Very Disproportionate, Indeed. By Marty Peretz
The New Republic Blogs. Saturday, December 27, 2008 9:22 PM
From January 1 until December 21, Hamas and its allies had launched exactly 1,250 rockets across the border between Gaza and Israel. Then the escalation really started: on Wednesday 70 projectile missiles landed in the Negev and its populated areas. On Thursday, more of the same. On Friday, two Palestinian girls, cousins of 5 and 12 years, were killed by a rocket that was launched in the Strip and landed in the Strip. But these unfortunates were not the targets of fire. It was just another day of blast offs into the Jewish state.
The government in Jerusalem had made it unmistakably clear that it would no longer tolerate this fire power aimed at innocent civilian life. It had been saying this for months to an increasingly skeptical and apprehensive, not to say, restive public. And to Hamas which didn't seem to care. Instead, it threatened Israel by word and follow-up deeds that confirmed the recklessness - as if confirmation was needed- of also this Palestinian "liberation" movement, the last in the long line of terrorist revolutionaries acting in the name of pathetic and blood-thirsty Palestine.
So at 11:30 on Saturday morning, according to both the Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz, as well as the New York Times, 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters demolished some 40 to 50 sites in just about three minutes, maybe five. Message: do not fuck with the Jews. At roughly noon, another 60 air-attack vehicles went after other Hamas strategic positions. Israeli intelligence reported 225 people dead, mostly Hamas military leaders with some functionaries, besides, and perhaps 400 wounded. The Palestinians announced 300 dead, probably as a reflex in order to begin their whining about disproportionate Israeli acts of war. And 600 wounded.
Frankly, I am up to my gullet with this reflex criticism of Israel as going beyond proportionality in its responses to war waged against its population with the undisguised intention of putting an end to the political expression of the Jewish nation. Within hours, Nicolas Sarkozy was already taking up the cudgel of French righteousness and pronouncing the actually quite sober Israeli response to the continuous war on its borders "disproportionate." Enough. What would be proportionate, oh, so so proportionate apparently, are those tried-and-true half measures to contain Hamas that have never worked. Remember that in 2005 Israel ceded Gaza to the Palestinians waiting and hoping that they would make something of a civil society of their territory, civil for their own and civil to their neighbors. It was not to be.
There is only small likelihood that Hamas has learned its lesson. These Sunni fanatics are still supported by the Shi'a fanatics in Iran. And they are also backed by the House of Saud which cannot be seen to be turning its back on Sunni piety. Gaza is the only place in the Middle East where Tehran and Riyadh are allied. In both Lebanon and Iraq, they are the bankrollers (and more than bankrollers) of hostile sectarian forces engaged in killing each other. Thus, Hamas has still some rope with which to play. Cash, after all, is a great deluder.
The current warfare will go on a bit longer. If there is a pause and if I were giving advice to the Israelis, this is what I would say to Hamas and to the people of Gaza: "If a rocket or missile is launched against us, if you take captive one of our soldiers (as you have held one for two and a half years), if you raise a new Intifada against us, there will be an immediate response. And it will be very disproportionate. Proportion does not work."
No sooner had I written these last words that Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader exiled in Damascus (which also apparently pines to make peace with Israel), announced the beginning of the Third Intifada.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
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Secretary-General urges immediate halt to renewed Israeli-Palestinian violence
ReplyDeletehttp://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=29425
The Proportionality Trap, by J.G. Thayer
ReplyDeleteCommentary Magazine blogs, Dec 28, 2008 - 9:34 AM
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/thayer/48162
As predicted, Hamas and members of the Arab world are condemning Israel’s current attacks on Gaza as “disproportionate,” meaning “excessive.” And they do have a purely mathematical point — during the recent bombardments of Israel from the Gaza Strip, casualties have been light. At last count, one Israeli and two Palestinians (sisters, ages 13 and 5) died from in rocket attacks. So a proportionate response, one presumes, would have required Israel to kill a single Palestinian and two of its own citizens.
There is a more fundamental problem here: the notion that Israel’s response (or, indeed, the response of any nation in a similar situation) should be “proportionate” to the provocation. And that is a horrific fallacy.
The notion that one should only respond to an attack with roughly the same force used by the aggressor is based on some fatally flawed presumptions.
