The war against the Jews (2)
Here is part of the item about the Gaza escalation broadcast by Jeremy Bowen on yesterday’s Today programme at 0840 am to which I referred in my entry below.
There isn’t much point trying to work out who started it; both sides blame each other.On the contrary: there is every point in doing so, because the side that started it — the Arabs — is the aggressor and its victim, Israel, only uses military force in defence. The moral equivalence routinely used by the media to assert that what’s going on is merely ‘tit-for-tat’ violence ignores this crucial moral distinction and results in Israel being blamed for defending itself. The facts are plain: Israel disengaged from Gaza; the response of the Gazans was to increase the rocketing of southern Israel many times over. If anyone really has difficulty working out which side started this conflagration, all they have to do is ask themselves a simple question: if the Arabs stopped the bombs and the missiles and the rockets and announced: ‘The war is over for ever and we only want a state of our own to live peacefully alongside Jewish Israel’, does anyone (apart from pathological Israel haters) seriously think Israel would be bombing Gaza?
Better perhaps to see the violence that's washing back and forth between Gaza and Israel as the latest episode in a conflict that has lasted around a century. It started because two different peoples wanted one piece of land. They're still working their way through the consequences of that single fact.No, it wasn’t ‘two different peoples’ because at that time there was no such thing as ‘a Palestinian people’, merely Arab people who lived in Palestine. The conflict did not start because they and the Jews ‘wanted one piece of land’. It started because the Arabs refused to accept the decision by first Britain and then the League of Nations to re-establish the Jewish national home in Palestine, to which they were deemed to be entitled as of right on account of their unbroken title to and unrivalled claim upon that land (which included what is now the West Bank and Gaza).
When you take the long view you realise how hard it will be to stop the killing. Here are some of the reasons behind what the two sides are doing now. The Israelis say that no country in the world would tolerate repeated attacks on its sovereign territory and that it must protect its citizens. That's why, once again, it's threatening a big military operation in Gaza. Never leaving an attack unanswered is a basic instinct in a state whose founders believed they'd abandoned centuries of Jewish weakness when they left Europe to build something new and strong in what they called the Land of Israel.‘Never leaving an attack unanswered…’? What planet is this man living on? There have been more than 2000 rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza since disengagement in 2005. Until now, the Israel government has more or less sat on its hands. The inhabitants of Sderot have been crying out for action to be taken but until now, apart from some small-scale raids, the government has refused to do so. As for the ‘basic instinct in a state whose founders believed they'd abandoned centuries of Jewish weakness’, in what other state would it not be a basic instinct to defend its citizens against such a bombardment? What other state would have ebdured bombardment by 2000+ rockets before acting? Here’s how America once responded to something that was only fractionally similar (from a WSJ article by Bret Stephens):
On March 9, 1916, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa attacked the border town of Columbus, N.M., killing 18 Americans. President Woodrow Wilson ordered Gen. John J. Pershing and 10,000 soldiers into Mexico for nearly a year to hunt Villa down, in what was explicitly called a 'punitive expedition.' Pershing never found Villa, making the effort something of a failure. Then again, Villa's raid would be the last significant foreign attack on continental U.S. soil for 85 years, six months and two days.The implication that defending one’s people against murderous attack is something peculiar to the Jews is demonstrably preposterous.
The Palestinians of Hamas, who run things inside the Gaza strip, say that their right to resist, to defend their people is absolute. They believe that their Palestinian rivals in Fatah, the other main faction, were ready to sell their birthright in negotiations with Israel that amounted to surrender. They say they will not make the same mistake. What's going on between the Palestinian rocket squads in Gaza and the Israeli army is a classic fight between the strong and the weak, which is known these days as asymmetric warfare. The thing about it is that the weakest side can exert leverage far beyond the power of its weapons. That accounts for some of the rage and frustration in Israel's defence establishment. They're big, they're strong and they have some of the most sophisticated weapon systems in the world and they're struggling to stop rockets that are the lowest of the low tech.Leverage? Leverage?? The inhabitants of Sderot are too terrified to go to the lavatory or take their children to school because dozens of rockets are falling on them every single day. This is not 'leverage'. It's attempted mass murder. Why are Israelis not seen as victims like anyone else?
Israel is not finally responding because it is in a 'rage' that ‘the weak’ are succeeding against ‘the strong’. It’s because it is under attack and people are being killed and maimed. The fact that these rockets are crude and often miss their target is neither here nor there. So too were the fertiliser bombs strapped to the British Islamist bombers who attacked London in July 2005. Are countries supposed to ignore a potentially lethal daily bombardment unless the rockets are of a superior design and efficacy? And what about the ‘Grad’ Katyushas that have been hitting Ashkelon, which Israel says are supplied by Iran? Is Iran also ‘weak’ and ‘asymmetric’?
That's probably why the Israeli deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai used the word ‘holocaust’ to describe what will happen to the Palestinians if the rocket fire intensifies. His spin doctor moved fast to sat that the deputy minister, a retired major-general, did not mean genocide.See posts below. Ye gods.
The Bret Stephens article, by the way, is well worth reading. He takes the argument that Israel’s response is ‘disproportionate’ and eviscerates it:
Does the "proportion" apply to the intention of those firing the Kassams — to wit, indiscriminate terror against civilian populations? In that case, a "proportionate" Israeli response would involve, perhaps, firing 2,500 artillery shells at random against civilian targets in Gaza. Or should proportion apply to the effects of the Kassams — an exquisitely calibrated, eye-for-eye operation involving the killing of a dozen Palestinians and the deliberate maiming or traumatizing of several hundred more?
Surely this isn't what advocates of proportion have in mind. What they really mean is that Israel ought to respond with moderation. But the criteria for moderation are subjective. Should Israel pick off Hamas leaders who are ordering the rocket attacks? The European Parliament last week passed a resolution denouncing the practice of targeted assassinations. Should Israel adopt purely economic measures to punish Hamas for the Kassams? The same resolution denounced what it called Israel's "collective punishment" of Palestinians. Should Israel seek to dismantle the Kassams through limited military incursions? This, too, has the unpardonable effect of resulting in too many Palestinian casualties, which are said to be "disproportionate" to the number of Israelis injured by the Kassams.
By these lights, Israel's presumptive right to self-defense has no practical application as far as Gaza is concerned.
Yup; that’s about the long and the short of it.