As the conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas has unfolded over the last three weeks, we've heard a tremendous amount from all sorts of commentators about how "disproportionate" Israel's response to the over 5,500 rocket attacks on its territory have been, with the usual evidence offered being a comparison of the number of Palestinian deaths which have been incurred as against the number of Israeli deaths which have transpired under indiscriminate Palestinian rocket fire. Although this "disproportionate response" argument has rubbed me the wrong way from the very first time I heard it, until now I've preferred to hold my peace in order to devote my time to more pressing concerns; but now I cannot stand the idiocy and hypocrisy of such sloganeering any longer, and I will endeavor to explain precisely why anyone who cries "disproportionate response!!!" is at best a misguided fool and at worst a barely disguised antisemite whose real issue is that Israel dares to respond at all.
The first thing to note about the rocket attacks which provoked Israel to go to war is that the number of fatalities they have caused in Israel are far from being an accurate gauge of the impact they have on life in Israel's southern territory. Unlike the Israelis whom every ignorant lefty and armchair critic is so quick to scream "genocide!!!!" at, Hamas does not and has never made any distinction between "civilian" and "military" targets when attacking Israel, not when it was sending suicide bombers to blow up pizzerias and discos, and not when it is launching Qassam and Grad rockets into Israel. In consequence of this, there is no such thing as an Israeli within Hamas' range who can go about about his or her daily business in the confidence that he/she is a civilian or even a child: it would not bother Hamas in the least if one of their rockets were able to hit a kindergarten and slaughter every child within it*. Fortunately for Israel's children, they live in a country with an organized government which cares about keeping its populace safe, and as such there is an effective early warning system to get people to shelter whenever a rocket is launched, as well as a number of concrete hardened shelters and bunkers in offices, schools and apartment buildings in which Israelis can take refuge during such situations. If Israel's mindless critics can state that "only" a handful of Israelis have died because of Hamas' actions, it is because these measures have been effective, not because living constantly under the fear of being killed by a rocket is something so minor that a responsible government should expect its citizens to continue to tolerate such a thing.
The second point Israel-bashers and sanctimonious tear-jerkers fail to register is that Hamas has been busy not just building ever more rockets but also in extending their range, so that a major population center like Ashkelon is now within reach, and now even Ashdod is no longer safe: were Hamas left alone to keep upgrading its armory, one could foresee a day when even the inhabitants of Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem would have to start cowering under bridges and in basements awaiting the fall of rockets from Gaza. Anyone with a smidgeon of moral decency and half a brain ought to be able to recognize why it would have been a massive abdication of responsibility for Israel's government to allow this entirely forseeable development to occur, but that is the thing about reflexive Israel bashers: either they are morally bankrupt Jew-haters and Arab sympathizers who would love for every inch of Israeli soil to be within range of random Islamic terror, or they lack the minimal brainpower required to go beyond simply emoting at the sight of dead children and crying women that Hamas relies so effectively (German language article) on to cultivate sympathy abroad: it is a good thing that emotion-driven morons like these weren't so plentiful on the ground in America and Britain when Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg and other German cities were being carpet-bombed, as Josef Goebbels would have shown no hesitation in using their incapacity for thought against the allies, even as the Third Reich continued its mass murder in eastern Europe. Indeed, the revelation of the Katyn massacre was just one such shamelessly hypocritical (and luckily, ineffective) effort.
Yet another point that I need to make here, and one that you'd think would be glaringly obvious, is that war is not a boxing match held under Queensbury rules. There is no law of war according to which a combatant who is attacked is compelled to retaliate only to the same extent as the damage which has been inflicted on it by an aggressor, and if there were such a rule, its only effect would be to bias any conflict in favor of the ruthlessly immoral aggressor, which in this case just happens to be Hamas: to see why this is so, consider that the immoral aggressor would feel no compulsion to abide by any "gentlemen's rules" the moment it gains the upper hand, while it need not necessarily fear utter extinction if it turns out to be the weaker party. In any case, one of the prime rationales for the existence of governments at all (and one of the few which even most libertarians are inclined to accept) is for the protection of their citizens from external attack, and the way to discharge this duty is not by engaging in tit-for-tat retaliation against such aggression - thereby implicitly valuing the lives of its own citizens at the same estimation as that of the foreigners who wish to harm them - but by pursuing actions which will quickly and definitively bring the external threats to an end. While this goal can on sometimes be achieved through diplomatic maneuvering, there are occasions when it means going to war, and on such occasions the true measure of "proportionality" is not whether one's military maneuvers are as ineffective as those who provoked the war, but whether they are commensurate with the goal to be achieved - which in Israel's case meant either destroying Hamas or at the very least bloodying the group enough to sufficiently deter its members from further rocket attacks. It's all well and good for outsiders with nothing at risk to suggest that Israel should have put its soldiers at extreme risk in order to minimize Palestinian casualties, but this makes no sense whatsoever from a military standpoint: any policy which raises the risk of Israeli casualties, diminishes the appeal of acting decisively against Hamas, and consequently alters the strategic calculus in favor of the Islamic terror group, which will be emboldened to escalate its aggression by the awareness of Israeli casualty avoidance. As Clausewitz noted, war is a continuation of politics by other means, and if the goal is deterrence, it makes no sense to listen to idiots who scream blue murder because one has made sure that most of those doing the dying are in the enemy camp rather than one's own.