The first is that the aggressor can be expected to respond in a rational manner. In this case, the presumption is that Hamas is actually interested in a peaceful solution and mutually beneficial situation. That is provably false. One need only look at Hamas’s charter and the group’s words and deeds to see that it is unabashedly dedicated to the absolute destruction of Israel.
The second fallacy is more subtle. The point of a “proportional” response is that it is intended to end the current hostilities and return to the status quo. And in this case, it implies that the status quo prior to the provocations was acceptable.
Hamas speaks of a “truce,” but their definition of a “truce” is one that no one else would recognize as valid. It consisted of a steady, constant bombardment of Israel by rocket and mortar shells. When they declared the truce to be at an end, they escalated the attacks, which in turn prompted Israel’s air strikes. Had Israel restrained itself to a “proportional” attack, then it would have been saying that the prior status quo — the rocket and mortar attacks reduced to one or two a day — was acceptable.
No, by striking as hard as they did Israel is sending a different message. And it’s, in an odd way, more respectful of Hamas than a “proportionate” response would have been. Israel is saying, in effect, “you are the legitimate government of the Gaza Strip, and we are holding you to the same standard as we would the government of any other nation. And when a nation declares war on us and commits acts of war against us, we respond by waging war on them.”
Hamas now finds itself having to argue before the world that it didn’t really mean all the things it said and did, that it doesn’t want to be treated that way, and that Israel needs to be restrained from further attacks.
And, sadly, there are enough nations in the world who will side with them.
Israel también ha violado la tregua en Gaza, dice la ONU, by Eugenio Garcia
ReplyDeletehttp://www.publico.es/internacional/130001/israel/gaza/hamas/onu
Público, Dec 28, 2008
Un informe de las Naciones Unidas determina que Israel violó la tregua en la franja de Gaza en siete ocasiones antes de que la Yihad Islámica disparara su primer cohete el pasado martes. El informe contradice la posición israelí de que el alto el fuego acordado con el movimiento fundamentalista Hamás, que controla Gaza, en vigor desde el 19 de junio, lo rompieron primero las milicias palestinas.
La fragilidad de la tregua ha incrementado la tensión en los últimos días, tanto en lo tocante a las relaciones entre Israel y Hamás como a las relaciones entre Hamas –que no ha disparado ningún cohete– y el resto de las milicias en la franja, que han lanzado media docena de cohetes sobre territorio israelí desde el martes.
Israel ha cerrado los accesos a la franja hasta nueva orden, lo que vuelve a privar a un millón y medio de personas de alimentos y provisiones de toda índole. Los israelíes, sin embargo, han autorizado la entrada de una cantidad limitada de combustible.
Hamás ha establecido un comité con todas las milicias para evitar el disparo de cohetes. La organización islamista tiene un gran interés en consolidar la tregua con el estado hebreo para aliviar la vida cotidiana de la población, aunque otras milicias sostienen que debe responderse a todas las agresiones y aplicar la ley del Talión: ojo por ojo y diente por diente.
Disparan a campesinos
La mayor parte de las violaciones que han cometido los israelíes se refieren, según las Naciones Unidas, a disparos del Ejército contra campesinos que acudían a trabajar sus campos cerca de la verja que separa la franja de Israel.
La primera, por ejemplo, se produjo el 20 de junio, sólo un día después de que la tregua entrara en vigor. En otro incidente, dos días más tarde, las tropas israelíes abrieron fuego contra un grupo de personas que recogían leña. Un palestino de 70 años resultó herido. Este incidente provocó el primer disparo de un cohete contra Israel.
El viernes, los palestinos lanzaron dos cohetes sobre zonas deshabitadas del desierto del Neguev.
Trashing of Civilizations: Identity and War in Gaza. By Stirling Newberry
ReplyDeleteSunday December 28, 2008 8:00 am
See complete post with links: http://firedoglake.com/2008/12/28/trashing-of-civilizations-identity-and-war-in-gaza/
Samuel Huntington died at a convenient moment: one of his wars is starting. Huntington was an advisor to Carter and Hubert Humphrey, from a generation of post-Victorian romantic nationalists. His work is broader and more nuanced than its readers. However, Clash of Civilizations and Who Are We are not books meant to attract nuanced readers. Nuance in both is a rationalization, not a rationale.
