Gaza and Just War
I think Michael Walzer is right to say that most of the “proportionality” talk around Hamas rocket fire and Israel’s attack on Gaza has been confused and irrelevant. But strangely this mostly leads him to go on talking about proportionality rather than considering other issues.
I would say, however, that what’s most relevant for both sides here are separate elements of just war theory — possession of “right intention” and “reasonable prospects for success.” First from the Hamas side. As Israel’s critics will happily let you know, Palestinians have just cause for fighting against Israel. But Hamas’ actual cause isn’t the just cause of Palestinian independence but an unjust cause of aggression against Israel. And even if Hamas were fighting for a just cause, their method of untargeted rocket fire has no reasonable prospects for success. If the way the world worked was that you should some rockets at Sderot, damage some buildings and hurt a few people, and then suddenly Israeli officials are ready to shake hands on a deal that ends the occupation forever you might be tempted to say that the loss of civilian life would be proportionate to the ends being pursued. But that’s not how the world works and it doesn’t characterize Hamas’ war aims.
A lot of commentators seem to want to believe that the situation on the Israeli side is very different from this. In fact, I think it’s only a little different. In terms of “right intention” this is where the settlements come into play. As long as Israel is occupying illegal settlements in Palestinian territory, restricting Palestinian movement in order to defend them, and indeed expanding the settlements it becomes difficult to view any Israeli activity as purely defensive in nature. And, again, if the way the world worked was that attacking Gaza and causing suffering there led Palestinians to say “you know, these Hamas guys are bloodthirsty maniacs — let’s put some non-violent moderates in charge” you could understand this campaign as having reasonable prospects of success at securing enduring safety from Hamas rocket fire. But that’s not how the world works. So asking what kinds of Israeli actions might or might not be “proportionate” to those war aims is really neither here nor there. Everyone understands that this round of fighting will stop some day soon, but that the halt in fighting won’t create a permanent end to rocket fire.
96 Responses to “Gaza and Just War”
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January 8th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Juan Cole argues that the rocket attacks actually are consistent with a Demographic strategy against Israel.
You’ll have to scroll down to point 4.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Good job, young Matthew.
At least you are paying some attention to this bloodbath, much of it financed by American taxpayers.
Why?
January 8th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
You really hit the nail on the head Matthew.
I’ve seen a number of reasonably nuanced defenses of Israel’s tactics (e.g., from your old colleague Ross Douthat) which, on their own terms, are almost convincing. But they always leave out the settlement issue. And once you factor in the settlements, decisions made by Israel go from fraught but arguably defensible to, well, monstrous.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Yes, yes and yes. MY successfully wades through the morality of both sides’ cause; Palestinians and Israelis both have morally defensible rationale for what they are doing and have both engaged in morally indefensible actions. Trying to figure out who is more immoral or moral makes my brain hurt so I try to focus on the reality of the situation: Palestinians will never have the military strength to threaten the existence of Israel via violent overthrow (for them to believe that they can destroy Israel corresponds to a mindset that will ultimately destroy them). The Israelis can destroy the Palestinians but do not seem to be doing so in an efficient manner (which corresponds to an inherent morality to their politics which some commenters seem to disbelieve).
The other reality is the demographic advantage the Palestinians have; unless they use this advantage (by non-violent resistance), there is no hope for a favorable solution for them.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Ever think that the Palestinians are sending the rockets up at the Israelies because they are pissed off and that is their only option for inflicting pain on Israelis?
I think that if the Israeli army wanted to end all rocket attacks the easiest thing to do would be to send a couple of young baby faced soldiers into Gaza every day to get kidnapped, beaten, and killed. It would be a way for the Palestinians to vent their anger against Israel – and the Palestinians might even think they are getting closer to freedom by doing it.
Heck, it would probably do a lot more to stop the rocket attacks then white phosphorus, cluster bombs, shooting up UN trucks, and bombing schools.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
what i mean by porportionality is 700:7, and a fully equipped and funded army against some sporadically armed guys in a heavily populated area. and i still don’t think israel explains this.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
As far as I know, shouldn’t we all be looking for a solution more than pointing fingers? I only do it when the Palestinians get completely demonized.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Particularly where the Middle East is concerned, all headlines could be boiled down to BASICALLY two:
1) WELL, HE WOULD SAY THAT, WOULDN’T HE and
2) YEAH, THAT WORKED SO WELL LAST TIME
January 8th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
The people that are complaining about “proportionality” in Israel’s actions don’t know what they are talking about. There is nothing proportional in war. Bombing Pearl Harbor and fire bombing Tokyo are not proportional. You fight wars to compel the other side to agree to your political aims.
I disagree with the notion that using force against Hamas will not achieve Israel’s aims. Israel is forced into a no-win situation and the electorate demands action. That is the way a democracy works. I guarantee that at the end of the current Gaza conflict there will be a cessation of Hamas rockets. War is an extension of politics. Israel has proven that they can reach political solutions with Egypt and Jordan so why do people think they can’t reach one with the Palestinians? Hamas is a bankrupt negotiating partner as their stated purpose is to destroy Israel. More negotiations while absorbing rockets is a non-starter for Israel. I see Israel re-occupying the border between Egypt and Gaza to ensure that weapons are not smuggled and then then an attempt to negotiate some sort of armistice.
Has everyone forgotten Gilead Shillat (sp?)? Of course Hamas is going to get away with capturing him and murdering him much like Hezbollah did with the captive Israelis in ‘06. And Isreal has to show more restraint?
January 8th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Well, I’m convinced. Both sides are in deep doo now, and the last chance to stop this violence was several cycles ago.
