I want to alert readers of History is Happening Now to an outrageously biased Islamo-fascio-leftist propaganda rag making outrageously anti-Semitic claims that Israel is committing egregious war crimes in Gaza against Palestinian civilians.
The notorious rag in question? Why, the Wall Street Journal:
The United Nations charter preserved the customary right of a state to retaliate against an “armed attack” from another state. The right has evolved to cover nonstate actors operating beyond the borders of the state claiming self-defense, and arguably would apply to Hamas. However, an armed attack involves serious violations of the peace. Minor border skirmishes are common, and if all were considered armed attacks, states could easily exploit them — as surrounding facts are often murky and unverifiable — to launch wars of aggression. That is exactly what Israel seems to be currently attempting.
And:
Israel has also failed to adequately discriminate between military and nonmilitary targets. Israel’s American-made F-16s and Apache helicopters have destroyed mosques, the education and justice ministries, a university, prisons, courts and police stations. These institutions were part of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. And when nonmilitary institutions are targeted, civilians die. Many killed in the last week were young police recruits with no military roles. Civilian employees in the Hamas-led government deserve the protections of international law like all others. Hamas’s ideology — which employees may or may not share — is abhorrent, but civilized nations do not kill people merely for what they think.
I recommend reading the whole piece. I have not blogged about the current conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza — grad school has been a bit demanding of late — but what’s noteworthy about this latest crisis is how completely unwilling mainstream Democrats have been to be even slightly critical of what seems to me to be a terrible moral, strategic, and (since we’re counting) legal error for Israel (not to mention the horrible suffering of the Palestinians). It seems as if liberal support of Israel is completely independent of its actions or the facts on the ground; as Matt Yglesias has pointed out:
I think that if people want to be honest, they need to ask themselves how many of them were sitting around the day before Israel started this action not only feeling that it would be smart for Israel to start a massive military action in Gaza but feeling so strongly about it that one would question the Jewish credentials and basic intelligence of anyone who didn’t agree. Frankly, I didn’t hear a lot of Americans taking that position. Then the Israeli government changed its policy, and a lot of Americans decided to agree with the new Israeli policy. Which is fine as far as it goes. But people who didn’t regard the previous policy as unconscionable at the time have no business suddenly deciding that it’s unconscionable to disagree with the new policy.
Indeed, the suggestion that Hamas’s horrible (albeit largely nonlethal) rocket attacks on Israel’s civilian populations didn’t simply come out of the blue — but were quite directly the result of Israel’s destructive blockade of the Gaza Strip, and its marginalization of a democratically elected government, not to speak of the forty years of occupation — hasn’t even been floated as an idea among mainstream political commentators, let alone our political elites.
To the liberal establishment, to stalwart left-leaning periodicals like the New Republic and Dissent, the recent rocket attacks just came out of the blue for no apparent reason. Even if this decontextualized account were true — it’s not, obviously — the WSJ piece points out correctly that Israel’s actions would still not be necessarily justified. Proportionality is a concept, in international law at least, that is independent of the actions of your enemy.
Whether or not you agree with the argument of this op-ed, please do give credit to the WSJ for being more open to unorthodox opinion than the Democratic party. I ask this question in all seriousness: has a single Democratic Senator — to say nothing of a certain Senator who will soon become our forty-fourth Present — said anything even slightly critical of Israel after this recent round of attacks?
I grew up in a family that supported Israel in the strongest terms. I was raised to regard the 1967 Six-Day War as an example of Jews, armed with their big brains and their fierce convictions, heroically overcoming their small numbers to defeat an enemy that came at them from all sides. I remember being told once in Hebrew school that the Palestinians had no legitimate right to complain about not having a homeland — because Jordan was their homeland. Later, in high school, I remember teachers who were absolutely unwilling to discuss their opinions about Israel in class for fear of being branded anti-Semetic. In my childhood, there was only one explanation for the hostility that Palestinians and Arabs harbored toward Israel: anti-Semetism.
Today, I regard a lot of what I experienced as stupid pro-Israel propoganda. Because an honest examinaton of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — combined with a moral sense that Palestinians and Arabs are full human beings — will clearly lead to a more complex, nuanced picture of the situation there.
Don’t get me wrong — I am a proud Jew, I’m proud of what Jews have accomplished in Israel (including the Six-Day War), I consider Israel a permanent part of the Middle East, and I want what’s best for the people of Israel.
But “supporters” of Israel who think they can bully thoughtful people into submission by launching into angry, aggressive screaming and moral condemnation every time somebody suggests there are two sides to the story — or that Israel’s moral obligations aren’t somehow erased by Hamas’ bad behavior — are only giving the impression that they are terrified of a dispassionate conversation about these issues — terrified that they can’t win because history is not on their side.
I’ve been willing to accept the idea that the attacks on Gaza can legitimately be called self-defense. The people of Israel have a right to consider it “unacceptable” that people in Gaza are launching rocket attacks into Israel. And I am also open to the idea — put forward by Israel — that Israel tries to avoid killing civilians but is forced to do so because Hamas uses civilians as “human sheilds,” and because Gaza is so densely populated.
Given the U.S. response to the Sept 11 attacks — a response that included our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, I don’t think we can credibly criticize Israel for lacking proportionality in its response. We can try, but George Bush has so undermined our moral authority to call for proportionality that we would do better, in my opinion, to avoid making a moral argument on that basis.
But Yglesias’ point is absolutely correct: So many people who adamantly defend Israel’s actions as “absolutely necessary” had no inkling that Israel was planning an attack only days before it happened. These people seem foolish and manipulative when they make the argument now that Israel “had no choice,” except to do what it did, and anyone who thinks otherwise is anti-Semetic.
What’s best for Israel isn’t necessary what Israel’s hard-line government says is best, any more than what’s best for America is what George W. Bush says it is.
Comment by Ian — January 11, 2009 @ 12:38 pm