... No, It's Survival (Richard Cohen)
If by chance you have the search engine LexisNexis and you punch in the words "Israel" and "disproportionate," you run the risk of blowing up your computer or darkening your entire neighborhood. Just limiting the search to newspapers and magazines of the past week will turn up "more than 1,000 documents." Israel may or may not be the land of milk and honey, but it certainly seems to be the land of disproportionate military response -- and a good thing, too.Why wonder? The connection is pretty obvious.
The list of those who have accused Israel of not being in harmony with its enemies is long and, alas, distinguished. It includes, of course, the United Nations and its secretary general, Kofi Annan. It also includes a whole bunch of European newspapers whose editorial pages call for Israel to respond, it seems, with only one missile for every one tossed its way. Such neat proportion is a recipe for doom.
The dire consequences of proportionality are so clear that it makes you wonder if it is a fig leaf for anti-Israel sentiment in general.
Of course, it's not always a matter of conscious hostility. Sometimes it's just ingrained, taken-for-granted bias that is in large part a residual effect of persistent long-term demonization of Israel (along with an understandable reluctance to face up to some of the more depressing underlying realities of the situation). And in some cases there are even elements of serious analysis and genuine moral concern involved--not every argument that harps on Israel's allegedly "disproportionate" response can simply be dismissed. Furthermore, this time around we haven't seen such an explosion of open hatred against Israel as in previous crises. (Although that's a matter of degree.) But all those qualifications don't affect the basic point. This pervasive, thoughtlessly reflexive condemnation of Israel's "disproportionality" (sometimes, admittedly, coupled with brief pro-forma critical comments about Hezbollah) can't be understood except in connection with an underlying anti-Israel bias that long ago hardened into "common sense" and that helps shape the immediate response to every new crisis.
It's important not to misunderstand or deliberately misconstrue what this means. Are Israelis right to be concerned about genuine long-term threats to their national and physical survival? Yes, definitely, and any discussion which ignores, dismisses, or trivializes such concerns--which many do--is not worth taking seriously. Does the survival of Israel sometimes require responses that other people will regard as "disproportionate"? Yes. Does that mean that every Israeli action taken on this basis is justified or intelligent? No, that doesn't follow at all, and it's obviously not true. In fact, the imperatives of national survival have sometimes been used to rationalize unjust, disastrous, and self-destructive policies. Does it mean that everyone who ever criticizes Israel or Israeli policies (as I do, for example) should be seen as an anti-Zionist or even anti-semitic bigot? No, that's stupid ... and, in most cases, a dishonest red herring. Criticism is not the same thing as demonization or persistent bias--but that's not equivalent to pretending that demonization and persistent bias don't exist.
Having said that ... read Cohen's whole column.
---Jeff Weintraub.
=========================
Washington Post
Tuesday, July 25, 2006; Page A15
... No, It's Survival
By Richard Cohen
If by chance you have the search engine LexisNexis and you punch in the words "Israel" and "disproportionate," you run the risk of blowing up your computer or darkening your entire neighborhood. Just limiting the search to newspapers and magazines of the past week will turn up "more than 1,000 documents." Israel may or may not be the land of milk and honey, but it certainly seems to be the land of disproportionate military response -- and a good thing, too.
The list of those who have accused Israel of not being in harmony with its enemies is long and, alas, distinguished. It includes, of course, the United Nations and its secretary general, Kofi Annan. It also includes a whole bunch of European newspapers whose editorial pages call for Israel to respond, it seems, with only one missile for every one tossed its way. Such neat proportion is a recipe for doom.
The dire consequences of proportionality are so clear that it makes you wonder if it is a fig leaf for anti-Israel sentiment in general. Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness. For Israel, a small country within reach, as we are finding out, of a missile launched from any enemy's back yard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is suicide. The last thing it needs is a war of attrition. It is not good enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary to reestablish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your lights.
Israel has been in dire need of such deterrence ever since it pulled out of Lebanon in 2000 and, just recently, the Gaza Strip. In Lebanon, it effectively got into a proportional hit-and-respond cycle with Hezbollah. It cost Israel 901 dead and Hezbollah an announced 1,375, too close to parity to make a lasting difference. Whatever the figures, it does not change the fact that Israeli conscripts or reservists do not think death and martyrdom are the same thing. No virgins await Jews in heaven.
Gaza, too, was a retreat. There are many ways to mask it but no way to change the reality. The government of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon concluded that Israel was incapable of controlling a densely populated area full of people who hated the occupation. Israel will in due course reach the same conclusion when it comes to the West Bank, although the present war has almost certainly set back that timetable. The fact remains that for Israel to survive, it must withdraw to boundaries that are easily defensible and hard to breach.
It's clear now that those boundaries -- a wall, a fence, a whatever -- are immaterial when it comes to missiles. Hezbollah, with the aid of Iran and Syria, has shown that it is no longer necessary to send a dazed suicide bomber over the border -- all that is needed is the requisite amount of thrust and a warhead. That being the case, it's either stupid or mean for anyone to call for proportionality. The only way to ensure that babies don't die in their cribs and old people in the streets is to make the Lebanese or the Palestinians understand that if they, no matter how reluctantly, host those rockets, they will pay a very, very steep price.
Readers of my recent column on the Middle East can accuse me of many things, but not a lack of realism. I know Israel's imperfections, but I also exalt and admire its achievements. Lacking religious conviction, I fear for its future and note the ominous spread of European-style anti-Semitism throughout the Muslim world -- and its boomerang return to Europe as a mindless form of anti-Zionism.
Israel is, as I have often said, unfortunately located, gentrifying a pretty bad neighborhood. But the world is full of dislocated peoples, and we ourselves live in a country where the Indians were pushed out of the way so that -- oh, what irony! -- the owners of slaves could spread liberty and democracy from sea to shining sea. As for Europe, who today cries for the Greeks of Anatolia or the Germans of Bohemia?
These calls for proportionality rankle. They fall on my ears not as genteel expressions of fairness, some ditsy Marquess of Queensberry idea of war, but as ugly sentiments pregnant with antipathy toward the only democratic state in the Middle East. After the Holocaust, after 1,000 years of mayhem and murder, the only proportionality that counts is zero for zero. If Israel's enemies want that, they can have it in a moment.
posted by Jeff Weintraub at 9:33 AM
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