“As far as I know, shouldn’t we all be looking for a solution more than pointing fingers? I only do it when the Palestinians get completely demonized.”
We should be, but mostly it involves one of the sides growing up and being the first to stop, closely followed by the other side. Both have tried that, but the perceived slights against the other side don’t, which just leads to another cycle.
I say they settle it by barechested cage matches pitting the Israeli PM against the leader of Hamas.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Um, they had a deal. Egypt brokered a deal whereby Hamas stopped firing rockets in exchange for a loosening of the blockade around Gaza. It was supposed to last for six months, but Israel attacked after four months, on November 4.
I wonder if Israel broke the cease fire before or after they knew who would be the next U.S. president?
January 8th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Reading Juan Cole makes me sympathize with the Israelis.
Cole:
The micro-wars, the wars of the rockets, are intended to discourage in-migration to Israel by the Russians and other former East Bloc Jews, and to foster out-migration by Israeli Jews, which the Israeli leadership and Zionism generally view as a dire threat to the character of the Israeli state.
So Cole believes that Hamas can persuade Israeli Jews to migrate via pot-shot-rocket-ethnic-cleansing? I would bet that if anyone is cleansed first, it would be Hamas’s Palestinians, thanks to Hamas’s rockets. The other outcome could be a regional conflagration with everyone perishing, therefore there would be no need for emigration or immigration and the refugees could return to an irradiated graveyard.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
The people who claim that proportionality is a novel concept that real warfighters don’t consider don’t know what they’re talking about.
Has everyone forgotten Gilead Shillat You mean the guy who’s capture by Hezbollah incited Israel to launch an ill advised action that led to a humiliating failure and made the most violent anti-Israel force in Lebanon the country’s de facto ruling party? Why, yes, I do remember him. I also remember seeing arguments almost exactly like those you just made being written during that humiliating failure, by people who thought they were actually being pro-Israel.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Juan Cole argues that the rocket attacks actually are consistent with a Demographic strategy against Israel.
By that logic, Israel is rational in bombing Gaza in an attempt to remove that demographic threat, one way or another. They’re both doomed to fail, and reprehensible.
Hamas may think they can influence Israeli demographics, but remember the law of unintended consequence. What kind of Jews are going to want to immigrate to Israel? True believers. Settlers. Right-wingers who think that it is God’s command that they settle the land. The kind of people who resist the idea that giving away land for peace is an option. The same kind of people who are going to stay. These Jews, typically, religious are fully cognizant of the demographic threat and have lots of children. Another major demographic I would be concerned about are the Ultra-Orthodox, who while not Zionists, have no love lost for the Palestinians and don’t want them taking their country, such as it is. They also have lots of kids.
Two weeks ago, I would tell you that the future electoral prospects for Israel’s right wing parties looked favorable, be they religious or secular. Livni and Olmert’s efforts may delay this, but terrorism, as a general rule, only makes the right stronger. Hamas’ efforts to influence demography may be as foolish as Israel’s efforts to influence Gaza elections.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Very good analysis, Mr. Yglesias, well argued.
However, you’re misreading Israel’s war aims. Assume that that Israel wants to stop the rockets, and that persuading the Gazans to topple Hamas isn’t their primary concern.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Well, I’m convinced. Both sides are in deep doo now, and the last chance to stop this violence was several cycles ago.
I’m hoping that, as someone commented in an earlier blog post, the governing coaltion calculated they better bomb now or Likud and Bibi will bomb worse later, as morally horrible as that is to consider. And hopefully Obama and the “international community” will force a deal. Otherwise yeah you’re probably right.
The shame is that the majority of Palestinians and Israelis agree on the two-state solution, but the leadership on both sides won’t get it done.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
“Hamas’s genocidal campaign to exterminate the Jews is morally equivalent to Israel”
They’re such Nazis right, and Israel is just fighting to stop itself from being exterminated by homemade rockets, right? You wanna say it so just say it.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Genocide is not the ‘right intention’.
I suppose Matt Believed that GWB started the Iraq war to make the world a better place too?
January 8th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Let’s think more closely about Jus in Bello, the part of the just war theory that we should all be able to agree upon. Perhaps the most important principle of Jus in Bello is distinction, or discrimination, between enemy combatants and civilians. The violation of this has been made eminently clear in Israel’s wars of the last three years, and the pathetic “they’re all enemy combatants if they shelter or support enemy combatants” completely misses the point of this part of just war doctrine.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Richard Blanco:
Except Israel isn’t letting anybody leave.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
“Non-proportionality” is a preposterous critique of a military strike. Nothing I’ve seen in any discussion of just war in general or this particular conflict has specified what the correct proportionality constant is. Israel chose 100:1. Fine. 100:1 is no less proportional that 10:1 or 3:1.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Oh I don’t know, I think some forms of terrorism (or freedom fighting – depend on your POV) that include wanton attacks on innocent civilians do indeed get movement on the political front. Seemed to work to a large extent in Northen Ireland & the IRA. A situation that while different obviously does strike some similar chords
January 8th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
“Non-proportionality” is a preposterous critique of a military strike. Nothing I’ve seen in any discussion of just war in general or this particular conflict has specified what the correct proportionality constant is. Israel chose 100:1. Fine. 100:1 is no less proportional that 10:1 or 3:1.
That’s because “proportionality” is a slightly misleading term for the concept. It actually has nothing to do with the relative proportions of casualties, or even anything to with your enemy’s attacks at all. It’s about the proportionality and reasonability of YOUR methods in relation to YOUR goals and hopes of success.
