“Are you seriously — keep asking me about Palestinian civilians? What is wrong with you? Have you not seen what’s happened? We’re fighting Nazis,” said Naftali Bennett, former Israeli prime minister, to Sky News some weeks ago. And Israeli UK ambassador Tzipi Hotovely compared her country’s military operation on Gaza to the Allied bombing of Dresden during World War Two, saying it was the “only way” to beat Nazi Germany. “Dresden was a symbol, but you attacked Hamburg, you attacked other cities, and altogether it was over 600,000 civilian Germans that got killed.”
The US and English bombings of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo stand out, not so much because they were targeting basically civilian populations (Hitler Germany had already done that during the raids against Amsterdam and London), but because they were so successful in achieving their objective: killing massive amounts of civilians. And much more successful than the German Blitz against London.
The Dresden bombing in February 1945, famously described in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Slaugtherhouse five”, is generally considered to have killed around 100,000 people, most of them civilians, children, women and elderly (even if some are now revising it down to 25,000), the bombing of Hamburg in 1943 (operation Gomorrah) killed probably around 40,000 people, while the bombing of Tokyo probably killed around 100,000 people (and injured one million). The initial death toll of the nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was estimated at 70,000 and 46,000, respectively (plus tens of thousands that died later on from the horrible effects of nuclear radiation).
But numbers are one thing. The other is the horrendous suffering it created. The air raids were made with incendiary bombs, carefully released so the wind would create a fire-storm, with winds that reached speeds of 270 km per hour and street temperatures that rose to at least 1400 degrees, enough to melt glass and asphalt. It not only destroyed buildings, but also deprived the bombing shelters of air, forcing people to leave the shelters, so that they would literally melt away when they came out. The choice of the name “Operation Gomorrah” shows that this was exactly the intention.
The ruins of Hamburg after “Operation Gomorrah” — Imperial War Museum / Wikipedia Commons
These bombings were carried out by the English and American air forces. English Prime Minister Winston Churchill was initially against it. ’My dear sir, this is a military and not a civilian war. You and others may desire to kill women and children. We desire (and have succeeded in our desire) to destroy German military objectives’, he told in 1940 an MP who had called for swift retribution for the Blitz. But he changed his mind. And from 1943 the US and English air forces deliberately targeted civilians. The theory was that the devastating losses at the home front would demoralise the German military forces at the front.
It can be discussed endlessly whether they were war crimes or not - there were no specific international conventions on air bombing at that moment, as there is now. However, to me there is not much to discuss: of course they were. Deliberate massive killing of civilians was not customary in wars before World War II. The main argument was that the enemy, including the civilians as they were supporting them, was so cruel and inhuman (and the Nazis and the Japanese militarists were horrible), that they were legitimate targets. And this is precisely the argument of the Israeli Government now.
The problem with this way of reasoning is that it implies that there cannot exist conventions of war any more. I can’t imagine a war where the enemies are not described as cruel and inhuman. If they weren’t, why would you be at war with them? So it is like you are establishing rules that will never apply to yourself. In the infamous ‘international rule-based order'.
However, morality aside, most of the critique of the bombing of civilians has been along another line: they were not effective in achieving their objective, which was to demoralise the enemy. After the devastating bombing of Hamburg in 1943, the military industry there was re-established in a couple of months. The horrible civilian losses would rather harden the Germans’ decision to fight to the end. Neither did the bombing of Dresden hasten the end the war - the war ended when the Red Army took Berlin three months later, with enormous losses (estimated in 80,000 soldiers killed and many more wounded).
Both the English and the Americans feel rather uneasy when the discussion about their targeting of civilians is brought up. Winston Churchill sent in March 1945 a memo intended for the British Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of the Air Staff: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land….” The responsible for the bombings, Chief Air Marshal Arthur “bomber” Harris wrote in his answer: “This is a doctrine to which I could never subscribe. Attacks on cities, like any other act of war, are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier….” As it can be seen, the English chief bomber used the same arguments as the Israelis are using now. The civilian Palestinians are not worth one Israeli soldier. Churchill’s was by the way not particularly soft-hearted himself. In response to concerns over the 1943 Bengal famine – for which British policies were largely responsible and where an estimated 3 million people died – he infamously remarked, “If food is so scarce, why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”
Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
In the US the main effort has been to justify the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even if the fire-bombing of Tokyo at least initially produced more civilian victims (but is much less well-known). As for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the morality of killing civilians has not been the main point of discussion, but its effectiveness in ending the war (and hence avoid getting American soldiers killed). Dwight Eisenhower, US general and later president, stated: “I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.” But influential Americans still defend the use of the bomb, and the majority of the American public find the use of the bomb justified, particularly elderly white, Protestants, Catholics, Evangelicals and Jews alike.
