Just 3 items this evening. The 2nd one nearly brought tears to my eyes. I won’t elaborate. Just enjoy it. The first item is less pleasant. It’s author argues that Israel intentionally targests civilians, either their bodies or their properties. Item 4 is a link to a brief video of Palestinians celebrating Friday’s rites in the Holy Land. All of these items have been forwarded to me by others. I apologize for duplicates.
All the best,
Dorothy
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1. [Thanks to Ruth H for forwarding, Dorothy]
Independent commentary from Israel & the Palestinian Friday, April 22 2011
Israeli policy (unlike Hamas or Hezbollah) is not intended to maximize civilian casualties. Yet it does intentionally target civilians: it is intended to produce maximal civilian distress, while avoiding mass civilian casualties.
In discussions about the Israeli-Arab conflict, one of the perennial issues is the targeting of non-combatants. The reactions to the brutal murders in the settlement of Itamar, and the collective punishment of the nearby Palestinian village Awarta (where the alleged killers live) have exemplified the concern many feel about the lack of distinction between those involved in hostilities and uninvolved civilians.
Even more attention has been given to the curious Washington Post article by Judge Richard Goldstone, who headed a UN fact-finding mission to investigate allegations of war crimes during the Gaza war of 2009. One of the key statements in this op-ed was (my emphasis):
While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.
I believe Goldstone’s article (and to some extent, his committee’s report) miss a critical nuance. Israeli policy (unlike Hamas or Hezbollah) is not intended to maximize civilian casualties. Yet it does intentionally target civilians: it is intended to produce maximal civilian distress, while avoiding mass civilian casualties.
One of the clearest articulations of this policy, cited in the Goldstone report, was made by Major General Gadi Eizenkot, in 2008, while discussing the lessons learned from the 2006 Lebanon war. According to him (Heb), trying to hit rocket launchers is “complete nonsense”, because “when there are thousands of launchers on the other side, it is impossible to hunt them down.” Israel, instead, should focus on deterrence:
Every village from which they fire from Israel, we will deploy disproportional force, and cause massive damage and destruction. As far as we are concerned, these are military bases.
Eizenkot emphasized that “this is not a recommendation, this is the plan and it has been approved”.
The concept which underlies this plan is clear. Hitting military targets is difficult, and destroying the enemy’s entire armed forces would require immense resources. Non-combatants, on the other hand, are labeled “soft” targets for a reason. By inflicting massive damage on the civilian population, one creates public political pressure, within the other side, to end hostilities under favorable conditions.
This has been Israel’s explicit policy in Lebanon for decades now. The Israeli Air Force official website, describing (Heb) an IDF operation in Lebanon in 1993, notes that many Lebanese civilians were forced to leave their homes, and adds that “the refugee convoys were supposed to apply pressure on the Lebanese government to act against the terrorist organizations.” A similar operation in 1996 is described (Heb) in even more explicit terms: “a massive bombardment of the Shiite villages in South Lebanon, in order to induce flight of civilians to the north, towards Beirut, thereby applying pressure on the government of Syria and Lebanon to restrain Hezbollah’s activities.”
The air force commander at the time is quoted explaining that the concept behind the operation was to create better conditions for Israeli political leadership, when it comes to negotiations with the Lebanese and the Syrians. “The way to implement this concept was to attack infrastructures, in order to create increasing economic damage, which will start affecting the residents and the Lebanese government.” The West Bank, as well as Gaza itself, have been targets of similar policies.
Certainly, Israel targets combatants and their armaments quite extensively. Much of the harm to civilians occurs as “collateral damage” during such attacks. This can be almost as reprehensible as targeting civilians intentionally, when callous indifference becomes extensive and systematic (as when the IDF’s chief ethicist pens a tome explaining why Israeli soldiers’ lives are more important than those of Palestinian civilians). Endemic cover-ups, unaccountability, and non-existent or inadequate investigations create an atmosphere of impunity which encourages attacks on non-combatants, even if there is no explicit policy directive to do so.
This can cause quite a lot of civilian casualties, but it does not mean that causing such casualties is an Israeli objective. Although efforts to avoid outcomes of this sort are almost always insufficient, they are not completely for show. To some extent, they are even motivated by genuine moral concern. Ultimately, however, they reflect strategic considerations.
Israeli policy makers believe that mass civilian casualties will create international pressure on Israel to end its military operations before they achieve their goal. This has been a major concern in almost every operation conducted in the Palestinian territories or in Lebanon over the past few decades. That is why, as a rule, the IDF prefers to avoid a large amount of non-combatant deaths.
On the other hand, Israeli policy is often explicitly intended to harm civilians, by causing them economic distress, displacement, disruption of critical service, shortage of basic goods, etc. This kind of effect is less likely to induce international pressure, yet Israeli decision makers believe it can produce public pressure on the enemy’s leadership, causing it to make concessions that are in line with Israel’s interests. Although many civilians die as a result of these actions, that is not their intent, and they are often carried out in a manner designed to actually reduce casualties, while maximizing non-lethal civilian suffering.
Are these policies better than intentionally causing civilian casualties? Morally, I think the distinction is shaky. Whether caused by deep indifference or during the course of trying to produce “mere” civilians suffering, it seems to me that the hurting of civilians, both lethal and non-lethal, is reprehensible and wrong. Israeli hypocrisy on this issue is, of course, also a very poor ethical defense.
Politically, however, understanding the difference is quite significant. First, inaccurate allegations make it easier for Israeli hasbara to paint all criticism as lies (as the Goldstone “retraction” debacle makes clear). Second, recognizing this distinction gives Israel an incentive to continue its current policy. Although it is quite bad, a policy that seeks to maximize civilian casualties would be much, much worse. The Israeli government is avoiding this kind of policy because it believes it will pay an internal and international price. I would like to think that equal condemnation of all policies that target civilians would make Israel cease such practices altogether. However, it is just as likely to tilt it in the opposite direction.
