JustASC

Jeffrey Goldberg, as he does more and more these days, sums up my thoughts when he explains why he hasn’t been posting more on Gaza:

My paralysis isn’t an analytical paralysis. It’s the paralysis that comes from thinking that maybe there’s no way out. Not out of Gaza, out of the whole thing.
 

Eli Valley’s latest comic in the Forward is a hilarious evocation of Jewish broyges. Check it out here (you may need to enlarge).

I just got off a conference call, arranged by United Jewish Communities, with Israeli Welfare minister Isaac “Bougie” Herzog. Herzog deftly parried ZOA president Morton Klein, who implicitly criticised Israel in the guise of asking a question. 

Klein asked Herzog what he should say in interviews when asked, if Israel suffered thousands of rocket attacks over the past decade, why did it “wait all this time” to strike back?

Said Herzog:

“When Israel sends its sons and daughters into battle, it makes sure it exhausts all the other alternatives.”

For all the usual Jewish fears that the press will gang up on Israel, I’m noticing tacit understanding of Israel’s dilemma on the part of nearly all the major outlets. Here’s Editor & Publisher, whose editor is no pal of Israel, actually complaining about it:

For over a week, U.S. media had provided largely one-sided coverage of the conflict, with little editorializing or commentary arguing against broader Israeli actions.

Or take a look at these two comments, one from reliably pro-Israel neocon Max Boot, the other from a New York Times analysis by Steven Lee Myers. See if you can tell which is which.

No. 1:

The essential dilemma Israel faces is this: It can’t ignore Hamas’s attacks, not only because of the damage they inflict, but also because of the terrible precedent they set. Israel has always been a state that is one battle away from destruction, and it cannot allow its enemies to think that it can be attacked with impunity. But at the same time Israel cannot do what it takes to wipe out the enemy, because of the constraints imposed by its own public, which is far less willing than in the past to suffer or inflict bloodletting.

So the Jewish state is forced to fight an unsatisfying war of attrition with Hamas, Hezbollah and other entities bent on its destruction. The current incursions are only one stage of this lengthy struggle. The odds are that once Israeli troops leave, Hamas will rebuild its infrastructure, forcing the Israelis to go back in the future.

This is the definition of a quagmire, yet Israel has no choice but to keep doing what it’s doing. Unlike the French in Algeria or the Americans in Vietnam, it cannot simply pack its bags and go home. If Israel is to continue to exist, it will have to continue to wage low-intensity war for a long time to come — definitely years, probably decades, possibly centuries.

 No. 2:

While Israeli leadership was not stating wider goals, there was clearly hope in the country — as tanks and troops massed late in the week — that the assault in Gaza would do more than just stop the rocket fire with which Hamas had broken a cease-fire last month. The larger hope was that subduing Hamas would delegitimize the group’s leadership in the eyes of the Palestinian people and eliminate its power to prevent a two-state solution. Already last week, it was exposing political, ethnic and sectarian divisions in the region that Israel, like the United States, had long sought to exploit.

In a highly optimistic scenario for Israel and the United States, a clear victory for Israel would make it easier for Egypt, Jordan and countries farther afield to declare common cause against Islamic militancy and its main sponsor in the region, Iran.

Then, as Martin S. Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel, argued, an international peacekeeping force made up of Turkish and Arab troops could clear the way for a restoration of political control in Gaza by President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the Fatah movement and is titular president of all Palestinians, but in reality is the weak leader of only the West Bank.

A two-state treaty could follow, and then perhaps peace between Israel and Syria, leaving Iran isolated behind the buffer of a newly democratic and peaceful, if not particularly friendly, Iraq.

Iran is the one country — aside from Israel — with the most at stake in the outcome. It sponsors Hamas and Hezbollah not only to torment Israel but also to spread its influence in the Arab world. A convincing defeat of Hamas would undercut that strategy, and presumably Iran’s ability to resist Western pressure in any broad bargaining — for example, over its support for terrorist groups and even its nuclear program.

No. 2 is the Times; no. 1 is by Boot.

If you’ve seen egregious stuff unsympathetic to Israel’s plight, or surprising examples of the opposite, please comment or email me at ascATnjjewishnewsDOTcom.

A strong editorial from the Forward, with this on-the-money line:

Hamas boasts it is at war with the Zionist entity. It got what it asked for.

There’s a spate of punditry defending Israel from the charge that its use of force in Gaza is “disproportionate”; writers include Jonathan Mark,  Dore Gold, Charles Krauthammer, and Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz lays out the basic case, writing,

Until the world recognizes that Hamas is committing three war crimes — targeting Israeli civilians, using Palestinian civilians as human shields, and seeking the destruction of a member state of the United Nations — and that Israel is acting in self-defense and out of military necessity, the conflict will continue. 

