different people might see in it. I imagine most of us would see a young girl. A child.

If we looked a little closer, we might think she was sleeping peacefully, although the setting – adults and other children sitting behind her, wide awake, and frightened – might suggest that she was actually sleeping in exahustion. I still hope that most of us, if we were present, would want to do nothing worse to her than lower our voices so she could keep on sleeping.

If we then read the article, we would discover that a large group of men in Iraq, where she comes from, would have wanted to do far more than that. They would have seen in her a target, a Satan-worshipper, and they would have been driven by a holy zeal to do God’s work, into killing her or forcibly converting her to Sunni Islam. After conversion, she would have been reduced to slavery.

I don’t think there’s much to rule out in the list of things that could be done to a young girl who’s made a slave by the Islamic State.

All that because she’s a Yazidi. That indeed is why she is where she is in the photo, and exhausted. She’s just completed a draining trek to safety in Kurdistan, from a home invaded by the IS militants.

The safety’s only relative, because it depends on the ability of the Kurdish Peshmerga to hold IS at bay. Equally, though she’s lucky to have escaped – many thousands of others have not – that luck is also relative: she is now entering onto the misery of life as a refugee, dependent on charity, with neither a home nor a living to support her.

So we should amend our view of the photo again. An exhausted, unfortunate young girl, we might say.

If she were from Gaza and not Iraq, she might not now be the deliberate target of a terrorist movement, but she would be in serious danger nonetheless, as a potential victim of collateral damage by the Israeli Defence Forces, one of the world’s most powerful armies. She would be at risk because Israel has decided that, in its self-defence, it has every right to deploy hugely destructive firepower in densely populated areas. Anyone it kills as a result it views a regrettable but entirely legitimate casualty.

So again, let’s review our judgement. An exhausted, unfortunate young girl who doesn’t really matter much, even to people who claim to respect democracy and human rights.

Which adds up to a measure of just how far humanity has progressed down the tens of millennia. We live in a world in which many people feel that it is perfectly justified to snuff out the life of that little girl, or to cause her unbearable suffering. Some will act that way because they believe it is the will of God. Others out of indifference to her fate. Yet others to gratify some deeply deformed appetite.

Humanity will have reached a state we can call civilised the day we can look at such a sleeping young girl, and the only thing any of us would want to do to her, is cover her with a blanket.

Gaza: you think that’s genocide? You ain’t seen nothing yet...

It’s interesting to see people throw the word “genocide” around when talking (or ranting) about the 2000 deaths at Israeli hands in Gaza. Indefensible, unjustifiable and quite probably criminal deaths. 2000 of them.

Let’s be absolutely clear.

Genocide is the deliberate extermination of a people. In other words, it’s the resolution of ethnic conflict by one people physically wiping out the other. Usually it’s accompanied by ethnic cleansing, where you can avoid being killed if you go away, abandoning everything you and possibly several generations before you have worked for, and settle for scraping a subsistence living in some miserable refugee camp somewhere.

Precisely that is happening right now, but not in Gaza. 130,000 members of the Yazidi sect have fled their main city of Sinjar in North West Iraq. 40,000 of them are now sitting on a mountain outside the city contemplating the unappealing alternatives of coming down and being murdered by Isis, or staying there and dying of thirst.

The Middle East's latest charmers: Isis at work in Iraq,
the nation where Bush accomplished his mission

Those who remain in the city have the third option of converting to Sunni Islam. That would certainly convince me. But then I prefer living on my knees to dying on my feet, on the basis that dying on your feet leaves you permanently on your back, whereas there is a chance of getting off your knees and back on your feet if you stay alive.

Even the figures of 130,000 and 40,000, shocking through they are, are on the smaller end of the scale of genocides. In Rwanda, for instance, estimates of deaths vary between 500,000 and a million. But Isis are just getting started. They showed their mettle by killing 1500 civilians in a single day (by comparison, it took the Israelis weeks to kill their 2200), and they have plenty of enemies other than the Yazidi: Shias (fellow Muslims), Christians, basically anyone who gets in their way.

Now it’s beyond a doubt that Israel has the capacity to be as genocidally effective as Isis. But if they had been in Gaza, there would have been hugely more deaths than there were. Whatever accusation we can make against the Israeli incursion, and we can accuse it of a great deal, charging it with genocide simply means ignoring what a genocide really is and what actually happened.

The UN has rightly said that the Israeli Defence Forces may have committed war crimes. It is, as I understand it, a crime to behave recklessly so that, even if an armed force is fighting legitimate military enemies, if it kills civilians through simple failure to take sufficient care, it has committed a war crime. That means no one needs to prove that they were deliberately targeting civilians: the mere fact that they didn’t take reasonable measures to protect them is enough.

It makes sense to investigate Israel on those charges. In the meantime, it would be a good move to suspend all arms exports to Israel. That might, indeed, force them to the table and oblige them to take a less violent line with their adversaries.

Nothing could be more necessary. That was brought home to me by an interview that John Alderdice, previously of the Alliance Party in Northern Ireland, gave to the BBC Today programme. With his experience of facilitating negotiations involving Protestant paramilitaries and the IRA in Ulster, he has no qualms about negotiating with terrorists. Indeed, he believes such negotiations are vital. He has personally held discussions, relatively recently, with Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas. Here’s what Alderdice said:

I understand the perspective that Israelis have. I would also of course say, “well there’s not much evidence that the Israeli Government’s way of working has actually helped.” And from a very early stage, one of the things that was part of the discussion, was that Hamas was saying, “look we’re prepared to engage, we’re prepared to engage in a kind of Western democratic style of things, and free and fair elections and forming governments, and even coalitions, and all of these kinds of things. If however this becomes impossible, we will not change our commitment to that, but we can let you know that there are people in our wider community who in any case want to burn the system not work the system.” So in the same kind of way as not engaging with Fatah for many years led to the rise of Hamas, trying to destroy Hamas will simply create something else.

Chilling words. And a salutary warning to us all. Israel’s decades-long attempt to crush Fatah led to the emergence of the far more vicious and dangerous Hamas. Now their long battle against Hamas may lead to something far worse still.

What might that far worse thing be?

Alderdice was in no doubt:

…and we’re seeing it developing: with Isis.

The fruits of Israel’s action is to generate the most violent and terrifying terrorist organisation the Middle East has yet seen. Israel’s action and that of the Western Powers in invading Iraq. And in time, it will be targeting the West as well as Israel.

Anyone who thinks what we’ve seen in Gaza over the last few weeks was genocide needs to think again. Because it’s going to fade into insignificance compared to what we may see in the months ahead. And let’s remember that it’s been brought into existence by Israel’s recklessness and our support for it.

That’s the biggest danger. Our task is to understand it, so that we can do something about it. And misusing terms like genocide to make them simple insults only muddies the waters.