Daniel Levy has his say on the Goldstone report here. What might the title of the piece mean? It’s got quite a new age ring to it so perhaps we shouldn’t expect too much by way of a specific diagnosis of what’s supposed to be ailing Israel. It does, however, reflect a common way of thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a framework which sees everything through the lens of the doings, plans and - above all - the faults of the Israelis. There may be a lot of dead Palestinians as a result of the Gaza Campaign but, it would appear, the priority is for Israelis to heal themselves. And remember now that Levy is not exactly a Likudnik, he’s as dovish as they come and sees himself as a fierce critic of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians.
We’ve already said what we think about the report at this blog here and here but I’d like to make a couple of further points about Levy’s response to it. He says that it
… covers disproportionate use of force, targeting of civilians and the foundations of civilian life, among other things, all against the backdrop of the sophisticated and precision weaponry at Israel’s disposal (Israel is a world leader in defence and military R&D and manufacturing, and was the world’s third-largest arms exporter in 2008).
I assume that he’s talking here about precision-guided munitions and means to say that the existence of such weapons should have allowed Israel to conduct operations while killing few if any civilians. Would that it were so. Unfortunately there are no technological silver bullets. You no longer have to drop hundreds of bombs to be sure of destroying a single target but the people inside that target will be just as dead and there’s no precision guided weapon that can go “Whoops! I’ve been sent to the wrong place.”, and decide not to explode if a mistake has been made with the targeting. There’s no sanitizing war but there’s one thing for sure; by reducing the quantity of ordnance required to achieve a given military objective precision-guided weapons tend to reduce civilian casualties.
And now for a fun quote:
Both Israeli and Hamas officials have expressed opposition to the report, although the latter have praised parts of it and are considering implementing the investigation recommended by the mission.
Levy really believes that Hamas is going to investigate itself in any sort of credible way? I ask because he plainly doesn’t believe that Israel is:
Israel produced a 157-page internal report mainly conducted by the IDF on the Gaza operation, but this serves as an exercise in self-justification, not investigation.
He also makes a bit of a song and dance about the so-called Dahiya doctrine,
In its Lebanon war of summer 2006, Israel declared the existence of a Dahiya doctrine, after the southern Beirut neighbourhood of the same name, a Hizbullah stronghold. The Goldstone report quotes the IDF’s then head of northern command as stating, “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on … we apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there … This is a plan, and it has been approved” (report, p329). Israel applied the Dahiya doctrine in Gaza.
There are quite a few things wrong with this. The IDF’s Nothern Command was led by Udi Adam not Gadi Eisenkot during the Second Lebanon War and the remarks made by the latter date from last year, not 2006. But, hey, they’re just details right? Why worry about them when you can throw phrases like “Dahiya doctrine” around in contexts where they have little relevance.
What Israel actually did in the summer of 2006 was spend some considerable time dithering before deciding to attack the Hezbollah-dominated Dahiya district and then only doing so after warning civilians, and hence Hezbollah fighters, that it was about to do so. Hezbollah’s power to damage Israel is vastly greater than that of Hamas and Eisenkot was issuing a warning that if Nasrallah embarks on a fresh round of adventurism there’ll be no dithering from Israel.
And finally, this:
The endless and ever-more-entrenched occupation constitutes the greatest threat to Israel and its future. […]To rephrase a well-known adage, occupation corrupts, but prolonged occupation corrupts profoundly.
So, Levy buys into the magic realist doctrine that Israel continues to occupy Gaza. I think that abandoning Gaza was the right thing to do but the irony of the matter is that had Israel not done so then there would have been no Hamas coup, no escalation of rocket attacks on Israel and no Gaza Campaign. Israel is always damned if it does what Levy and those of a similar view want it to and just as damned if it doesn’t.
David Levy has picked up on the latest anti-Israel bumper sticker.
From the article:
“From the perspective of a friend and supporter of Israel – wishing to see Israel healed and its future guaranteed – the message is loud and clear. To rephrase a well-known adage, occupation corrupts, but prolonged occupation corrupts profoundly.”
This is nonsense.
Many countries in the world occupy foreign territory from Russia and China, the US which occupied one third of Mexico and India. Not to mention those countries like Great Britain which occupied almost a third of the world at one time?
Are these countries also profoundly corrupt? Was Great Britain “profoundly corrupt the centuries in which it occupied Ireland, India, or most of Africa? Will Levy write an article about the occupation of Tibet?
This must be the third article critical of Israel that mentioned the same adage.
The Forward has a meaningful editorial on boycotts:
“Behind the Boycott”
“The argument that pushing Israel into economic, academic and cultural purgatory will somehow persuade its government to dismantle the security barrier, evacuate the West Bank and embrace its sworn enemy is misguided. And that’s being generous. Whatever the flaws of the Netanyahu administration — and there are many — it is clearly responding to (and, true, at times stoking) real fears and anxieties among the Israeli population.
The boycotters are either grossly ignorant about the Israeli psyche, or don’t care to understand it. The attempt to isolate and delegitimize “is counter productive because of the nature of who we are. It confirms our worst fears,” says the noted South African journalist Benjamin Pogrund, who now lives in Israel and writes extensively about boycotts, having lived through the apartheid era in his native land.
While the BDS movement hopes to do to Israel what a similar movement claims to have done in South Africa, the economies are not at all equivalent. South Africa’s exports during the apartheid regime were limited, while Israel is intimately connected to the global economy, especially in technology, medicine, finance and scientific research. A real boycott, of course, would eliminate more Israeli-born medicines and technological advances than there is room to recount here, but then, according to the BDS approach, one can still throw mud at those who save you.
A more fair, useful and indeed noble way for outsiders to influence the Israeli government and its people is to engage and encourage both them and the Palestinians to take meaningful steps towards reconciliation and support of human rights across the troubled landscape. Perhaps the first thing that these “boycotters” ought to sacrifice is their self-righteous belief that only one side of this conflict bears any responsibility for its continuance.”
Read it all here:
http://www.forward.com/articles/114907/
There’s an interesting article related to the Goldstone report in an Israeli blog:
http://samsonblinded.org/news/palestinians-undeterred-by-obama-13838