Kill Them All, Let Yahweh Sort Them Out

[NOTE: I revised and extended the ending paragraphs later this afternoon.]

Daniel Larison did a nice job today of dissecting a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece on the current Israeli blitzkrieg in Gaza.  He points out that the writer, one Thane Rosenbaum, "unintentionally endorses the logic of every terrorist group in history:"

On some basic level, you forfeit your right to be called civilians when you freely elect members of a terrorist organization as statesmen, invite them to dinner with blood on their hands and allow them to set up shop in your living room as their base of operations. At that point you begin to look a lot more like conscripted soldiers than innocent civilians. And you have wittingly made yourself targets.

As Larison indicates, Rosenbaum's argument would justify Arab "terrorist" attacks on Israel, whose citizens have freely elected a government that carries out attacks on civilians and thereby -- on Rosenbaum's logic -- wittingly made themselves targets.  As far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of Israelis are strongly supportive of what their government and their army are doing, thereby allowing them to set up shop in their living room as their base of operations.

Larison also answers a popular defense of Israeli violence that was often invoked in the NPR coverage I heard while traveling over the weekend (I added the bold type):

It may please Hamas to make use of these victims’ deaths for their own purposes, but that doesn’t absolve the Israeli government of its responsibility for causing those deaths. If Hamas benefits politically from these civilian deaths, and it seems likely that they do, it would seem obvious that Israel should not want to cause any more, and yet at each step over the last few weeks Israel’s government has responded with tactics that are guaranteed to continue killing many more non-combatants for as long as this operation continues. 

Of course, Israel also benefits politically from Israeli civilian deaths (though according to Rosenbaum, remember, there are no civilians), which would suggest that its enemies should not want to cause any more either.  It also indicates that the US government and corporate media should view Israeli exploitation of its civilians' injuries as they view Hamas's.  Of course that isn't going to happen; indeed, President Obama joins in the exploitation of the suffering of Israeli civilians.

The comments, as usual under Larison's work, are pretty good.  One person asked:

I ask this as a rather naive bystander, but: why is it that, on any given day, I can read The American Conservative on how Israel continues to kill more and more non-combatants (“running up the score”) and I can read National Review’s defense of Israel as being about the most careful regime in the world in terms of protecting non-combatants. What is the truth?

I don't see these two positions as necessarily contradictory.  An apologist for Israel could reply that if Israel weren't so scrupulous and careful, many more Palestinians would be killed.  (An apologist for Hamas could argue that they are even more careful, since rockets fired from Gaza into Israel kill almost nobody, civilian or military.  No one would take such an argument seriously, of course.)  Therefore, the apologist would continue, covering Palestinian deaths is a sign of the media's anti-Israel and indeed anti-Semitic bias, trying to win sympathy for these animals in hopes of driving Israel into the sea.  The problem for Israel is that they are clearly targeting civilians and civilian targets, such as hospitals, deliberately (though, the apologist would insist, they would kill so many more if Israel weren't such a moral exemplar), and this doesn't look good.  As another commenter pointed out, the killing of Arab civilians has been Israeli policy since its founding in 1948.

Another commenter wrote:

But the practical question is, what is Israel to do? Hamas deliberately installs rocket launchers in densely populated areas, it benefits politically from civilian casualties. We are witnessing a new form of warfare, where one side (Hamas) uses a horrific strategy of maximizing casualties among their own as an informational warfare weapon.  It works, too.

As I already pointed out, so does Israel, especially since any Israeli casualties will be trumpeted to the world as proof of Arab barbarism. When US media say that things have been quiet in Israel-Palestine of late, they mean only that no Israelis have been killed; Palestinian deaths are business as usual, nothing to see here, folks.

I suppose another practical question is what you expect Hamas to do. Gaza is, as we’re often told, one of the most densely populated areas on earth. Its government has no place to put defensive weapons except among the civilian population. Certainly Gazans have a right to defend themselves against Israeli violence — don’t they? And Gaza is under blockade, which is an act of war (as even the Israelis recognize if a blockade is directed against them); Israeli violence against Gaza is not limited to major assaults like the one currently underway. And that’s aside from the ongoing, daily violence and repression directed against Palestinians in the West Bank, and increasingly against Israeli Arabs in Israel itself. (Jonathan Cook’s 2006 book Blood and Religion is good on that subject.)