Both Hamas’ and Israel’s attacks are disproportionate. Independently.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Nail on the head.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
joe from Lowell – No, I am talking about the Israeli soldier captured by Hamas. I am giving them credibility they don’t deserve by referring to it as “capturing” instead of “kidnapping”.
People that claim Israel is being indiscriminate or disproportional make the IDF sound like Oskar Dirlewanger. Get a grip! The IDF is undertaking a very difficult mission that has been thrust upon them by poor circumstances.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Walzer’s suggestion that Palestinians would soon have rockets killing as many Israelis as Palestinians now being killed Israel is ludicrous. Maybe proportionality isn’t the biggest ethical problem with Israel’s attacks, but it’s a sufficient problem to make them even less ethical than Palestine’s desperate bottle rockets.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Matt: “But Hamas’ actual cause isn’t the just cause of Palestinian independence but an unjust cause of aggression against Israel. And even if Hamas were fighting for a just cause, their method of untargeted rocket fire has no reasonable prospects for success.”
Once again, Matt is massively confused and ignorant about what is actually going on.
First of all, on what basis does he claim that Hamas is waging “an unjust cause of aggression against Israel?” That statement hangs in the air without any visible logic behind it. If you’re part of a group who has been driven off your land by colonialist, imperialist, racist assholes, I’d say you have a considerable cause for aggression against them?
Second, is Matt stupid enough to believe that Hamas is stupid enough to believe that firing a few rockets at Israel is going to “succeed” at defeating Israel? Hamas has repeatedly stated that the goal of firing the rockets is to provide SOME sort of resistance to Israel and more importantly to dramatize the plight of the Palestinians. It has nothing to do with “success” in the broad issue. It’s a tactic, not a strategy. It seems to them to be the only tactic they have given that they are literally walled off from doing any damage to Israel in any other way, except for the odd suicide bomber that manages to sneak into Israel. Personally I don’t think that’s the case, and they’ve managed their “resistance” very badly, but there’s no doubt they believe they’re doing what they can with what they have.
All this arsenal everybody claims they’ve built up in Gaza is only usable INSIDE GAZA. They can’t drag it across the border and attack Israel directly. Which is why they have to lure Israel into the urban areas, which is why they tend to not mind so much when Israel takes the bait and attacks them on the ground. It’s not that they enjoy getting hundreds of Palestinian civilians killed – they simply have no choice if they want to strike back at Israel in some military manner.
Hizballah in Lebanon is basically in the same boat. They can’t wage a conventional war against Israel by invasion, nor can they even infiltrate enough people into Israel to start a significant guerrilla war IN Israel. They have to wait for Israel to cross the border before they can do any damage at all.
Israel has a primary advantage of having a large, technologically sophisticated conventional military which happens to be sealed up behind rather narrow borders opposite their primary enemies (with the exception of Syria). For both Hamas and Hizballah, this is a major problem preventing them from pretty much doing anything to seriously threaten Israel or its oppression of the Palestinians.
Which is why they resort to rockets in an attempt to make the situation bad enough that the international community will take steps to remediate the situation. Unfortunately, the only member of that community who could conceivably apply enough economic and military pressure on Israel to do so is the US – which is owned and operated by Zionists in the US Congress and media.
So Hamas and Hizballah – Hamas more so than Hizballah – are screwed.
I don’t think Juan Cole is correct that Hamas thinks that their rockets are somehow going to prevent Israeli immigration. That might be a side effect of the entire conflict, but it’s not going to be any more significant than the rockets impact on Israel’s military or direct impact on the number of deaths of the Israeli population.
Hizballah has enough rockets with enough range to cause significant problems for Israel’s population for a specified period of time, but not indefinitely. They demonstrated that in 2006. Hamas doesn’t even come close.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
“Everyone understands that this round of fighting will stop some day soon, but that the halt in fighting won’t create a permanent end to rocket fire.”
But the rationality of the Israeli offensive doesn’t depend on its ability to lead to a permanent end to rocket fire (an unrealistic standard in the near term), but on its ability to degrade Hamas’s ability to fire rockets, and thus lessen the threat of the rocket fire. By destroying arms caches, killing Hamas fighters, rocket scientists, and top leaders, and destroying Hamas smuggling tunnels, Israel is trying to degrade Hamas’s ability to fire rockets, and it stands a good chance of doing so.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
MY you wrote:
Everyone understands that this round of fighting will stop some day soon, but that the halt in fighting won’t create a permanent end to rocket fire.
Then what is the point of the whole gastly exercise? How many people are going to die and how much capacity for folks to support themselves and how much good will is going to be lost in order to not do something?
Any one reasonably conversant with the situation can recount lots of bad acts by any number of players going back a good many years; some of us remember those events. But if you are right, this invasion becomes just another bad act undertaken for an unobtainable purpose which will not conduce to some sort of a peaceable outcome. In that respect, I think you’d be right; proportionality is irrelevant. But the question of proportionality would also be of dubious value because the Israeli government’s actual cause would not likely be particularly just given all the destruction. So we’re stuck with the occupation and the expanding settlements (not so hot politically and very, very illegal with all that follows from that illegality) and a lot of destruction to no particularly legal (sorry Al, not moral, legal) purpose.
MY, I think I’m agreeing with you. Its only that this view leaves me more convinced there is no reason to have a dog in this fight.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
That’s because “proportionality” is a slightly misleading term for the concept. It actually has nothing to do with the relative proportions of casualties, or even anything to with your enemy’s attacks at all. It’s about the proportionality and reasonability of YOUR methods in relation to YOUR goals and hopes of success.
