Category: The Dish

Who Is Putting Gazan Lives At Risk?

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Philip Klein flags an UNRWA statement about rockets its relief workers found stored in a vacant Gaza school, offering it as proof of Hamas’s disregard for the lives of Gazans:

UNRWA said it had taken steps to have the weapons removed. As I noted on Wednesday, the fact that Palestinian terrorists store and fire rockets from schools, hospitals and residential areas increases the likelihood of civilian casualties.

But does that justify bombing the school? Max Fisher thinks not:

Israel has overwhelming military superiority in the conflict, and while that does not make Hamas rockets disappear or obviate their very real effects on Israeli civilians, Israel is strong enough to choose not to bomb a mosque and a center for the disabled in Gaza, as it did on July 12. It can choose not to bomb Gaza beaches frequented by civilians, as it did on Wednesday, killing four boys between the ages of 9 and 11. …

This is the one thing that both Hamas and Israel seem to share: a willingness to adopt military tactics that will put Palestinian civilians at direct risk and that contribute, however unintentionally, to the deaths of Palestinian civilians. Partisans in the Israel-Palestine conflict want to make that an argument over which “side” has greater moral culpability in the continued killings of Palestinian civilians. And there is validity to asking whether Hamas should so ensconce itself among civilians in a way that will invite attacks, just as there is validity to asking why Israel seems to show so little restraint in dropping bombs over Gaza neighborhoods. But even that argument over moral superiority ultimately treats those dying Palestinian families as pawns in the conflict, tokens to be counted for or against, their humanity and suffering so easily disregarded

Both sides are putting innocent Gazan lives at risk. And Israel cannot grotesquely pin the deaths of, say, those four boys, or countless others, on Hamas. Omar Baddar adds that the question of who is using “human shields” is also not as clear as Israel would like it to be:

While human rights organizations haven’t yet addressed “human shields” allegations in the ongoing round of Israel-Gaza violence, they did after the 2009 round when Israel killed at least 773 Palestinian civilians, compared to three Israeli civilian casualties (a ratio of 257:1), and used the same “human shields” argument to deflect responsibility for those deaths. When the dust settled, Amnesty International investigated the matter and concluded that there was “no evidence that [Palestinian] rockets were launched from residential houses or buildings while civilians were in these buildings.” …

By contrast, the same report found that “in several cases Israeli soldiers also used [Palestinian] civilians, including children, as ‘human shields’.” Going back in time just a little further to put this into context is important: when the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the Israeli military had to stop using Palestinian civilians as human shields, the Israeli “defense” establishment objected to the ruling. The appeal against the ruling failed, and the practice remains technically illegal, but Israel implicitly encourages it to continue by offering an “inadequate … slap on the wrist,” as Human Rights Watch put it, to Israeli soldiers caught using this reprehensible tactic.

Christa Case Bryant and Ahmed Aldabba examine why Gaza doesn’t have bomb shelters like Israel does:

If Gaza’s leadership were able to replicate [Israel’s] civilian infrastructure, would it be able to achieve similar protection in the face of Israel’s military superiority? “If there is a direct [Israeli] hit … the shelter will not stand,” says Lt. Col. Avi Bitzur (res.), former head of the Israeli military’s fortifications branch. “If [the munitions] will fall next to the shelter, it can stand against it.”

From an urban planning perspective, it would be feasible to build an extensive network of civilian shelters in Gaza despite the outdated infrastructure, says Bitzur, who now serves as deputy head of Homefront Defense Studies at Beit Berl College.  But financially it is unworkable, he says. “It’s too much expense, too much to do it now. You cannot give now a shelter for 1.5 million people,” he says, estimating that it would require billions of shekels and at least five to six years.

(Photo: A Palestinian man holds his daughters, Shada and Lama al-Ejla, who were injured in an Israeli tank attack, as he leaves al-Shifa hospital on July 18, 2014 in Gaza City. Israel warned it could broaden a Gaza ground assault aimed at smashing Hamas’s network of cross-border tunnels, as it stepped up attacks that have killed more than 260 Palestinians. By Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images.)

How Reagan Handled A Situation Like This

Andrew Rudalevige draws parallels between the MH17 tragedy and the USSR shooting down a Korean Airlines plane in 1983. Reagan’s reaction to it:

Reagan demanded an apology to the world and continued a number of sanctions — but he decided not to end grain sales to the USSR or to suspend arms control talks. George Will argued that “the administration is pathetic…. We didn’t elect a dictionary. We elected a President and it’s time for him to act.”  The Manchester Union-Leader editorialized that “if someone had told us three years ago that the Russians could blow a civilian airliner out of the skies – and not face one whit of retaliation from a Ronald Reagan administration, we would have called that crazy. It is crazy. It is insane. It is exactly what happened.”

