The shameful reaction of “humanitarians” to to the war in Gaza

I woke up this morning to find this Substack commentary written by my friend the philosopher Maarten Boudry.

Few things have shocked me more than the open acquiescence—or even outright support—of the international “humanitarian” community for Egypt’s decision to seal, and even reinforce, its heavily fortified border with Gaza throughout the war. Early on, Israel tried to negotiate with Egypt to allow Gazan civilians out of harm’s way so it could target Hamas more effectively. The international “humanitarian” community reacted with outrage to the very suggestion. Meanwhile, Egypt threatened to tear up its peace treaty with Israel and declared that it was “ready to sacrifice millions of lives so that nobody would approach a grain of sand [in Sinai].”

You expect that kind of cynicism toward “fellow Arabs” from a corrupt and authoritarian regime. But from self-proclaimed Western “humanitarians”? Apparently, they’d rather keep Gazan civilians trapped in an active war zone, where Hamas could exploit them as human shields, because evacuation would supposedly amount to “ethnic cleansing.” And all this while they were hurling the obscene “genocide” libel at Israel. Because that’s obviously how you would behave if you sincerely believed a genocide was taking place, right? Prevent people from escaping? It’s either callousness, mendacity, or both.

By way of analogy, imagine that Poland had sealed its border with Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in 2022, telling the world: “Why should we let in Ukrainian civilians? We don’t want a bunch of Nazis in our country.” Bad enough. Now imagine the “humanitarian” community supporting that stance—insisting that Poland bore no responsibility for Russia’s aggression, and that admitting Ukrainians would amount to “ethnic cleansing” because Moscow might never allow them to return.

In this brilliant article, my good friend Shany Mor uses a series of clever thought experiments to expose the revealed preferences of the “humanitarians” in the Gaza war. The conclusions are deeply disturbing. They reveal an astonishing level of indifference—whether intentional or not—to the very people these organizations claim to care about. If they have to chose between demonizing Israel and helping Palestinians, they always chose the latter.

I will never, ever, ever donate to any of these organizations again—even though I supported many of them regularly in the past.

I’ll mention below which organizations Maarten deems not worthy of donations. But you’ll want to read Shany Mor’s piece, which I discuss below.

Note as well that Maarten has two related articles. One, published in The Jewish Chronicle in January (Maarten is not Jewish) is called, “Europe’s silenced scholars: the forced Gaza genocide ‘consensus’,” which has this paragraph:

In reality, the accusation of genocide is as obscene as it is absurd. Netanyahu and his far-right cronies may be guilty of many things, but there’s no evidence whatsoever that Israel intends to exterminate Gazans, and abundant evidence to the contrary. The eagerness of Western intellectuals to nonetheless accuse Israel of genocide is by now depressingly familiar, as is their blindness to Hamas’s cynical war tactics and the extraordinarily difficult conditions under which Israel has had to pursue its legitimate aims of defeating Hamas and freeing the hostages. In my latest book, Het verraad aan de verlichting (The Betrayal of Enlightenment), I trace this reflex to a postcolonial ideology that casts the West as perpetual oppressor and anti-Western forces as inherently virtuous victims.

And a very nice essay on his substack site (originally published in Quillette) called “They don’t believe it either,” which is mostly about how those who accuse Israel of “genocide” don’t believe that accusation. An excerpt:

The many fabrications and distortions in the genocide case against Israel are evidence of something different from rational inquiry and truth-seeking. What explains the frantic search, from almost the first day of the war, for statements by Israeli officials that can be twisted into proof of genocidal intent? What accounts for the willful blindness to Hamas’s cruelty, to the point of erasing Hamas altogether, as if the war had only one combatant? And why is the definition of genocide gerrymandered by NGOs to implicate and condemn Israel—through inventions like “slow-motion genocide” or “incremental genocide”—even though the Palestinian population grew from 1.1 million to 5.1 million between 1960 and 2020?

The answer is that the “Gaza genocide” calumny has become the Left’s equivalent of the “stolen election” hoax on the American Right—a baseless accusation that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. That is why nonsense like the Amalek verse keeps being recycled, impervious to correction—the point is not to offer evidence, but to hammer down a pre-established conclusion.

Shany Mor is described by Tablet as “an Associate Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and a Research Fellow at the Chaikin Center for Geostrategy at the University of Haifa. He served as a Director for Foreign Policy on the Israeli National Security Council.” His Substack, “Roter Faden“, began in April, and you can subscribe to help get it off the ground.  The article mentioned by Maarten is otherwise free to access, and you can read it by clicking on the screenshot below.

Mor considers the “epistemic community of nongovernmental organizations, activists, experts, scholars, and even a few formal intergovernmental bodies united by loosely overlapping commitments to global and transnational justice,:” and divides what he calls these “Humanitarians” into four groups.  He then performs a thought experiment on the groups, to wit:

Take everything you know about the course of the war which began on October 7, about the capabilities and actions of the belligerent parties, about the war’s duration and casualties, and about the terms of the various ceasefires, but pretend you know nothing about the claims and calls to action of the Humanitarians. And ask yourself what you might expect them to say and do under each of the following four hypotheses about the rough overlapping consensus of their collective preferences.]