What I find interesting about this comment is that it changes the subject, which is typical among apologists for outlaw states (including the US — I remember the very same argument being made during the US invasion of Iraq). The article Larison dissected argues that it’s okay to kill (Arab) civilians, because they’re all effectively and morally combatants, which renders the question of Israeli scrupulosity irrelevant: Israel is completely in the right to kill civilians, because they're not civilians anyway.  (A recent error of attribution by ABC News showed this very effectively: given a photo of a family in their bombed-out house, ABC assumed that the suffering civilians must be Israelis -- but they were Palestinians.)

It’s increasingly difficult for many people to believe anymore that Israel kills civilians only unintentionally, as mere collateral damage, after the killing of four kids building sand castles on the beach, after the bombing of hospitals, and so on.  Israel (like any other state, to be sure) usually explains away these killings by claiming either that the victims were really terrorists or that the killers thought that they were shelling a militant base.  These explanations are routinely exposed as lies, but who cares?  There are no consequences for Israel.  The commenter's question is also irrelevant to the larger problem of Israeli violence against civilians, since Israel targets them directly and deliberately even when they’re not in Gaza. The argument is clearly offered in bad faith when Israeli spokesman make it, so it’s suspect when unofficial apologists make it too.

What do I "expect" Israel to do?  I expect Israel to stop its ongoing campaign of violence against the people it has displaced, to lift the blockade on Gaza, to negotiate a settlement with the Palestinians, and so on.  I don't really expect this to happen, of course.  Israel has gone too far, too successfully, to stop now.  What does Israel expect the Palestinians to do?  It expects them to surrender, I suppose, and failing that, to die, with its assistance.  Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that the current atrocities will continue as long as necessary to guarantee Israel's security.  I don't see how this conduct can produce security for Israel except by exterminating all Palestinians, and that seems to be Israel's goal.  (Or as near to extermination as makes no difference: the US didn't totally wipe out its Indians, but it did kill them off to the point that they no longer posed any danger to US settlers.  Even that wasn't permanent. Israeli leaders may not have heard of the American Indian Movement, but they probably intend not to let any such potential for future resistance survive.)

Israel's wars have not won it security, so Netanyahu's "goal of bringing a prolonged quiet to the area" is disingenuous at best.  But then, like those of his American counterparts, his lies never have any consequences for him. When Israel has gained prolonged quiet from Palestinians in the past, it has always ended it with new violence.  (And to repeat, its war of attrition against the Palestinians, through dispossession, harassment, and retail violence, never stops.)   Like an American hawk, Netanyahu claims that only military strength guarantees security, though it hasn't given Israel (or the US ) security so far.  Larison has written about this many times: no matter how much military might and action they get, hawks always claim that their country is weak and ineffectual, under constant threat, so more weapons and invasions are needed to instill fear in our (real, imagined, or potential) enemies.  The difference, for what it's worth, is that most Americans aren't hawks, while Netanyahu speaks for the majority of Israelis.  Endless war hasn't gotten Israel what it wants or claims to want, but I see no hope that it will try less murderous alternatives.

One More Time, with Feeling

Israel is now attacking Gaza and the Occupied Territories as vengeance for the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers from an illegal settlement, blaming the deed on Hamas even though another group has claimed credit for it.  But who did it isn't all that important.  If I condemn the killing of those three kids, and I do, then I must condemn even more the long history of atrocities by a country that has killed far more than three teenagers along with babies, young children, old people, and adults; that has violated most of its agreements, including ceasefires; that has used torture on an administrative basis; that uses civilians as human shields; that has refused negotiated settlements for decades, secure in the knowledge that it can get away with its obstructionism; and that refuses to recognize the right of its opponent to exist.

