What we talk about when we talk about Gaza
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.) New York Times:
Still we fear that Israel’s response – devastating airstrikes that represent the largest military operation in Gaza since 1967 – is unlikely to weaken the militant Palestinian group substantially or move things any closer to what all Israelis and all Palestinians need: a durable peace agreement and a two-state solution.
So far, the bloodshed in Gaza has not much changed the equation. Hamas has lost massively in terms of physical assets but gained hugely in sympathy. Yet the group has been brutally shoved towards a long-postponed decision. The surge of impotent rage in Gaza over Israel’s violence will momentarily boost Hamas’s standing, but Gazans may then ask what brought them to this awful pass. The Islamists may win some meagre concessions when the dust settles and the blood is washed away: perhaps a loosening of Israel’s siege, an opening of Egypt’s border, a torrent of aid from appalled fellow Muslims, and maybe a modicum of international recognition. But unless the current furious street protests spark a region-wide revolution that scares the wits out of Israel and its friends, Hamas will still face the same painful old choice of how to come to terms with an immensely more powerful and equally determined enemy.
Israel was offering upbeat assessments of its air offensive yesterday even while warning that it could continue for some time and possibly expand to ground operations. Yet, as in Lebanon, no decisive military victory is likely: Israel will not be able to topple Hamas unless it fully reoccupies Gaza, and it will probably not be able even to stop the rocket attacks on its cities without some kind of political settlement.
Los Angeles Times (Gershon Gorenberg)
It is possible that Israel’s attacks on government institutions, including the police, will weaken Hamas’ control or even shatter the regime in Gaza. But will that benefit Israel? The most likely result will be chaos, a version of Somalia on our border. There will be no one to stop factions that are even more radical than Hamas from firing rockets. If Israel’s army reoccupies Gaza, it will be the target of a new guerrilla campaign. Three months from now, we may long for the control that Hamas exerted. Our leaders are right that a country must defend itself. But while choosing a military option, they’ve failed to persuasively define limited, achievable goals.
The longer this campaign goes on, the more disproportionate Israel’s actions will seem. Israel must desist as soon as it has neutralized the threat of rocket attacks, either through its own actions or as the result of a new and more robust cease-fire of the kind being pursued by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
JustASC is written by Andrew Silow-Carroll, Editor-in-Chief of the 