This blog, like so many others, devotes a lot of its efforts to questions arising from the Israel-Palestine conflict. Open any newspaper and you’ll find hectares of news and opinion about the current tension between Israel and the United States. The death of one Thai worker in Israel yesterday, killed by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, has made the front pages of today’s New York Times and the Times of London, to name just two of the many important papers that have prominently covered it.
Continue reading ‘Israel-Palestine And The World’s Forgotten Conflicts’
This article includes a guest contribution by habibi from Harry’s Place.
A group of friends in London alerted me to this grubby little piece by a British Labour Party Member of Parliament, Bob Marshall-Andrews, concerning his recent visit to Gaza. Upon reading it, I was struck by various thoughts, not least the degree to which Marshall-Andrews words will be welcomed by the Hamas cheerleaders who compose the Palestinian solidarity movement, in marked contrast to the fierce condemnation with which this blog, and others like it, will greet his compendium of antisemitism-laced falsehoods. Why bother to refute such lies, one might ask, when those of us who defend Israel are at irreconcilable odds with those who demonize her, when any charge of antisemitism we make is bound to be dismissed as another tired attempt to muzzle debate? The most satisfactory answer I can come up with is that some things - and Marshall-Andrews article is one of them - are so odious that they cannot pass without rebuke.
Continue reading ‘Lying in Gaza’
If Vidal Sassoon lived in Gaza, he’d be in hiding now for two reasons. One, because he’s Jewish. Two, because he’s a hairdresser who works in women’s salons. More here. Someone please remind me: wasn’t there something, somewhere about Hamas being moderate and enlightened?
I received an e-mail circular from B’Tselem today about Israel’s policies towards Gaza. The first substantial argument offered is this:
“The siege of Gaza is causing enormous suffering among innocents, and it’s hard to see how that deprivation can be justified,” said Uri Zaki, B’Tselem’s USA Director. “International law, as well as basic human and Israeli values, demands that Israel do its utmost to address its legitimate security concerns without inflicting unnecessary harm to the civilians of Gaza. The current policy doesn’t come close to meeting that standard.” Gazans’ rights to minimal standards of food security, shelter, health, education and to travel are protected under international law. These needs should not be held hostage to security and political issues.
Continue reading ‘B’Tselem And Bad Arguments’
Soccer Dad points us to this fine essay by the Israeli philosopher Asa Kasher which demonstrates why Operation Cast Lead was a just war justly fought. Among the pertinent points Kasher makes:
Compare the Gaza operation to the U.S. Marine operation in Fallujah, Iraq, in late 2004. During the operation, about 6,000 Iraqis including 1,200-2,000 insurgents were killed. Of the city’s 50,000 buildings, some 10,000 were destroyed, including 60 mosques. Thus, the U.S. left a trail of destruction in Fallujah far greater than anything Israel inflicted on Gaza. Comparing IDF activities to those of military forces of Western democracies is an essential part of any present attempt to use international law.
We in Israel are in a key position in the development of customary international law in this field because we are on the front lines in the fight against terrorism. The more often Western states apply principles that originated in Israel to their own non-traditional conflicts in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, then the greater the chance these principles have of becoming a valuable part of international law.
Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff have a piece here in which they assess Operation Cast Lead a year after its conclusion. They acknowledge that,
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) penetrated to the heart of the strip — the center of Gaza City, where most of Hamas’s major compounds are located. The organization’s defensive infrastructure, which had been painstakingly built over three years and included hundreds of booby-trapped houses, tunnels, landmines, and smuggled anti-tank rockets, was destroyed.
Hamas fighters had no answer for the IDF’s technological and military edge. Their attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers failed and, though Hamas fired hundreds of rockets into Israeli territory, only a few civilians were killed. More than a year after the fighting, the strip is still under siege by both Israel and Egypt. Most Gazans are forbidden from traveling abroad, while their supply of goods depends primarily on smuggling through tunnels from Egypt.
Continue reading ‘Cast Lead And Contemporary Warfare’
This article by Richard Landes is cross-posted from Augean Stables.
Judge Richard Goldstone spoke yesterday at Yale in the framework of the George Herbert Walker Bush Jr. Lecture in International Relations. Obviously a most prestigious platform for someone of stature, but inappropriate for a figure who is not only highly controversial, but has done much to marginalize himself, as Noah Pollak and Adam Yoffie pointed out the previous day in the Yale Daily.