When Israel attacked Gaza a couple of years ago, I encountered a move by apologists for Israel that I hadn't seen before.  Apparently, they'd finally decided they needed to engage with the fact that Palestinian and other casualties of Israeli violence greatly outnumber the Israeli casualties of Palestinian violence, by a factor of ten or more to one.  The apologists retorted that this was because Israel is better at defending its people than the dirty Arabs are.  It's not a very good move, since an obvious response would be that in that case, the Palestinians need to find ways to get past Israeli defenses and kill a lot more Jews.  I don't think the hasbaristas really want anyone to draw the conclusion from what is, after all, their logic.  But they were certainly granting that as far as they're concerned it is okay, in a conflict, to kill as many civilians on the other side as you can, which means that Israel has no moral case to object when its people are attacked: Israel can't honestly complain that killing civilians is a sign of intractable evil.  But it appears that Israel has largely abandoned the pretense of a moral high ground in its conflicts.

At around that same time a Jewish friend on Facebook objected to some criticism I'd made of Israel, responding with the prepackaged claim that Israel is a "vibrant democracy."  (He also deployed the equally prepackaged pinkwashing move.)  That's dubious in any case, but even if an overwhelming majority of Israelis favor the slaughter of Arabs (and I gather they do), it doesn't legitimize it.

My Brother's Keeper III

In view of the current Israeli attack on Gaza, it has become increasingly untenable to try to cast Israel's conduct as self-defense.  (Which doesn't keep the Only President We've Got from trying, of course.)  Once again Israeli broke a ceasefire to kill a few people in Gaza, which led to retaliatory missiles aimed at Israel, which led to the Israeli assassination of a Hamas official and then to the Israeli blitzkrieg.  It needs to be stressed again that it is usually Israel that breaks the ceasefires, and that if Israeli leaders really wanted to stop missiles from Gaza, they need only to stop their own attacks.  If any further evidence were needed, it is clear that contrary to its protestations, it is Israel that doesn't want peace, except the peace of the conqueror.

I was quite surprised to see that the Washington Post had put on their front page a picture of a Palestinian father grieving for his 11-month-old baby killed by Israeli violence.  Ordinarily only Israeli suffering gets this treatment in corporate US media.  But of course, most other US coverage of the attacks on Gaza has followed the Israeli/US line.  That means lying, but what else is new?

An interesting trope emerged in comments to Glenn Greenwald's post on the subject today:

Missing is some good literature about what would happen to the Israelis if the Arabs won. What would happen to the Jewish and Christian Arab children, women and older men if the IDF is defeated? How would the Arabs treat the Israelis that are left alive? How would they divide up the country among the victorious parties? A good thought piece for a novel, and one that many people don't ever think about.

But what would happen if the people of Gaza won, and were able to rush out of Gaza and take over Israel. Would they be nicer to the Jews than the Israeils were to them?

This is a rather daring move, comparable to Obama apologists who admit that their POTUS has been something of a disappointment.  This commenter admits, at least rhetorically, that the Israelis have not been "nice" to the people of Gaza, which is pretty bold since all decent people know that the Arabs have only gotten what they deserved for wanting to drive the Jews into the sea.  We are constantly dunned with celebrations of the moral superiority of Israel not only to the Arabs but to all other nations. (The commenter also makes an interesting flipflop from "Jews" to "Israelis.")  Given what the commenter admitted, could Israelis and their American apologists really complain if a defeated Israel suffered the same treatment it has inflicted on its enemies?  If the conquering "Arabs" were no "nicer" to the defeated Israelis than the Israelis have been to the Palestinians and Lebanese, consistency would require the world (or at least the US) to marvel at the conquerors' very great indulgence and mercy, and to hail them as a moral example to the rest of the world.

But as with Obamabots, the concession is in the service of a greater lie.  It's a breathtaking diversion, but one I've seen before, sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit.  No doubt many people in the Middle East would like to see Israel vanish into thin air, but Hamas has declared that it accepts a two-state solution on the 1967 borders.  Perhaps this declaration is as disingenuous as Israel's own claims to want peace, but it should be tested.  It won't, of course, because both the US and Israel reject it, in defiance of the international consensus. And it would not mean that the Palestinians had won and were ready to take over Israel.  (The commenter's echo of traditional anti-Semitic rhetoric is, I presume, unconscious.)  It's unlikely that Palestine would ever have the military might that Israel has, which includes a nuclear arsenal of dubious legality, nor would it receive military aid on the scale Israel receives.  Maybe what the commenter is proposing is a worthwhile thought experiment, but I don't see why.  It's really irrelevant, but I think it lurks beneath the surface of a lot of Israeli and pro-Israeli propaganda, so it's worth noticing.

