OPINION: ‘Perhaps Michael Gove was right – we’ve had enough of experts’
'EVERYONE has an opinion on Israel, but are they forgetting about the hostages still captive in Gaza?' asks communications adviser Andrew Freedman for Jewish News
In the run up to Britain’s referendum on membership of the European Union, the then lord chancellor, Michael Gove, declared “this country has had enough of experts”.
To say that experts have made a comeback would be an understatement. Today, we live in a country- and indeed a world- of experts. Whether an epidemiologist (Covid), constitutional scholar (prorogation of Parliament- remember that?) and specialist in international humanitarian law (Israel), experts are back.
Forgetting social media, with its own Wild West of an editorial code, media outlets and indeed their guests, whatever their background or pedigree tend to be a jurisprudential scholar, war studies professor, or a moral philosopher.
What luck for Israel. Day after day journalists and pundits all bandy about weighty terms to add heft to their argument: Israel is exhorted to abide by international law. Sometimes “humanitarian” is thrown in for good measure. Often, people who do not hold Israeli citizenship, pay no taxes to the State, and may never have even set foot into the travelator at Ben Gurion, are still asked to opine on issues pertinent to the sovereign state. Issues that citizens who pay taxes and send their children to the army have an informed right to express.
Earlier today, an MP said in a tone similar to a headmaster berating a wayward pupil, that Israel has been given too much leeway in its military activity and it must abide by international humanitarian law to which it is a signatory. I’m sure that the MP’s expertise in asymmetric military warfare comes in handy with local surgeries conducted within his constituency.
His statement epitomised how the world at large appears to treat Israel: like the wayward pupil: everyone knows what’s best – if only the pupil would listen to the teacher.
Numbers of innocent Gazans who have died continue to vary depending upon the level of outrage of the speaker. But of course, casualties do happen in war. And each one is a tragedy. Isn’t the saddest logical conclusion of any warfare that innocents will die? War is not a hermeneutically sealed experiment. Idealised conditions belong to the textbook and the training ground. That is the sad but inevitable result of Hamas’ actions on 7 October. What sovereign state could not respond militarily? What sovereign state could not continue to fulfil its sacred obligation to bring its citizens home from captivity?
The most recent iteration of experts are those who opine on the Genocide Convention. While some blithely accuse Israel of genocide, there are those who try to demonstrate some sort of fairness by paying lip service to Israel’s plight. They talk about the “clearly awful” “shocking” “deplorable” actions by Hamas on 7 October.
But what they tend to forget about while ostensibly defending Israel, is about the hostages held in Gaza. Remember them? We do. All 236 of them.
And if nobody purports to be an expert on the captivity of innocent men, women and children by terrorists, then the hostages become an inconvenient truth who collectively bear living testimony to the horrors Hamas has wrought. And who wants to hear about that?
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