JustASC

This Times’ oped piece on Gaza by Roger Cohen is disingenuous,  self-involved, and about as insightful and nuanced as a bumper sticker — not bad for 800 words.

Where to start — with the stupid historical analogies? (France, Poland and Germany did not “free… themselves after 1945 from war’s cycle.” After Germany crushed France and Poland into submission, a massive alliance vanquished Germany.) With the dimestore psychology? (Israel’s security fence was not intended to turn Palestinians into a “vague abstraction.” The goal was to prevent them from killing Jews.)

So why do I think we need to take his piece seriously? It comes down to this line:

…I’ve been having nightmares. I cannot see a scenario in which any short-term Israeli tactical victory over Hamas is not overwhelmed by the long-term strategic cost of this war.

The more this war goes on, and the higher the body count rises, the more this sentiment is bound to seep into the mainstream. And not just among the “Israel-bashers,” but among disinterested third parties, and even American Jews, who will find it harder and harder to defend the carnage. Perhaps that is their failing, and they should man up and recognize that tough things have to be done in a tough neighborhood. Perhaps the qualms that lead Cohen to say that he has never been so “shamed” by Israel actions are misguided. But they are real. And even among the, let’s say, 10 – 20 percent or so who are deeply engaged with Israel, either politically, religiously, or philanthropically, I can see a tipping point being reached. Israel may or may not care how American Jews feel about their policies. But others do.

Jon Stewart offered this particularly bitter commentary on Gaza that has surprised some viewers, judging by the discussion forum at the Comedy Central site and some comments I’ve seen at Facebook.

Stewart was put out by the near unanimity in which American politicians accepted Israel’s side of the story. And he mocked Mike Bloomberg, who defended Israel against the “disproportional” argument by saying that if a crazy person was hammering at your door, you’d want the police to send all the resources they could to keep you safe.

Says Stewart (at the 5:41 mark): “I guess it depends if I force the guy to live in my hallway  and make him go thru checkpoints every time he had to take a s–t.”

I’m not sure if it’s Israel “forcing” the Gazans to live where they live, or if Israel needs to be as welcomong to the “refugees” as its Arab neighbors are — which is to say, not at all. And the checkpoint analogy may be more germane to the West Bank than Gaza, although Israel is in control of the flow of goods and utilities in and out of the Strip.

But rather than argue with his take on the situation, I’m more interested where his pique comes from. Bloggers will call him “self-hating” or suggest that as a Jew he needs to prove to his hip audience that he won’t be blinded by ethnic loyalty. Or perhaps, like the pro-Israel liberals at J Street or Israel Policy Forum, he’s disappointed that Israel went with a massive military operation before exhausting its diplomatic options. Or as a Jew he is holding his own people to a higher standard than, say, the Muslim suicide bombers who killed as many as 100 people in Iraq this week.

Whatever prompted Stewart, the segment will be valuable evidence when people write about the American Jewish community and how it responded to Israel’s war on Hamas. It won’t reveal the majority opinion, but will speak for a segment that holds Israel to a high, and to me and many others, an unfair standard of behavior. I don’t agree with Stewart on this one, but I understand where he’s coming from. And I’ll say this: I’m just as disappointed in Stewart’s refusal to acknoweldge Hamas’ culpability as I am in the Jewish leaders who are so rah-rah for war that they can hardly bring themselves to acknowledge the human toll on the other side.

The ADL notes, in a news release sent today, what I did earlier:

In the first days of Israel’s military operation into Gaza major American newspaper editorials showed understanding and support for the Israeli effort to stop scores of Hamas rockets from attacking Israel’s southern cities and towns, according to a survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

“The many editorials in support of Israel are important for their understanding that Israel had to respond to the terrorizing of its citizens by the daily bombardment of Hamas rocket attacks,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “These editors did not engage in moral equivalency, but strongly backed Israel’s right to defend its people and its land.”

[The release isn't yet available at the ADL site.]

[UPDATE: Here's the release.]

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.) (more…)