The trouble with humanitarianism.

In the wake of Israel’s sanguinary assault on the MV Mavi Marmara, much of the debate has focused on the question of whether those aboard the Free Gaza flotilla were humanitarians, peace activists, or Hamas supporters. The benign, and, crucially, the depoliticized interpretation was that they were humanitarians bringing aid to a besieged people desperately in need of it. This view was encapsulated in a cartoon that ran in Le Monde two days after the event—it showed a tiny boat populated by stick figures who had their hands raised above their heads and were surrounded by gigantic rifle barrels pointing down at them. The caption had only one word: “Humanitarians.” On the other side of the ledger, the conservative columnist, Christopher Caldwell, wrote in the Financial Times that, the participants aboard the Mavi Marmara had not only a humanitarian motive but a military one--to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza—and, because of that, had in effect become parties to the conflict and, as such, entirely appropriate targets for the Israeli military.

Both of these viewpoints are strangely binary, and, in consequence, occlude more than they reveal. Self-evidently, to speak of Free Gaza’s mission as purely humanitarian is absurd, as the movement’s leader, Greta Berlin, and celebrities on board the Mavi Marmara like the Swedish writer, Henning Mankell, who have written about the event since, make clear. One does not have to agree with Caldwell’s claim that the flotilla was engaged in a military mission to believe that it was engaged in a political one. At the same time, to assert that the humanitarian component was somehow a flag of convenience for a political end, as Israel’s supporters have tended to imply, is to miss the point about what humanitarian action has become, and, perhaps, what it has already been for a long time.

Viewed coldly, and without partisanship, the Free Gaza flotilla represents not just a significant event in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but an extraordinary victory for an idea that has been talked about ad nauseam, but actually rarely put into practice so successfully—the ability of non-state actors not themselves military formations (Caldwell should go back and read his international humanitarian law on proportionality in war) to influence political outcomes in conflict zones. Before the attack on the Mavi Marmara, there was no movement whether from the Israeli side or from Egypt towards modifying the blockade and no serious pressure from major external actors, above all the United States, on the two countries to do so. But today, Egypt has opened its border with Gaza, Prime Minister Netanyahu himself is talking about the need to rethink the blockade, and, whatever they say in public, and whatever they block in the UN Security Council, the Obama administration is pressurizing the Israelis to do just that.

But these ramifications for the Palestinians, for Israel, and for the neighboring countries are only part of the story. Like it or not, the success of the Free Gaza flotilla (or, to put it another way, Israel’s Pyrrhic victory) represents the coming to fruition of the idea of the non-governmental organizations as central players in global geopolitics. And that is where humanitarianism comes in. For one of the central ideas of the modern humanitarian movement, with the exception of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and, at least during the past two decades, the French section of Doctors Without Borders, has been to insist that national sovereignty simply could not be used by states to behave as they wished toward either their own citizens or, as is the case in Gaza, populations they judge to be hostile and who are under their control.

It was Bernard Kouchner, a founder of Doctors Without Borders (though despite what he sometimes implies, he was forced out of the organization decades ago), who wrote of a right of intervention that needed to be added to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Like many of his close collaborators, including Bernard-Henri Levy and Andre Glucksmann, Kouchner has largely been a supporter of Israel. But consider his words, written in 1987, as a preface to a book on the right to intervention, in the light of the Free Gaza flotilla. We, in the outside world, he writes, should not accept that we cannot intervene to help people in need “on the basis of state sovereignty, and a nation’s ‘ownership’ of the sufferings [of its people].” And Kouchner writes that the fact that the relevant authorities forbid such non-state interventions (we are back to Caldwell again) must not be allowed to trump either need or morality.