Gaza: A Just War - A Response to Jerome Slater by Doug 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.

Both print editions can be bought here:

https://www.reachandteach.com/store/index.php?l=product_list&c=30.

Website Editor's note: This article by Doug Lieb responds only to the print version of Jerome Slater's "A Perfect Moral Catastrophe," which you can read by clicking here. Both were printed in the March/April 2009 issue of Tikkun. While that was going to print, Jerome Slater prepared a much longer, footnoted version of his article for the web, which you can read by clicking here, to which Doug Lieb naturally did not have access.

March 31, 2009: Jerome Slater has now written a response to Doug Lieb, here.

An Israeli woman lays on the floor and covers the heads of her two children as an alarm is heard warning of incoming rockets fired by Palestinian militants in Gaza, in Kfar Azza, southern Israel, near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, January 7, 2009.  --  AP PHOTO/SEBASTIAN SCHEINER

Gaza: A Just War - A Response to Jerome Slater
by Doug Lieb

The title of Jerome Slater's "A Perfect Moral Catastrophe" pretty well sums up this comprehensive brief against Israel.

For Slater, Israel doesn't just suffer from bad policymaking. It is rotten to its core. Slater's Israel deliberately blows up hospitals, violates every principle of just war theory, and endangers "the entire world." Its leaders are not to be believed when they say they want peace, nor are its adversaries when they say they want to destroy it. Those looking for the shades of gray of a complex reality should look elsewhere.

To be fair, however, Slater's essay is original and illuminating in its own way. For he has the courage to argue explicitly what most of Israel's critics would rather let linger under the surface: that unless Israel withdraws completely to its pre-1967 borders, Israeli civilians should be allowed to die.

This erroneous, counterproductive, and unethical view has little to do with just war theory, and much in common with those who just want to wage war on Israel.

***

Slater begins with the question, "Did Israel have a moral right to go to war against Hamas in order to end its rocket attacks aimed at the Israeli population?" He says no, as "it is widely argued" that Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza was just a ruse to consolidate its control over the West Bank.

Many things are widely argued, of course, but that does not make them true. In reality, Israel left Gaza because it was not in Israel's interest to continue ruling 1.5 million Palestinians there. The scrupulously balanced European Union welcomed "the historic progress made on Israel's withdrawal from Gaza," believing that "disengagement should be a significant step towards implementing the Quartet Roadmap."

After Hamas won the January 2006 Palestinian elections, the United States and European Union refused to directly fund a government run by a terrorist organization, but funds were transferred to humanitarian groups instead. The Rafah crossing to Egypt was open. Goods moved back and forth to and from Israel-except when Hamas tried to launch a massive attack on the Karni border crossing in April 2006. Gaza hardly enjoyed the economic openness of Singapore, but there was no blockade.

So why were there 946 rocket and mortar strikes on Israel from Gaza in 2006? Why was an imported Katyusha rocket fired deep into Israel in March 2006? Why, indeed, has southern Israel been indiscriminately fired upon for the last eight years?

Slater would answer that, blockade or not, Hamas was responding to constant Israeli "repression," including the destruction of Gazan institutions during the 2002 confrontation with Yasser Arafat. Of course, if Hamas were really concerned about the shortage of schools, hospitals, and administrative offices in Gaza, one might wonder why it did not just renounce violence, acquire international assistance, and build some. In reality, Hamas prefers to exploit rather than fix Gaza's deprivation, as evidenced by its theft of blankets and food parcels from a UN warehouse on February 3.

Israel is so committed to repressing Palestinians, Slater argues, because it wants to crush "all forms of resistance to Israeli control, including nonviolence." This argument is absurd in light of Israel's full-throated embrace of today's Palestinian Authority, which nonviolently resists Israeli control of the West Bank by seeking to negotiate its end as quickly as possible. In fact, the premise of Israel's strategy toward the Palestinians is to strengthen the PA leadership and to demonstrate the practical rewards of moderation.

