The Terrible Logic of the Moment

Let’s just stipulate that throughout the long, tortured history of Israeli-Palestinian relations, beginning with the partition mandated by the UN 75 years ago, there’s been plenty of blame to go around. Let’s also agree, just to put the issue aside, that recent Israeli policy with respect to the West Bank, especially during the tenure of Benjamin Netanyahu, has been entirely wrong-headed, and utterly antithetical to the spirit of the Oslo Accords that cost Yitzhak Rabin his life in 1995, amounting to an unlawful and even immoral annexation in pursuit of a vision of Greater Israel that leaves no room for a two state solution. Finally, let’s acknowledge that for the great mass of ordinary Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, life has long been miserable and all but intolerable, characterized mainly by suffering and injustice. None of that should obscure how little the Arab world in general, and the Palestinians themselves, have done to improve the situation, or how limited Israel’s options have been since Hamas took over the government of Gaza, nor should we overlook the extent to which the largely self-inflicted disaster in Gaza following the end of Israeli occupation has driven Israeli policy towards the West Bank. Still. Plenty of blame to go around.

We can argue about all of that, and God knows this is a mess that provides vast scope for reasonable disagreement, but we are where we are, and can’t undo the various tragedies that put us here. Gaza is governed – not just inhabited, but governed – by an organization dedicated solely to the eradication of Israel and the extermination of the Jewish people. Nobody in Hamas wants a two state solution. Nobody in Hamas will accept any bargain, however objectively reasonable, that permits the Jewish state to exist. Since gaining power they’ve done nothing but use Gaza as a launching pad for guerrilla warfare and rocket strikes, and last Saturday they committed atrocities that can never be condoned or rationalized. These evil, inhuman obscenities demand a decisive response, whatever the plight of ordinary Palestinians, despite the justice of their cause, and regardless, sadly, of the pitiable reality that most of them have nothing to do with Hamas and wish they were governed by somebody else. It was an abomination. Crimes against humanity were committed in stunning abundance. More Jews, innocents all, were murdered in one day than at any time since the Holocaust. The attackers were so merciless that they didn’t even spare babies in their cribs. No nation could turn the other cheek in the teeth of such an assault, or permit the ongoing existence of the status quo that made it possible. However we feel about how we arrived at this hideous place, we’re here now, and something has to be done. Israel must – must – put a permanent stop to this. Now, pretend that you’re the Prime Minister of Israel. What do you do?

I don’t know what’s right, what hypothetically moral and enlightened response best meets the absolute imperative of self defence, or even which available option would be least counterproductive over the long term. Do you?

Let me answer for you. No, you don’t.

You don’t, because there is no good option left for Israeli policymakers. As so often in the course of international relations involving ruthless dictatorships, all the plausible choices are awful (see: Iran, and North Korea). How do you fight an implacable, genocidal enemy that embeds itself within a civilian population, yet do no harm to the innocent? Under the circumstances, what sort of effective military response even permits the minimization, let alone the complete avoidance, of civilian deaths? What can be done, now, to keep the blameless out of the crossfire? How to avoid a bloody and terrible land battle that might well, in the nature of urban warfare, involve the deaths of thousands, even tens of thousands, on both sides, far too many of them non-combatants? You have to do something, so what’s that going to be?

I’m sitting here, watching the inevitable air strikes that form part of any “shaping operation” in anticipation of a land war, and I’m just as appalled as you are. The Israelis are dropping leaflets, telling the population to evacuate southward to avoid the coming invasion, but really, where can they go, by the million, to get away in time? As I write this, they’ve been given 24 hours, beginning I don’t know how many hours ago, to move themselves out. Of course they won’t all be able to, over rubble-strewn roads, with no fuel for their vehicles, and no way to avoid the deadly blasts and shrapnel from the relentless air strikes, should they expose themselves in the open to attempt the migration. I just saw video of terrified people, women and children, trying to flee with what little they can carry, running on foot, or, somehow even more pathetically, travelling in small carts being pulled along by overburdened little donkeys. It made me sick at heart. Knowing that these people are just as victimized by Hamas as the 1200 Israelis who were murdered last Saturday makes their plight all the more awful to comprehend, as does the awareness that fully half of Gaza’s population is composed of children, aged 18 or younger, kids who’ve never known anything but the humiliation and privation of a life hemmed into what’s been aptly described as an “open air prison”. What seems certain to happen next won’t do much to quell their rage and desperation, as they reach adulthood over the next few years, especially if Israel then feels it necessary to once again occupy their territory.