Even at the height of the Cold War, however — and keeping in mind that the flight had departed from the U.S., with dozens of American passengers, including a sitting member of Congress – Reagan told a National Security Meeting that “we’ve got to protect against overreaction. Vengeance isn’t the name of the game.”

What Putin And Netanyahu Have In Common

Meeting of Vladimir Putin with Benjamin Netanyahu in Kremlin

Both have been riding nationalist waves of xenophobia – and have done their best to inflame it some more; both believe that military force is the first resort when challenged; both have contempt for the United States under its current president; both regard Europeans as pathetic weaklings and moral squishes; both use a pliant mass media to instill the tropes of paranoia, wounded pride and revenge; both target “infiltrators” in their midst, whether it be African immigrants and Palestinians or gays and Westerners; and both have invaded and threatened their neighbors. Perhaps most important of all: both have lost control to the even more enraged extremists to their right.

Check out the thoughts of  Gleb Pavlovsky as told to David Remnick:

The nightly television broadcasts from Ukraine, so full of wild exaggeration about Ukrainian “fascists” and mass carnage, are a Kremlin-produced “spectacle,” [Pavlovsky] said, expertly crafted by the heads of the main state networks. “Now this has become a problem for Putin, because this system cannot be wholly managed,” Pavlovsky said. The news programs have “overheated” public opinion and the collective political imagination.

“How can Putin really manage this?” Pavlovsky went on. “You’d need to be an amazing conductor. Stalin was an amazing conductor in this way. Putin can’t quite pull off this trick. The audience is warmed up and ready to go; it is wound up and waiting for more and more conflict. You can’t just say, ‘Calm down.’ It’s a dangerous moment. Today, forty per cent of Russia wants real war with Ukraine. Putin himself doesn’t want war with Ukraine. But people are responding to this media machine. Putin needs to lower the temperature.”

Now consider the vigilantes who poured gasoline down the throat of a young Palestinian and burned him alive. Do you think they come out of a vacuum? Or the horrifying tweets of young Israelis proudly urging genocide of Arabs. Or the cheers from the hilltops outside Sderot as Israelis celebrate the slaughter of civilians in Gaza. Or the fact that Netanyahu’s endless provocations have led to a cabinet even more hawkish than he and a country ever further away from any reconciliation with the people whose land it took decades ago.

Both men have the supreme self-confidence of fools; and the political instincts of geopolitical arsonists. Our only hope in restraining them is to watch them slowly hoist by their own canards. The problem is that hundreds of civilians in an airplane and in the crowded streets of Gaza keep becoming the collateral victims of their posturing.

(Photo: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian president Vladimir Putin appear during the Security Council meeting in the Kremlin on November 20, 2013 in Moscow, Russia. Netanyahu was on a one-day visit to Russia. By Dmitri Azarov/Kommersant via Getty Images.)

Culpability And Morality In Gaza

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Emily Hauser reflects on these thorny questions:

Targeting enemy civilians is a war crime. Let’s not entertain any doubt about that. Hamas and other Palestinian militants have targeted Israeli civilians with rockets for years; the fact that these rockets are crude and their aim poor doesn’t mitigate the simple fact: Targeting civilians is a war crime. Trying to determine who “started” our current state of conflict is not quite so simple, though, unless we accept ideology as fact. For some Jews, the Palestinians started it by refusing to accept our nationalism as ascendant to theirs; for some Palestinians, the Jews started it, in precisely the same way.

If, however, we’re trying to uncover a chain of discrete events leading to the seemingly permanent state of war between Israel and Gaza, the waters are muddy. Did the latest round of rockets come in response to an IDF incursion, or the other way around? Did it start when Israel neutralized a terrorist infiltrator, or was that terrorist a farmer trying to gather crops? Both sides play into the provocation-response cycle, each conveniently forgetting that actions have consequences, often beyond those we first imagined.

Her bottom line:

I have lived under missile attack, and I have family under attack in the south right now. I do not for one moment doubt Israel’s right to self-defense. But even if we set aside the damage and forget the dead, if we remain incurious about the impact both might have on our enemy’s will to compromise – even if all we consider is sheer efficacy – how can we look at this history and believe that repeating past failures will keep the Jewish State safe? Are you safe now?

