How Many Israelis Should Have Died First to Make The Gaza Assault Proportional?
Richard L. Cravatts Ph.D.
January 12, 2009
No sooner than Israel launched its December 27th offensive against Hamas operations in Gaza, reacting to the unceasing barrages of rockets and mortars that have rained into southern Israel, the moral arbiters of acceptable behavior in war between democratic states and terrorism were condemning Israel for its perceived abuses in executing its national self-defense.
David Miliband, Britainīs Foreign Secretary, smugly accused Israel of causing a "dangerous and dark moment" in history, and made the preposterous, and unrealistic, judgment "that any innocent loss of life is unacceptable." Malaysiaīs Deputy Foreign Minister Abdul Rahim Bakri obscenely suggested that Israelīs actions were crimes against humanity that were "tantamount to genocide," indicating both an ignorance of what that term actually signifies and a blindness to actual genocides occurring presently at the hand of his co-religionists.
But the most insidious refrain, one which is uttered only when Israelīs enemies are killed and not when only Jews are murdered, is that Israelīs military response is too aggressive, that the force and effect of the excursion into Gaza are beyond appropriate boundaries. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, for instance, could not get to a microphone fast enough to decry "the disproportionate use of force" on the part of Israel. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who presides over a morally bankrupt group of comprised largely of despotic, self-righteous regimes, deemed the violence "unacceptable," and added that he had to specifically condemn the "excessive use of force by Israel in Gaza." Indiaīs External Affairs Ministry spokesman, Vishnu Prakash, was disappointed at what he witnessed as "the use of disproportionate force is resulting in a large number of civilian casualties on the one hand and the escalating violence on the other," both taking place, presumably, as a result of Israelīs actions.
Nor did non-governmental figures refrain from chiming in with the moral scolding of Israelīs actions. Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, Katharine Jefferts Schori, personally challenged "the Israeli government to call a halt to this wholly disproportionate escalation of violence." And the Muslim Public Affairs Council, always reticent when confronted with terrorism unleashed in the name of Islam, was quick to determine that "Israel's latest military assault is a disproportionate and inhumane response to Palestinian militants' cross-border rocket attacks."
The issue of "disproportionate" response is obviously something of an obsession with critics of Israelīs defense policy, making one wonder when, if ever, an Israeli military responses would be deemed to be proportionate. How many Jews should have died in the 6300 rocket barrages falling on Sderot, Ashkelon and Netivot since 2005 when Israel disengaged from Gaza to have made Israelīs incursion legal and morally acceptable?
Was the daily terror of 3000 Qassam rockets and mortars falling into civilian neighborhoods in the last year alone not justification enough for self-defense? Should Israel have continued to wait until a school or daycare center was struck, forcing Israel to play, in the words of Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, "Russian Roulette with its children?" What harm had to be done, in addition to the trauma and social dysfunction that daily rocket barrages have on civilian populations, until critics would ever decide, in their sanctimony and moral equivalency, that Israel finally had the right to defend its population? Were not the 425 attacks between 2000 and 2004 on Israel that wounded more than 2,000 and killed nearly 400 civilians adequate in their lethality and seriousness to indicate the unrelenting jihad that defines Hamasī existence?
The remonstrations of Israelīs many and far-flung critics aside, Israel is not the international outlaw here, but the victim who is now involved in a defensive countermeasure to illegal terrorism. In fact, in a recent report, Justus Reid Weiner and Dr. Avi Bell, two legal scholars at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, note that Hamasī shelling of civilian targets within Israelīs borders clearly violates international law, even though world observers have been oddly silent on those transgressions. "The Palestinian attacks violate one of the most basic rules of international humanitarian law," they say, "the rule of distinction, which requires combatants to aim all their attacks at legitimate targets—enemy combatants or objects that contribute to enemy military actions. Violations of the rule of distinction—attacks deliberately aimed at civilians or protected objects as such—are war crimes," exactly what Hamas has been committing with its relentless rocket assaults.
On the other hand, Israel, which is promiscuously condemned for committing "genocide," "crimes against humanity," and human rights violations, not only waited for years before responding to Palestinian terrorism, but then, in one of the most populous areas on earth with a population of 1.5 million, scrupulously followed the rule of distinction by precisely targeting Hamas terrorists and infrastructure, with minimal, though still unfortunate, collateral damage to the Gaza civilian population—a feat made all the more difficult by Hamasī insidious tactic of embedding rocket launchers and armament stores within residential neighborhoods as a perverse way of further demonizing Israel when the inevitable killing of civilians occurs. Even so, with some 350 fatalities in Gaza as of the fourth day of incursions, even UN observers, not partial when Israel is involved, admitted that the great majority of causalities were Hamas operatives and gunmen—showing that, unlike its enemies who target only civilians, Israel has not only effected obvious "distinction" in its targeting, but by doing so it also maintained "proportionality," the other aspect of warfare upon which international law insists.
