When terrorists massacre Jewish civilians do you suggest that Israel should do likewise?
Ruth R. Wisse - Mar 01, 2009
Commmentary Magazine
The charge that Israel’s incursion into Gaza led to a “disproportionate” use of force against Palestinians, issued by the likes of former President Jimmy Carter and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, met with surprising rhetorical resistance in unexpected quarters (on this continent, at least) in the first few weeks after Israel began its operation at the end of December.
“Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness,” wrote Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, who is better known as a critic than as a defender of Israel. “These calls for proportionality rankle. They fall on my ears not as genteel expressions of fairness, some ditsy Marquess of Queensbury idea of war, but as ugly sentiments pregnant with antipathy toward the only state in the Middle East that is a democracy.”
As a term in international law governing the conduct of war, “proportionality” requires that the destructive force of a military operation should only be as great as the destructive force that provoked it. By the time Israel had launched its operation, Hamas had fired thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians, and had chosen publicly to break the terms of a six-month “cease-fire” to which it had only subscribed in theory anyway. The demand for proportionality created a false equivalence between aggressor (Hamas) and target (Israel) as if the two were engaged in a reciprocal conflict. It then shifted the blame for aggression from assailant to victim, censuring Israel for using more firepower in its defense than Hamas had used in its attacks.
“Would the international community truly prefer a proportionate or equal response?” asked Alan Richarz, a Toyko-based writer, in the Christian Science Monitor. “If Hamas launches three crudely-fashioned rockets into Israel, should the Israeli government respond with three equally-crude rockets? If three Israeli Defense Forces are kidnapped by Hezbollah, should the IDF respond by kidnapping an equal number of Hezbollah foot-soldiers?”
The American Jewish Committee pointed out that international neglect of Hamas’s aggression forced Israel to deal with the problem on its own. Given Hamas’s tactics of placing rocket launchers, weapons depots, bunkers, and other military installations in densely populated areas of Gaza, “the only way Israel could protect non-combatants from harm would be to take no meaningful action to suppress Hamas’s attacks.”
Former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler listed multiple violations by Hamas of international humanitarian law, including the deliberate targeting of civilians, which is “in and of itself a war crime;” the use of civilian infrastructures for the launching of rockets; “the misuse of and abuse of humanitarian symbols [of the Red Cross and the UN] for the purposes of launching attacks;” and the recruitment of children into armed conflict. When Israel is the responder, and civilians are killed because Israel is targeting an area from which rockets were launched, then according to international law, Cotler wrote, “it is Hamas and not Israel which bears responsibility for the deaths.”
Common-sense arguments like these did a great deal inside the United States to keep the “proportionality” theme from sinking into the national consciousness and thereby becoming a weapon with which to assail Israel in its effort to end the rocket fire. But a more essential aspect of the charge of “disproportion” has so far gone unnoticed. The key disproportion is between the goals of Hamas and the goals of Israel, and more broadly, the overall approach of the twenty-one Arab countries on the matter of Palestinian nationhood and the approach of the Jewish state they surround on three sides.
Imagine a world structured along truly “proportional” lines. In such a world, Israel would have spent 60 years denying that Arabs had any rights to any form of statehood, rather than doing what Israel has actually done, which is to give up major swaths of land to Arabs in pursuit of peace. What move on the part of Arab states has been proportionate to the Israeli actions in giving up the Sinai and its oil riches, the vast majority of the West Bank, the entirety of Gaza, and the territory in Southern Lebanon from which Israel pulled its occupying force in 2000? An Israel acting in proportionate fashion would have gone to the United Nations and its constituent agencies and done everything it could to denounce illegitimate interlopers in the region, would have sought resolutions condemning Arab nationalism as racism, and would have pursued political alliances with other blocs on the basis of common opposition to Arab or Muslim states.
The further application of proportionality in the Middle East conflict would have required that Israel foster a culture of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim hatred and intolerance reaching (according to parallel Pew Global Attitudes studies of anti-Jewish attitudes in Muslim lands) levels of 99 percent to 100 percent. Israel would be using weapons of mass communication to charge Muslims with ritual murder and spending tens of millions of dollars on anti-Arab propaganda worldwide. It would be training suicide bombers for anti-Muslim missions. Its warriors would be mutilating the bodies of Muslims they cornered and killed.