Finally, let it be noted here that as military campaigns go, Israel's "Operation Cast Lead" has not in fact been particularly bloody: leaving aside the fact that Hamas-sympathizing Israel haters routinely scream about "over 1,000 dead!" without noting that the great majority of that number were in fact Hamas gunmen killed while trying to kill Israelis, 1,000 people is almost nothing when compared to the number of lives lost in conflcts within the Muslim world itself which the "Zionism is Nazism" nutcases have never bothered to rant and rave about: take the more than 7,000 slaughtered during Assad the elder's "quelling" [sic] of revolt in Hama, for instance, or the 3,000 killed in the Halabja gassing by the great Arab hero Saddam Hussein, or the 400,000 murdered in Darfur, and of whom the Arab media has breathed nary a word (except to dismiss Western attention to the mass murder as part of a supposed "American/Zionist conspiracy"). The funny thing about such incidents in the Arab world is that they not only represent Arab governments butchering their very own citizens, whose lives they should be protecting, but that the great majority of those who were killed have invariably been genuine non-combatants, rather than cowardly gunmen who run about in civilian clothes, shoot from hospitals, mosques and schools, and rejoice in the suffering of their own populace: that the great majority of Palestinian deaths have been those of combatants, in spite of the fact that Hamas is unscrupulous enough to use the basement of Gaza's biggest hospital as its wartime headquarters, speaks volumes about the care Israel has taken to minimize civilian deaths - and it also indicates that Hamas is clearly far more aware of the moral constraints Israel has imposed on itself than those abroad who see Israelis as modern-day nazis. To lambaste Israel for civilian deaths, when Hamas has done everything in its power to maximize the number of such deaths in order to wring maximum propaganda value out of the conflict, is not merely stupid but outright indecent: it is simply unheard of militarily for a combatant to intentionally sacrifice the element of surprise by giving enemy combatants advance notice of when and where it plans to attack, but that is just what the IDF has done, and there is only one possible reason for doing such a thing, namely to minimize the very civilian casualties Hamas and its useful idiots around the world wish to hold up in condemnation of Israel.
In closing, let me state here that I am as disturbed by the sight of dead children and wailing mothers as anyone, and I would like nothing more than for the Palestinian population to live and prosper in an atmosphere of peace and security, but for that to happen they will need to give up their own insistence on wreaking as much havok on their Israeli neighbors as they possibly can. If the Palestinians genuinely want peace, and are prepared to choose leaders who make it clear that peace is the goal they will work towards, then I will throw my support behind them 100%, but until then it is sheer madness to expect rational, unbiased outsiders to sympathize with their sufferings when they are the ones to repeatedly provoke such sufferings in the first place. It takes real chutzpah to insist on trying to murder 6 million people over the border and then demand the world's pity when the folks you want dead prove to be far stronger than you are.
What is "disproportionate" about the present conflict in Gaza is not the Israeli response to it, but the sheer amount and intensity of unfair, hypocritical criticism leveled at Israel by people who would not tolerate a tenth of the provocations from a foreign country that Israelis have weathered for years before finally being prodded into action: Israel's critics care disproportionately greatly about the plight of people who have freely chosen to work towards Israel's demise, and disproportionately little about the harm inflicted on Israel by Islamist extremists in Lebanon, Gaza and elsewhere - and that is why not a single one of them had anything critical to say whatsoever throughout the 8 years during which Israel passively withstood rocket fire and suicide bombings from Gaza's inhabitants.
*This is precisely why Hamas' statement about Israeli children now being fair game for killing rings so hollow; they make it sound as if this were something genuinely new on their part ...
Unsurprisingly, the BBC commentary from "innocent" Palestinians were essentially monotonous in proclaiming that Hamas defeated Israel.
There are even doubts about whether most Hamas fighters actually had the balls to fight (BBC Middle EAST: Gaza ruins beg questions of Hamas).
Hamas too is now claiming "victory," and I suppose by his definition, victory equals: Inciting a clearly superior military to war, running away from the war, having hundreds of your own fighters and an equal number of your people killed, then coming back to proclaim "victory" at last! I guess they never got the memo that the only way to make demands from a superior force was to try the "non-violent" way, you know, like Mandela did in Africa, like Ghandi did in India, and as MLK did in the U.S.A. Perhaps if they tried reading a different piece of literature other than the Quran...
Posted by: Jubril | January 22, 2009 at 12:18 AM