Thanks jack, you said exactly what I was about to, and probably more concisely. The problem that I have with the proportionality argument is that it doesn’t address whether the military goals in play are reasonable in the first place. Realistically, the only way to permanently and definitively end the rocket fire is genocide. And so if the IDF says its goal is to stop the rockets for good, then proportionality is not violated under any circumstances, up to and including genocide. So proportionality alone cannot justify a military operation.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
“Except Israel isn’t letting anybody leave.”
Israel didn’t control Gaza’s border with Egypt, through which every single resident of Gaza could have left, had the Egyptians let them do so. Israel recently let every Gazan resident with a foreign passport leave Gaza. The issue isn’t that Israel won’t let Palestinians leave Gaza but that Israel won’t let them enter Israel, and no Arab country (or non-Arab country, for that matter) wants them.
This has been the primary cause of the conflict for sixty years, that rather than welcome and assimilate Palestinian refugees in their countries, the Arabs have preferred to confine them to “refugee camps” for decades, to use them as a political pawns against Israel. The idea that the grandchildren of refugees are still called refugees is absurd and unprecedented. Every other group of refugees from sixty years ago — including the Jews expelled from Arab countries — has been resettled.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Those skeptical of Israel’s ability to stop rocket fire
are the same people who claimed suicide bombers
can not be stopped back in 2002-3.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
i just saw the most heartbreaking fucking story on the news about four little Palestinian children who were stuck in their bombed out home for four days, laying on top of their dead mother, crying and asking “momma, where did you go?”. They had no food or water, and were all scared up in the face and arms. Maybe one day we can talk with them about “Just War Theory”. I’d like to hear their thoughts…
January 8th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Matt, I am seeing photo’s of young palestinians throwing rocks at israeli armor and heavily armed soldiers of the IDF every day it seems since the first Intifada. Ok gross generalization. But I imagine these same angry teenagers having access to cheap inaccurate rockets instead of cheap inaccurate rocks. A dramatic increase in power but for them possibly a more powerful expression of their anger and hatred of israel I would imagine. I can only imagine how angry would I feel if my wife and daughters were killed by IDF forces firing expensive and extremely accurate tank rounds at UN “safe” shelters? I provide the above as a perhaps alternative way to think about Hamas. Not to justify Hama’s behaviors only to suggest that they are in a way a perfectly human response to overwhelming personal tragedy are they not?
Mickster
January 8th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Walzer doesn’t get it. You cannot evaluate modern American and Israeli wars by the old standards of just wars, because those rules of just war envisioned a fair fight, which this isn’t. Walzer seems to think if a single bullet comes in the direction of a tank, it’s acceptable for the tank to unleash overwhelming, and unprecedented by the standards of human history, explosive power in the general direction where the bullet came from. Yes, in some sense such instant massive killing of Palestinians can be justified by the rules, but only because the rules did not really envision that killing would become as quick and easy and thoughtless as it has become with first-world weapon arsenals.
repeating two comments I made on Ezra’s blog, because I think they’re important:
If it weren’t so tragic, the current American and Israeli military predicaments seem to me similar to the Seinfeld episode of Kramer versus the 8-year olds. Like Kramer gassing on about how his “Katra” philosophy enabled him to find the inner strength defeat his (8-year old) opponents, Americans and Israelis obliviously insist that “military necessity” requires them to inflict a 100-1 casualty ratio, and they (we) seem puzzled when the world recoils in horror at the consequences of such complacent, thoughtless killing.
KPS Gill is not a saint, he may have committed human rights abuses for all that I know of. Nevertheless, I think he makes an important point here, in this internat chat:
http://im.rediff.com/chat/kpschat.htm
Buddy (Wed Jun 11 1997 21:12 IST)
MR. GILL I HAVE HEARD THAT YOU DIDN’T SPARE EVEN AN FRIEND OF TERRORIST OR A PERSON WHO EVEN ONCE MET THAT TERRORIST..WOULD U PLS. COMMENT….
K P S Gill (Wed Jun 11 1997 21:18 IST)
Buddy: What you have heard is a calumny. When we found that quite a number of terrorists were continuing to engage us in gun fights, we took a conscious policy by telling them: Come and surrender before and we shall take a lenient view of what has happened. Thousands surrendered. These were active terrorists, not their friends. Although there are certain text books on terrorism which advise this course of action, fortunately I did not learn my work on the anti-terrorist front from any text book. The death of terrorists caused me as much anguish as the death of my policemen and officers.
If Israel wants the support of the world, they have to fight their wars in the same way KPS Gill [claimed] that he fought his. Otherwise, their claims to be fighting a just war will rightly be considered a sick joke by the plain fact of the number of people killed.
Israel is trying to make this an abstract & qualitative debate, i.e. whether they have a “right to defend themselves”, whether they are “justified in taking action”, whether there have been any “violations of just war theory”, etc. But the immorality of Israeli killing in Gaza is not due to the abstract, or qualitative apsects of such killing; It’s due to the concrete, and quantitative aspects.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Also, the timing of this operation makes sense for Israel. For one thing, Hamas clearly didn’t expect it, and so Israel was able to kill hundreds of Hamas fighters and officials in their facilities in the first few minutes of this war. Additionally, Israel gets to deal with this before Obama comes into office, and also during a period when oil prices are low so it can’t be blamed for driving up gas prices
January 8th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
“i just saw the most heartbreaking fucking story on the news about four little Palestinian children who were stuck in their bombed out home for four days, laying on top of their dead mother, crying and asking “momma, where did you go?”.”