While Huntington warned against America imposing its order on the rest of the world, his paradigm left few other options. His late influence obscures his contributions to political realism, such as Political Order in Changing Societies, which featured perhaps the most concise discussion to its day of modernization which, despite its rationalism does not necessarily mean the rationalization of power, authority, structure, or political participation, because of the difference between modernization as a direction, and modernization as a process.
The current war between Hamas and Israel is a Huntingtonian War, in that it is based on the belief that cultural unity is essential for national hegemony, and that unlimited force is acceptable in pursuit of this goal. It is an idea that was born of the rise of the Nation-State, and which traces a vast arc for good and evil, to land in the sands of Al-Anbar, the ravines of Helmand, and the mazes of Gaza. Israeli politics is predicated on certain totems of cultural unity which must be pursued at all cost as essential to their national identity, even if these conflict with peace. They are arrayed against a people - the Palestinians - who beginning 80 years ago traded their identity as Palestinians, for their identity as the edge of militarized pan-Arabism, a movement to which they historically had not belonged.
The outgoing administration backs Israel completely, however virtually the rest of the international community has called for a halt to the attacks, which have claimed more than 230 lives, of which Hamas reports 160 are security personnel. 700 are reported wounded. For comparison 31 Israelis are listed as killed by terrorism this year through October, 12 of them soldiers or security personnel. Steve Clemons perceptively notes that this is part of Bush's reverse hundred days to restrict Obama to Bush's policies.
Both Israel and their antagonists are creatures of outside flows of capital and funding: the current military aid deal to Israel is 30 billion over 10 years, with as much as an additional 1 billion from private donations. Hamas is even more dependent on outside funding, including allegations that Israeli intelligence community funded Hamas to create a counter-weight to Fatah in the first place. However, it is from Iran and other states seeking a counterweight to Israel that its military moneys come.
This inflow of outside funds drives cycles of terrorism, and it drives the military instrument in Israel. As a result, while taking nothing away in terms of responsibility of the parties involved, people are dying there, because of the internal political dynamics of the United States, Saudi Arabia, and a host of other states that find financing military proxies to be convenient.
At the present moment, however, this is a game changing moment. Israel's political coalition, faced with electoral catastrophe, decided not to wait for administration change in Washington, and is pursuing an action aimed at decapitating the political leadership of Hamas in Gaza, risking a wider asymmetrical response. The gamble is undertaken, absent an overwhelming economic response from the outside world, or a stinging military defeat, neither of which should be relied upon.
Instead of a clash of civilizations, this should be seen as a clash of economic identity, with Israel and Hamas both willing to use violence to influence economic outcomes, and other actors funding a proxy war for their own economic needs. This is a collision between what Philip Bobbitt might call a "Market-State" in Israel, and a National-pre-state in the form of Hamas.
What's the matter with Waziristan? By Mark Steyn
ReplyDeleteSunday, December 28, 2008,
09:47 AM
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZmI0YzI1ZmExODMzZjE0YTA1MGE5Y2ZjYzI0N2FhYWU=
Samuel Huntington's key point in his most famous book is that the conventional western elite view of man as homo economicus is reductive - that cultural identity is a more profound indicator that western-style economic liberty cannot easily trump.
This should have been obvious: If a man is a Muslim bus driver, which is more central to his identity - that he is a Muslim or that he drives a bus? Yet much of the trouble in the world comes from the assumption that economic interests will always outpunch cultural ones: The British imported a large Indian population to serve as a merchant and clerical class in Fiji. It made perfect economic sense. A century later Fiji was a coup-racked ruin split open on cultural fault lines.
In The Clash Of Civilizations, Huntington gave us the phrase "Islam's bloody borders" to describe the striking number of conflicts along "the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims". The "border" - in the sense of a line of demarcation - is increasingly hard to discern. In parts of western Europe, it's more like the overlapping area codes you now get in certain US cities. Forty years ago, the mills of northern England needed workers so Britain imported them from Pakistan. The mills closed, but the workers stayed, and now Yorkshire has adopted Mirpuri customs of arranged cousin marriage: in Bradford, 75 per cent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins. As to the seductive assimilatory charms of time, 30 years ago the percentage was half that. A victory for culture over economics.