Had the Jews of Israel fully applied the doctrine of proportionality, they would have declared Jerusalem their Mecca, a city holy to themselves alone. They would have forbidden entry to Jerusalem except by extraordinary permit to persons of all other faiths. They would have prohibited the presence in their holy city of churches or mosques. What has Israel actually done? Almost from the moment it unified Jerusalem in June 1967, Israel surrendered control of the site of the last Jewish temple to an independent Muslim authority, which is responsible for managing the mosque that sits atop it. On this plot of land, which sits wholly within borders that Israel says are permanent, no Jew is allowed to pray.1 This is a directive enforced by Israeli police and the Israeli military.
Radical asymmetry is the essence of the Arab war against the Jews, and the reason it remains resistant to resolution. In the Middle East, it must be said yet again, 21 Arab countries cover hundreds of times the territory of Israel, including land that had been allotted to the Jews by the League of Nations in 1921 but that Britain gave instead to the Hashemite rulers of Jordan. Rather than cultivate their bounty, Arab leaders have chosen over the past 60 years to spend the better part of their political capital in opposition to a Jewish state.
So that they could more convincingly essay the role of aggrieved party, they kept generations of fellow Arabs homeless on the borders of Israel in refugee camps in Gaza, Jordan, and Lebanon. Hamas’s use of Arab civilians as human shields in Gaza is merely an extension of the decision by the Arab League to house Palestinians in perpetual refugee camps to serve what Cairo radio called “a moral asset” in the war against Israel.
The asymmetry is not existential, but essential. And to the overwhelming geographic, demographic, economic and political advantages the Arabs have over Israel, one must add the ideological charge of Zionist guilt for Arab suffering. At its extreme, the disproportionality that reigns supreme in the Middle East holds Israel responsible for the harm Arabs do themselves and one another.
Nor does it end at the Mediterranean’s waters. The asymmetry is also part and parcel of the effort to delegitimize Israel in the West. Muslim demonstrations against Israel, increasingly accompanied by violence, are now as common in Europe as anti-Jewish demonstrations were in the late 1930’s. Slandering Israel and Jews is tolerated because it is considered a legitimate component of Islam, and to oppose it would be to oppose the free exercise of religion.
Not only has there been not a single anti-Muslim demonstration staged by the Jewish remnant in Europe; attacks by non-Jewish Europeans on Muslim doctrines have led to arrest (the anti-Muslim Dutch politician Geert Wilders, now under trial for hate speech), assassination (the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who made a short film about violence against women in Muslim countries), and serious threats of imminent death (the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, who depicted Muhammad with a bomb inside his turban and now lives under police protection). No one in Europe who criticizes Israel does so with even the whisper of the notion crossing his mind that he might be placing himself in danger, from a judicial system keenly sensitive to slights on Islamic honor or from an assassin’s blade and bullet.
In the United States, the disproportion finds its most salient expression on university campuses. Blaming Israel for the sorry condition of the Palestinians has emerged as the only sanctioned form of inter-religious and inter-ethnic hostility on campuses otherwise dedicated to ostentatious invocations of diversity and tolerance.
This attitude dominates student activism on Middle East issues and is mirrored in the behavior of the professoriat, particularly in the field of Middle East Studies. A relatively mild example from my university, Harvard, is a course in “Modern Arabic Narratives,” many of which are Palestinian; students who complain of inaccuracies and bias in the curriculum have been told that since the very name of the seminar indicates its perspective is solely one expressed by writings in Arabic, it cannot by definition be biased.
At Vassar College, the Fall 2008 catalogue description of History 214, “The Roots of the Palestine-Israel Conflict,” warns students: “This course is NOT2 designed to present ‘an objective’ account of a ‘two-sided’ conflict”:
The fact that there are supposedly two sides does not obligate us to portray each as equally right and/or equally wrong. The goal, rather, is to understand why the conflict arose, and what sorts of power inequalities have made it continue....Why and how did economic globalization, technological development, and European imperialism foster the creation of two different national identities in Palestine? Why and how and when did these two identities develop in such a way as to preclude members of certain religious or ethnic groups from belonging?