What I and probably most thoughtful critics of Israel favor is not an Israeli defeat. What we favor is that Israel should stop its terrorist violence against the Palestinians and others. (A good parallel would be the US "defeat" in Vietnam, which only meant that the US had to withdraw its forces; it did not mean US surrender to the Vietnamese people, who did not then occupy Washington and take over the US government.)  The Israelis need not surrender, contrary to what the commenter and others assume. All they need to do is stop their abuse of human rights, their violation of every humane concern that arose after the obscenity of World War II and the Nazi crimes. There are more alternatives than the status quo and the obliteration of Israel.

As the political philosopher Michael Neumann wrote in his 2005 book The Case Against Israel (Counterpunch/AK Press), no one is morally required to compromise with an invasion, and "having renounced all of pre-1967 Israel, the Palestinians have already compromised enormously when they demand total withdrawal from the Occupied Territories" (146). What comparable compromise can the Israelis offer?

My Brother's Keeper

Jack. I fear there can be no possible doubt about the matter. This afternoon during my temporary absence in London on an important question of romance, he obtained admission to my house by means of the false pretence of being my brother. Under an assumed name he drank, I’ve just been informed by my butler, an entire pint bottle of my Perrier-Jouet, Brut, ‘89; wine I was specially reserving for myself. Continuing his disgraceful deception, he succeeded in the course of the afternoon in alienating the affections of my only ward. He subsequently stayed to tea, and devoured every single muffin. And what makes his conduct all the more heartless is, that he was perfectly well aware from the first that I have no brother, that I never had a brother, and that I don’t intend to have a brother, not even of any kind. I distinctly told him so myself yesterday afternoon.

Lady Bracknell. Ahem! Mr. Worthing, after careful consideration I have decided entirely to overlook my nephew’s conduct to you.

Jack. That is very generous of you, Lady Bracknell. My own decision, however, is unalterable. I decline to give my consent.

I haven't done much posting this past week, because I was spending a lot of time reading discussions at other sites on the Israeli Blitzkrieg in Gaza -- sometimes posting comments, doing a little debate, but mostly seeing what I could learn. I spent most of an evening scanning over 400 comments on Glenn Greenwald's critique of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's enthusiastic endorsement of Israeli terrorism against civilians. (It's up to 799 comments tonight, but I haven't bothered to catch up.) I knew I was going to have to write about this; I should have done it sooner, since nothing I have learned in the past week or two has made Israel's conduct look any better. If anything, it's made it look worse.

The same goes for the arguments (maybe that word should be in scare quotes) of Israel's defenders. Most of them make just as much sense reversed. For example: Israel has the right to defend itself (or its citizens) against terrorists. So it does, but Palestine has the same right, and much more restricted means for self-defense. The Palestinians aren't getting big arms shipments from the US, as Israel is, to make sure they don't run out of ammunition. Israel has just, as I began writing this post Saturday night, declared a ceasefire in Gaza, but they plan to keep their troops there until they feel like removing them. On the other hand, they're saying they'll withdraw them in time for Obama's inauguration tomorrow. So who will defend the Palestinians from Israeli occupation and violence? Hamas declared a ceasefire of its own, "for a week to give Israel time to withdraw its forces from the Gaza Strip."

Which reminds me: the terminology being used could use some scrutiny. The parties to the conflict now going on are generally labeled Israel and Hamas, especially in the American corporate media. But Hamas is a political party, so perhaps it would be more correct to refer to Likud and Hamas. It wouldn't change much, since the vast majority of Israelis, regardless of party, support the Blitzkrieg. Support for Hamas is apparently growing among Palestinians as the invasion goes on, in the West Bank as well as in Gaza. Even if Israel and Palestine are too prejudicial, I intend to use those names here except when I'm specifically talking about political parties or factions.

I point this out mainly because there is a tendency, among Americans at least (though probably also among Israelis) to forget that Hamas is the present, democratically-elected government of Palestine. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, referred to Hamas as "non-state actors" at her recent confirmation hearings (via Chris Floyd); Barack Obama said, during a visit to Israel last summer, "In terms of negotiations with Hamas, it is very hard to negotiate with a group that is not representative of a nation-state ..." No doubt he'd rather negotiate with the increasingly discredited Fatah party, who attempted a coup against Hamas (via ATR) at the instigation of the US and Israel, but failed. You may see this fact turned around, even at The Nation -- yes, even that far-left outpost of Israel-hatred! -- where a writer claimed that among the "sins" which led to the Israeli attack was "the fact that Hamas carried out a coup against the PA in Gaza."