That’s awful, but that’s war. You don’t think the same thing happened in Germany when we bombed the crap out of it during WWII? Do you think every German killed by American bombs was a Nazi?
January 8th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Ah, yes. Matthew’s moral equivalence – Hamas’s genocidal campaign to exterminate the Jews
Wow, Al. That’s news. Part of their campaign is to come to the USA and kill Matt? Oh wait, their stated goal is to destroy Israel, the country, not exterminate its people!
This has been pointed out to you a number of times. You refuse to correct. You, sir, are a lying hack.
January 8th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
oh snap! i induced nazi germany analogy! holla!
but no, clearly that’s absurd, as was your analogy.
January 8th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Fred – I may stand corrected but the UN ran camps for DPs in Germany until 1961. That is 16 years. About 1/4th the time they have been running camps in the ME. Ridiculous! If we stil had Poles sitting in camps outside Wurzburg we would need our heads examined. The Arabs tried to kill Israel in the cradle and lost. This is why the Palestinians are still taking the lumps.
January 8th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
The idea that the grandchildren of refugees are still called refugees is absurd and unprecedented.
You do realize that any Jew in the world have a “right to return” to Israel? If it’s absurd for kids to have the right to return to their parents’ homes, then isn’t even more absurd for Jews to have an automatic right to move to Israel based on the fact their ancestors ruled Israel 2500 years ago?
(As a practical matter, I favor a 2-state solutions & some limitations on the number of Palestinians refugees allowed to return to their homes. But I can’t blame Palestinians for being resistant to giving up this right.)
This has been the primary cause of the conflict for sixty years, that rather than welcome and assimilate Palestinian refugees in their countries, the Arabs have preferred to confine them to “refugee camps” for decades, to use them as a political pawns against Israel.
Integrating these refugeees into these Arab countries would impose enormous political, social & economic costs. The Palestinian presence led directly to a civil war in Jordan and probably played a major role in the civil war in Lebanon.
January 8th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
It’s worth noting that neither side is really fighting for any human lives. There’s a really simple way to avoid getting killed in this conflict on either side. Don’t live in Israel/Palestine. Just leave. If you kill anyone to prevent or deter further attacks, you aren’t killing to protect any lives, you’re killing to protect your turf.
Of course, it’s possible one side would have harder time emigrating than the other.
January 8th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Peter H – I believe the “Right of Return” is an Israeli concept, not some sort of UN mandate. The Germans have something similiar.
Integrating a 3.5 (?) million Palestinians in amidst approx. 400 million Arabs shouldn’t be a problem. Of course, they get kicked out of or cause internal problems everywhere they go (Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Tunisia, etc.) except the US it seems
January 8th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
In case you haven’t noticed, Al, there are lot of people being killed & maimed in Gaza who aren’t part of Hamas.
January 8th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
Danceswithgoats,
The German Law of Return is very different from the Israeli Law of Return. See here:
http://themagneszionist.blogspot.com/2007/08/law-of-return-part-ii-what-israel-can.html
January 8th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Danceswithgoats,
The Palestinians have been a notably successful minority in South America. Many of those were Christians however and emigrated in the 19th or early 20th century.
I agree that the case for Palestinian nationhood is weak on theoretical grounds. However, a two state solution appears to be a humanitarian and political necesity. The Palestinians aren’t going anywhere, even if we think they ought to.
January 8th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Ok Peter H – I read it but don’t see the problem. The Israeli Law of Return allows all Jews, including Somalis, Ethiopians and assorted other non-white Jews to return because it is not based on an ethnic background. This is a problem?
January 8th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Peter H.
The German Law of Return is very different from the Israeli Law of Return. See here:
It certainly is. It is much looser. All one needs is proof that one grandparent was a German citizen. One doesn’t have to speak German or even set foot in Germany. Case in point, mathematics graduate student Alon Levy who was born in Israel but had a grandparent who was a German citizen. Mr. Levy has German citizenship and travels on a German passport, even though he doesn’t speak German and, to my knowledge, has never set foot in Germany.
January 8th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
kill hundreds of Hamas fighters and officials
Leaving aside the other concerns raised: As a commenter at Lawyers Guns and Money pointed out, this claim (which is entirely consonant with Israeli statements) amounts to an admission that the Israelis are deliberately targeting civilians, which is a war crime. Civilian officials are noncombatants even if they’re officials in an objectionable government like Hamas’s. See B’Tselem’s report on the subject. [Note that Israel has jailed the killers of Rehavam Ze'evi, who was a legitimate target if Hamas officials are.]
January 8th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Neither the Israelis or the Germans run nearly as free a society as ours, that’s for sure.
January 8th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Goebbels was an “official”. I think he needed killing.
January 8th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
“The Palestinian presence led directly to a civil war in Jordan and probably played a major role in the civil war in Lebanon.”
Palestinians still comprise the majority in Jordan. It wasn’t the Palestinian presence per se but the presence of the PLO, which rewarded Jordan’s hospitality by trying to depose the king. The PLO was then forced into Lebanon, which it effectively colonized until it was forced out by Israel. Then it went to Tunisia, until it was let back into the West Bank and Gaza under the Oslo Accords. Then it was kicked out of Gaza by Hamas.
“The Palestinians have been a notably successful minority in South America.”
Christian Palestinians, like other Christian Arabs, are like a spice. A little bit goes a long way, and can make for a more interesting city. But a city (or a country) full of them is a recipe for disaster.
January 8th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
Actually, forget the modifier “Christian” in that previous comment. If there were only Christians in Lebanon, that country would probably be OK. It’s the Muslim Arabs that are like a spice.
