The old moral law, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” dates back to the Mesopotamian Hammurabi’s Code (c. 1790 B.C.) and the Bible’s Book of Exodus (21: 23-27). Nowadays, it’s often taken to be a licence for bloodthirsty vengeance but the original aim was to limit tribal violence and prevent its escalation. It meant your retribution should not exceed the injury suffered.
In many parts of the tribal Middle East and North Africa, this code survived into our century, including in eastern Libya. Long ago, however, it was refined: monetary compensation was established for every imaginable injury – a life, an eye, a tooth. If you took out someone’s eye, you could avoid having yours plucked out by accepting responsibility, recognising the injury you caused and paying compensation.
Europeans, preening ourselves on our post-Christian sensibility and Enlightenment, look down on such codes because they deal in ‘blood money’. But if an eye for an eye is retrograde, how should we judge the ferocity of Israel’s vengeance on Gaza? Around 1,200 people were killed as a result of the terrorist attack led by Hamas on October 7. In return, so far, around 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, with women and children making up over two-thirds. Seven thousand people are still missing under rubble. And over two million are on the cusp of a man-made famine and epidemiological disaster.
Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, says his country is fighting on our behalf – for the sake of Western civilisation. Since when is it civilised to declare “Israel should find ways more painful than death for the Palestinians” (Israel’s minister of heritage, Amichay Eliyahu)?
What civilisation is defended by a TV journalist who laughs, and has his guests laugh with him, as he announces that he’s delighted at the idea that Palestinian children may be living in a sewer? That he can’t sleep unless he watches homes in Gaza being destroyed?
It was Herzog who said there are no non-combatants in Gaza, meaning everyone is fair game. IDF soldiers have been filmed chanting it. But not distinguishing between fighters and civilians isn’t a Western value. We count it a war crime.
Recognising Palestinian suffering doesn’t mean minimising the crimes committed on October 7. On the contrary, the viciousness of what happened that day helps us recognise the viciousness of what’s happening in Gaza now.
Some of what happened on October 7 is contested. It appears (from Israeli sources) that around 400 of those killed were Israeli security forces (IDF). Some of the atrocities initially reported (like ‘beheaded babies’) were propaganda fiction, since debunked. But none of that reduces the horror of what we can lay, with certainty, at the door of Hamas – 750 dead civilians, 250 people abducted, of whom around 40 were children.
If an eye for an eye is retrograde, how should we judge the ferocity of Israel’s vengeance on Gaza?- Ranier Fsadni
All but two children have since been released. It’s right to give a name and face to the kidnapped eight-month-old baby, the red-haired Kfir Bibas, who would have turned one under captivity earlier this month. Hamas reported him (and his mother and four-year-old brother, Ariel) killed by an Israeli airstrike.
It’s our moral duty to recognise the suffering of David Tahar, who had to bury his 19-year-old son, Adir, a fallen IDF soldier, without his head. The terrorists beheaded him by firing their AK-47s at his neck and shoulders. Then they made off with the head. (Among the evidence is the video footage uploaded by the terrorists themselves.)
Of course, we should demand that Kfir, alive or dead, is released (together with his parents and brother). But it’s because we’re aware of the trauma this young child must have undergone that we see the contradiction of responding by unleashing hell on tens of thousands of other children.
Deborah Harrington, a British doctor who recently spent two weeks on Gaza, has described what she saw to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour: “Children with… open fractures, partial amputations, open chest wounds, horrendous lacerations… and burns. And that was every day. I feel ashamed and shocked that we’re doing this to fellow humans.”
By what civilised measure is it “justice for Kfir” to oblige a father in Gaza, who is a doctor, to amputate his daughter’s leg without anaesthesia or painkillers?
Such amputations are routine because there are no medical supplies. Access to antibiotics is limited. Even ordinary products can’t be found. Women and girls are using tent scraps instead of sanitary towels.
As for Adir, the fallen IDF soldier whose body was desecrated, is justice restored when his fellow IDF soldiers lose all restraint and execute Palestinian men by shooting them in the back? The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor says that, in 13 field executions, the arbitrariness of the killings was corroborated.
And this is to say nothing about sniper fire, which has targeted children fetching water, people collecting food and even Christians (what possible connection to Hamas?) taking refuge in church.
One such victim, earlier this week, was Husam Hamada, head of the Pathology Department of Al-Shifa Hospital, shot close to the Nusairat camp. Even as he bled, rescue workers were unable to reach him because of the ongoing gunfire on civilians.
If the war continues at this rate, the number killed risks growing exponentially because of disease (no sanitation facilities), exposure (no shelter) and hunger (supplies are nowhere near the scale necessary).
Anyone complicit with such destruction is disqualified from speaking in defence of enlightened civilisation. Let them justify things by their name: might makes right. If it’s a rules-based order, then it’s the rules of Genghis Khan, not Hammurabi, let alone the Bible.