The Mess in Israel
Jan. 7th, 2009 01:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumI have some thoughts about Gaza, and the mess going on there for the past several years. Lots of people are using words like terrorism to describe the rocket attacks on Israel. Many of the people who so characterise them also say Israel is justified in “disproportionate response; which is in contravention of the laws of war, common sense, human decency and the biblical principal of equal justice (eye for an eye, and all that).
What lost in all this is the merits of the situation. Israel has been blockading Gaza. Blockade is an act of war. That’s why the Cuban Missile Crisis was as serious as it was. It wasn’t that Cuba was being used as a staging ground for threats against the US, but that by blockading Cuba we were committing an act of “hot” war, and Cuba’s ally, the Soviet Union, could have used that as casus belli for a declaration of war against us.
Israel, herself, believes blockade is a cause for just war:
Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser blockaded the Straits of Tiran on May 21st and 22nd to all shipping from and to Eilat; the area was open to Israeli ships under UN supervision since 1957, and Israel repeatedly stated that such a blockade will be considered as casus belli (justification for acts of war).
Israel included the right to make an actual attack on Egypt, in retaliation for the blockading of Eilat. In the early morning of June 5th 1967, the war broke out. Israel made a preemptive strike on the Egyptian Air Force.
Eilat isn’t all of Israel. There were open ports. The residents there could leave. they were free to travel outside of Israel. Egypt wasn’t blocking access to food, medicine, and freedom. Nonetheless Israel was of the opinion it was grounds for a Just War (the principle of jus ad bellum) it got international support for the war.
Which brings us to the present allegation of the rocket attacks being reason for the level of response Israel is making now. With jus ad bellum is twinned the idea of jus in bello, which is; to sum up, the idea of fair play.
Proportionality in war is part of the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Israel isn’t being proportional. I’ve hunkered down when people were lobbing things my way, trying to kill me, and the people I was with, it wasn’t like this:
A tower of white smoke rose from the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun after another Israeli bombardment Monday morning, and a half-dozen Israelis, perched on a dusty hilltop, gazed at the scene like armchair military strategists.
Avi Pilchick took a long swig of Pepsi and propped a foot on the plastic patio chair he'd carried up the hillside to watch the fighting. "They are doing good," Pilchick, 20, said of Israeli forces battling Palestinian militants in Gaza, "but they can do more."
Pilchick, and his compadres were on that hillside in Sderot on a sightseeing trip. They drove down from Jerusalem to watch the fireworks.
Why do they feel so comfortable heading down to treat it as a spectator event? Because in all of 2008, with hundred of rockets and mortars fired into Israel, a grand total of 81 people have been wounded, and 5 killed.
For the role of Irony in Everyday Life I particularly like this snippet: A cease fire was declared on 19 Jun. It was almost broken with a rocket attack on Israel, by an Israeli, who'd built a homade rocket with which he was trying to hit the Palestinian West Bank.
The first actual break occured on 24 June, when Isreal conducted an operation in Nablus.
On the 26th of June Hamas warned Israel that maintaining the blockade of the West Bank would cause a formal ending to the cease-fire.
All in all, Israel has been acting ham-handedly. They haven’t adhered to reasonable responses. They treat the Palestinians like red-headed stepchildren, and then wonder why the bad faith actions they take are greeted with something less than cheer and joy by those whom they are harming.
Are the Palestinians lily-white in this? No. But they are acting with far more restraint than the Israelis. The Palestinians have a case for their attacks. The Israelis don’t have justification for the level of response they’ve made.
Add the reports I saw on Monday, where Israel was spending it’s diplomatic efforts to keep any ceasefire from happening, so they could initiate the invasion they are undertaking now, and what reserves of trust and faith I have that the gov’t wants a peace, are getting harder to justify.
What lost in all this is the merits of the situation. Israel has been blockading Gaza. Blockade is an act of war. That’s why the Cuban Missile Crisis was as serious as it was. It wasn’t that Cuba was being used as a staging ground for threats against the US, but that by blockading Cuba we were committing an act of “hot” war, and Cuba’s ally, the Soviet Union, could have used that as casus belli for a declaration of war against us.
Israel, herself, believes blockade is a cause for just war:
Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser blockaded the Straits of Tiran on May 21st and 22nd to all shipping from and to Eilat; the area was open to Israeli ships under UN supervision since 1957, and Israel repeatedly stated that such a blockade will be considered as casus belli (justification for acts of war).
Israel included the right to make an actual attack on Egypt, in retaliation for the blockading of Eilat. In the early morning of June 5th 1967, the war broke out. Israel made a preemptive strike on the Egyptian Air Force.
