Slater replies to Lieb   

Editorial Introduction to the Israel/Palestine Section of the March/April 2009 Tikkun:

Normally Tikkun tries to publish articles that reflect a progressive middle path, but in the heat of the violent struggle that erupted in January 2009, that proved difficult to find.

In our New York Times ad of 1/14/09, which you can read by clicking here, we avoid the discussion of who is really to blame for what happened in Gaza. As you can see by looking at this issue's letters to the editor (see the print edition), which include a representative sample of responses, many of our readers came down heavily on one side or the other. We decided that instead of presenting our perspective once again, we would present two partisans, neither of whom reflects the compassionate tone and attempt to understand the other side that we believe is essential if we are ever to move from the "blame game" to the healing. We hoped thereby to document the extent of each side's inability to hear the suffering of the other side. It is this inability that makes real, tikkunish healing impossible. This healing would be better achieved through the approach outlined by Cherie Brown (see the print edition) and is reflected in the proposals that you can read in our ad or in the introduction to our "Israel at 60" issue from May 2008.

Jerome Slater's original article and Doug Lieb's response to it appeared in the March/April print edition. Slater then wrote a much longer, footnoted version of his article for the website. This is now Jerome Slater's response to Lieb's article. 

Jerome Slater's Reply to Doug Lieb's "Gaza: A Just War - A Response to Jerome Slater"

Doug Lieb, an official of the American Jewish Committee, writes a predictable non-response to my critique of the recent Israeli attack on Gaza: he mischaracterizes my arguments, impugns my motives, and—above all—blandly ignores all the evidence I cited in support of my arguments. To be sure, when he wrote he had access only to the shorter print version, not to my much longer and fully-cited version, now posted on the Tikkun website. Judging from both the tone and substance of his piece, however, it seems quite improbable that Lieb would write anything very different, despite now having had the chance to read not only my longer article but far more importantly, the continuing extensive reporting in Israel and the United States on the nature and consequences of the Israeli attack.

Lieb begins with the charge that I “argue explicitly…that unless Israel withdraws completely to its pre-1967 borders, Israeli civilians should be allowed to die.” Not only did I make no such argument “explicitly,” I didn’t make it implicitly either. My argument, of course, was that a nation cannot claim the ‘right’ of self-defense “if attacks on its soil are triggered by—or are acts of resistance against—its own aggression, colonialism, occupation, or repression;” in those circumstances what it is defending, (as Henry Siegman has written) is “its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza’s population.”

Similarly, Lieb charges that my argument has “much in common with those who want to wage war on Israel.” In fact, not only am I a life-long Zionist and a former Fulbright lecturer at Haifa University, in the early 1970s I volunteered to serve, if needed (it wasn’t), as an anti-submarine warfare officer in the Israeli Navy, following my service in that capacity on a U.S. destroyer.

The ad hominem attacks aside, Lieb can barely bring himself to acknowledge the fact of Israeli occupation—he mentions it just once, and in the context of Palestinian criticism of Israel. Moreover, he effectively denies the clear fact of the extensive Israeli repression in the service of the occupation by referring to it only in quotes—that is, “repression.” Likewise, Lieb denies that Palestinian violence could be seen as resistance against over forty years of Israeli occupation and repression, for he also uses the word resistance only in quotes: that is, “resistance.”

Moreover, Lieb suggests that if Hamas attacks are morally allowable on the grounds of Israeli occupation—an argument I didn’t make and (in the long version) explicitly reject—then U.S. cities could be fairly attacked by Iraqis or Afghans, since the U.S. “arguably” occupies Iraq and Afghanistan. One doesn’t have to be a supporter of either war to reject such an absurd and disingenuous comparison with Israel’s policies and behavior towards the Palestinians.

In both versions of my article, I provide concrete and detailed evidence—most of it drawn from Israeli sources—of the Israeli killings, the economic siege of Gaza, and the destruction of West Bank as well as Gazan governmental institutions, industries, roads and bridges, electrical systems, public and private health systems, and schools and universities. Not only does Lieb fail to challenge this evidence, he refers to the destruction “of Gazan institutions” in the massive Israeli attack on Arafat and the PLO in 2002, apparently unaware of the fact that the attack was in the West Bank, not Gaza. This is not a minor error for someone who wishes to refute criticism of Israeli behavior.