In fact, collateral damage—the accidental killing of civilians during military conflicts—is itself allowed by international law, provided the actions that caused the civilian deaths are not, according to Dr. Bell, excessive in relation to the military need. But the fact that deaths occur in civilian populations—even what might be perceived as excessive deaths—are not in and of themselves indicative of violation of international law, and, says Dr. Bell, "if a state, like Israel, is facing aggression, then proportionality addresses whether force was specifically used by Israel to bring an end to the armed attack against it."
An odd, racist student organization on American campuses, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), like the Palestinians, is an irredentist movement that seeks the "liberation" of what they consider to be their rightful ancestral homelands. For MEChA, that mythic land is something called "Aztlan," a territory which inconveniently includes much of the Southwest of the present-day United States, from Washington State to Texas and great swathes of territory in between. In language eerily similar to the PLO Charter, MEChA claims a right to reclaim lands stolen from it by imperial powers. Aztlan "became synonymous with the vast territories of the Southwest," says the MEChA charter, "brutally stolen from a Mexican people marginalized and betrayed by the hostile custodians of the Manifest Destiny. It also initiated the rebirth of our consciousness as indigenous people, whose history and heritage have overcome the forces of European colonialism in order to inspire us today."
Assume for a moment that a radicalized element of the MEChA organization decided to act on their "reconquista" ambitions and repeated terrorist attacks had taken place against Texas border towns; at the same rate of causalities per capita that Hamas has achieved in Israel, those 400 Israeli dead in a nation of under six million would be the equivalent of some 19,000 dead American civilians. Can anyone doubt the inexhaustible effort, might, and political will that would have been unleashed on those perpetrators, how every resource of our government would have justly and firmly responded to domestic terrorism with formidable wrath and might? Would we have hesitated to eliminate the leadership of such a horrific enemy, even if its leadership had alleged, divine claims to our land and had ordained that we had no right to exist?
Of course we would not, nor would we countenance the criticism of the international community that cautioned us against possibly inciting further terrorism or in being heavy-handed in protecting our own citizenry from harm—just as Israel has, appropriately, largely ignored world opinion critical of its actions last week.
"Palestinian terrorism is not a plea to Israel to relieve material needs," suggested Louis Rene Beres, sadly, "but rather a demand to die so that Arabs can realize their spiritual wants." So an Israel-hating world may well call for restraint in Gaza as the IDF neutralizes Hamasī ability to spread its homicidal ideology, but Israel certainly is not violating international law in this incursion, nor does it ever have to enter into a suicide pact in the often morally-defective universe of world diplomacy.
David Miliband, Britainīs Foreign Secretary, smugly accused Israel of causing a "dangerous and dark moment" in history, and made the preposterous, and unrealistic, judgment "that any innocent loss of life is unacceptable." Malaysiaīs Deputy Foreign Minister Abdul Rahim Bakri obscenely suggested that Israelīs actions were crimes against humanity that were "tantamount to genocide," indicating both an ignorance of what that term actually signifies and a blindness to actual genocides occurring presently at the hand of his co-religionists.
But the most insidious refrain, one which is uttered only when Israelīs enemies are killed and not when only Jews are murdered, is that Israelīs military response is too aggressive, that the force and effect of the excursion into Gaza are beyond appropriate boundaries. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, for instance, could not get to a microphone fast enough to decry "the disproportionate use of force" on the part of Israel. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who presides over a morally bankrupt group of comprised largely of despotic, self-righteous regimes, deemed the violence "unacceptable," and added that he had to specifically condemn the "excessive use of force by Israel in Gaza." Indiaīs External Affairs Ministry spokesman, Vishnu Prakash, was disappointed at what he witnessed as "the use of disproportionate force is resulting in a large number of civilian casualties on the one hand and the escalating violence on the other," both taking place, presumably, as a result of Israelīs actions.
Nor did non-governmental figures refrain from chiming in with the moral scolding of Israelīs actions. Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, Katharine Jefferts Schori, personally challenged "the Israeli government to call a halt to this wholly disproportionate escalation of violence." And the Muslim Public Affairs Council, always reticent when confronted with terrorism unleashed in the name of Islam, was quick to determine that "Israel's latest military assault is a disproportionate and inhumane response to Palestinian militants' cross-border rocket attacks."
The issue of "disproportionate" response is obviously something of an obsession with critics of Israelīs defense policy, making one wonder when, if ever, an Israeli military responses would be deemed to be proportionate. How many Jews should have died in the 6300 rocket barrages falling on Sderot, Ashkelon and Netivot since 2005 when Israel disengaged from Gaza to have made Israelīs incursion legal and morally acceptable?
