Women and children first?
Plus: a Florida phone ban, a fall drink, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
Women and children first?
Today, for the first time since the Israel-Hamas war began, a few people have been permitted to leave Gaza. Their numbers are fairly small: “hundreds,” per a New York Times report. Of those, “more than 80” are “seriously wounded people from Gaza,” and the rest are foreign passport holders.
“American citizens are not expected to be among Wednesday’s evacuees,” unnamed diplomats told the Times, “other than those working for certain aid groups, but they are slated to follow in batches later in the week.” And these evacuations are all happening through the Rafah Crossing at Gaza’s southwest border. The country letting them leave is Egypt—and only very cautiously.
“Egypt has made clear that it would not accept large numbers of Palestinian refugees on its soil, a proposal that some in the international community, including Israel, have reportedly floated,” and the Egyptian government reportedly fears the crossing will be swarmed by “a throng of desperate people [trying] to break through to Egypt as soon as the gate opens.”
All that context is just part of why the idea I’m suggesting here is almost certainly nonviable, but I think it’s worth suggesting anyway: Israel should let women and children leave Gaza before its campaign escalates any further. It’s old-fashioned, I know, but: women and children first.
I’ll return to the practical objections, but first let me make the case. Israel is a partial signatory of the Geneva Conventions, and it has laws of war which are concerned with avoiding harm to innocents. That’s not to say those rules are always followed, or even that an outside observer would agree with the Israeli military’s notion of what following them looks like. But in principle, however checkered the practice, Israel wants to avoid civilian casualties. This is both a major distinctive between Israel and Hamas and something for which Israel should be held to account.
The trouble with avoiding civilian casualties in Gaza, as has been widely discussed by this point, is that it is small, densely populated, and about half kids. No one can leave due to the Israeli blockade and, until today, Egypt’s closed border. So it’s all well and good that Israel does stuff like dropping flyers warning of bombs to come, but there simply isn’t a good evacuation option, and the situation will only get worse as more buildings and transit infrastructure are damaged and destroyed.
Israel doesn’t want to evacuate Palestinian innocents into its own land for a host of reasons, some about long-term implications. But an obvious and immediate issue would be that Hamas is not a uniformed military, and it could lace the refugee crowd with terrorists who would murder even more Israelis. Given the impossible logistics of finding perhaps thousands of Hamas members in a crowd of a million or more—needles in a haystack in a battlefield—that scenario will never happen.
But there is a way to screen out all or very nearly all terrorists in one fell swoop, and that’s evacuating only women and children, a 21st-century update of the Birkenhead drill. More than 3,400 Gazan children have died already, per UNICEF; there’s every reason to think that number will keep ticking up if they don’t get out.
Now let’s return to the objections. I see five big ones:
What do you mean by “children”? A 17-year-old boy could be a Hamas member. That’s true, and if anything even close to this were to happen, the age cutoff for boys would probably be more like 14 than 18. Some families would refuse to leave on this account, choosing to stay with their sons.
Women can be terrorists too. Also true, and I’ve had trouble finding credible, recent reporting on whether and to what extent women are permitted combat roles in Hamas. I spoke briefly over email with Jessica Trisko Darden, a political scientist who has researched female combatants, and her short answer was “fighters, no. Radicalized women, yes,” with female suicide bombers a real possibility. (There have been female Palestinian suicide bombers before.) Still, selecting for sex would dramatically reduce this risk.
It’s not fair. It’s extremely not fair. It reminds me of the Obama administration policy of counting every military-age male its drone strikes killed as an enemy combatant: guilty until proven innocent. But then, none of this is fair! It’s all a horror. In that light, taking hundreds of thousands of children out of a war zone would be a triumph even in its injustice to those left behind. On this, I suspect, the fathers, grandfathers, brothers, and uncles who had to stay would agree.
Do they even want to go? Hard to say. “The biggest fear, of course, is that they’re going to be evacuated and turned into refugees,” a Palestinian-American woman told CNN of her family in Gaza. “This is what everyone is now openly talking about, as if they didn’t matter. They don’t want to move. They would rather die in Gaza than move.” I haven’t found polling on how widespread that view is—it might be very common.
Where would they go? Few countries accept Palestinian refugees under ordinary conditions, let alone on this scale during active conflict, and one of those countries is Syria, which has plenty of troubles of its own. Israel wouldn’t host them. The West Bank? I don’t know. I don’t have a good answer.
And maybe that last objection is enough to moot the whole thing. Probably it is, and if not that, then certainly all five objections combined. But the idea has been bouncing around my head all week, so I figured I’d share, if only as an exercise in futile hope, and to hear what others think.
2. What I'm reading this week
“This Florida school district banned cell phones. Here’s what happened,” by Natasha Singer for The New York Times this week. An interesting report with some, uh, revealing lines from reporter and sources alike, including:
Parents said their children should be able to contact them directly during free periods, while students described the all-day ban as unfair and infantilizing.
“They expect us to take responsibility for our own choices,” said Sophia Ferrara, a 12th grader at Timber Creek who needs to use mobile devices during free periods to take online college classes. “But then they are taking away the ability for us to make a choice and to learn responsibility.”
And:
The ban has made the atmosphere at Timber Creek both more pastoral and more carceral.
And:
Ms. Stanley added that she also found the ban problematic, saying she would feel safer at school if she could carry her cellphone in her pocket and be able to text her mother immediately if needed.
Other students said school seemed more prisonlike. To call their parents, they noted, students must now go to the front office and ask permission to use the phone.
Ah yes, prison, the place where you have to talk to a receptionist before you call mom.
Read the rest here.
3. A recommendation
Apple cider and red wine, 50/50 mix. It’s quick, low ABV, delicious. Reminiscent of mulled wine but much less effort, especially if you have box wine.
4. Recent work
Got some CT pieces in edits now; more soon.
Is America at risk of being pulled into the Israel-Hamas war? | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
5. Miscellaneous
The issue of Palestinian pregnant women giving birth at Israeli checkpoints:
Information was received from UNFPA, UNRWA, and WHO in the course of August 2005. WHO quoted statistics from the Palestinian Ministry of Health indicating that 61 women had given birth at checkpoints between September 2000 and December 2004 and 36 of their babies died as a result. A breakdown of these figures shows that in 2000-2001, 31 pregnant women delivered at checkpoints and 17 of the babies died; in 2002, 16 women gave birth in similar conditions and 11 babies died; in 2003 and 2004, the numbers decreased: 8 and 6 women gave birth at checkpoints and 3 and 5 of the babies died, respectively.
According to other statistics provided by UNRWA, not yet complete for 2005, in the Gaza Strip, out of eight pregnant women transported to hospital, one woman gave birth inside the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulance while waiting at a checkpoint. Another woman, suffering from problems in her six-month pregnancy, aborted inside a PRCS ambulance, as she was held up for one hour at a checkpoint before being allowed to proceed.
On the cell phone thing: I don't know what's right. My instincts welcome shutting down the tech during the day, but realistically - in my school district anyway - that just means using a different piece of tech. And more to the point: In the age of mass shootings, I'd rather my son have a way to reach out to the outside world if it comes to that.
Too paranoid? Maybe.