There are a number of other problems with Lieb’s argument, only a few of which I can mention here:

•    Lieb claims that Hamas rockets began in early 2006, when “there was no [Israeli] economic blockade” of Gaza. In fact, severe Israeli economic pressures began well before the January 2006 Hamas electoral victory in Gaza, and were immediately intensified afterwards; by early 2006 a number of Israeli commentators were terming the Israeli economic warfare as “the siege of Gaza.” (For example, in February 2006 Gideon Levy wrote that “while masses of Palestinians are living in inhumane conditions, with horrifying levels of unemployment and poverty…humiliated and incarcerated under our responsibility...the top military and political brass …[decided] to impose an economic siege that will be even more brutal than the one until now.”) Moreover , as I show in my article (and in greater detail in the long version), there were very few Hamas attacks on Israel throughout 2006 and, indeed, 2007.

•    Lieb writes that Israel agreed to a ceasefire with Hamas “in the months before the Gaza operation,” but that “this did not halt the rocket fire.” That purports to be a statement of fact, not Lieb’s opinion. As such, it simply ignores the detailed chronological evidence I provided demonstrating that the contrary is the case.

•    Lieb writes that the Israelis “would be nothing short of ecstatic” if Hamas turned to nonviolence, as proven by Israel’s “full-throated embrace” of the nonviolent strategy of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. I imagine they would be ecstatic. Aside from the demonstrable fact that (as I wrote) Israel has repeatedly crushed nonviolent resistance, it has always taken advantage of periods of Palestinian nonviolence to further expand its settlements and control of the West Bank—which is precisely what has occurred since Abbas came to power after the 2004 death of Arafat. What occupier in history has failed to welcome those who essentially pose no effective challenge to its continued control?

•    Lieb writes that Hamas’s repeated offers for a long-term truce with Israel are meaningless because it “resolves to destroy [Israel] once the ten years are up,” so Israel can’t be “expected to negotiate the terms of its own disappearance.” The first quote ignores all the evidence I pointed to, including assessments by top Israeli intelligence officials, that the Hamas position has been steadily evolving into a de facto acceptance of a two-state settlement; the second quote ignores the obvious point (made in both of my articles) that Israel cannot and should not completely withdraw from the occupied territories until an enforceable political solution is reached.

•    Lieb claims that the Israeli army “has a rigorous process of approval” designed to prevent Palestinian civilian casualties, and charges that I don’t “even attempt to make the case” that the Israeli attack on Gaza was disproportional and indiscriminate. As I wrote, the Israel military, astonishingly enough, made that case itself, openly admitting that it planned to ignore the principles of proportionality and discrimination. In any case, the continuing extensive reporting as well as findings of international and Israeli human rights organizations on how the Israeli army treated Palestinian civilians, including vivid testimony from Israeli soldiers themselves, has made the facts overwhelmingly clear. As the Haaretz military correspondent Reuven Pedatzur wrote: “The IDF…planned to attack buildings and sites populated by hundreds of people, did not warn them in advance to leave, but intended to kill a great many of them, and succeeded.”

•    Since I wrote my articles the evidence continues to mount that the Israeli attack was not only immoral but unsuccessful: Hamas is rearming, rockets are again hitting Israel, its popularity among Gazans has been enhanced and Israel’s few remaining allies in the Muslim world are either outraged (Turkey) or under great domestic pressure (Egypt). Above all, Israel is becoming a pariah state in the eyes of much of the world, including not only westerners in general but an increasing number of Jews.

No serious observer would deny these facts. Lieb, however, clearly believes the attack was successful. Why? Because “the senior military and political officials to whom I spoke”—that is, the people who planned and carried out the attack—“uniformly” told him so. Personally, I would be embarrassed to write a sentence like that.

The worse Israel’s behavior becomes, the more indefensible the arguments and tactics of its hardline defenders. It has become almost a cliché—but nonetheless true—that what Israel is in desperate need of from its true friends is tough love, not more disingenuous propaganda masquerading as analysis and persuading increasingly few serious observers of Israel policies. When organizations like the AJC defend Israel no matter what it does, they succeed only in enabling its morally and strategically bankrupt strategy.