Month: November 2012

Walter Russell Mead claims that Americans support Israel's use of overwhelming force, even if it means more victims like those above:

Certainly if some kind of terrorist organization were to set up missile factories across the frontier in Canada and Mexico and start attacking targets in the United States, the American people would demand that their President use all necessary force without stint or limit until the resistance had been completely, utterly and pitilessly crushed. Those Americans who share this view of war might feel sorrow at the loss of innocent life, of the children and non-combatants killed when overwhelming American power was used to take the terrorists out, but they would feel no moral guilt. The guilt would be on the shoulders of those who started the whole thing by launching the missiles.

But what if the US had previously invaded and occupied part of Mexico, was populating that area with Americans, building American free-ways to build new cities, and slowly asphyxiating the native Mexican population with barbed wire, road-checks, and economic isolation? Wouldn't some of us support undoing the annexation and settlements rather than bombing the crap out of Mexico City in an unrelenting escalation? But Mead has no truck for the tradition of just warfare when it comes to Israel:

[T]he kind of tit-for-tat limited warfare that the doctrine of proportionality would require is a recipe for unending war: for decades of random air strikes, bombs and other raids. An endless war of limited intensity is worse, many Americans instinctively feel, than a time-limited war of unlimited ferocity. A crushing blow that brings an end to the war—like General Sherman’s march of destruction through the Confederacy in 1864-65—is ultimately kinder even to the vanquished than an endless state of desultory war.

So now we're talking Sherman! How many dead Arabs will satisfy Mead? Does he really want Israel to do to Gaza and the West Bank what Russia did to Chechnya? And what does "unlimited ferocity" mean? Nuking them? Or just mass death arriving from the skies? Would that really be "kinder"?

Yes, he used that word: kinder. To mean a Shermanesque march with not a smidgen of "moral guilt". We have gone through the moral looking glass. Tribalism will make you do that, if you are not careful. 

(Photo: The bodies of a children from the al-Dallu family lay draped in Palestinian and Hamas (2R) flags during the funeral of several members from the al-Dallu family in Gaza City on November 19, 2012. An Israeli missile struck a three-story building in Gaza City on November 18, killing several members of the al-Dallu family – five of them children – and two of their neighbours, medics said. Full story here.  By Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images)

One of the most widely distributed photographs from the past week’s Israeli/Palestinian violence has itself become a conflict. The dead child in this photograph, an image I referred to last week, was originally reported as having been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Not so fast:

The highly publicised death of four-year-old Mohammed Sadallah appear[s] to have been the result of a misfiring home-made rocket, not a bomb dropped by Israel. The child’s death on Friday figured prominently in media coverage after Hisham Kandil, the Egyptian prime minister, was filmed lifting his dead body out of an ambulance. “The boy, the martyr, whose blood is still on my hands and clothes, is something that we cannot keep silent about,” he said, before promising to defend the Palestinian people. But experts from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights who visited the site on Saturday said they believed that the explosion was caused by a Palestinian rocket.

Max Fisher contemplates the controversy:

The mere fact that we’re [questioning the validity or spin of these photographs] shows the degree to which images of human suffering in Israel-Palestinian violence are treated as necessarily, even primarily, political; as pieces of evidence to bring before the court of global public opinion. The photos are evaluated on their political strengths and weaknesses: Is the Egyptian prime minister leaning unnaturally into the frame? Do we know for sure that the 11-month-old son of a journalist was killed [link] by an Israeli munition? Was Netanyahu’s tweet [link] too strong?

I have kept my distance from commenting on the latest spiral in this miserable conflict for the past few days. Why? Because the passion on both sides is part of a tribalism that I despise in a conflict to which all now appear to be addicted. The fusion of religion and politics is bad enough; the fusion of politics and religion and territory is the nadir of human conflict. No good can come from it. Who wants to stare into its depressing abyss?

And, alas, the activities and vile philosophy of Hamas are simply incompatible with any compromise; and the same must be said of the potential Netanyahu-Lieberman coalition this latest piece of “deterrence-enhancement” seems to be designed, in part, to elect. State assassination of other countries’ leaders is a grotesque act that sets a horrifying precedent any Western country should fear. So too is the targeting of civilians of another country by missile. I wish I could share Peter Beinart’s hope for some kind of negotiation between Israel and Hamas. But after the last four years of Netanyahu’s Cheney-esque mindset determining events, and Hamas’ and Netanyahu’s successful weakening of Abbas’s hand, all I can say is that I admire Peter’s tenacity. At least he still cares.

My ennui comes from the now obvious conclusion. With each of these incursions, Israel is even further embittering and alienating the next generation of Arabs, a generation that will likely determine the future of an increasingly democratic and populist Middle East. As time goes by, technology will also steadily increase the chances of conflict reaching within 1967-lines Israel itself. As Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s rockets gain greater range and accuracy, Israel’s relentless colonization of Palestinian land on the West Bank will encourage them further.

In other words, without diplomacy toward a two-state solution, we are looking at a lifetime of constant Israeli warfare against all of its neighbors, deeper isolation in the region (with Turkey and Egypt already fast moving away) and growing international pariah status as Greater Israel becomes more fundamentalist and less democratic. And at some point, as America’s energy revolution leaves us less and less exposed to Middle East oil, and as the national interest becomes more attuned to events in Asia and the Pacific, and as the occupation turns Israel into the South Africa of the 21st Century, the Jewish state will become a self-evident burden for America, spawning terror and conflict and anti-Americanism as far as the eye can see. If all Israel can count on then are America’s Christianists and the current GOP, if they continue to spurn American attempts to unwind the conflict by undoing the settlements, then Israelis should be genuinely afraid for their future. I sure am.

They are slowly preparing for national suicide – both in how they operate within the land they control and beyond it. Obama has tried to save them. But you cannot save those who refuse to save themselves.

(Photo: Kashmiri Lawyers set an Israeli flag on fire while holding placards during a protest against Israel and in solidarity with Palestine in the city centre on November 19, 2012 in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian administered Kashmir, India. By Yawar Nazir/Getty Images.)