Continue reading ‘The Coke-Lite of International Law: Goldstone Speaks at Yale’
Here’s British parliamentarian Sir Gerald Kaufman on Israel’s operation in Gaza against Hamas: “”We have had a fuss in our country about the inability of certain Israeli politicians to visit Britain for fear of being arrested…Anybody who uses white phosphorus should be arrested and should be tried for war crimes.”
Sounds like a bold interventionist on behalf of human rights, no?
Here’s what Gerald Kaufman, then the Shadow (opposition) Foreign Secretary, said at the onset of the Serb onslaught against Bosnia, in June 1992: “The situation is far too confused for forcible intervention from outside to do any positive good…The Foreign Secretary is equally right to make it clear that the Serbs are not the only guilty party - that others share the guilt.” (Quoted in Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, Penguin 2001, pps. 297-98.)
And here he is again in early 1993, when the genocidal nature of the Serb campaign was becoming increasingly clear: “The European Community should have no military role in this conflict or indeed in any other. The need is not to extend the conflict but to maintain it [sic].” (See Brendan Simms, p. 298.)
To maintain it. To maintain, in other words, a state of affairs which enabled the punishing siege of Sarajevo, the concentration camps in which women were raped and men brutalized, the massacre at Srebrenica and myriad other atrocities.
Gerald Kaufman was perfectly content for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Bosnia to continue apace. So whenever you hear him delivering one of his inchoate, hateful rants against Israel, ask for the salt.
War, when practised by Israel, is frequently seen as having paradoxical consequences. The more often it inflicts damage and defeat on its enemies the stronger they are held to become. Never mind that Egypt and Jordan long since grew sick of defeat and signed peace treaties with the Jewish state, never mind that Syria, with the partial exception of the First Lebanon War, hasn’t risked a direct confrontation with Israel since 1973 and never mind that part of the leadership of the Palestinians accepts Israel´s existence; victory is still seen as making Israel weak and its enemies strong.
Continue reading ‘Long Live the Dahiya Doctrine!’
Just a couple of lines to recommend a lecture on the question of proportionality in war by Professor Jeff McMahan of Rutgers University. It’s worth the full hour and twenty four minutes of your time but in case you need a couple of teasers to tempt you I’ll throw you these; he thinks that certain classes of Israeli and Palestinian civilians are not entitled to complain if they are harmed by enemy action and that the idea of proportionality in unjust wars makes no sense. I found the lecture here.
This is a guest post by ganselmi.
At the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh, President Obama revealed what Western intelligence agencies have apparently been aware of for some time: that the Islamic Republic has been constructing yet another secret nuclear facility - this time near the holy city of Qom, where, presumably, the proximity of so many sacred shrines would give second thoughts to anyone planning airstrikes. Earlier this week, Iranian officials admitted the existence of this pilot facility in a short, typically cryptic document filed with the IAEA.
Continue reading ‘Iran’s Nuclear Program: Learning from the Qom Revelation’
This is a guest post by Fabián of La Fusión.
There is a common misconception that the Gaza Strip is “one of the most populated places on the planet”. Sometimes this is said because people want to emphasize the plight of the “overcrowded” Palestinian people, accuse Israel of stealing most of “Palestinian” land, and sometimes it is said by others to remark that in case of war in the Gaza strip, there is no chance of fighting it without hitting civilians, since the Palestinians are, as if were, living one over the other.
Continue reading ‘Gaza: The Overcrowding Myth’
You remember all the fuss at the start of the year about Israel’s supposedly disproportionate use of force in Gaza, no? Well, unless you are a close student of Afghan affairs it may have escaped your attention that last Thursday Spanish forces killed 13 members of the Taliban without suffering so much as a scratch on their own side.
Continue reading ‘Because Wars Are Either Won Or lost’
It’s three years to the day since Gilad Shalit was kidnapped and incarcerated by Hamas. The Red Cross has been denied access to him, his family has had no contact from him, no-one knows what his condition is or the circumstances he is being held in. Which is why the Israeli government will perhaps want to revisit all the options available to it, including the complete sealing of the border with Gaza (with the exception of, as Gilad’s father Noam has said, urgent medical and humanitarian requirements) until Gilad is released.
The Progressive Commentariat and the Palestinians
Many commentators who argue in favor of the Palestinian cause base themselves on an assumption which they never voice and which, perhaps, they are not entirely conscious. That assumption is that Israelis are morally superior to Palestinians and, in political terms, more intelligent than them. There follow a couple of examples of what I mean.
Continue reading ‘The Progressive Commentariat and the Palestinians’