Rearview Mirror

Lessons of Gaza:

The Cost of Accountability and of Reprisal

The genocide debate -- is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? -- which I commented on a few weeks ago, raises other problematic issues. One involves the legitimacy of reprisal. A second inheres in the idea of "accountability." Let us take them up in turn. The notion of reprisal is codified in the "laws" of war. To be clear, Israeli authorities aren't claiming that reprisal is at stake; rather they have been in a protracted war with an unrelenting terrorist enemy. Nonetheless reprisal, if not revenge, remains an underlying theme: "They started it"is the eternal cry of the child or country who resorts to violence. The so-called laws of war -- aspirational international agreements -- do envisage that reprisals can be staged after an enemy's prior illegal acts, so long as these actions try to stick to military targets and observe "proportionality," or crudely put, keep the body count at an equal magnitude. Thus in Gaza, the Israelis point to the Hamas rampage as the provocation for their action, and the Gazans cite their 60,000 or more dead as a violation of proportionality.

The language of reprisal implies that it is not always possible to keep a pristine boundary between military and civilian targets, much less to distinguish between good soldiers and bad ones. The most notorious incidents in Western Europe during World War II occurred at the hands of SS divisions in France (Ouradour sur Glâne) and in Italy (the Ardeatine Cave massacre), but countless murders of civilians took place in Eastern Europe, massacres documented in the celebrated 1995 West German exhibit on crimes of the Wehrmacht (Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941-44).

The case that I know best involved the German retreat in Italy as British and American soldiers, abetted by local resistance units, were retaking the Tuscan Val di Chiana at the end of June 1944. The German theater commander General Kesselring had decreed that attacks by Italian partisans would be avenged at a ten-to-one ratio. A bar dispute occurred in the village of Civitella in which non-uniformed Italian partisans, provoked perhaps by a fight over a girl, shot a couple of German soldiers. Two were killed, one or two, though, made it back to their units to report what had happened. Many of the villagers foresaw the probable consequences and fled the village. But thinking that the Germans had continued their retreat when no immediate reprisal followed, they returned too early and were rounded up a week later -- 244 plucked from the village church celebration of the June 29 Feast of Saints Peter and Paul -- and shot in groups behind the church. Perhaps another 750 were executed from villages nearby. In the decades afterward, locals debated whether "the Resistance" had behaved irresponsibly when they knew that collective vengeance would be carried out. The issue fed into partisan divisions. The Communist parties of France and Italy defended the righteousness of assassinating German soldiers.

There will always be controversy as to when a sequence of criminal violations begins. The chain of offenses seems endless. Does the current chain of violence in Gaza and the related continuing violence in the West Bank and Lebanon begin with October 7, 2023? With the deficiencies of the Oslo agreements? With the unwillingness of Israel or Arab states to follow through on land-for-peace efforts after 1967? With the Nakba and the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Arabs in 1948? With the Arab armies' attack on the state of Israel in May 1948? With the contradictory British pledges to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine in the 1930s even as the Nazis' coming to power led to increased Jewish settlement? With the British pledge in 1916 to look with favor on a Jewish homeland -- the Balfour Declaration -- in territory far from England that they were running as a colony. Jews, of course, were not just newcomers; they had continued to live in the region since perhaps 1100 years or so BCE, but had in turn conquered it from previous settlers. History seems a series of reciprocal grievances stretching into the remote past -- a tale of perpetual revenge and of the need to take vengeance on those chosen to be loser in the most recent round of killing.

Each episode is justified by the virtuous call for accountability. When I wrote on this theme indirectly and now forty years ago in The Unmasterable Past, accountability seemed to me to be a self-explanatory duty. There had not been enough of it after World War II: recall the cold-war amnesties for German war criminals, or the stubborn refusal of Chancellor Adenauer to remove Hans Globke, his chief of staff of his Chancellery in the 1960s but a drafter of the Nuremberg laws in the 1930s. The lack of accountability seemed indecent. Still the question persists: did the stability of the Federal Republic benefit from such institutional amnesia? Would stringent accountability have helped postwar democratic consensus? Spain forewent accountability when it moved on from the Franco regime. South Africa sought to find a way of finding reconciliation through a combination of acknowledgment and amnesty by means of the Truth and Reconciliation process. Not every previous victim could personally accept the bargain, which has been defended as "restorative justice." It is often not very tasteful. Did President Clinton have to meet with Gerry Adams? The underlying question is whether political societies can we have both reprisal and reconciliation? Should there be a half-life for personal national, religious, racial, tribal grievances? If so of what duration? Can politics transcend being just a continuation of war by other means? Did Hobbes and Carl Schmitt express a truth that Locke, Mill, and even Isaiah Berlin refused to face up to? Or is it a functioning capitalism that imposes an imperfect compromise? Contemporary America may be putting these questions to the test once again.

CSM August 7, 2025