It’s wrong to compare Hamas and the IRA

Speaking to the Sunday Times, Karim Khan KC, the aforementioned chief prosecutor of the ICC, has done just that. Kahn told Christina Lamb, the paper’s foreign correspondent, that when he was asked by “a senior official” what Israel could do, given that it doesn’t know “where the hostages were, in tunnels or houses, or how they were being kept”, he gave the example of Britain during the period when the IRA was active.

According to Khan: “There were attempts to kill Margaret Thatcher, Airey Neave was blown up, Lord Mountbatten was blown up, there was the Enniskillen attack, we had kneecappings … But the British didn’t decide to say, ‘Well, on the Falls Road [the heart of Catholic Belfast] there undoubtedly may be some IRA members and Republican sympathisers, so therefore let’s drop a 2,000lb bomb on the Falls Road.’ You can’t do that.”

It's a reasonable expectation, I would have thought, that the ICC’s chief prosecutor is someone who is able to see through self-serving and utterly bogus comparisons. That’s sort of the point of the job. It’s also, surely, reasonable to expect that the ICC’s chief prosecutor would not himself be the author of self-serving and utterly bogus comparisons. But reasonable as those expectations may be, it seems Karim Khan is unable to meet them.

Let’s start with the basics. Hamas is not merely a terrorist organisation committed to attacks against Israel and Israelis in pursuit of its objectives. It is a terrorist organisation committed by its charter to the elimination not just of Israel but of all Jews – all Jews, everywhere on the planet. It is, literally, genocidal in its aims.

Hamas and the IRA have their terrorism in common. But while the IRA was a despicable organisation which had no compunction in murdering anyone, it did not aim at the elimination of the UK itself, and the death of all Brits, everywhere.

More specifically, the IRA was not the government of Northern Ireland. The government of Northern Ireland – the British government - was committed to hunting it down and preventing its terrorism. Hamas, however, has been governing Gaza since 2007, using the territory as the hub of its terror activities and embedding itself in every aspect of the area and its population.

The IRA’s threat was eliminated by a two-pronged strategy – a recognition that it could not win by terror leading to a political solution, the result of which (the Good Friday Agreement) is in place today. That was made possible because, for all that the IRA’s methods were unacceptable, its aims were capable of being negotiated. Hamas’ aims cannot be negotiated – do I really have to point out that it is no less opposed to a two-state solution than it is to the existence of Jews? – which leaves only a military solution.

Khan’s comparison asserts that Israel indiscriminately drops bombs, almost for the sake of dropping bombs. Yet as he must well know, the IDF goes to extraordinary lengths to warn civilians in advance of its attacks. Which is why, as the UN’s corrected figures show, the ratio of civilian to terrorist deaths in Gaza is lower than in any other conflict for which such figures exist.

As John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, has written: “Israel has done more to prevent civilian casualties in war than any military in history – above and beyond what international law requires and more than the US did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – setting a standard that will be both hard and potentially problematic to repeat.”

This includes evacuating 70 to 90 per cent of civilians from cities before attacks, which the US did not do in the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, the Vietnam Tet counter-offensive or the Korean War.

When the UK was fighting the IRA it was able to operate within Northern Ireland because the IRA was in hiding within the province. Hamas, on the other hand, had control of Gaza. Israel could not move freely around Gaza to carry out its operations against Hamas. To defeat – or even just to degrade – Hamas, it has had to launch an invasion. That by its very nature is more dangerous, both for the IDF and for Gazans – especially as the Gazans are used as human shields by Hamas.

Karim Khan must know this. It is basic stuff. And yet for whatever reason he chooses to ignore it, and to make risible, illegitimate and wrong-headed comparison between the Israeli fight against Hamas and the UK’s defeat of the IRA. He treats the rest of us as fools.