President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad work cooperatively with Israel, but they also do not hesitate to criticize its occupation and advance hostile initiatives at the UN and in foreign capitals. They are precisely the nonviolent adversaries that Slater claims Israel cannot abide. Yet if Hamas relinquished one of its thousands of rockets every time a senior Israeli bolstered Fayyad's excellent credentials, Gaza would be quiet within a week. (And if Fatah's armed wing foreswore martyrdom and became the Al-Aqsa Sit-In Brigade, Israelis would be nothing short of ecstatic.)

***

Clearly, then, Hamas violence cannot be explained by "repression" that forecloses any alternative. In fact, judging by its pervasive (and underreported) torture and execution of Fatah members in Gaza during the recent conflict, Hamas is not only well aware of the nonviolent Palestinian alternative, but also finds it threatening.

The better explanation for Hamas terrorism is its ideology. Slater attempts to explain why we should not believe Hamas when its charter defines all of Palestine as an Islamic waqf that cannot be relinquished. Or when it welcomes the sixtieth anniversary of the UN Partition Plan by declaring: "Palestine is Arab Islamic land, from the river to the sea, including Jerusalem. There is no room in it for the Jews." Or when Khaled Meshal travels to Tehran after the Gaza conflict and, according to NPR, tells Iranian leaders that Hamas "is preparing to liberate all of Palestine, retake Jersualem, and ensure the return of all Palestinian refugees."

Slater contends that Hamas will cater to the 73 percent of Gazans who support a two-state solution, not the 1 percent who want it to implement Islamic law. Even assuming that the percentages are accurate, this logic is belied by Hamas's effort to implement a sharia penal code, as reported in December 2008 by the London-based Al Hayat. More important, if so many Gazans support a two-state solution, and if Hamas listens to them, why wouldn't it have proudly announced its own support a long time ago?

Unless Hamas is just historically inept at responding to obvious political incentives, this facile picture of a democratic Hamas catering to peace-loving Gazans must be false. Lest anyone be misled, Musa Abu Marzouk, the "deputy chief of the Hamas political bureau," wrapped up the Gaza conflict by inveighing against the "settlers of Sderot" in a blog for The Guardian. For Hamas, all of Israel is a colony to be liquidated.

Thus, negotiations cannot be reasonably expected to yield a deal, unless Israel is expected to negotiate the terms of its own disappearance. And even if an agreement could be reached, it would not be implemented-as Slater acknowledges, to his credit-unless Israel is assured that it is "enforceable." How could Israel trust a ten-year truce with a group that resolves to destroy it once the ten years are up? This is why the Quartet insists that Hamas recognize Israel before negotiations commence. Otherwise, they have no purpose except to reward Hamas's intransigence.

Of course, the fruitlessness of seeking a comprehensive agreement did not prevent Israel from agreeing to a tahdiya, or calm, with Hamas in the months before the Gaza operation. This did not halt the rocket fire. Excusing these attacks as Islamic Jihad retaliation against Israeli actions in the West Bank, as Slater does, is insufficient. Hamas is responsible for what happens in Gaza, and the Palestinian government of the West Bank did not resist the Israeli actions in question.

Israel's operation was, therefore, a legitimate response to attacks by a hostile government. It might have even been the only viable option.

Nor should Israel have been dissuaded by a "predictable" lack of success. While Slater may think that Israel should have foreseen its own failure, his opinion is rendered irrelevant by the fact that Israel sees its operation as successful. The senior military and political officials to whom I spoke when I visited the country in January were uniformly convinced that they had achieved key objectives. They believe that Israel has significantly reduced the attacks, diminished Hamas tactical capabilities, introduced new fissures within the Hamas leadership, strengthened international resolve to address weapons smuggling, and sent a clear signal to Iran that Israel's military capacity remains strong.

***

The justice of Israel's tactics in Gaza still remains an open question. Curiously, Slater does not actually argue why Israel's actions were disproportionate. He simply asserts that it is an "easy" call, repeating his earlier claim that Israel was the aggressor and citing the lopsided death toll. It's not easy for me to respond to an allegation of criminal behavior that doesn't even attempt to make the case.

