“Let me remember when I find myself inclined to pity a criminal that there is likewise a pity due to the country.”

-Sir Matthew Hale, The History of the Pleas of the Crown, 1736

Among the many disconcerting stories to come from the international society in recent has been the election of a right-wing Israeli government, whose coalition leaders seem willing to openly flaunt their opposition to any solution that would address the grievances of the occupied Palestinians. Indeed, Israel’s new foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman has chastised the world’s heads of state for using “slogans” such as “occupation, settlements, (and) settlers”. Perhaps the foreign minister purposely left out the “slogans” of corruption and racism, two charges with which Lieberman will have been well acquainted by now.

That the rhetoric of the new government led by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is obliquely absent of the phrase “two state solution” is as distracting as it is worrying. The turn of the New Year, while marked by celebration in some corners of the globe, was a simultaneously choleric and somber affair in the Middle East. The scenes of dead and dread emanating from the Gaza Strip during the egregious 21-day Israeli assault on this embattled territory engulfed the minds of the region’s residents. According to the U.N, Amnesty International, and many individual experts of international law, the actions of the Israeli Defense Forces constituted a transparent violation of the norms of war set by the international society. The rhetorical gymnastics of Israel’s fervent defenders aside, few serious observers would allow for a justification of operation Cast Lead, which offered the typically blinkered Al Jazeera news channel plenty of grim footage to perpetuate its bias on a nightly basis. The concern of this writing, then, can be phrased as a question whose answer does not conform to the reality of the international system: should the occurrence of one disquieting event cause the international society to overlook similarly worrying preceding event?

The conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians is not an easy one to broach; one in which accusations are easily lobbed back and forth, and where justifications are plentiful. Every so often, we receive word, picture and sound of this atrocious reality of protracted Middle Eastern conflict. To the informed and emotional, such a perpetual clash of the haughty forces the heart to pound, battles lines to be drawn, and words of the polemic to flow. Our induced emotional turbulence, whether provoked by the beleaguered cries of the newly widowed or the impassioned prose of a President defending his nation, serve only to perpetuate longstanding hatreds and satisfy our need to take a stand for beliefs we hold dear. Yet when these episodes pass, when the leaders of atrocity and the promoters of atavism sign their treaties, so do the emotional climaxes make their descent. And with these tempered heartbeats come lowered voices. Newspapers no longer publish the advocates of retribution, equity and due process. Events become memories, and crimes that were uncovered are banished to the notebooks of history.

It would be facile to say that the plummet of zeal should not diminish the need for justice and punishment. Such a view, while ultimately agreeable, would indicate quite the romanticized view of the world, attributing little to its actual construct. The lines between the criminals and heroes of the Middle East are often blurred (see, for example, any of coalition leaders of Lebanon’s sectarian democracy). The assigning of blame is a frequent occurrence in a land where friends are the enemy of an enemy. To punish the perpetrators of atrocities that make hollow the international society’s responsibilities to protect and intervene would be to classify a wrongdoer from a pool of his like. As the Kuwaiti poetess Souad al-Sabah wrote in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s conquest of her homeland:

We all participated in the crime
We all took part in the making of the devil
We all applauded the tyrants and tyranny
We can’t complain about our idols.
Was not the making of idols our profession?

Similarly, the punishment of criminals is an exercise typically left to periods of peace. The attack on Gaza was little more than a gruesome fluctuation of a perpetual conflict in which actors on both sides look willing to continue. Richard Goldstone, the head of the 1992 commission to investigate crimes in South Africa and the recently appointed head of a similar investigation in Gaza, has written of the need for a cessation of violence in order for war criminals to be brought to justice. Such a scenario is unlikely in the holy land, as unlikely as the killing of over 300 children to meet with its requisite punishment.

That these crimes may never be gratified with the redress of international law should not serve solely as a depiction of the international society’s ability to forget, but also as a failure of its responsibility to remember. And while the gravity of these atrocities are superseded by calamities in the current annum (see the Tamil population, and note the similarities to the conflict addressed in this article), the threat of forgetfulness is far graver to our conscience than that of any new tidings the conflicts of the international society may bring. In the words of Richard Goldstone:

“War crimes clearly have to be rooted out and people have to be brought to justice. What I’m very strongly against is closing the book on the past and pretending it didn’t happen.”