These are difficult questions from which the progressive multicultural mind recoils in instinctive revulsion. Samuel Huntington, a lifelong liberal, never did: as Kaplan's headline in The Atlantic put it, he looked the world in the eye.
Iraqi Parliamentarian to His People: "It's Not Between Palestinians and Israelis, it's Between Terrorists and Moderates". By Heather Robinson
ReplyDeletePosted December 30, 2008 | 01:35 AM (EST)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heather-robinson/iraqi-parliamentarian-to_b_154134.html
Just spoke over the phone with Iraqi Parliamentarian Mithal al-Alusi, head of the Iraqi Nation Party in Baghdad, who advocates normalized relations between the new Iraq and Israel and promotes human rights in the Middle East. He says that, not surprisingly, the airwaves in Iraq are saturated with anti-Israel propaganda as Israel strikes back at Hamas for 3+ years of rocket attacks on Israel's southern towns. But interestingly, a significant number of Iraqis are not reflexively anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian, he says.
As Israel strikes back at Hamas, this champion of Iraqi-Israeli cooperation has been explaining to his fellow Iraqis, "the conflict is not between Palestinians and Israelis, it's between terrorists and moderates."
Alusi has made several trips to Israel to promote cooperation between Iraq and the Jewish state on counter-terrorism. In February, 2005, as revenge for Alusi's decision to break the longstanding taboo in the Arab world against visiting Israel, terrorists murdered his two sons, Ayman, 30, and Jamal, 22, who were helping their father build the Iraqi Nation Party, a political party dedicated to protecting human rights and promoting free markets and cooperation among democracies. But Alusi, an ideological pioneer in the middle east, refused to back down. He got his party, which his fallen sons had helped him establish, onto the ballot and in December, 2005 was elected to the Iraqi Parliament.
Tonight Alusi says that many Iraqis, while they are not necessarily sympathetic to Israel, are not pro-Palestinian either. Many, he says, feel they have been abused by Palestinians. For starters, some of the foreign-born suicide bombers who have tormented the Iraqi people in recent years have been Palestinian, and many ordinary Iraqis know it, and resent it. Also, Iraqis remember that many Palestinians were loyal to Saddam Hussein, who hideously abused Iraqis and whom most of them loathe the memory of (Saddam, remember, sent $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers for targeting Israeli civilians).
Furthermore, Alusi says that when he leaves Baghdad's Green Zone, as recently as the day before yesterday, "thousands of [Iraqi] people would like to shake hands. They know I was in Israel, and they are very positive."
Moreover, he maintains that the "realists" in Iraq-those people who are not fanatically religious or anti-democracy (and he maintains these "realists" are in the majority) "want to be normal" and are open to the idea of accepting Israel as "a modern country and a ... part of the middle east," especially if doing so would mean cooperating with Israel to protect Iraq against terrorist forces bankrolled by Iran. "Iraqis are willing to be free, to be normal," he says. "Pragmatic people are moving in the direction of normality."
While Alusi notes he is grieved by war and hopes Israel's operations minimize casualties to Palestinian civilians, he believes Israel must devastate Hamas.
"We understand why this fight started, and if someone starts something, he has to finish," he says. He also referred to connections between some of the extremist religious political parties in Iraq and Hamas, all of whom he says receive funding from Iran, and all of whom are the enemies of free people who oppose terrorism and fanaticism.
"Who do you think the Islamist parties are in Iraq?" he says. "If Hamas wins, they will also be stronger."
Some Moderate Proposals, Victor Davis Hanson
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The Corner/NRO, Dec 30, 2008 08:08 AM
1) Request that 50% of Israel's air-to-ground missiles be duds to ensure greater proportionality.
2) Allow Hamas another 1,000 free rocket launches to see if they can catch up with the body count.
3) Have Israeli soldiers congregate in border barracks so that Hamas's random rockets have a better chance of killing military personnel, to ensure it can claim at least a few military targets.
4) Redefine "holocaust" to refer to deaths of terrorists in numbers under 400 to give greater credence to Hamas's current claims.
5) In the interest of fairness, allow Hamas to establish both the date that war is supposed to begin and the date when it must end.
6) Send Israeli military advisers to Hamas to improve the accuracy of their missiles.
7) Take down the barriers to return to Hamas a fair chance of getting suicide bombers back inside Israel.