For Gobry, it is crystal clear that Israel has the moral high ground:

What I have not forgotten is the following: the State of Israel is a democracy with the rule of law and respect for human rights (yes, imperfect, unlike the United States and Europe, which, as we all know, are perfect); demonic hatred of Jews is a real and persistent fact of history and when left unchecked it always leads to atrocities; this demonic hatred is absolutely clearly distilled into the enemies of Israel; and most, most importantly this: if tomorrow Hamas, Hizbullah and other enemies of Israel dropped their weapons, peace would break out; if tomorrow Israel dropped its weapons, a genocide would break out.

There is, there can be, no moral equivalency. Sometimes there really are Good Guys and Bad Guys.

But not to Seumas Milne, who stresses the centrality of the occupation in driving the conflict:

The idea that Israel is defending itself against unprovoked attacks from outside its borders is an absurdity. Despite Israel’s withdrawal of settlements and bases in 2005, Gaza remains occupied both in reality and international law, its border, coastal waters, resources, airspace and power supply controlled by Israel.

So the Palestinians of Gaza are an occupied people, like those in the West Bank, who have the right to resist, by force if they choose – though not deliberately to target civilians. But Israel does not have a right of self-defence over territories it illegally occupies – it has an obligation to withdraw. That occupation, underpinned by the US and its allies, is now entering its 48th year. Most of the 1.8 million Palestinians enduring continuous bombardment in Gaza are themselves refugees or their descendants, who were driven out or fled from cities such as Jaffa 66 years ago when Israel was established.

Waldman argues that justifying Israel’s assault by referring to Hamas’s criminality is “no justification at all”:

It’s been said many times that no government would tolerate rockets being fired into its territory without a response, which is true. But those rockets do not grant Israel a pass from moral responsibility for what it does and the deaths it causes, any more than prior acts of terrorism have. In this as in so many conflicts, both sides—and those who defend each—try to justify their own abdication of human morality with a plea that what the other side has done or is doing is worse. We’ve heard that argument made before, and we’ll continue to hear it. But when we do, we should acknowledge it for what it is: no justification at all.

Actions are either defensible on their own terms or they aren’t. The brutality of your enemy makes no difference in that judgment. It wasn’t acceptable for the Bush administration’s defenders to say (as many did) that torturing prisoners was justified because Al Qaeda beheads prisoners, which is worse. And our judgment of Hamas’s lobbing of hundreds of rockets toward civilian areas tells us nothing about whether Israel’s actions in Gaza are right or wrong.

(Photo: A relative mourns during the funeral of Rani Abu Tawila, a Palestinian who was killed in an Israeli attack, on July 18, 2014 in Gaza city. Israel warned it could broaden a Gaza ground assault aimed at smashing Hamas’s network of cross-border tunnels, as it stepped up attacks that have killed more than 260 Palestinians. By Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty.)

No Drama Obama vs High Drama Putin: Meep Meep

It’s been a study in contrasts for quite some time. One global leader whips up nationalist sentiment to get sky-high ratings at home; the other glides through another summer of Tea Party dyspepsia with imperturbable equanimity. One leader acts on the world stage by annexing a neighboring country and then threatening it some more; the other slowly and painstakingly ratchets up sanctions, whether it be on Iran or Russia, and keeps his options open. And it all came to a fitting climax yesterday. In the morning, no-drama Obama announces new, tougher sanctions because of intelligence showing deeper Russian assistance for the slowly fading separatists in east Ukraine; and only hours later, Putin’s hot-headed goons, using weapons they clearly are not fully in control of, shoot down a civilian airliner. So who, Mr Krauthammer, looks weak now?

Putin has lost Ukraine, its trade pact with the EU is now signed, and its Russophile separatists exposed as fanatical, fantasizing idiots, while Ukraine elected a new president to chart its future. The Russian economy, already hobbled, could face increasingly strong headwinds, if Merkel decides to press the West’s advantage or finally leverages a real climb-down from Moscow over Ukraine. Obama, on the other hand, has a wide noose around the Russian economy and just increased the odds of deeper EU tightening.