True, true, but I have to ask — against whom are these writers arguing? I did a quick (and admittedly cursory) Google search for major media outlets and diplomats (outside of the usual suspects in the Arab world or the UN swamp) who are blaming Israel for “disproportionality,” and, Sarkozy’s comments notwithstanding, it doesn’t appear to be the guiding critique of the war.

The sample of newspaper editorial opinion that appears after the jump, from outlets that tend not to be overly solicitous to Israel, suggests that debate is not whether the war is “proportionate” or “justified,” but whether all the killing will actually achieve Israel’s aims. It’s telling that that the writers mentioned above don’t say exactly who is calling Israel’s war “disproportionate.” Justifying the war in legal and moral terms is the easy part; much harder is to debate whether the war is or will be effective in carrying out its prosecutors’ stated aims.

Eugene Volokh acknowledges such:

BTW, I don’t have a strong opinion on the wisdom of the Gaza operation. Despite the many strong opinions that one will see in the blogs on this issue, there are so many variables, and so much secret information that only government officials possess (including the real, as opposed to public, views of Egypt, Jordan, and the PA), that it would be rather foolish of me to express a strong viewpoint on whether the operation will achieve its objectives at a reasonable cost or not. But as with the 2006 Lebanon operation, arguing over its wisdom is a very different matter than arguing over whether Israel has the moral right to act to defend its civilian population from rocket attacks launched by terrorist entities.

I’ve been receiving a spate of mail from Jewish organizations in the past week offering talking points on Gaza. And I haven’t until now been able to put my finger on what makes the Jewish discussion of Israel and the war so unsatisfying. Our role, these talking points tell us, is to defend Israel’s moral authority and right to defend itself. (A subtext of these appeals is the sense that we have to have the arguments to justify Israel’s actions to ourselves.) As for the wisdom of this or any Israeli action — well, that’s up to the politicans and the generals.

An argument can be made (see Rosner’s comments here) that that is all an American Jew can or should do for Israel — argue for its existence, send money, go visit, neutralize the most virulent critics.

I’m not talking about the age-old question of whether Diaspora Jews have the right to criticize Israel. I’m arguing for the right to understand Israel — and understanding is harder to come by if our talent for dialectic and argument is expended on strawman arguments and righteous indignation.

[Take a look at the excerpts that follow – for the most part (with the possible exception of the LA Times editorialists) the big editorial pages have accepted Israel’s right to defend itself. Their question, however, is whether there is an endgame and is the war the best way to bring it about.) Read the rest of this entry »

For what it’s worth, today is the one-year anniversary of this blog.

I’ll take this opportunity to wish however many readers I happened to pick up along the way a healthy and happy New Year.

The biggest problem in writing for a weekly newspaper is that by the time you get to your readers, anything you’re going to say has probably already been said by somebody else. That wasn’t a problem, oh, 20 years ago. But the Web can provide instant access to the opinions of just about everyone with a keyboard, from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists to bored office workers to the poor guy hunkered in his bomb shelter or safe room.When it comes to the Middle East, meanwhile, anything you’re going to say not only has been said by somebody else - but has been said before the event in question has even taken place. Mideast punditry has become the foreign affairs version of “Mad Libs” - the basic story lines stay the same; you just have to plug in new proper names, dates, and locations.

Still, there are plenty of folks writing about the Middle East whose opinions and reportage remain fresh and even surprising. And in a week like this one, with events moving quickly and chaotically, I rely on them to make sense of the maelstrom. The following list of such pundits and reporters is not exhaustive, and I’ll make room for readers’ suggestions in future columns. Read the rest of this entry »

This headline and story says something about Israel — what, exactly, I can’t tell:

Tel Aviv: Dozens rally in support of Gaza op 

Several dozen people, most of them Likud activists, rallied across from the Defense Ministry’s Tel Aviv headquarters in support of Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. The offensive entered its fourth day Tuesday.

Jonathan Pollard’s advocates tend to be on the Right, but the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, a reliably liberal group, has joined those asking President Bush to commute the convicted spy’s sentence:

Writes Rabbi David Saperstein:

…Mr. Pollard’s sentence is grossly disproportionate to sentences that others have received for comparable espionage offenses. Only those who spied for enemy nations have received life sentences. No other individual convicted of disclosing information to an ally has received such a sentence.

For more than 20 years, Mr. Pollard has remained in prison, including significant time spent in solitary confinement. In the interest of justice, it is now time to commute Mr. Pollard’s sentence to time served.