Tutu in Gaza, meeting Hamas

South African Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is in Gaza on a fact-finding mission that he, along with LSE professor Christine Chinkin, is conducting on behalf of the UN Human Rights Council.
He– and also, presumably, Chinkin– entered Gaza from Egypt through the Rafah international crossing point.
Yesterday, he met with elected Palestinian PM Ismail Haniyeh. The pro-Hamas PIC website reported that, in a press conference that he and Haniyeh held in Gaza, Tutu called for an end to targeting civilians in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Today, Tutu travelled to the north-Gaza town of Beit Hanun where an Israeli attack in November 2006 killed 19 Palestinian civilians (including five women and and eight children) in their own homes. AFP reports that Tutu described his team as “quite devastated” by the accounts he heard in Beit Hanun from survivors of the attack.
It was that incident in Beirut Hanun that Tutu’s team was primarily sent to report on. The team originally planned to investigate the situations both in Beit Hanun and in Israeli places subjected to Hamas rocket attacks, but the government of Israel has continued to deny them the necessary visas and permissions. Indeed, the team was only able to get to Beit Hanun, via Rafah, after Israel’s vise-like control over the Rafah crossing-point was lifted last June, though the modalities for any broader and more more meaningful re-opening of Rafah– such as would allow actual Gazans to connect more easily with the global economy and with family members living in the Palaspora– have yet to be agreed.
AFP says that after hearing the harrowing reports from the Beit Hanun survivors,

Tutu commented that the purpose of the visit was to gather information to write a report for the UN Human Rights Council, “but we wanted to say that we are quite devastated”.
“This is not something you want to wish on your worst enemy,” added the retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town.

It also notes this:

In February, the Israeli army announced that no charges would be brought against Israeli soldiers over the attack.
After conducting an internal investigation, Israel concluded that the shelling of the civilians’ homes was “a rare and grave technical error of the artillery radar system”.
The army said it had been aiming its artillery at an area from which Palestinian militants were firing rockets at Israel but, due to the technical problem, the shells instead hit two homes.

This explanation from the Israeli authorities handily underlines one of the serious problems with the whole notion of focusing only on stopping acts of violence that target civilians.
Both Israel and Hamas say that they do not deliberately target civilians, and there is evidence that, on both sides, this claim is now largely though not completely true. However, “technical errors,” as that Israeli report described the phenomenon, happen. Perhaps they happen more frequently in the case of Hamas’s very primitive rockets. (So should we therefore be calling for an upgrading of Hamas’s capacity to target its rockets more precisely?) It is also the case that some of the non-Hamas groups in Gaza are less focused than Hamas on trying to target only military facilities on the other side.
But if there is a “targeting capability gap” between the forces on the two sides of the Gaza-Israel border, we should recognize that there is also a truly gargantuan “lethality gap” between the two forces, too.
So when the Israeli forces– whether through a mere “technical error of the artillery radar system” or through a much more serious, and potentially justiciable, case of inattention to the potential for such an error– end up mistargeting their ordnance, it has effects that are considerably more harmful to the civilians living in the combat-zone.
Also, just look at the sheer number of artillery shells, missiles, mortar shells, high-impact bullets, etc, that Israel uses during any escalation of hostilities with Gaza. If each piece of ordnance has just a tiny chance of suffering “targeting error”, then the greater the number of pieces of ordnance you launch, then the more the chance of error happening increases. This is not hard-to-understand “rocket science”. It’s the simple arithmetic of aggregating probabilities. Plus, if soldiers are shooting off large numbers of rockets, shells, big bullets, etc during any battle, then the complexity of managing that amount of fire mounts as well, so the probability of “targeting error’ mounts somewhat more than arithmetically.
Month after month after month , the highly lopsided mortality figures– for civilians– on each side of the Gaza-Israel border underline these disparities in the lethality and sheer number of pieces of ordnance used.
It strikes me, therefore, that while all the well-intentioned humanitarians around the world continue to try to stress the principle of trying to “avoid targeting civilians”, that will not on its own do much to reduce the actual harm that this conflict has caused to civilians over recent months and years. What we need to focus on, rather, is finding a way to end the hostilities themselves. In the first instance this might be just a limited tahdi’eh (ceasefire.) But once that ceasefire is won, enormous further efforts immediately need to be invested in finding a final and sustainable end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in all its dimensions.
The conflict itself inflicts continuing harm on civilians, primarily on Palestinian civilians around the world whose families are split up, properties expropriated, immediate environment darkened by the threat of further attack, rights denied, etc. The conflict also inflicts harm on Israeli civilians by harming some of them directly and by forcing them all, too, to live in an atmosphere of dread and threat and preventing them from concluding normal neighborly relations with the peoples living all around them.
… But anyway, it is a great first step that Tutu and his team have visited Gaza, that they’ve talked to Haniyeh, and done something to bring the ghastly experiences of the survivors of the Beit Hanun massacre to world attention. This, coming shortly after Pres. Jimmy Carter’s recent groundbreaking visit with overall Hamas head Khaled Meshaal.
So let’s now move rapidly on from here to a robust ceasefire, and then a final peace?
Do you think final peace is unlikely and/or unattainable? Desmond Tutu could probably tell you a few things about how determined and well-organized action taken by a principled coalition acting across national borders can make radical transformations from conflict to basic peace happen much sooner than anyone once thought possible.