By Steve Kramer
ALPHE MENASHE, Israel — We hear a lot about “disproportionate force” these days, aimed chiefly at Israel’s incursion into Gaza as part of its Operation Protective Edge. Various world luminaries have explained how Israel is running roughshod over the “poor Palestinians”:
“U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon leveled his strongest criticism yet of Israel’s military operation in Gaza on Monday, accusing Israel of ‘pummeling’ Gazans with ‘indiscriminate destruction’ and warning Israel to fulfill its obligations as an ‘occupying power’ to protect civilians. Mr. Ban stopped short of accusing Israel of targeting civilians, but he said that ‘every home, every school, every refuge’ had become a target. He told reporters in New York that the Israeli bombardment had raised questions of the ‘proportionality’ of Israel’s military operation. (Wall St. Journal 28/7)
Deputy U.N. secretary-general Jan Eliasson said it is plain to see that Israel’s use of force has been disproportionate, and that the Palestinian casualties have been excessive. (Jerusalem Post, 31/7)
International movie star Javier Bardem, who is married to Penelope Cruz, said in an op-ed for the newspaper El Diario, that Israel’s war against Hamas is one of “occupation and extermination against a people without means, confined to a minimum of land, without water and where hospitals, ambulances and children are targets and alleged terrorists… In the horror happening right now in Gaza there is no place for distance or neutrality… I cannot understand this barbarism, even more brutal and incomprehensible considering all of the horrible things the Jewish people have gone through in the past.” (The Guardian 30/7)
As an Israeli-American, but even more important, as a Jew, how should I feel when these calumnies are raised against the country where I live (and in Europe against Jews in general). Did Israel’s leaders awake one morning and decide that Israel should bombard Gaza and even invade it, to kill civilians and destroy their homes, mosques, and schools, without a reason?
No, Israel has shown too much forbearance towards the Arabs in Gaza, much more so than any other country in the world would have shown. How’s that? The proof is that no other country would absorb rocket fire from a neighboring territory, year after year, without totally destroying the military capacity of the aggressor. Israel is finally taking actions toward that goal, but not without soul-searching and efforts to avoid endangering civilians that have been put in harm’s way by the aggressor. If you doubt that, you aren’t aware of the myriad actions that have been aborted by Israeli fighters when civilians were plainly endangered. (theblaze.com)
Let’s imagine a scenario to illustrate what “proportionality” entails. During WWII, after Germany had been defeated, the war still raged in the Pacific. The American president, Harry Truman, faced the implacable Japanese, who were determined to defend their homeland. Rather than risk huge American casualties which could have easily exceeded 100,000, Truman elected to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima to subdue Japan, which surrendered after a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Far fewer Americans were killed because “disproportionate” force was used. Many Japanese died, but many Americans didn’t. This is an extreme example, but aren’t all wars won by extreme force that overpowers its enemy? The modern world calls extreme force disproportionate – usually when Israel is defending itself.
Clearly, it’s the aggressors who deserve the blame for the damage when those attacked begin to retaliate. War is cruel, especially to civilians who are put in danger by fanatical rulers. In Gaza, many suffer because their homes, churches, schools, and mosques have been honeycombed with rocket launchers, weapons caches, and tunnel openings.
What chance do the innocents have in a situation like this, when the inevitable retaliation comes? Of course, that’s the whole point: Hamas needs to show piles of dead Gazans to convince the world that it’s Israel’s fault. (That’s their entire argument.) Most Gazans who voted for Hamas knew that it is engaged in a sacred war against the Jews and would never come to a peace agreement with Israel. That’s because Hamas is dedicated to either kill the hated Jews or subjugate them to Islamic rule.
One also has to ask, how many Gazans were willing accomplices to turning their homes into military targets? How many demanded that bomb shelters be constructed while the attack tunnels were being dug in their homes? Instead, they claim they didn’t know about the tunnels, despite the fact that thousands of Gazans built them and even work in them (National Geographic 7/14)? Nor did anyone complain when mosques and schools became armories.
The same people who castigate Israel for defending itself, such as UN diplomats and Western leaders, are also guilty: they pretend that the strife between Hamas and Israel is a territorial conflict, not a lifelong struggle to annihilate the Jews, or force them to convert to Islam or be executed, as is happening to the Christians in Mosul, Iraq.
I nearly throw up when listening to various Palestinian apologists talk about the many Palestinian casualties and the few Israeli ones. For example, on July 20, PLO Executive Committee Member, Dr. Hanan Ashwari, told ABC News, “These are war crimes being committed before the world, before the eyes of the whole world and I just can’t understand how people sit back and say [it’s] self-defense. I just can’t take the language, I can’t take the propaganda, I can’t take the mantra that Israel has a right to defend itself. Against whom? Against innocent civilians? More than 80 children have been torn to bits. Is this self-defense?”
This is the height of hypocrisy and chutzpah. Hamas planned for this “July war” and provoked the Israelis with an onslaught of rockets too dangerous for Israel to ignore, after kidnapping and killing three Jewish youths. Each one of the thousands of rockets fired by Hamas and its allies was fired with the intent to indiscriminately kill Jews. It’s the lack of dead Jews that is at the heart of the argument about disproportionate response. At this time, many “talking heads” declaim about how many Gazans have been killed, but so few Israelis. Actually, it’s all about not enough dead Jews.
When Ban Ki-moon turns his attention to the root cause of Israel’s conflict with the Muslims, the mere existence of the Jewish State of Israel, when he talks about the eviction of Christians from the Middle East, which the Arabs are perpetuating daily, when he talks about the internecine slaughter of Muslims in countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, then he might be able to bring up the subject of disproportionate warfare. But even then, Ban Ki-moon will be hard pressed to make an objective argument that Israel fails to limit civilian casualties as much as, or probably more, than any other army.
*
Kramer is a freelance writer based in the Israeli town of Alphe Menashe. He may be contacted via steve.kramer@sdjewishworld.com