January 8th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
Israel is occupying illegal settlements in Palestinian territory????
Israel left Gaza in 2005, giving Palestinians the chance to run their own lives. Despite this, more than 6300 rockets and mortars have been fired into Israel since then.
The Palestinians also consider Tel Aviv and Haifa as occupied land.
What Israel is doing is an act of self defence.
January 8th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
The Palestinians also consider Tel Aviv and Haifa as occupied land.
What Israel is doing is an act of self defence.
Why not? When you move in and drive out the inhabitants of a place and move in their houses, seize their bank accounts, etc.. after you drive them out with massacres what do you think will happen? Everyone was just going to say “to hell with it”? Many of those who got away with enough money did just that, and emigrated to Europe or the U.S. or the gulf states. What are you going to do if you got ran into the Gaza strip and you can’t get out?
There aren’t supposed to be a million people in there. Prior to 1948 they all lived in the area inhabited by the people bitching about the rockets! That’s why there is a Gaza Strip. I don’t know how to undo any of this with any sort of justice but Israeli self-righteousness about it is beyond nauseating. It’s the shittiest victimism on the planet.
January 8th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
Ed Marshall,
What is now Israel was a sparsely-populated, desolate wasteland before the first wave of Zionists immigrated there in the late 19th Century. Look at any photos of the land from the late 19th Century, or read Mark Twain’s account of his travels there. Most of the Palestinians only moved there due to the economic opportunities created by Zionism. Some of them stayed and became Israeli Arabs. Some left, thinking that Israel was going to be destroyed by the invading Arab armies and they could have the whole thing to themselves. They lost. Time to move on.
January 8th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
Do not listen to nincompoops talking out of their asses about how Palestine was “empty” and relying on Mark Twain for evidence.
Check out All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 by Walid Khalidi, in which Arab towns, villages, and settlements are documented, photograph, etc.
For the online project, including oral history interviews, maps, satellite photos, Excel files, the whole god-awful detail oriented lot of it, check out Palestine Remembered.
Or just listen to some moron prattle off shit they heard from some dumbass talk radio.
January 8th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
Yeah, Fred, you are way in over your head on this. Serious, hired, Israeli propogandists don’t try and sell that anymore. The Turks and the British shared an anal-retentive streak in Empire management and the historical provenance is unanswerable. This particular line of revisionism is discredited with anyone who even wants to try and play the game. 9/11 truthers probably have more going for them than “land without a people, people without a land” fantacism.
January 8th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
Fred (@ 37) writes:
Also, the timing of this operation makes sense for Israel. For one thing, Hamas clearly didn’t expect it, and so Israel was able to kill hundreds of Hamas fighters and officials in their facilities in the first few minutes of this war. Additionally, Israel gets to deal with this before Obama comes into office, and also during a period when oil prices are low so it can’t be blamed for driving up gas prices.
So we have good reasons to murder b/c Isreal is not driving up gas prices or b/c the real bad guys died in the first few minutes or b/c Obama isn’t president yet. Sorry….even 2nd degree is still murder.
Democracies are suppost to be regimes of law and not regimes of either men or of opportunity: Nuremburg????? Why shouldn’t, by your account, the people ordering this assult upon a, by definition, civilian population be hung by the neck until dead? Raison d’etat? That’s preisely what Nuremburg was supposed to destroy as an argument.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:04 am
The Hamas fighters he is talking about are the police cadets graduating.
I’ve got friends from Palestine and friends who have spent time in Palestine and if you squint your eyes right, I guess the Gaza police count as “Hamas fighters” in a sense. They have small arms and have a sort of a secondary mission, some vague role as a paramilitary but catching them off guard while they graduate and blowing them all to hell in the hundreds isn’t exactly a strategic coup. If that’s what they have left in the barrel to try and replicate their destruction of the Egyptian Air Force on the ground in ‘68 it’s beyond farce.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:07 am
There were maybe 100k inhabitants in what is now Israel + Gaza and the West Bank in the 19th Century. Sparsely populated is right. I wouldn’t expect objective truth from Palestinian websites.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:11 am
Yer nuts, Fred. I don’t know what craziness you are imbibing in but my guess is those borders haven’t enclosed only 100k people since before the time of Christ. Can I see where you found this incredible figure?
January 9th, 2009 at 12:15 am
“Democracies are suppost to be regimes of law and not regimes of either men or of opportunity: Nuremburg????? Why shouldn’t, by your account, the people ordering this assult upon a, by definition, civilian population be hung by the neck until dead?”
Because they’re not deliberately targeting civilians, but going out of their way to avoid them. Unfortunately, Hamas chooses to hide behind women and children like the slime they are. It’s Hamas that puts its civilians in danger, not Israel.
If Hamas has such an existential beef with Israel, than they could launch attacks on it from places where Israeli retaliation won’t put Palestinian civilians in danger. Or, alternatively, they could take the land in Gaza they were given three years ago and do something productive with it, like build a decent society, instead of launching pointlessly nihilistic attacks at Israel.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:18 am
Fred, don’t leave me hanging here, you beat out Joan Peters who even Daniel Pipes had to cut off as, errrr, mistaken. Do you have someone nuttier than her (or whatever was using her for a pseudonym) or did that come straight out of you?