A photo from the Miss Atomic Bomb pageant in the 1950s shows a woman in an outfit shaped like a mushroom cloud. (Photo by Tamami Shimizuishi)
I remember a debate many years ago in Denmark about the morality of the Dresden bombing. Perhaps because of the appearance of Kurt Vonnegut’s book, I am not sure. A Danish politician, ex-social democrat and leader of his own party, the “Centre-Democrats”, angrily said that this was stupidity, “I jumped in joy as I learned that tens of thousands German had been burned to death in Dresden” (quoted as I remember it).
It should be remembered that Dresden and Hiroshima were killing fields for civilians in wars between nations. According to the UN, Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, is tantamount to ‘settler-colonialism’, and there are specific international conventions on the duties of occupiers (and the rights of the occupied, among them the right to rebellion). So what the Israelis are doing in Gaza is therefore even more criminal than the Dresden and Hiroshima bombings, that they feel entitled to repeat.
The Jaramana refugee camp in Damascus, Syria, following the displacement of Palestinians on 1948. Credit: in public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Man_see_school_nakba.jpg
What perhaps is surprising is the full backing Israel receives from the US and EU (with a few decent exceptions). Why is that? An Indian commentator writes: “There are many reasons for the West’s seemingly endless tolerance for Israeli violence in the West Bank and Gaza of which the most important is the belief that Israel is basically a European country that ended up in a bad neighbourhood.” I fear that he is right. This is like the arguments in favour of the US campaigns against the Indians or the English campaigns against the Kenyan mau-mau resistance to the colonial regime (they killed white settlers, including women and children, and burned down their homesteads, horrible, right?). So we have to chose between civilisation (Israel) and barbarity (the Palestinians). Can it really be that difficult?
So, are the Israelis right then in invoking Dresden? If they want to say that the English and the Americans should regret what they have done, they are right. But if they want to point to others’ war crimes to justify their own, they are wrong.
The French aviator and author Antoine de St. Exupéry (who’s most well-known book is “The Little Prince”) wrote on the morality of aerial bombing (referring to the German/Italian bombing of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War): “A moral role? But a bombardment is self-thwarting. It defeats its very purpose. Each shellburst in Madrid provokes a gradual hardening. What was wobbly indifference stiffens. A dead child matters when it is yours. A bombardment, it seemed to me, does not disperse; it unifies. Horror induces a clenching of the fists, a closing of ranks in the same shared shudder.... Madrid is there, taking its blows in silence. But so it is with man: hardships slowly fortify their virtues” (quoted by Donald M. Schurman in “Mass Bombing. Some Moral and Historical Perspectives”).
The pictures coming out of the Gaza Slaughterhouse have been uncomfortable for the leaders of the EU and US. They haven’t changed their unconditional support for the Israeli war, but they now feel the need to soften their language and add demands that the Israeli armed forces show restraint and diminish the killing of civilians. But this is for the public only. Their military, financial and political support is undiminished, sending money, shells and bombs, and voting for Israel in the UN. As if particularly the Americans couldn’t stop the war if they wanted to – Israel is completely dependent on financial and military support from the US. It is like the illegal settlements on the West Bank: the US and EU have been publicly lamenting them for decades, but they know all well that they have continued unabated. Public handwringing is for free.
The peak comedy is when the Danish Foreign Minister visited Israel in mid-November to show the Danish solidarity with Israel, but through the Danish press let us know that he also came with a “raised index finger” (a Danish expression of what you do to a disobedient child), telling them that the whole world is watching, 'so take care'. I guess the Israelis had a good laugh when he had left.