Current Israeli policy on targeting civilians should be exposed, criticized and unequivocally condemned. But ignoring the nuances is counter-productive, even dangerous.
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2. [Thanks to Ruth H for forwarding this strong and so important letter. Dorothy]
In a letter titled, “Ruh Jedida: A New Spirit for 2011,” young Jewish descendants of the Arab and Islamic world living in Israel write to their peers in the Middle East and North Africa
We, as the descendents of the Jewish communities of the Arab and Muslim world, the Middle East and the Maghreb, and as the second and third generation of Mizrahi Jews in Israel, are watching with great excitement and curiosity the major role that the men and women of our generation are playing so courageously in the demonstrations for freedom and change across the Arab world. We identify with you and are extremely hopeful for the future of the revolutions that have already succeeded in Tunisia and Egypt. We are equally pained and worried at the great loss of life in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, and many other places in the region.
Our generation’s protest against repression and oppressive and abusive regimes, and its call for change, freedom, and the establishment of democratic governments that foster citizen participation in the political process, marks a dramatic moment in the history of the Middle East and North Africa, a region which has for generations been torn between various forces, internal and external, and whose leaders have often trampled the political, economic, and cultural rights of its citizens.
We are Israelis, the children and grandchildren of Jews who lived in the Middle East and North Africa for hundreds and thousands of years. Our forefathers and mothers contributed to the development of this region’s culture, and were part and parcel of it. Thus the culture of the Islamic world and the multigenerational connection and identification with this region is an inseparable part of our own identity.
We are a part of the religious, cultural, and linguistic history of the Middle East and North Africa, although it seems that we are the forgotten children of its history: First in Israel, which imagines itself and its culture to be somewhere between continental Europe and North America. Then in the Arab world, which often accepts the dichotomy of Jews and Arabs and the imagined view of all Jews as Europeans, and has preferred to repress the history of the Arab-Jews as a minor or even nonexistent chapter in its history; and finally within the Mizrahi communities themselves, who in the wake of Western colonialism, Jewish nationalism and Arab nationalism, became ashamed of their past in the Arab world.
Consequently we often tried to blend into the mainstream of society while erasing or minimizing our own past. The mutual influences and relationships between Jewish and Arab cultures were subjected to forceful attempts at erasure in recent generations, but evidence of them can still be found in many spheres of our lives, including music, prayer, language, and literature.
We wish to express our identification with and hopes for this stage of generational transition in the history of the Middle East and North Africa, and we hope that it will open the gates to freedom and justice and a fair distribution of the region’s resources.
We turn to you, our generational peers in the Arab and Muslim world, striving for an honest dialog which will include us in the history and culture of the region. We looked enviously at the pictures from Tunisia and from Al-Tahrir square, admiring your ability to bring forth and organize a nonviolent civil resistance that has brought hundreds of thousands of people out into the streets and the squares, and finally forced your rulers to step down.
We, too, live in a regime that in reality—despite its pretensions to being “enlightened” and “democratic”—does not represent large sections of its actual population in the Occupied Territories and inside of the Green Line border(s). This regime tramples the economic and social rights of most of its citizens, is in an ongoing process of minimizing democratic liberties, and constructs racist barriers against Arab-Jews, the Arab people, and Arabic culture. Unlike the citizens of Tunisia and Egypt, we are still a long way from the capacity to build the kind of solidarity between various groups that we see in these countries, a solidarity movement that would allow us to unite and march together–all who reside here–into the public squares, to demand a civil regime that is culturally, socially, and economically just and inclusive.
We believe that, as Mizrahi Jews in Israel, our struggle for economic, social, and cultural rights rests on the understanding that political change cannot depend on the Western powers who have exploited our region and its residents for many generations. True change can only come from an intra-regional and inter-religious dialog that is in connection with the different struggles and movements currently active in the Arab world. Specifically, we must be in dialog and solidarity with struggles of the Palestinians citizens of Israel who are fighting for equal political and economic rights and for the termination of racist laws, and the struggle of the Palestinian people living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and in Gaza in their demand to end the occupation and to gain Palestinian national independence.
In our previous letter written following Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009, we called for the rise of the democratic Middle Eastern identity and for our inclusion in such an identity. We now express the hope that our generation – throughout the Arab, Muslim, and Jewish world – will be a generation of renewed bridges that will leap over the walls and hostility created by previous generations and will renew the deep human dialog without which we cannot understand ourselves: between Jews, Sunnis, Shias, and Christians, between Kurds, Berbers, Turks, and Persians, between Mizrahis and Ashkenazis, and between Palestinians and Israelis. We draw on our shared past in order to look forward hopefully towards a shared future.
We have faith in intra-regional dialog—whose purpose is to repair and rehabilitate what was destroyed in recent generations—as a catalyst towards renewing the Andalusian model of Muslim-Jewish-Christian partnership, God willing, Insha’Allah, and as a pathway to a cultural and historical golden era for our countries. This golden era cannot come to pass without equal, democratic citizenship, equal distribution of resources, opportunities, and education, equality between women and men, and the acceptance of all people regardless of faith, race, status, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnic affiliation. All of these rights play equal parts in constructing the new society to which we aspire. We are committed to achieving these goals within a process of dialog between all of the people of Middle East and North Africa, as well as a dialog we will undertake with different Jewish communities in Israel and around the world.
3. Easter in the Holy Land. To all Palestinians, I wish you a traditional Jewish wish on the Passover: ‘For all who wish it, next year in Jerusalem’ Easter, Xmas, and other days holy or not, with no need for passes and permissions.
