Dissents Of The Day

Several readers take issue with my 23 -1 post on proportionality:

A “fair fight”?  When did that become an element in the definition of a Just War?  The most merciful of wars are probably the ones where one side overwhelmed the other as completely and quickly as possible. Whatever one may think of WWII, its finish (atom bombs and crushing superiority) was certainly not a “fair fight”.

Agreed that the conflation of “fair fight” with “just war” confuses much more than it clarifies. Just war requires never targeting civilians, period. I can merely see the desperate logic behind it, but that doesn’t excuse it for an instant. Another elaborates:

Are you really arguing that “proportionality” means an eye for an eye and that it would be proportional for Israel to shoot the same rockets back at Hamas as Hamas shoots at it but it is totally unfair for Israel to use its technological advantage? Or perhaps Israel is meant to send suicide bombs into civilian areas or something.  Maybe the US should have invaded Afghanistan with only the same tools the Taliban had.

Don’t be silly.  Proportionality doesn’t mean it has to be a “fair fight”.  Israel acts badly in this, but not because it’s better equipped and more powerful than Hamas.

I think Israel‘s best tactic IS to stop responding to Hamas, take purely protective action and say to the world “see, these people keep trying to kill us no matter what we do”.  Or maybe Hamas would actually stop attacking and there would be a peace to negotiate in.  Stranger things have happened.

Let’s all remember that the Arabs tried repeatedly to wipe out Israel from the moment it was declared to exist.  There WAS a two-state solution and they tried to drive it into the sea.  If they had lived and let live there would be a two-state solution today.  This is all historical fact.  The Arab side tried to obliterate Israel, still denies Israel‘s right to exist, and only fails because Israel (with the help of the USA) became too strong for it.  I feel sorry for the Palestinian people, but their leadership is what has created this situation.  They are not some innocents trodden on by an evil imperialist Israel.

I’m not defending Palestinian leadership over the last several decades because it’s not worth defending. But the West Bank has produced a generation of peaceful leaders in the last decade who have been rewarded for their moderation by ever more settlements and humiliations. And of course, Israel’s original establishment was a radical intervention in another people’s land to which those existing inhabitants never consented. To note Palestinian resistance without noting the Israeli incursion and violence and terror that is known by Palestinians as the nakba is to miss exactly half the story, and to misread everything thereafter. Another reader:

Until Hamas declined the ceasefire, I was largely aligned with your recent coverage of recent events. Even though Israel does not intend to kill those innocents it does, it knows that it will happen, and thus doing so is immoral if the back and forth can be stopped. And I figured if Israel stopped shelling, Hamas would stop wasting its ineffectual missiles. So I put the blame on Israel. I was wrong.

And, yes, the missiles are largely ineffective, but that doesn’t change the fact that Israelis simply shouldn’t ever have to accept that hundreds of missiles fired per day is normal, that no attempt to squelch them is justified. Some Israelis sitting on a hill is a small sample size and proves nothing. There are countless others who describe their fear. As long as Hamas rejects a cease fire, there is no moral ambiguity here.

Even apart from the recent conflict, you routinely neglect to reference a single key fact that really informs my view of the conflict, generally, when I feel torn about what’s “moral” and “right.” And the reader who wrote in on your most recent post “23-1” ignores it entirely.

Only ONE side in this conflict has the power to lay down their arms and renounce violence without the fear of instant death and/or destruction. Hamas, Fatah, and/or Palestinians generally, have the power to actually change the situation. Renounce violence, renounce the right of return, renounce any hold over part of Jerusalem (frankly, I’ve never understood why any country in control of its capital should ever be willing to give part of it up to an enemy that reviles its very existence). If a campaign of peace and acceptance of Israel’s existence swept through the Palestinian communities, then Israel would have no reason to fear opening the West Bank’s border with Jordan, would have no reason to keep Gazans penned, and would have no reason to exist in a state of fear.

And if Netanyahu and his right-wingers in government still kept the situation as is, there would be no ambiguity. It would be immoral with no possible justification. As it is, though, how can you sit here and expect a country with terrorists at its borders to relax and treat the Palestinian communities that support those very terrorists with any kind of respect or trust? How can you suggest that Israel is to blame for the current situation when Israelis (not “Greater Israelis,” who are no better than Hamas) would be happy to live in peace if their neighbors would let them do so? It is a somewhat fanciful notion, given history, but the fact is that Palestinians hold their own salvation in their hands, they just choose to hate instead. Israelis do not have a choice.

I’ll end this just by saying that while Gaza may be on open air prison, and there may be resulting psychological effects from that, Israel is an open air bunker, something that comes with its own attendant psychological effects. Israel is comprised of a bunch of Jews (and some Arabs) surrounded by a sea of millions more who hate them passionately. If you choose to give the Palestinians of Gaza the benefit of the doubt for being imprisoned, you have to do the same for the Israelis.

Is my reader saying that if Israel stopped its Gaza campaign, it would face “the fear of instant death and/or destruction”? Isn’t that exactly what has been disproved in the past decade, as the wall has severed the West Bank and Palestinians from most Israelis and reduced terrorist deaths in Israel proper to a fraction of the past? Hasn’t the Iron Dome also made the notion of instant destruction largely moot, given the pathetic home-made rockets Hamas is sending into the air? Yes, the Palestinians have a choice; but so too do the Israelis. They are the regional super-power. They have virtual impunity for anything they do. Within that context, their extra security on the Jordan border could easily be guaranteed by other countries, and the US has offered to do just that. Israel could easily acquiesce to a real, democratic Palestinian state on the West Bank, and use its success as a way to lure Gazans out of Hamas’ embrace. But Israel not only refuses to do this; it has intensified its colonization of the West Bank, while balking at any efforts to freeze or restrain it; and has fostered an atmosphere of hatred and intolerance that makes any future compromise increasingly hard to envisage at all.

I cannot and won’t justify Hamas’ desperate, criminal, cynical tactics. But there is nothing to negotiate with Bibi Netanyahu over, except the degree to which you are completely fucked. The goal – as plain as day – is to entrench Greater Israel as a permanent state, and, if the brutal logic holds, eventual ethnic cleansing to keep its tenuous Jewish majority. My view is that anyone who does not see that is doomed to misunderstand what’s going on. Which is a sliding, intensifying tragedy.