Eilat isn’t all of Israel. There were open ports. The residents there could leave. they were free to travel outside of Israel. Egypt wasn’t blocking access to food, medicine, and freedom. Nonetheless Israel was of the opinion it was grounds for a Just War (the principle of jus ad bellum) it got international support for the war.
Which brings us to the present allegation of the rocket attacks being reason for the level of response Israel is making now. With jus ad bellum is twinned the idea of jus in bello, which is; to sum up, the idea of fair play.
Proportionality in war is part of the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Israel isn’t being proportional. I’ve hunkered down when people were lobbing things my way, trying to kill me, and the people I was with, it wasn’t like this:
A tower of white smoke rose from the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun after another Israeli bombardment Monday morning, and a half-dozen Israelis, perched on a dusty hilltop, gazed at the scene like armchair military strategists.
Avi Pilchick took a long swig of Pepsi and propped a foot on the plastic patio chair he'd carried up the hillside to watch the fighting. "They are doing good," Pilchick, 20, said of Israeli forces battling Palestinian militants in Gaza, "but they can do more."
Pilchick, and his compadres were on that hillside in Sderot on a sightseeing trip. They drove down from Jerusalem to watch the fireworks.
Why do they feel so comfortable heading down to treat it as a spectator event? Because in all of 2008, with hundred of rockets and mortars fired into Israel, a grand total of 81 people have been wounded, and 5 killed.
For the role of Irony in Everyday Life I particularly like this snippet: A cease fire was declared on 19 Jun. It was almost broken with a rocket attack on Israel, by an Israeli, who'd built a homade rocket with which he was trying to hit the Palestinian West Bank.
The first actual break occured on 24 June, when Isreal conducted an operation in Nablus.
On the 26th of June Hamas warned Israel that maintaining the blockade of the West Bank would cause a formal ending to the cease-fire.
All in all, Israel has been acting ham-handedly. They haven’t adhered to reasonable responses. They treat the Palestinians like red-headed stepchildren, and then wonder why the bad faith actions they take are greeted with something less than cheer and joy by those whom they are harming.
Are the Palestinians lily-white in this? No. But they are acting with far more restraint than the Israelis. The Palestinians have a case for their attacks. The Israelis don’t have justification for the level of response they’ve made.
Add the reports I saw on Monday, where Israel was spending it’s diplomatic efforts to keep any ceasefire from happening, so they could initiate the invasion they are undertaking now, and what reserves of trust and faith I have that the gov’t wants a peace, are getting harder to justify.
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-08 05:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-08 05:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-08 05:19 am (UTC)I still see, in my mind's eye, the full moon setting over the Banana Beach, cafe, a "hafuch gadol bemug" with random cutlery inside it; Dizengoff, littered with the Margosa berries, all of two lanes wide; Shuk Hacarmel, with it improbably poets hawking veg & cheap plastic toys; Halper's, on Allenby, which has the kind of time warp that used book places do; Jaffa, evelasting Jaffa, visible through the filth as the gem that it is...
...I can never go back, not even for a visit. I've learned too much and would see too many ghosts, wherever I went. But oh, I *do* love that city.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-08 05:40 am (UTC)Although I have not cut off my relationship with Israel, I did meet people in their 20s who seem to be on the road you have traveled. They will probably end up in the States never to return. I do not share that experience, although I can empathize. But right now I can't give up on the Middle East.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-08 05:51 am (UTC)Maxim Ghilan, whom I met while he was still a political exile in Paris, always said that you can take the man out of the Middle East, but you can't take the Middle East out of the man. I hope it works differently for women.
The real subject for concern - and despair - is that I see no road out of the bloodletting. Some days I frantically preserve pieces of both cultures. Some days I shake my head until my hair curls and try and push the thoughts away. It looks all too much like a genocide in the making, a genocide that will leave me either friendless or familyless or both, for how can I keep within my life people who commit genocide?
(And the best Hummus is at Linda's, in the Old City of Jerusalem: go in through the Nablus Gate, down the Via Dolorosa, and on the right - there it is, the Da Vincis of Hummus. And libna, but that's easier to get right.)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-08 05:59 am (UTC)I also do not see an end to the bloodletting. I've definitely become more cynical over the years, but I don't see it as a genocide. I think that those Israelis who are truly interested in genocide are a minority, although they might be growing, but I don't think they will become the majority.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-08 06:57 am (UTC)The people I've spoken with in Israel don't seem to see any place that is ok for the Palestinians to be. They sort of want them to be gone, without specifying where to and how (except for the ones who specify busloads of forced emigrants).
It doesn't seem realistic.