Dresden, February 1945: Our parents and grandparents received the news of Dresden's destruction with equanimity. We were at war. By 1945 the civilian population of Germany had ceased to be "collateral damage", they were now regarded as legitimate targets. Israel's deliberate targeting of civilians in Gaza is not without precedent.
SUCH A BRIEF RESPITE.
Barely time to find water – let alone food. And all around the shelter fires
blazing unchecked. She did not tell her children what she had seen in the
streets. Could not admit, even to herself, what lay there. Where was God, she
wondered, amidst all this death? As if in answer, the sirens wailed again,
their harsh note of alarm rising and falling like the cry of some gigantic
beast in pain. In the shelter they could already hear the ominous drone of the
bombers. And then, the thud, thud, thud of the bombs.
God may have been absent from Dresden on St Valentine’s Day
1945, but the Devil was there and he had brought the fires of Hell with him.
My wife and I have been arguing about Gaza. She demands to know
what benefit Israel could possibly derive from deliberately bombing and
shelling innocent women and children? I asked her what benefit our
grandparent’s generation derived from ordering the bombing of Dresden – a city
packed with refugees posing no threat to either the British, the Americans or
the Russians? By February 1945 the Allies were driving Adolf Hitler’s
battered armies before them and in less than three months the war in Europe
would be over. Why unleash a firestorm on one of Germany’s most beautiful
cities? Why kill 25,000 people, most of them women and children, needlessly?
Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris justified the Allies’ terror
bombing of German cities in explicitly biblical terms:
“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish
delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to
bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they
put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they
are going to reap the whirlwind.”
Those words may sound harsh to New Zealanders living in the
twenty-first century, but in the ears of our parents and grandparents they
sounded both true and just. In the eyes of Hitler’s enemies, Nazism was an
unmitigated evil which had to be destroyed – by any means necessary.
Once a nation thrusts itself into the unrelenting horrors of
war, its over-riding priority is to end them, on the most favourable terms
possible, as quickly as possible.
Almost exactly 100 years ago, at the outbreak of the First
World War, Great Britain’s first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill,
ordered the Royal Navy to institute a complete naval blockade of Germany. Of
this ruthless strategic decision he would later write: “The British blockade
treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly
sought to starve the whole population – men, women, and children, old and
young, wounded and sound – into submission.”
These are not pleasant facts to dwell upon. The
terror-bombing of civilians. The deliberate starvation of whole populations.
And yet, these were, indisputably, the tactics employed by “our side” in both
world wars. Unsurprisingly, when paying our respects to “the glorious dead” on
ANZAC Day, we prefer to draw a veil across the inglorious death we inflicted in
return.
I wonder, were it possible to travel back in time and
confront our parents’ and grandparents’
younger selves about these measures; if we could demand to know their
justifications for acquiescing, without protest, in these crimes against
humanity: how would they respond?
I think they would look at us strangely. I think they would
shake their heads in disbelief. I think they would reply, simply: “We are at
war.”
That same incomprehension is similarly imprinted on the
faces of Israelis when the world demands to know why their jets and artillery
are pounding Gaza until the rubble bounces; why the whole of the Gaza Strip is
being treated, in Churchill’s words, “as if it were a beleaguered fortress” and
why “the whole population – men, women, and children, old and young, wounded
and sound” are being ruthlessly bombed and shelled and starved into submission.
“Does the world not understand that we are
at war?” Israel asks.
“They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind.” So said
the Prophet Hosea. If Bomber Harris could quote the Bible, can Israel not quote
the Torah?
Gaza, July 2014.
Such a brief respite.
Barely time to find water – let alone food. And all around the UN school fires
blazing unchecked. She did not tell her children what she had seen in the
streets. Could not admit, even to herself, what lay there. Where was Allah, she
wondered, amidst all this death? As if in answer, the sirens wailed, their
harsh note of alarm rising and falling like the cry of some gigantic beast in
pain. In the shelter they could already hear the hideous screech of the jets.
And then, the thud, thud, thud of the bombs …
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
5 August 2014.