As Michael Walzer, who literally wrote the book on just and unjust wars, argued in January: "How many civilian casualties would America's leaders think were ‘not disproportionate to' the value of avoiding the rocketing of New York? The answer is too many.... The question ‘Is it disproportionate?' isn't hard at all for people eager to say yes, but asked honestly, the answer will often be no, and that answer may justify more than we ought to justify."

The proportionality principle applies to states, which have special obligations to protect their citizens. How special those obligations are-that is, how much harm to citizens of other states can be accepted in order to meet them-is a subject for complex moral and legal debate. A theory of just warfare that simply says "it's disproportionate because 1,300 deaths are too many" is no theory at all.

Slater then discusses two more obligations derived from the laws of war: to distinguish combatants from civilians, and to immunize noncombatants from being targeted. These laws assume that states will separate their own military installations from civilians. Even then, they do not prohibit attacking military targets when civilians are present. Yet Hamas, like other guerilla movements, deliberately blurs the military-civilian boundary. It stores weapons in mosques, fires from residential buildings, and hides out in tunnels beneath civilian infrastructure. If a Hamas fighter has been allowed into an apartment to shoot out the window, is the apartment's owner a civilian or a combatant?

Regardless, the IDF uses a rigorous process of approval when determining what targets to strike, including review by legal counsel. It leaflets neighborhoods and calls houses before bombing them in order to encourage evacuations. And the most notorious allegation of civilian targeting during the Gaza operation was the claim, spread around the world by screaming headlines, that Israel deliberately shelled a UN school used as a civilian refuge. The UN has since clarified that "the shelling and all of the fatalities took place outside and not inside the school."

Neither Slater nor I can adjudicate whether a particular commander was right to fire on a particular building, given the information and intelligence he had at the time. If evidence suggests impropriety, as U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice has said, Israel can be expected to investigate. Indeed, it has already begun to do so. This is consistent with its commitment to the rule of law, its self-scrutiny after previous wars, and its obligations to the international community. Let's not hold our breath waiting for Hamas to do the same.

***

Ultimately, this theoretical debate over past decisions only goes so far. Slater's argument, however, would have deeply troubling implications if people actually used it to guide their future decisions.

Slater believes that "a nation does not have a ‘right' of self-defense if attacks on its soil are triggered by-or are acts of resistance against-its own ... occupation." Indeed, an occupying power has no right to defend its citizens "even when the form of resistance-terrorist attacks intended to kill civilians-is itself morally wrong." In other words, civilians are fair game.

This is bad news for citizens of the United States, which arguably continues to occupy Iraq by maintaining effective control over much of that country. Playing by the rules that Slater wishes to enforce on Israel, the United States would have no right to strike back if the Mahdi Army or Sunni insurgents bombed a mall in San Francisco.

Thinking about Afghanistan, where polyglot NATO-led forces control whatever areas are under control at all, only expands the list of permissible terrorist targets under Slater's logic. Paris? Sydney? Warsaw? Nor should we overlook the horrific human consequences if this proposed impunity were granted to Greek Cypriot refugees who bombed Istanbul, Georgians who targeted Moscow, or Azeris who fired on Yerevan.

And then there is Iran's patronage of Hamas, which is apparently so irrelevant to Slater's calculus that he does not even mention it. Not only is "resistance" permitted to take the wrong "form," but third-party sovereigns are evidently permitted to supply the firepower.

Talk about "a perfect moral catastrophe." This is no way to advance the cause of peace and justice. One need not support all of Israel's policies, or even its prosecution of this fight in Gaza, to recognize that this notion of just warfare is grossly distorted.

Fortunately, there is a more sensible way to see the issue, which European, Egyptian, American, and peace-seeking Palestinian leaders have embraced alongside Israelis.

The ongoing firing of rockets and mortars at cities in southern Israel is not merely an imperfect means to an acceptable end. It is not "resistance" to be glorified. Hamas's continued efforts to kill the "settlers of Sderot" resist nothing except Israel's existence, and achieve nothing except too many funerals on both sides of the border.

This terrorism should be condemned-and stopped. Sometimes, sadly, peace takes a tough fight.

Doug Lieb is executive assistant to the executive director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), a global Jewish advocacy organization. From 2004 to 2007, he was a senior editor of the Harvard International Review.