H1: Humanitarians, especially including scholars of international law regarding armed conflict, are neutral regarding the belligerent parties in the war, and the Humanitarians collectively are genuinely committed to the humanitarian needs of civilians and noncombatants among both Israelis and Palestinians.

H2: Humanitarians are indifferent to the humanitarian needs of the Israelis but genuinely committed to the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians. Operating on imperfect information in rapidly changing conditions, and limited by what is allowable in international law and what is politically or materially feasible, they seek whatever can be done to reduce or eliminate loss of life or suffering on the part of Palestinians either as a direct or indirect consequence of the war.

H3: Humanitarians are indifferent to the immediate humanitarian needs of Palestinian civilians, but they fervently wish to see Israel defeated in the war Hamas started on October 7. They fervently believe that the only moral conclusion to the war is one that is a net gain for the Palestinians and a net loss for the Israelis. To this end, they endeavor to act as force multipliers both in theatre to preserve Hamas’ power and, especially, in Western states, to push for policies that limit Israel’s freedom of action, cut it off from military supplies, and apply pressure on it.

H4: Humanitarians are indifferent to the war’s strategic outcome and prefer to see more death and more suffering on the Palestinian side, not as an end in and of itself but rather as a means to confirm beliefs in Israel’s essentially demonic nature, and as a way of mobilizing hatred and social isolation of Jews in the West. In particular, there is a preference for any rhetoric or political action which removes what are believed to be the unfair social privileges which western Jews hold due to the memory of the Holocaust.

Mor then says what one would expect from each group if the characterization were true. (Of course he’s operating with the wisdom of hindsight here, but that doesn’t negate his argument.)

Did you decide which was the most accurate characterization of the worldwide “humanitarian” response to the war? In light of what Maarten said above about the border with Egypt, and the total neglect of Hamas’s stealing of humanitarian aid to Israel, as well as the distortions about the “starvation” situation in Gaza and the push to stop Israel from taking military action, I guessed correctly. Yes, it’s H3. Here’s what Mor “retrodicted” under that scenario:

H3 would see immediate demands for Israel to forgo any military offensive against Hamas at all, effectively locking in the tactical gains Hamas made on October 7, and opening the door for future October 7-style operations as a means to securing political advances for the Palestinian cause. Humanitarians would do nothing to get Palestinians out of a war zone, and they would boycott aid mechanisms that threatened Hamas’s continued rule in Gaza. They would pressure Western governments to cut off weapons supplies to the IDF and to suspend trade relations with Israel. They would mobilize international courts to try to stay Israel’s hand on the battlefield in order to limit Hamas’ defeat. And they would use their influence to push governments to hand the Palestinians tangible diplomatic achievements that could have been secured for decades with a peace agreement for free as a reward for the war launched on October 7.

That is pretty much what happened: the calls for Israel to not retaliate, or calls for a cease-fire, began even before Israel attacked and entered Gaza to retaliate. The lack of criticism of Egypt for sealing its borders was deafening to some of us, though most people—perhaps on purpose—didn’t even consider the implications of that silence.  The pressure on Israel is obvious: Douglas Murray said something like, “Israel is the only country in the world that is not allowed to win a defensive war.” Many apologists said that Hamas’s attack was justified retaliation for Israel’s oppression of the territory, despite the fact that Israel booted the Jews out of Gaza in 2005 and handed it to Palestinians.  They had, in effect, a state, but then elected Hamas, which ruined whatever valid governance Gaza had. (Don’t forget that the Palestinians had rejected a two-state solution half a dozen times before.)

Mor’s conclusions:

The war has provoked a lot of anguished discussion about the role of international law and global civil society, to say nothing of the role of international norms and the “rules-based order.” But the epistemic community that claims for itself the role of protector of those values is due for a serious moral reckoning too.

And once that reckoning begins, it shouldn’t limit itself just to the Humanitarians’ actions following October 7. Critics of Israel’s government often point to its role in supposedly propping up the Hamas regime in Gaza in the years before October 7, supposedly as a counterweight to the more moderate Palestinian Authority operating in the West Bank. It’s a legitimate critique, voiced domestically in Israel as well. But it’s worth remembering that Israel’s role in propping up the Hamas regime was tiny compared to that of international organizations such as UNRWA, MSF, and others who took care of crucial governance functions for the de facto Hamas statelet during its two-decade reign in the Gaza Strip, freeing it to hijack all the Strip’s resources for tunnel digging and weapons smuggling and manufacture. And these were joined by the experts and agencies who invented bespoke international norms after 2007 that meant that any Israeli action that we now know could have prevented October 7 would have been decried as a war crime.

Oh, and what were the NGOs that were in group 3? Maarten got a list from Claude that you can see here; it includes Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights.  The question he posed to Claude was this:

Which international humanitarian NGOs or organizations have criticized the Israeli proposal early in the recent Gaza war to evacuate Gazan civilians to the Sinai peninsula, worrying that it might amount to ethnic cleansing, or arguing that Egypt has no responsibility to help Israel’s war efforts? Give me names and links please.

Maarten added, “Amnesty was appalling, as usual.”  Amnesty International has gone the way of the ACLU and SPLC: ideologically captured by “progressives.”

As for the “g-word”, I write off those who accuse Israel of genocide as either ignorant blockheads or antisemites.