By Steve Kramer
ALFE MENASHE, Israel — Nicholas Kristof is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and author, who has written op-ed columns for The New York Times since 2001. Kristof generally highlights human rights abuse and social injustice. His article of July 19, “Who’s Right and Wrong in the Middle East” is not his first to misrepresent Israel in its existential battle with neighboring Arabs.
While Kristof admits that the ongoing Israeli Operation Protective Edge in Gaza is a “struggle between good and evil, right and wrong,” he equates Israelis and Palestinians and blames “cross-demonization” for the conflict. I, and the vast majority of Israelis, take issue with that equation.
Though Kristof doesn’t mention it, Israel recognized the “humanity and legitimate interests” of the Gazans when it completely vacated the Gaza Strip in 2005. The Israelis’ state-of-the-art greenhouses and agricultural industry were donated to the Gazans, but were never utilized. Instead, the greenhouses were dismantled and much of the metal ended up being used to make rockets. Since 2005, about 8,000 rockets have been shot from Gaza into Israel, double the 4,000 that bombarded Israel between 2001-2005.
Kristof mentions Israel’s embargo of Gaza, ignoring why it is necessary. Scores of tunnels have been built under Gaza, many exiting near Israeli communities in the Negev Desert. The tunnels have been used to attack Israeli civilians and soldiers. The huge quantity of cement, allowed in to Gaza by Israel, was used to construct the tunnels, not to provide much-needed housing. Is it any wonder that Israel strictly controls the shipments into and out of Gaza?
Gaza also borders on Egypt, which controls its own crossing into Gaza. Kristof fails to mention that Egypt participates in the Gaza embargo nearly as energetically as Israel, because Egypt recognizes that the Hamas government perpetrates and encourages terrorism against Egypt in the Sinai Peninsula.
While Kristof intimates that Hamas is the “villain” in the current conflict, he writes that, “in both Gaza and Jerusalem, hawks are in charge, and they empower each other.” Israel does not have a hawkish government, despite the Western habit of describing Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu as a hawk and his coalition as hard-line. In fact, Bibi’s coalition includes both right, left, and center parties. Netanyahu has received tremendous criticism from members of his own Likud party and from other parties to the right of Likud for not ordering the Gaza incursion sooner.
Netanyahu hesitated to authorize an incursion into Gaza because he feared the increased death toll on both sides. It was only because of the protracted firing of hundreds of rockets at Israelis, primarily civilians, that the ground forces rolled into Gaza.
Kristof writes, “Israeli leaders, starting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, think that the way to protect their citizens is to invade Gaza and blow up tunnels — and, if Gazan civilians and children die, that’s sad but inevitable.” I don’t dispute that statement. Does Kristof think that Israel has another option, when Hamas refuses to agree to a ceasefire and to stop firing missiles? Thousands of missiles showering down on Israel finally convinced the government that boots on the ground are required to stop this aggression. I believe that even Nicholas Kristof would come to the same conclusion if rockets were continuously fired into his community.
Kristof complains that, “We’ve seen this movie before: Israel responded to aggression by invading Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, and Gaza in 2008; each time, hawks cheered. Yet each invasion in retrospect accomplished at best temporary military gains while killing large numbers of innocents; they didn’t solve any problems.”
There’s a reason for that. The West has refused to allow Israel to defeat the Arabs either militarily or politically, applying rules of war not appropriate for battles against terrorist organizations. It’s no secret that Israel’s army is incredibly well equipped and could level Gaza (and Lebanon for that matter) in a matter of days, if it were to unleash its full arsenal. But Israel won’t do that, unless its very existence is endangered. Israel goes to incredible lengths to minimize civilian casualties.
When influential people, such as the EU’s Catherine Ashton and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, press for Israel to stand down and negotiate, no resolution of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs will result. That’s because the Arabs are continually “saved” from recognizing the legitimacy of Israel and by Western pressure on Israel not to “win.”It’s often said by liberals that, “There is no military solution, only a political one.” That cliché is false. Yes, large numbers of innocents are killed during wartime and that is why countries avoid going to war. But when one side doesn’t care how many of its citizens are killed, and embeds its weapons and fighters among its civilian population, the other side cannot throw up its hands and suffer defeat. No international law of warfare requires a country to put the welfare of its enemies’ civilians above its own citizens’ welfare. Not to mention the fact that the cowardly Hamas leadership hides far beneath a Gaza City hospital while “conducting” its war.
The current warfare between Israel and the Gazans is not “a conflict between right and right that has been hijacked by hard-liners on each side who feed each other,” as Kristof writes. His plea that the two parties de-escalate, with Israel withdrawing its troops and Hamas ending its rocket attacks won’t work. Hamas has never stopped its aggression, but only suspended it.
Kristof ignores the fact that the overriding goal of Hamas, as expressed in its charter, is to destroy the Jewish State of Israel, not to build a prosperous Gaza. Additionally, Kristof is wrong in believing that President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, who has a PhD in Holocaust denial (really), is Israel’s best-ever negotiating party. Even if he wanted to, Abbas could not ignore the PLO charter, which also has as its main goal the destruction of Israel.
To conclude, I applaud Kristof’s commitment to stop human rights abuse and social injustice, but I deplore his refusal to recognize that the Palestinians want to destroy Israel, not to make peace with it. The Palestinians have been trying to accomplish this goal for decades, helped by the West’s inability to recognize the facts, or worse, to disregard them.*
Kramer is a freelance writer based in the Israeli community of Alfe Menashe. He may be contacted via steve.kramer@sdjewishworld.com
Kramer is a freelance writer based in the Israeli community of Alfe Menashe. He may be contacted via steve.kramer@sdjewishworld.com