Was the daily terror of 3000 Qassam rockets and mortars falling into civilian neighborhoods in the last year alone not justification enough for self-defense? Should Israel have continued to wait until a school or daycare center was struck, forcing Israel to play, in the words of Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, "Russian Roulette with its children?" What harm had to be done, in addition to the trauma and social dysfunction that daily rocket barrages have on civilian populations, until critics would ever decide, in their sanctimony and moral equivalency, that Israel finally had the right to defend its population? Were not the 425 attacks between 2000 and 2004 on Israel that wounded more than 2,000 and killed nearly 400 civilians adequate in their lethality and seriousness to indicate the unrelenting jihad that defines Hamasī existence?
The remonstrations of Israelīs many and far-flung critics aside, Israel is not the international outlaw here, but the victim who is now involved in a defensive countermeasure to illegal terrorism. In fact, in a recent report, Justus Reid Weiner and Dr. Avi Bell, two legal scholars at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, note that Hamasī shelling of civilian targets within Israelīs borders clearly violates international law, even though world observers have been oddly silent on those transgressions. "The Palestinian attacks violate one of the most basic rules of international humanitarian law," they say, "the rule of distinction, which requires combatants to aim all their attacks at legitimate targets—enemy combatants or objects that contribute to enemy military actions. Violations of the rule of distinction—attacks deliberately aimed at civilians or protected objects as such—are war crimes," exactly what Hamas has been committing with its relentless rocket assaults.
On the other hand, Israel, which is promiscuously condemned for committing "genocide," "crimes against humanity," and human rights violations, not only waited for years before responding to Palestinian terrorism, but then, in one of the most populous areas on earth with a population of 1.5 million, scrupulously followed the rule of distinction by precisely targeting Hamas terrorists and infrastructure, with minimal, though still unfortunate, collateral damage to the Gaza civilian population—a feat made all the more difficult by Hamasī insidious tactic of embedding rocket launchers and armament stores within residential neighborhoods as a perverse way of further demonizing Israel when the inevitable killing of civilians occurs. Even so, with some 350 fatalities in Gaza as of the fourth day of incursions, even UN observers, not partial when Israel is involved, admitted that the great majority of causalities were Hamas operatives and gunmen—showing that, unlike its enemies who target only civilians, Israel has not only effected obvious "distinction" in its targeting, but by doing so it also maintained "proportionality," the other aspect of warfare upon which international law insists.
In fact, collateral damage—the accidental killing of civilians during military conflicts—is itself allowed by international law, provided the actions that caused the civilian deaths are not, according to Dr. Bell, excessive in relation to the military need. But the fact that deaths occur in civilian populations—even what might be perceived as excessive deaths—are not in and of themselves indicative of violation of international law, and, says Dr. Bell, "if a state, like Israel, is facing aggression, then proportionality addresses whether force was specifically used by Israel to bring an end to the armed attack against it."
An odd, racist student organization on American campuses, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), like the Palestinians, is an irredentist movement that seeks the "liberation" of what they consider to be their rightful ancestral homelands. For MEChA, that mythic land is something called "Aztlan," a territory which inconveniently includes much of the Southwest of the present-day United States, from Washington State to Texas and great swathes of territory in between. In language eerily similar to the PLO Charter, MEChA claims a right to reclaim lands stolen from it by imperial powers. Aztlan "became synonymous with the vast territories of the Southwest," says the MEChA charter, "brutally stolen from a Mexican people marginalized and betrayed by the hostile custodians of the Manifest Destiny. It also initiated the rebirth of our consciousness as indigenous people, whose history and heritage have overcome the forces of European colonialism in order to inspire us today."
Assume for a moment that a radicalized element of the MEChA organization decided to act on their "reconquista" ambitions and repeated terrorist attacks had taken place against Texas border towns; at the same rate of causalities per capita that Hamas has achieved in Israel, those 400 Israeli dead in a nation of under six million would be the equivalent of some 19,000 dead American civilians. Can anyone doubt the inexhaustible effort, might, and political will that would have been unleashed on those perpetrators, how every resource of our government would have justly and firmly responded to domestic terrorism with formidable wrath and might? Would we have hesitated to eliminate the leadership of such a horrific enemy, even if its leadership had alleged, divine claims to our land and had ordained that we had no right to exist?
Of course we would not, nor would we countenance the criticism of the international community that cautioned us against possibly inciting further terrorism or in being heavy-handed in protecting our own citizenry from harm—just as Israel has, appropriately, largely ignored world opinion critical of its actions last week.
"Palestinian terrorism is not a plea to Israel to relieve material needs," suggested Louis Rene Beres, sadly, "but rather a demand to die so that Arabs can realize their spiritual wants." So an Israel-hating world may well call for restraint in Gaza as the IDF neutralizes Hamasī ability to spread its homicidal ideology, but Israel certainly is not violating international law in this incursion, nor does it ever have to enter into a suicide pact in the often morally-defective universe of world diplomacy.
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