Israel — VOICES for REASON

If you’ll be in the Boston area in early July, consider attending the Ayn Rand Institute’s Objectivist summer conference. Voices for Reason writers Tom Bowden, Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo will all be speaking on topics of interest for pro-reason, pro-individual rights advocates. Read the rest of this entry »

In addition to Keith Lockitch’s Global Warming Panel at UCLA on Monday night (see his post earlier today), there’s another event coming up that Voices for Reason readers might be interested in.

On Wednesday April 15, Elan Journo will be speaking at American University (School of International Service building, room 203, 8:30 pm). The title of his talk is “What’s at Stake in the Arab-Israeli Conflict?” With President Obama presently making overtures to an Iranian regime that continues to pursue nuclear technology and openly calls for the destruction of Israel, this question is as relevant as it’s ever been before.

For a complete list of talks (all open to the public), visit ARI’s events page for more information.

The BBC and Sky News have come under fire for refusing to air a two-minute appeal for donations on behalf of Palestinians in Gaza. The group of British humanitarian organizations behind the appeal is furious. Along with a number of British politicians and public figures, like the archbishop of Canterbury, they have railed against the two television networks. What’s their beef against the broadcasters?

The broadcasters explained that they did not want to compromise their journalistic impartiality, since airing a solicitation for charity to Palestinians might be seen as endorsing one side in the recent war. Sky is a private satellite broadcaster, and so it should be free to decide what it airs; the BBC is in a more complicated situation, because it is publicly funded and required to serve the “public interest,” but its position is not unreasonable. (For the BBC, like other “public” institutions, there’s ultimately no objective way to determine what is in the “public interest” nor what content the network should air. Ayn Rand’s point re the “public interest” is particularly relevant here.)

But the British charity groups behind the appeal believe that there’s a more important issue at play, and that the broadcasters must put aside their own decision regarding what they’re willing to put on the air. The two networks are being urged to sacrifice that–in the name of what?

Mr. ADRIAN LOVETT (Director of Campaigns and Communications, Save the Children): Whatever the – what we acknowledge are deeply complicated issues around this crisis, at the heart of it are 400,000 people today without running water, 50,000 people who are homeless today, raw sewage running down the streets, and children who tell us on the ground in Gaza that they are afraid, that they’re traumatized….[Read the NPR transcript.]

Richard Burden, a Labour member of Parliament, has been leading the charge against the BBC and Sky:  ”This is not about taking sides in the conflict. It is about providing urgent help to people in desperate need.”

Need, on this moral outlook, is paramount–regardless of one’s own convictions and values, and regardless of the actions and moral character of the people deemed needy. Even though the Palestinian people overwhelmingly embraced the anti-Western, jihadist group Hamas for its leadership–that doesn’t matter. Even though so many of the people in Gaza are complicit in the attacks on Israel–that doesn’t matter. Even though some, if not all, the charitable funds sent to Gaza will end up with Hamas–no, all of that must be put aside, because there is a duty to serve others. Any evidence that the needy are in fact hostile and undeserving is papered over and evaded (hence the common fiction that Hamas and the Palestinian people are utterly distinct and separate groups, with Hamas somehow rising to power against the wishes of the people). 

Given this moral ideal of service to the needy, is there anything the Palestinians might say or do that would disqualify them from receiving Western largesse? Seemingly not.

Memo 

To: Secretary of State Clinton 

Just a quick note regarding the vacant position in your advisory team. I gather that you have been beleaguered by “a coterie of emissaries who have made the Arab-Israeli conflict their specialty” for decades. But apparently you’re “eager to recruit a fresh face to handle the Arab-Israeli issue, perhaps reaching beyond the circle of Middle East stalwarts.” With that in mind, I wanted to offer a friendly suggestion for what you should consider in selecting an advisor–and, later, framing U.S. policy. 

Obviously no one wants yes-men, but you also should reject candidates who trot out the shop-worn view of the conflict: the idea that it can be settled by placating Palestinian grievances and pressuring both sides to make concessions. No, the problem is not that this approach was tried, and that it failed. Quite the reverse. It was tried–in the so-called peace process and later in different form under G.W. Bush–and it worked . . . . to embolden Palestinian aggression, particularly by Islamic totalitarian groups like Hamas. 

The problem was not a lack of imagination or creative tinkering with the basic land-for-peace formula. The problem was a failure to understand the conflict and particularly the character and motivation of the Palestinian cause. George W. Bush went further than previous administrations in promising to fulfill the supposed Palestinian aspiration for statehood–and the results have been fiercer Palestinian aggression (see also the ongoing rocket fire from Gaza).

Madam Secretary, what you need is not merely fresh faces, but a top-to-bottom re-thinking of the conflict–and a radical break with past U.S. policy. 

–Elan Journo

Expressing the views of many people, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon implored Israel to “ensure the protection of civilians and that humanitarian assistance is able to reach those in need” in Gaza. The Bush administration for its part has similarly urged that Israel “be mindful of the potential consequences to civilians.”

This widely shared concern for civilian casualties has been weirdly one-sided. After all, the point of Israel’s incursion is to stop the barrages of rockets fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza onto Israeli population centers. In just the last two years more than 2,500 rockets whistled across from Gaza into nearby towns in southern Israel, yet few people expressed a correspondingly intense concern for the Israeli civilians imperiled by the Palestinian rockets.

I see two questions here. (1) why is there an outcry about Palestinian casualties, but nothing like the same response to the long-running attacks on Israeli civilians? The basic reason, I think, has to do with the common mis-perception of Palestinians. In their own propaganda and that of their surrogates, Palestinians are portrayed as the perennial victims. They are the supposed “little guy”–getting beaten up by a stronger bully. The facts, however, belie that notion (note for instance the money and weapons and ammunition, much of it from Iran, that has flowed into Gaza–enough for all those rocket attacks and, so far, two weeks of fighting in the face of Israeli forces). 

(2) The second issue: why do so many in the West condemn Israeli retaliation as “disproportionate” and implore Jerusalem to go out of its way to avoid civilian casualties (and here too, notice that the Palestinians are held to a different standard). The answer lies with an influential view of morality in war, called Just War Theory, that enjoins going out of one’s way to show compassion to civilians. This is also the source for the idea that a “disproportionate” use of force is wrong. But is the Just-War doctrine right? The situation in Gaza raises this broader moral question: if Israel (or another nation) launches a retaliatory military campaign, what’s the proper attitude to take regarding civilians residing in the hostile regime? 

In an article from a few years ago, critiquing Just War doctrine, Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein convincingly present a strikingly unconventional view on that issue: They argue, in part, that the prevailing injunction to avoid civilian casualties is improper and destructive of a free nation’s efforts to defend itself. There is a lot more to their viewpoint, which has broad application to today. Read the whole thing.

Post Script: Notice that the Israeli military long ago internalized these supposedly moral constraints. Take, for instance, this story about how the Israelis drop leaflets warning (hostile) Palestinians of upcoming bombing raids, so that they may flee. It is in no small part due to this “just war” prosecution of the wars that Israel has weakened itself. But that’s a topic for another post.