Despite the proliferation of Jewish-studies programs on campuses throughout the United States, it would be an impossibility to find a course description at an elite American university that operated from an opposing ideological premise—say, that the Jewish people had a connection to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean that was greater and of longer duration than the nomadic peoples who came to be called Palestinians, and that the central place of Palestinians in world politics is due to an imbalance of power between the small Jewish state and the petroleum-drenched Arab states with which it must contend. Such theorizing would be seen as crossing the line from analysis into advocacy, but no such comparable reticence is seen in academic circles when it comes to treating the Palestinian question from the Palestinian perspective. Perhaps even more to the point, the Vassar course is actually taught by a professor involved in the school’s Jewish-studies program.
A recent letter-petition addressed to Barack Obama, signed by some 900 American academics, represents yet a third level of disproportionate action on campus. “Since the election of Hamas, in fair and open elections,” the document begins,
Israel has subjected the civilian population of Gaza to a prolonged state of siege, designed to suffocate them into submission, depriving them at will of water and power, medical supplies and food, and of access to the outside world. The most recent, all-out assault on Gaza, the disproportionate and bloody use of excessive force, is no act of self-defense, but the dramatic extension of an insidious policy of extermination of a people that refuses to disappear.
These accusations, which ignore Israel’s voluntary and complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and the ideological meaning of an election elevating an irredentist terror group whose primary goal is destroying its neighbor, invert political reality beyond any sensible attempts at rectification.
This type of disproportion is nothing new. Back in 2001-02, during what became known as the Second Intifada, terrorists under the direction of Hamas and Yasir Arafat’s more putatively mainstream Fatah faction declared open season on Israel’s citizens, murdering twenty-one at a Tel Aviv beachside disco, fifteen at the Sbarro Pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem, twenty-nine at a Passover seder in Netanya, seventeen on a bus from Tel Aviv to Tiberias, and on and on. At the time, a contingent of academics from MIT and Harvard took note of the region’s carnage only once Israel launched its defensive action, and then circulated a petition urging their universities to divest from Israel, the terrorized country. Lawrence Summers, then newly (and, it would turn out, only briefly) installed as the president of Harvard, gave the signatories the benefit of the doubt when he said that unfairly singling out Israel was “anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent.”
Summer’s formulation generously distinguished between deliberate and involuntary anti-Semitism. Rather than take the opportunity offered them to deny their anti-Semitic intention, the signatories responded by charging that Summers was stifling their freedom of speech. In so doing, they complained they were being denied the very rights they were using, while seeking to silence Summers for using the same rights to criticize them. Their anti-Semitism, in effect or in intent, was to be exempted from criticism on the grounds that the act of identifying it posed an insuperable danger to the exercise of the First Amendment.
No discussion of disproportion in the Arab war against the Jewish state would be complete without reference to the role played by Jews in making the enemy’s case. Here again, the campus offers us the clearest view of this. An example is the recent case study of the academic conference on “Alternative Histories Within and Beyond Zionism” held in 2007 at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Sponsored by eight university departments, the conference heard four professors and a graduate student present papers “whose primary goals,” according to a report by Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, “were the deconstruction, delegitimization, and elimination of Zionism and its realization in a Jewish state.”3
All the speakers claimed that Zionism was racist in its formulation and in its realization in the state of Israel. Four branded it a species of European colonialism and imperialism. One called Israel “an apartheid regime,” and another called Israel’s actions “worse than apartheid.” Three said that Zionism was discontinuous with Jewish historical experience, and hence historically and religiously illegitimate. Since the case study simply set out to see whether this was “a legitimate exercise of academic freedom or an abuse of it,” it did not identify the speakers except by name and position. All were Israeli or American Jews.4 Need one ask whether there has ever been a comparable effort at national self-delegitimation on the part of Palestinian or Arab thinkers and scholars?
The academics who petitioned President Obama claim that if he wishes to be “on the right side of history,” he must make common cause with Arab belligerents. That has not been the view of the United States Congress or the people it represents. On January 9th, the House of Representatives extended by a vote of 390 to 5 its “vigorous support and unwavering commitment to the welfare, security, and survival of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state with secure borders, and [recognized] its right to act in self-defense to protect its citizens against Hamas’s unceasing aggression, as enshrined in the United Nations Charter.” With history as our guide, we know that this “unwavering commitment” may occasionally waver. Still, the two democracies continue to stand together against the nihilistic behavior of terrorist actors and the tyrannies abetting them. They should continue to stand together against the those who seek to employ sophistry of the worst order to delegitimize the entirely defensive and entirely defensible actions of a small free state that has lived under the constant threat of violence, and its occasional and devastating outbreak, from the very moment of its inception.
No comments:
Post a Comment