January 9th, 2009 at 12:43 am
Fred (@65) that’s not relevant…the intent follows the bullet, or to put in another way, if one you fire into a densely populated city it really doesn’t matter. Murder 2, maybe homocide, but not an accident instead predictable and inevitable; who ever fired intended to kill and whoever ordered the firing intended to kill. R’aison d’tat was supposed to die at Nuremburg; why else punish folks way down in the food chain of an obviously bad regime? Yeah, I know who else this legal doctrine applies to (people who sit at my parents dinner table and who otyherwise I think well of, so….). So what…
democracies are supposed to be regimes of law and not regimes of men. Without that distinction, there is no moral claim. Isreal is party to the requisite Geneva Conventions; that makes this their law whether their courts say so or not.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:48 am
Fred (@65) wrote:
Or, alternatively, they could take the land in Gaza they were given three years ago and do something productive with it, like build a decent society, instead of launching pointlessly nihilistic attacks at Israel.
With what, as they has no control over their borders and could not therefore trade freely across said borders? For the last 10,000 years or so ibn that general part of the world, productivity has involved trade, or so all the archaeology tells us so.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:14 am
Ed Marshall,
What’s your population figure for Israel/West Bank circa 1880? Do you have any photos from that period that show any population density? The only photos I’ve seen from then show desolation.
More in Sorrow,
“the intent follows the bullet, or to put in another way, if one you fire into a densely populated city it really doesn’t matter. Murder 2, maybe homocide,”
What rubbish. Following your logic, no one would ever go after terrorists hiding in densely populated areas, and terrorists would use that immunity to continue attacking from such areas.
“With what, as they has no control over their borders and could not therefore trade freely across said borders?”
Listen, if they were interested in trade and not firing rockets at Israel, they would be given the ability to trade goods by either Israel or Egypt (as it is, Gaza’s border with Egypt remains porous). In fact, rich Jews paid to buy the high tech greenhouses that Gazan Jews were using to export produce to Europe, and gave those greenhouses to the Palestinians, who promptly destroyed them. Hamas is too nihilistic to care about trade, and since they have the teat of UNRWA to suck on, they don’t need to do anything constructive.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:32 am
El Cid: didn’t you know that Fred has David’s slingshot on his mantle? He bought it off some guy who said he dug it up in Israel.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:45 am
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January 9th, 2009 at 1:56 am
Fred is a fucking moron who doesn’t rely on facts or census or anything else but what some asshole like Dershowitz said.
Wikipedia cites the following authorities on the population of Palestine:
And this:
And this:
Read that again: “Prior to 1850 there were in the country only a handful of Jews.”
But, no, he wants to rely on some photos from some Zionist textbook.
Fucking moron.
January 9th, 2009 at 5:36 am
It is beyond dispute that most
Palestinians are descendants of
immigrants who came to the land after 1880.
Hence the prevalence of names like Masri,
Turki, Halabi and Basri.
January 9th, 2009 at 7:32 am
What yellowbelly Hack and Mr. El Cid fail to mention relative to the numbers they cite is that it includes Bedouins who were not permanent residents of what is now Israel but were nomads who just happened to be present when the census figures were taken. Thus we have to go on what visitors, like Mark Twain, in the middle to late 18th century observed, which was that they found little evidence of settled communities.
January 9th, 2009 at 7:59 am
SLC has literally no idea, as he doesn’t know the sources I cited, and didn’t look at them, but he’s been told something about Bedouins a couple of times, and those same people told him about trained population historian and geographer Mark Twain, so, why not blather on about it? After all, it makes him sound like he cares about Jews or Israelis, which he doesn’t, he just likes any excuse to shout “Hama Rules!” and hate on Arabs / Muslims.
January 9th, 2009 at 8:00 am
Stopping violence once it starts is a lot more difficult than preventing it from starting in the first place.
Not enough attention has been given to advancing a peace process that will improve the lives of both Palestinians and Israelis. Instead, Bush has supported the counterproductive spiral where the Palestinians and Israelis try to outdo each other in making life more miserable for the other.
There is NO military solution. Bush doesn’t do diplomacy/nuance.
January 9th, 2009 at 8:34 am
Re El Cid
So, according to Mr. El Cid, there are no Bedouins living in any part of Palestine, either then or now.
January 9th, 2009 at 8:35 am
It should be noted that the expulsion of the Palestinians is hardly without precedent in postwar history. Look at the forced expulsion of the Germans from Kaliningrad in 1946. (Which no one, except some hardcore neo-Nazis, complains about today.) And Russia’s historic claim to Kaliningrad was nonexistent (it was, in point of fact, _the_ Prussian homeland) while Israel’s claim is at least arguable. Why the difference in judging the two? If Russia has a right to Kaliningrad then the Jews have a right to Israel.
January 9th, 2009 at 8:37 am
Hamas is playing into the hands of Israel who doesn’t want to end the conflict or even protect its people. There is clear evidence of this. The government chose to forego purchasing a CIWS to shoot down the rockets and instead said they’d design one. However, the one they designed doesn’t work on the rockets and they knew it. They lied to their citizens. Some people in Sderot sued because of it. They’re real intention was to sell the system abroad. They never intended to protect their people. Why would they? The conflict is good for them as it keeps the US dollars flowing. If they wanted to take concrete steps to end the conflict they’d stop the settlements and buy adequate defensive measures. They aren’t doing either.
January 9th, 2009 at 8:45 am
“The conflict is good for them as it keeps the US dollars flowing.”
U.S. economic aid to Israel amounts to $500 million per year, which is less than 1% of Israel’s GDP. Peace would bring a far bigger dividend, in terms of tourism, foreign direct investment, etc. On the other hand, UNWRA and other international alms amounts for almost all of the Palestinian GDP.
January 9th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Hector brings up a good point, that there is a legal and historical precedent for transferring populations of state-less groups when their continued presence would likely spark another war. The reason a double-standard is applied to Israel is that it’s a Jewish state, and characterizing it as an evil or immoral actor helps Europeans assuage their guilt over their complicity in the genocide of European Jewry.
