How Israel and the West lost their moral compass

Many thousands of words have been written about the killing of Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut last week and I am not about to add to your ennui by contributing more. In any case, you will already have made up your mind about whether the Hezbollah leader was a resistance hero who fought the might of Israel’s military to a standstill in 2006 or a puppet of Iran who ordered the deaths of hundreds of innocent people — or, arguably, both.

So, no. What does concern me, however, is the morality (or lack of it) of those who order what can only be described as extrajudicial executions.

I suppose the most prominent in recent memory was that of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, shot dead by US special forces at his compound in northern Pakistan on May 2, 2011, with his body then unceremoniously dumped at sea. The media were not invited to the execution, so the abiding image is the photo taken inside the White House situation room as events unfolded — Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and assorted other bigwigs staring rapt at live video as though they were attending a private screening of the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Look carefully and you can see a nascent secretary of state, Antony Blinken, peering over a shoulder from the back of the room. As Lady Macbeth observed, “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand” when it has blood on it.

More recently, a US drone strike at Baghdad airport in January 2020 killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, head of the overseas Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It also, incidentally (a word I use advisedly), killed nine other people, including the Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, who had the misfortune to lose his life alongside the most powerful person in Iran after the supreme leader and has thus become merely a footnote to history.

The mantle of Lord High Executioner has largely passed to Israel, which has not been slow in putting it to use. 

Ross Anderson

Since then, the mantle of Lord High Executioner has largely passed to Israel, which has not been slow in putting it to use and boasting about it. Last week, the Israeli military published the photos of 11 Hezbollah commanders it claimed to have killed in a week of mayhem in Lebanon, and the glee with which they did so was almost palpable.

The moral argument, if it can be called that, advanced by Israel and the West is that they are the good guys at war with the bad guys, that they are democratically elected governments fighting in defense of the rule of law. The question they do not answer is this: when the good guys behave in exactly the same way as the bad guys (just with bigger guns), what exactly is it they are fighting for? The law, they say, but no law permits indiscriminate mayhem.

US President Joe Biden used a curious phrase to describe the death of Nasrallah: it brought, he said, “a measure of justice.” Biden is no sprightly youth, but even he must surely know that America has moved on from the days of cowboys in the Wild West dispensing justice from the barrel of a Colt 45. He may not know what justice looks like nowadays, but I do: it is when a criminal is investigated, arrested, charged, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced in a court of law. Justice must have a moral element, and it is not dispensed with a 2,000-lb bunker-buster bomb dropped on a densely populated residential suburb of Beirut.

It is often argued that traditional arrests and prosecutions are impossible when the “enemy” lurks in the shadows, protected by layers of security and numerous identities, refusing to play by the rules of traditional warfare — but that is the whole point of being the so-called good guys: we have rules, they do not.

If you think this happens only in the Middle East, you would be wrong. In 1989, Northern Ireland was in the depths of a period known euphemistically as “The Troubles” — a 30-year insurgency by republican paramilitaries in pursuit of a politically united Ireland, with the support, either overt or tacit, of about half the population. They were opposed by the other half of the population, who wished to remain part of the UK, along with loyalist paramilitaries and the British state. Between the late 1960s and 1998, more than 3,500 people died.

Pat Finucane was a human rights lawyer in Belfast. His clients came from both sides of the divide, but unionists viewed him as a republican mouthpiece. In February 1989, two loyalist gunmen smashed through the front door of Finucane’s home with a sledgehammer, shot him twice as he enjoyed a Sunday meal with his family, then fired 12 more bullets into his face at close range while his three children cowered under the table.

Justice is when a criminal is investigated, arrested, charged, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced in a court of law. 

Ross Anderson

Numerous independent investigations have established that the murder was carried out with not only the collusion of the British security services, but also their active participation. British agents provided information on Finucane’s precise whereabouts at a specific time and date and supplied one of the pistols used to kill him.

One of the gunmen, who was also a police informer, pleaded guilty to the murder and served a few years of a 22-year sentence before being released in 2006. No member of the British security establishment has ever been held to account for their involvement. Famously, Prime Minister David Cameron told the Finucane family at a meeting in Downing Street in 2011: “There are people in buildings all around here who won’t let it happen.”

Well, not any longer. New government in Westminster, new policy: after 35 years, there is now to be a full, judge-led public inquiry into Finucane’s extrajudicial execution, at which the full involvement of the British state and its agents will be laid bare.

As Martin Luther King observed: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” When the history of these years in the Middle East comes to be written, we should hope that moral justice is served.

• Ross Anderson is associate editor of Arab News.