And if the missile that shot down the plane can be traced to Russia itself, then the consequences dramatically widen. And that seems possible this morning. Austin Long points out that a Buk missile launcher would not have been easy for Ukrainian rebels to capture from the Ukrainian government and that the operation of such weaponry is complicated. This leads him to suspect that “the Buk was provided by Russia along with any necessary training”:

This is supported by U.S. and Ukrainian reports last month that Russia had provided tanks and other heavy equipment to the separatists. Notably both the tanks alleged to have been provided (T-64s) and the Buk are older Soviet-era equipment that Russia would not miss but would also be plausibly present in Ukrainian arsenals. This allows the Russians to retain a figleaf of plausible deniability about the equipment.

If Russia is directly involved in this way, it seems to me that Putin has now over-reached in such a way that all but destroys what’s left of his foreign policy.

And Josh Marshall’s right that the spectacle of Russian cluelessness, amateurism and recklessness could be the worst news of all for Putin. If there’s one thing a neofascist Tsar cannot afford it’s the appearance of incompetence and chaos.

Leonid Bershidsky, meanwhile, declares that “the separatists’ campaign is doomed.” He argues that there “is no chance of the rebels marching on Kiev or even making secession work: They are too weak for that, and after MH17, they have lost their last shreds of moral authority”:

If Putin keeps backing the insurgents until their inevitable defeat, his international isolation will deepen, as did that of the Soviet Union’s leaders after their jets shot down a Korean passenger jet in 1983, and former Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi after the 1988 bombing of a PanAm airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland. Malaysia, a Muslim nation that has long fought American influence, can hardly be expected to listen to Russian fairy-tales about the crash. The developing world will now join the West in condemning the rebels — and Putin as their only ally.

And The Beat Goes On

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As Netanyahu vows a “significant expansion” of the ground offensive in Gaza, the WaPo’s live blog updates the body count so far:

Israeli forces launched a ground operation in Gaza Thursday night. Since then: 28 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier have died. This brings the Palestinian death toll to more than 260, with more than 2,000 injured. The Israeli death toll is at 2.

Emma Green digs deeper into how the toll of the conflict is measured and how that contributes to the media narrative:

Even the tallies of rockets fired and shelling exchanged aren’t simple: The numbers themselves are imbued with meaning. The New York Times has a running count of “the toll in Gaza and Israel, day by day“; aggression from Hamas is measured in “X rockets launched from Gaza,” while aggression from Israel is measured in “X targets struck by Israel.” The unit of measurement is the important part: Palestinian firepower is measured as discrete weapons, rockets that Hamas is intentionally hurling at Israeli civilians. Israeli firepower is measured in hits, which are called “targets” (not people, or houses, or “militants”). And yet the two numbers are placed side by side for comparison, implying clarity of fault, or even clarity of what’s happening on the ground in Gaza and southern Israel.

Gregg Carlstrom expects no breakthroughs anytime soon, partly because Hamas’s conditions for a ceasefire are unacceptable to Israel and Egypt:

Hamas has been clear about its demands since the conflict began: It wants Israel to lift the siege of Gaza, and to release the dozens of prisoners freed in the 2011 deal for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who were rearrested this summer in the wake of the killing of three kidnapped Israeli teens. Neither of these demands, however, are politically viable. Members of Netanyahu’s government, including the hawkish Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, have demanded an end to prisoner swaps. And the military-backed government in Egypt, which labeled Hamas a terrorist organization and spent a year demonizing the Muslim Brotherhood, is unlikely to agree to open the Rafah crossing with Gaza.

Comparing the situation in Gaza to the US military’s experience in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004, Juan Cole expands on his longstanding argument that Israel can’t achieve permanent “quiet” with force:

The Israelis cannot actually destroy Hamas or its capabilities as long as significant numbers of Palestinians in Gaza support it. That support is political, having to do with the organization’s role in at least trying to stand up to Israeli oppression, occupation and blockade. Just as the enemies of the US ultimately prevailed in Falluja, so the enemies of Israel will prevail in Gaza.

Oppression and occupation produce resistance. Until the oppression and the occupation are addressed, the mere inflicting of attrition on the military capabilities of the resistance will not snuff it out. Other leaders will take the place of those killed. If Israel really wanted peace or relief from Hamas rockets, its leaders would pursue peace negotiations in good faith with Hamas (which has on more than one occasion reliably honored truces). Otherwise, invading Gaza will have all the same effects, good and bad (but mostly bad) that the US invasion of Falluja had on Iraq.

The Lusitania Of The 21st Century?

