Israel's Invasion of Gaza

It has been two years, since the disastrous invasion by Israel into Lebanon. I spoke out forcefully against that folly at the time – See here and here and here and here and here as well as the comments at the end of each of my commentaries. Talk about “Déjà vu all over again” in the immortal words of Yogi Berra.

After the folly of the Lebanese invasion, which it was generally agreed was folly; an almost identical folly has now been committed. If you look at the comments you will see that very few agreed with me on Lebanon. There are few dissenting voices in the American community, and even less in the Jewish American community. But in Israel there are strong dissenting voices. See numerous opinion pieces in Haaretz entitled, “The Neighborhood Bully Strikes Again” and “Trying To 'Teach Hamas A Lesson' Is Fundamentally Wrong.”

That is a lot of reading, but with so many dying, so many wounded, so many made homeless, is it really too much to ask that a little time be spent reading other opinions.

We keep hearing, “Israel Has a Right to Defend Itself.” What we don’t hear is “Palestinians Have a Right to Defend Themselves.” We hear “Hamas has ended the truce.” Was there ever a truce on Israel’s side? It is well recognized that a blockade is an act of war. But during the six month of the so-called truce, Israel had a tight blockade applied against Gaza. No food, no medicine, no electricity was allowed into the territory, and Israel never ceased assassinating Hamas leaders.

As a Jew who knows what being a Jew means, not only in Nazi Austria, but at the hands of anti-Semitism in the US, I reject the notion so widely spread by the Israeli lobby, that to criticize Israel constitutes anti-Semitism.

They say that in the US Social Security is the third rail. In fact the third rail in the US is Israel and this is particularly true in the Jewish community. I maintain that criticism of dumb and immoral policies whether by the US, or by Israel, is the height of patriotism, or as Obama said in another context, "I am not against all wars, only dumb wars." When I spoke out against the madness of Lebanon, I was addressed as “Dear un- American Anti-Semite” in a comment here, but as Martin Luther King said, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter" and I will not be silent.

There are so many myths around the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The biggest is “Jews good” “Arabs bad” ‘Muslims bad”.

I hear that Hamas refuses to recognize Israel. But Israel refuses to recognize Hamas. After all, as a result of pressure by the US, an election in the territories was held, and Hamas won the election and as a result became the duly elected representative of the people of the territories.

I hear that even in the West Bank children’s textbooks display a negative image of Israel. But Israeli textbooks refer to the territories as Judea and Samaria, clearly carrying the implication that Israel is negotiating in bad faith when it talks about a two state solution. And even a spokesperson for the Israeli foreign office talks about not the West Bank but about Judea and Samaria.

This is not calculated to instill trust.

After Hamas declared the truce at an end and fired some rockets into Israel not one Israeli was killed. The rockets were too inaccurate and the Israeli’s had good bomb shelters. That is not true the other way around.

The government of Israel says they try as hard as they can to avoid civilian casualties and that Hamas uses civilians as shields and so a thousand Palestinians have been killed and a multiple of that wounded and many, many more made homeless. There is a doctrine in the law called reckless endangerment. The concept says that if you recklessly endanger lives that is almost as bad as murder. Can anyone say that even if the IDF did not intend to kill civilians, there was not reckless endangerment?

When In our society a criminal take hostages, the police does not recklessly fire upon the criminal if it endangers the hostages. They will negotiate, they will wait, they will truly do all they can to avoid endangering the hostages. Can anyone say that is what the IDF has done?

And the use of cluster and phosphorous bombs. What can possibly justify these horrific weapons?

But even if we put all morality aside, what has all this carnage done for the security of Israel. According to an article in the New Yorker, Hamas had grown weak. Its support among Gazans was waning. It needed an Israeli strike to bolster its popularity. Israel has accommodated it.

What has it gained? Hate! Oh, there was hate there before, but there are degrees of hate.

Before 1967 Israel was in fact a besieged country. It faced the combined arms of all the surrounding Arab states and they were being armed by the Soviet Union. That is not the case any more. Peace treaties have been signed with Egypt and Jordan; there is no Soviet Union. Israel is the 80 pound gorilla in the Middle East. When a bee stings, the gorilla cannot go around destroying the whole jungle around it, because it is enraged.

Gideon Lichfield, the Jerusalem correspondent for The Economist writing in the NY Times from Tel Aviv said:

“Even if Israel now manages to impose a cease-fire on its terms, the calm will be short-lived unless it is willing to reoccupy much of the Gaza Strip indefinitely. Moreover, as long as Israel plays the role of aggressor in Palestinian eyes, Hamas’s support remains high. And each attack has weakened the relative moderates within Hamas and strengthened its most extremist leaders.

“Israel needs instead to abandon its military concept of deterrence in favor of a more pragmatic political one. What could deter Hamas is the fear that by using violence it will lose support among its people.

“How to create this? It is worth remembering that Israel launched its operation after the breakdown of a cease-fire that had held, reasonably well, for several months. Each side accused the other of breaching it, both with some justification. Instead of trying to re-establish the cease-fire, Israel’s leaders, driven by the need to bolster their ratings ahead of an election in February, decided to try to strike a decisive blow against Hamas.

“What Israel should do now is work for a cease-fire on terms that allow both sides to save some face. It should then do something it has done far too little of in the past: improve Gazans’ living conditions significantly. The aim should be to construct a long-lived state of calm in which Hamas has more to lose by breaching the cease-fire than by sticking to it.

“In the longer term Israel will have to accept that Hamas is no fringe movement that can be rooted out and destroyed, but a central part of Palestinian society. This will be the hard part, not least because of the opposition from Hamas’s secularist Palestinian rivals, Fatah.

“But even though Hamas’s stated goal is Israel’s destruction, it has said many times that it would accept a truce extending decades. Some former Israeli security chiefs argue that such an accommodation — a peace treaty in all but name — would eventually oblige Hamas to accept Israel’s existence, or else lose its own base of support. It is a gamble, certainly. But the alternative is more innocent lives lost, more extremism and ultimately more trouble for Israel.”

Even as I write this Israel has started withdrawing, having accomplished nothing except sowing destruction and hate.

What should Israel do? It should stop building illegal settlements on Arab lands. It may build walls to keep out terrorists, but on its own territory, not on occupied territory. It must not blockade Gaza. Gazans are entitled like any other people to come and go and to trade and to build a viable economy. Are there risks for Israel in this? Of course! But the alternative is worse. Israel instead of tearing down the Palestinian economy should build it. A prosperous Palestinian people tied to Israel by trade will not tolerate a Hamas in its midst, unless Hamas reforms. There will always be rejectionists, but they can be isolated, and without support they will wither.

The lessons of Vietnam and of Iraq have relevance.