More entertainingly, the US ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration, Martin Indyk found himself paired on Democracy Now! with Norman Finkelstein, who kept correcting Indyk's -- well, let's call them misstatements:

Hamas, having won the PA elections and then—we don’t need to go into the details of that, but essentially what happened was, as a result of a competition between Hamas and Fatah over who would rule, Hamas took control of Gaza by force in what was, in effect, a putsch against the Palestinian Authority. It therefore moved from being a terrorist organization to a terrorist government, responsible for controlling territory in Gaza and responsible for meeting the needs of one-and-a-half million Palestinians in Gaza. ...

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Well, I think the problem of Mr. Indyk’s presentation is he constantly reverses cause and effect. Just as he said a moment ago that it was Hamas which broke the ceasefire, although he well knows it was Israel that broke the ceasefire on November 4th, he now reverses cause and effect as to how the present impasse came about. In January 2006, as he writes in his book, Hamas came to power in a free and fair election. I think those are his words. He then claims on your program and he claims in his book that Hamas committed a “putsch”—his word—in order to eliminate the Palestinian Authority. And as I’m sure Mr. Indyk well knows and as was documented in the April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair by the writer David Rose, basing himself on internal US documents, it was the United States in cahoots with the Palestinian Authority and Israel which were attempting a putsch on Hamas, and Hamas preempted the putsch. That, too, is no longer debatable or no longer a controversial claim. ...

Indyk responded to Finkelstein's rebuttal by calling him "just a propaganda spokesman for Hamas, you know" and protesting that

I was invited on to talk about my book and the Gaza situation. I was not invited on to debate with Norman Finkelstein, and I’m not prepared to do that. So if you want to talk about the situation, I’m happy to do that, but I’m not here to be the representative of the government of Israel.

He could have fooled me. One indication of just how deeply in the wrong Israel was in this most recent attack on Gaza was how much its defenders had to falsify the facts. It was Israel, not the Palestinians, who broke the ceasefire; it was Fatah (with the US and Israel) that tried to overthrow Hamas, not vice versa. It's the IDF, not Hamas, that uses civilians as human shields. There's really no need for Israel and its advocates to lie about breaking the ceasefire in the first place, because they also argue that Hamas only wants a ceasefire so that it can rest and get more weapons for another attack on Israel. In fact, though, it's usually Israel that violates the ceasefires and truces it enters into, and the longer the ceasefire lasts, the more likely it will be Israel who breaks it. But on the apologists' showing, Israel doesn't want the war to stop in the first place. The Arabs, they claim, are dedicated to the destruction of Israel, and will never give up that aim. They'll only stop fighting strategically until they can rearm. If this is what Israel believes, then its own pious talk of peace should be taken as a front for its intent to continue killing Palestinians.

I want the Palestinians to stop firing homemade rockets into Israel too, but that's not likely to happen as long as Israel continues its longstanding assault on Palestine. I have to keep reminding myself that most Americans probably don't know about the decades-long campaign of harassment, random violence, confiscation of land and other property, extrajudicial killings, imprisonment, and torture that Israel has been waging against Palestine. Most Americans think that as long as they're not hearing about Arab suicide bombers, everything is peaceful in the Holy Land, no matter how many Palestinians are being killed. The media watch group FAIR discussed this a few years back with regard to American corporate media coverage of the Middle East:

The Los Angeles Times (8/13/03) wrote that the [Palestinian suicide] bombings "broke a six-week stretch during which the people of this war-weary land had enjoyed relative quiet."

During this six-week period of "relative quiet," however, some 17 Palestinians were killed and at least 59 injured by Israeli occupation soldiers and settlers, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society. The dead included Mahmoud Kabaha, a four-year-old boy, who was sitting in the back seat of a jeep with his family at a checkpoint when an Israeli soldier shot him dead--in a spray of bullets that the army simply called an "accidental burst of gunfire" (Associated Press, 7/25/03). Virtually none of the major U.S. news reports on the August 12 bombings alluded to the Palestinian death toll in this period, leaving out a key piece of the story: For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the violence had never ceased; while the Israeli attacks had decreased, there had never been anything like an Israeli cease-fire.