The common sense, humane solution to the conflict would be to offer resettlement to Palestinians in neighboring Arab countries with generous compensation. A one state solution would be pointless, because majority-Arab countries have already demonstrated their intolerance toward Jews. A two state solution would be pointless for two reasons. First, enough Palestinians want to see Israel destroyed that it wouldn’t satisfy them; thus they would continue the conflict. Second, a Palestinian state would likely be as autocratic and despotic as the typical Arab state, or worse. The world doesn’t really need another Arab autocracy.
January 9th, 2009 at 9:41 am
I think you may have missed the point people are trying to make when they talk about proportionality, which is really just talk about asymmetry, right? It doesn’t matter whether that’s how war is conducted usually or not, death tolls are the only way for people to really quantify what’s going on there. The average American gets zero, none, nil actual news from either Gaza or Israel or any sources that really know what is going on there either, except for the briefest little blurbs here and there.
When someone has been reflexively sympathetic to Israel’s side of the conflict learns that its 5 dead on one side and 500 on the other side, that does, and should, have an impact on their way of thinking. This is simply a very important thing to take into account. Everything isn’t some nice, neat little equation on paper, these lives that are being lost are real. And larger aggregate numbers of lost lives damn well should mean more than exponentially smaller numbers of lost lives. What isn’t absolutely and totally obvious about that?
January 9th, 2009 at 10:28 am
Fred: “there is a legal and historical precedent for transferring populations of state-less groups when their continued presence would likely spark another war.”
So kick the fucking Israelis out of Israel. They were “stateless groups” when they invaded Palestine in the 1930’s and 1940’s.
Unless they can produce documentation that says their relatives from two thousand years ago owned X piece of Israel, they have zero claim to any Palestinian land that was being worked by a Palestinian in 1948, when the bastards drove those Palestinians out of their villages by the hundreds of thousands.
The official and public statements of the Zionists REPEATEDLY show that the intent was then and is now to seize ALL of Palestine from the Palestinians, and then enlarge Israel to seize at least parts of Syria, Jordan and elsewhere.
Fred is a fucking moron.
Let’s restate his last paragraph:
The common sense, humane solution to the conflict would be to offer resettlement to Jews in European countries with generous compensation. A one state solution would be pointless, because Israeli Zionists have already demonstrated their intolerance toward Arabs. A two state solution would be pointless for two reasons. First, enough Israelis want to see Arabs destroyed that it wouldn’t satisfy them; thus they would continue the conflict. Second, a Jewish state would likely be – and is – as autocratic and despotic as the typical Arab state, or worse. The world doesn’t really need another Jewish theocracy.
January 9th, 2009 at 10:43 am
No, there were plenty of “Bedouins” in Palestine, then and now, and many have suffered under Palestinian authority as they earlier suffered Israeli authority. It’s that (a) I meant that literally when saying SLC does not care about any actual studies of who was or was not in Palestine, Jewish or otherwise; and (b) “Bedouin” is used to describe various identities, as a lot of Palestine’s inhabitants did not so clearly identify themselves before the onset of late 19th century nationalism which took hold in the west (i.e., the founding of Italy); and (c) anti-Arab / anti-Muslim propagandists mostly use the term in its “nomad” sentiment, the notion being that if you can get people to think that everyone was just wandering pastorally, and there was no significant settled agricultural production and village settlement (and there was, hugely, in part the Zionists liked the place for its proven agricultural output), then there’s no problem pretending that they can all just wander away elsewhere.
Why do you keep playing this game, SLC? You don’t care about Israel, Israelis, or Jews anyway? Why? What’s it all about? Just another fatuous Obama / Osama trick?
January 9th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
If Russia has a right to Kaliningrad then the Jews have a right to Israel.
Firstly, “Russia” and “the Jews” are not comparable entities. But if you want to treat Israel as just another nation-state engaged in retributive ethnic cleansing, that’s just fine, as long as you’re honest about it.
This is the problem that charlatans like Fraud face: they can’t decide whether Israel is just another nation-state — an artificial entity with an ideological backstory that pretends otherwise — or whether it has a “unique” foundation and so special privileges apply. (Which is really just another ideological backstory.)
Of course, the reason to invoke special privileges is that if Israel’s just another nation-state, it ought to be judged by the standards applied to, say, Milosevic in Serbia.
January 9th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Like I said in another thread, the creation of Israel was a historical and legal mistake. To rectify the problem is to rid of this notion of Jewish state which has produced an apartheid state, the biggest concentration camp in history of mankind and has installed world-class thugs in power in Tel Aviv.
January 9th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
El Cid, I don’t know why you ask about SLC. In any other blog, he’d be labeled a fucking troll and be done with it.
Of course, on other blogs I’ve been labeled a fucking troll – or at least “anti-Semitic” on Josh Marshall’s blog. Being so labeled by a fucking “crypto-Zionist” hypocrite, however, is a badge of honor.
SLC – not so much.
January 9th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Israelis would prefer not to annihilate the Palestinians because they have historically provided a good pool of cheap labor. Because of the Intafadas, though, Israel has had to increasingly rely on imported workers from other countries for this purpose. For simple logisitical reasons Israel would probably prefer a permanent underclass of docile workers right next door, much as the U.S. has with Mexico or South Africa had with the homelands
January 11th, 2009 at 5:41 am
But Hamas’ actual cause isn’t the just cause of Palestinian independence but an unjust cause of aggression against Israel.
Disagree.
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