The scenes I saw this evening, all those people running for their lives, were enough to horrify anyone of good conscience, yet we’re left with a difficult question: if warning a population to get out of the way on an impossibly abbreviated schedule is a war crime, and contrary to international law, what’s the better alternative? Forgoing the airstrikes and the subsequent invasion isn’t on the table, not now. That leaves delay. Should Israel be expected to hold off, allowing more time for the evacuation, but also more time for the hardened fighters of Hamas to dig in, fortify their positions, prepare ambushes, lay mines, and set booby-traps, making the already arduous, bloody task of dealing with them that much more difficult? Many are saying so, but under these circumstances, both military and political, could any nation be expected, reasonably, to ignore tactical common sense, and sacrifice the lives of its own soldiers in pursuit of even the most obviously humanitarian objective? Do we still think so when the lives of the hostages taken by Hamas become more tenuous with every hour of their captivity? Would you ask them to accept that nothing can be done to save those people anyway? Would you accept that?

If the Israelis do pause their invasion on humanitarian grounds, they deserve enormous credit.

One other terrible thing: if the people try to flee, Hamas will stop as many of them as possible. They won’t give up their human shields.

Consider too that an Israeli, listening to pleas for greater restraint, might find that rich coming from us. It bears remembering that what we did to civilian populations during World War II was a thousand times more cruel, at least in scale, than anything Israel is apt to do. The avoidance of civilian casualties wasn’t always all that scrupulous in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, either, and the Americans’ drone campaign, in which anti-tank missiles were used against human targets, killed over 1,400 innocent bystanders (and that’s the Pentagon’s number). This is not empty what-aboutism. It’s a reminder that nations facing existential threats from murderous and irredeemably savage adversaries will feel an almost irresistible pressure to do whatever seems necessary to save themselves, however ugly the consequences. Perhaps Israel should resist this pressure, as perhaps we should have, too, when it was our turn. It nevertheless feels hypocritical to demand they do so. Not wrong, perhaps, but hypocritical. It’s difficult to condemn others for their failure to be better than you were, or likely would be again, if push came to shove.

Looming over all of this, of course, are the most troubling questions of all. Will any Israeli action simply set the stage for another generation of strife? Whatever the success of the coming invasion (and success is by no means guaranteed), what then? What’s the end game? How does this ever get any better?

I don’t know. Oh, I can come up with fanciful scenarios, such as an Israeli withdrawal following the end of operations against Hamas, facilitating the stabilization of the region by a pan-Arab peacekeeping force under the auspices of the UN, perhaps bolstered by Western forces acceptable to the Palestinians (Canadians? Dutch?), after which the international community could fund the reconstruction of Gaza and oversee the eventual free and fair election of a peaceful government. That would be nice. It would require unprecedented cooperation between nations with disparate interests, including Arab states which have thus far found it more useful to perpetuate the festering mess in the region, not to mention an extraordinary amount of the sort of good luck and goodwill that’s usually absent in such efforts at nation-building, but yes, it sure would be nice.

Outside of fantasyland, I don’t have any bright ideas. Maybe somebody does. I doubt it.

Meanwhile, pray that this war doesn’t expand and spiral out of control. Hezbollah remains poised in the North to rain down the destruction of an Iranian-supplied arsenal of about 150,000 rockets, according to our best intelligence estimates, an onslaught that even Iron Dome won’t be able to blunt. Iran is out there, stirring the pot. Syria, through which flows the Iranian supplies for Hezbollah, could easily get pulled in (Israeli air strikes within Syria are already occurring). There’s a terrible sort of logic that often attends these geopolitical struggles, the actions and escalatory reactions, with all the associated miscalculations and missed opportunities, all coming in predictable sequence as if pre-ordained. The most nightmarish scenario isn’t inevitable, not yet, but this can still get a lot worse.