As long as only Palestinians are dying, FAIR found, Americans were told that Israel was "calm." So, of course, when there is an outbreak of violence by Palestinians against Israel, from most Americans' point of view it seems to come out of nowhere: the "peace" has been shattered by the apparently motiveless craziness of Islamic "terrorists." (The terrorism of Israeli settlers, who carried out pogroms against Palestinians with general impunity, is also usually overlooked here.)

Partisans of Israel are often quite open about their disregard for Palestinians' lives.



They believe, or at least claim to believe, that everyone who is critical of Israel's conduct wants to see 'the Jews driven into the sea.' One such person tried to bait a critic in comments at A Tiny Revolution:

When you talk about Israels defeat, can we hope that soon the country will cease to exist and that the Jews will have to pack up and abandon their criminal project? Where will they go? Not here I hope!

This is a mild version -- more often the partisan accuses the critic of exulting in the thought of all Jews being killed because they wouldn't defend themselves, like this commenter from Salon:

Glenn and your misguided supporters: it is indeed wearying to listen to the same drivel from you always attacking Israelis for defending themselves against what Glenn admits is "exactly the same "logic" that fuels the rockets from Hezbollah and Hamas into Israel." What would you have the Israelis do? Lie down and die? NEVER AGAIN! I'm afraid that your answer will be so awful that I'm almost hesitant to post. But I realize that my comment here will really make no difference to the Israel haters. This is an old and tragic story, and people never seem to learn. Woe is us. All of us, impoverished humanity.

What would this commenter have the Palestinians do? Lie down and die? NEVER AGAIN! I'm afraid her answer (like Israel's) will be so awful that I'm almost hesitant to ask. ... And so on. One reason I find it easy to dismiss this tactic is that it's also used against critics of US violence: we are accused of wanting, craving, dreaming of the destruction of America. I wrote about this in a posting on patriotism last year:

But as usual with people of her ilk, it soon becomes clear that Barkan will not concede that America has ever done anything wrong, that any people anywhere in the world have reason to want to strike back at us, that no country in the world has any business defending itself against us, that it’s time to throw out reason and complexity and boil everything down to the question, “Do you want to see America conquered, or don’t you?”

No, I don’t -- not that America is in any danger of being conquered: the US has not fought a war of self-defense in my lifetime. But I don’t want to see any country conquered. People like Barkan get so furious at any mention of American malfeasance because they’ll gladly sic the dogs of war on any other country that behaved as the US has behaved, that killed a tenth as many people as the US has killed, that supported a tenth as many dictators as the US has supported, that harbors the kinds of terrorists the US harbors – so it is they who want to see the US attacked and humbled, if they had any consistency of principle. Those of us who can recognize the faults of our country, by contrast, simply want it to stop hurting people so wantonly.

I think it’s a safe bet, for example, that in 1967, when Martin Luther King Jr. called his own government the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, he wasn’t calling for other governments to invade the US. No, he said explicitly that he had come to realize that he couldn’t condemn the violence of others without first condemning and opposing the far greater violence being done in his name by his own government.

When I say that Israel is the aggressor in the conflict in Gaza, that doesn't mean I want to see Israel destroyed, any more than I want to see Palestine destroyed. Or the United States. If Hamas are "terrorists," so are Likud and the IDF. So the exchange of epithets is meaningless. If Israel wants peace (which, as I've shown, is dubious), it will have to start negotiating in good faith, with Hamas, the democratically-elected government of Palestine. (Some who are reading this may not be old enough to remember that until the 1990s or so, Israel refused to negotiate with Palestinians at all, or even to acknowledge their existence. Now Israel is trying to do the same with Hamas.) The usual pro-Israel response to the critics of Israel is to accuse them of anti-Semitism. That doesn't follow, any more than my criticism of the US makes me anti-American; but it also doesn't matter. Even if I were anti-Semitic (which I don't think I am), Israel would still be the aggressor, and it needs to stop right now.