By Bert Hetebry

The statistics are horrific.

On October 7 last year, 1200 Israelis were killed and over 200 hostages were taken in an attack on a music festival near the Gaza/Israel border. Included among the fatalities were a number killed by ‘friendly fire’ when the IDF were deployed to take care of the situation.

Of the fatalities recorded to date of deaths in Gaza, more than 40,000 – over 60% – are women and children. Women and children tend not to be soldiers fighting in the war zone, but rather ‘collateral damage’, unfortunate people who just happened to be in the way as the bombs went off. Reports tend not to tell of Hamas fighters being killed.

In Lebanon, including the targeted attack using pagers and walkie talkies and the targeted blowing up of buildings where Hezbollah leaders meet has killed 569 people including 50 children and wounded 1,835 people, according to the Lebanese health ministry. Oh, and yes, a senior Hezbollah commander was among those killed.

Why are there no clearer indications given of actual fighters being killed or are all males over a certain age considered to be enemies or potential enemies?

Available on ABC iview there is a documentary film, Prosecuting Evil, about a Jewish lawyer, Ben Ferencz, who as a 27 year old graduate in 1945 was the prosecutor in the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. In his opening statement to the court he said:

“Vengeance is not honourable.

Nor do we seek merely a just retribution.

We ask this court to affirm by international penal action man’s right to live in peace and dignity regardless of his race or creed.”

As the trial off 22 Nazi officers proceeded, each pleaded their innocence, but were convicted on their documentation of the deaths they were held to account for, but there was one defendant who stood out for the prosecutor. He was Otto Ohlendorf, a doctor, a general, a father of five children and a devoted husband. In presenting his rationale for the killings he signed off on, apart from the plea of ‘following orders’, couched in his subservience to Hitler who had said that Russia was going to take over Germany and the Jews would take over too or words something like that, but claimed his sense of humanity, his attempt to make the murders less traumatic, that he did not ‘smash babies heads against trees’ instead order that when a mother was holding a baby, to shoot the baby and so doing kill both mother and child. That was far less traumatising and far more efficient. I somehow come to the conclusion that the trauma alluded to was not that of the victims. His plea of self defence was based on the perceived threat from Russia and the survival of the Jewish people and how that endangered his and Germany’s existence.

After the Colonel-Doctor was convicted and sentenced to hang, the young lawyer visited him to ask, person to person, looking for some measure of remorse, some acknowledgement that the had in fact committed a war crime, a crime against humanity.

Perhaps an apology to his family for his crimes.

“Can I do something for you?”

“You will see that I was right. The Russians will take over, The Jews will survive.”

I relate that because after the war, the Nuremberg Trials exposed the criminality of the Nazi regime who conducted, in fact industrialised the mass murder of people based on ethnicity, both Jews and Gypsies, and on sexuality by killing homosexuals, and those who were deemed to suffer from mental disorders, or anyone else who did not conform to the Nazi definition of who was allowed to live.

More than the Nuremberg Trials, the newly formed United Nations passed a resolution to partition the middle eastern British protectorate of Palestine to be a two nation state for Jewish refugees, survivors of the Holocaust to settle alongside the existing Palestinian population.

And still more was done: the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was written and endorsed by all member states, including the newly formed nation of Israel. The declaration re-affirmed the ideals of freedom of religion, that there cannot be discrimination based on ethnicity, religion, sexuality, that there is freedom of thought and speech, for refugees the right of return and so many other rights we have as human beings.

But it didn’t stop there, the International Court of Justice was formed to allow for leaders who perpetrated crimes against humanity could be held to account.

These were actions taken to try to in some way redress the horrors of the Holocaust and acknowledging the attitudes which led up to the marginalisation and genocide which had occurred, trying to ensure that such events would never occur again.

Peace has never been easy to find. And despite the best efforts of the International community it seems peace in the middle east is particularly elusive. What does not help is the rhetoric both from the Israeli leaders and military spokes people, and from the Palestinian side along with their regional supporters. While international support for Israel was strong immediately after the October 7 attack, the devastation of their retaliation which smacks more of vengeance and retribution that to seriously search out the Hamas leadership and seriously negotiate the release of hostages, some of whom have also been accidentally killed by Israeli soldiers.

With the death toll now approaching forty, Palestinian lives for each Israeli life lost and the seemingly complete destruction of anywhere to live within the Gaza strip, that support is fading fast, and now to make the claims that their intelligence is so good they can find the leadership of Hezbollah whereever they are, the bombing of residential buildings and subsequent loss of civilian lives, including women and children again appear to be more vengeance than an execution or assassination of a known target.

To date, there has been no reported deaths by Hezbollah attacks into Israel, but the death toll in Lebanon as a result of those attacks is climbing fast. If Israel invades, as seems to be their threat, it will be the sixth time since 1978.

It seems the Israeli leadership, the Zionists and Prime Minister Netanyahu will not be satisfied until the Biblical promise of the land belonging to the descendants of Abraham is realised, and the land cleansed of those who are not identified as such… and the identification is one of belief, a religious creed, that of Judaism. In effect, using the same argument the Nazis had for eliminating people who did not conform to their definition of what a good German looked like.

But why are there so many women and children killed in these conflicts?

Could it be that each child killed cannot grow up to become the enemy?

And could it be that by killing women and children cannot be born to grow up to become the enemy?