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It was, eerily enough, 99 years ago, and the parallels are a little too close for comfort. A reader writes:

When I heard of the plane having been shot down yesterday, I immediately thought of the Lusitania. Now, that was probably mostly because I’m currently working on finishing my dissertation which includes a chapter on World War I. And while as a historian, I am quite aware that history doesn’t simply repeat itself and that the current situation is indeed very different from the one a hundred years ago, there are a few takeaways from the sinking of the Lusitania.

The passenger vessel was torpedoed by German submarines in 1915 after Germany had declared the waters around the UK a war zone. 1,198 people on board lost their lives. Among them were 128 U.S. citizens. This act of aggression against a civilian target caused the American public’s attitude toward Germany to change and made America’s entry into the war in 1917 easier.

We are in a very different situation now. The skies above Ukraine were not declared a war zone by Russia. Russian military (as far as we know) did not shoot down this plane. But the Russian supported separatists in Eastern Ukraine apparently did. With Russian support of these separatists (including apparently military equipment), this puts Russia in a similar predicament that Germany was in after the sinking of the Lusitania.

Similar in the following aspects:

Russia and the separatists so far had several important countries that showed sympathies towards their position. It has also received support from parts of the population of several Western countries, even though their governments were sympathetic towards the Ukraine. This may now well change – just as sympathies towards Germany changed after the Lusitania sinking, especially with so many citizens of Western countries among the dead. Will this lead to additional sanctions? Yes. Will there be military retaliations? Highly unlikely. Will this be a repeat of World War I? No. History doesn’t simply repeat itself. But we can learn lessons from it. Let’s hope Mr. Putin does.

I do too. I’ll note, however, Putin’s willingness to tell bald-faced lies about the situation in Ukraine, his Cheney-esque inability to admit error, and the highly pitched nationalist atmosphere his entire political standing now rests on. I’ll also note the pathetic unwillingness of the Germans and the Italians and the British to enact any serious sanctions so far (including Merkel’s refusal to commit to anything yesterday); and the somewhat Putin-supportive words from the Chinese government, decrying a rush to judgment on who shot down the plane.

This is a 21st Century tragedy born of a 19th Century farce.

What If You Had A Waiting Period For Your Prostate Biopsy?

Marcotte applauds a bill in Congress that would prohibit targeted restrictions on abortion providers:

It’s called the Women’s Health Protection Act, and it would end the attacks on abortion clinics through one simple measure: requiring states to regulate abortion providers in exactly the same way they do other clinics and doctors who provide comparable services. No more singling out abortion providers. …

Want to force women seeking abortion to listen to a script full of lies and then make them wait 24 or 48 hours to think it over? Better be prepared to do the same for people who need colonoscopies. Want to require a bunch of unnecessary visits before a woman is allowed to have a procedure? Now you need to do that for a biopsy, too. Want to force abortion clinics to meet ambulatory surgical center standards and abortion providers to have hospital admitting privileges? Well, dentists will have to meet the same standards before they can drill a tooth.

Because a tooth has the same moral standing as a fetus. And this is apparently self-evident. Callie Beusman concedes that “there’s basically no chance that the bill will pass the GOP-controlled House” but adds, “that doesn’t mean it’s not significant”:

It serves the valuable purpose of asking Republicans to explain the disingenuous, unsupported reasoning behind the scores of excessive regulations they’ve imposed in the past few years. As [sponsor Richard] Blumenthal notes, this may effectively remove the “patina of respectability” from the whole ridiculous charade. Which would be a very welcome change indeed.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Nolan Brown mulls over the proper libertarian response:

Putting an end to this sort of infringement on women’s abortion access is a noble goal. But it’s one thing to fight states passing these types of laws and another to say the federal government should pass a law blocking states from passing these types of laws. If the state laws are unconstitutional, shouldn’t that be left to the courts to determine? Why a federal act? …

I put this question to some libertarians I know, inside and out of Reason, and received a range of responses. Some pointed out that the text of the Women’s Health Protection Act was very vague—under what standard do we determine if an abortion restriction is “medically unwarranted” or oppressive? And under what constitutional provision is Congress claiming the power to enact this law?

But others said that when it comes to protecting individuals from government intrusion, federal action can be appropriate; and where government is passing laws to restrict itself to uphold the Constitution, that can be a good thing. “I’m a peoples’-rights advocate, not a states-rights advocate,” as one Facebook friend commented. “What matters is if individual liberty is, on net, increased.”

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz describes the bill as  “a very real manifestation of a war on women … given the health consequences that unlimited abortion access has had on many women.” It will be interesting to see if “many women” agree.