I Heard it Downtown

I never had the opportunity to address Middle East issues or foreign affairs in general in the Lantern. There was kind of a major U.S. election going on, and my focus on foreign policy was limited to issues like torture and criticism of George W. Bush (and by extension, John McCain).

So, needless to say, while I’m sad that such a war has broken out, part of me regrets that I won’t be able to write about it next quarter. But there here I go anyway.

The abandonment of the peace process is one of the greatest failures of George W. Bush, a president who already amassed considerable failures in virtually every other category. John Mearsheimer will have you believe that the influence of AIPAC is primarily responsible for this madness. Nonsense. It was Bush’s ideology that left no room for compromise in dealing with terrorism, and it was Bush’s ideology that pushed for Palestinian elections against the advice of, well, everyone involved except Hamas, who won those elections. If not for that, we probably wouldn’t be in a situation that will see the resuming of military occupation in Gaza. But here we are.

I wrote extensively about Hamas in my Terror and Terrorism class. I’m no expert. Not knowing Arabic, I had to rely on translations. Their political philosophy notwithstanding, they’re a strategically Maoist organization. Two steps forward. One step back. And they’re such on a horizontal scale – not merely militarily, but politically as well. They make political progress via misguided elections and give hints that they’re willing to negotiate over peace, then they take an active hardline, going so far as to fire rockets across the Israeli border and killing civilians. They’ve been doing that for a year. Their calculation is political, and to them it’s a win-win. By killing civilians without any discrimination whatsoever, even between Israelis and Palestinians, Hamas thinks Israel will either a) respond with little force, broker a cease-fire and further legitimize Hamas or b) respond respond with much force (which Israel did), and using the resulting devastation as a rallying cry to further the organization’s support.

I hope that was a miscalculation and that Israel’s actions will help dismantle Hamas. It could very well be that Israel is making a mistake, only further angering Palestinians and emboldening Hamas. While I believe what Israel is doing is more than a political calculation on the part of Kadima, the domestic political situation in Israel cannot be dismissed so easily. So we’ll see if this will turn out better in the long-term than the war against Hezbollah. I certainly hope it will.

But I don’t really want to address that issue. I only want to address this in terms of just war and proportionality. War sucks. Over 400 Palestinians are dead. 2200 are injured. Hamas doesn’t care, obviously. As Jeffrey Goldberg writes, what makes Hamas such a formidable enemy is their lack of concern for the lives of Palestinians. What’s Israel to do when facing an enemy who believes that Palestinian lives lost go to Paradise and that Jewish lives lost are lives better off lost? Morally, a Palestinian life lost means less to Hamas than it does for Israel – except insofar as Hamas’ political legitimacy depends on dead Palestinians.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a hawk, but I have to dissent from a large portion of the American left in its assessment of Israel’s actions on a philosophical level. Maybe strategic criticisms are salient, but the moral criticisms are strangely anti-historical. The primary argument of the doves is that Israel’s retaliation is disproportional because more lives were lost. But this ignores the interconnectedness Israel’s capacity to kill and its higher moral standing in this war. In history, sovereign countries have taken advantage – if only a tiny advantage – of their capacity to kill in order to defend themselves from their enemies. Given the power imbalance between these two foes, and the obvious conclusion that Israel has been victimized by terrorism, it is morally indefensible to suggest that Israel does not have the right to set the standard of escalation in this war. If Hamas gets to dictate how many lives are too many – if the number of lives Hamas takes determine what is and what is not proportional – then Israel is in a war it cannot win. That is not fair. It is an insult to its sovereignty. If Israel cannot take advantage of the power imbalance, then no sovereign country has the right to defend itself.

Israel’s stomach to kill, compared to Hamas, has nausea. That’s because most Israelis – like all sane people- want to pursue a foreign policy not based around violence. If organizations like Hamas did not exist, foreign policy would never require violence. But the world is not a pleasing place. I hope Israel is doing what they’re doing because an opportunity has emerged to strike a serious blow against this terrible organization. I hope this is not a repeat of the war in Lebanon, which saw Hezbollah garner considerable political legitimacy out of military devastation. I really hope this ends well for both the Israelis and the Palestinians, for Hamas could care less about the latter. It primarily wants to make the former suffer, and that is why it cannot be allowed to have political power.

On the larger issue of the peace process, until Hamas is uninvolved and until the settlements in the West Bank are abandoned, there’s not really much hope. Hopefully having a grown-up as president will make a difference.