Monday, April 30, 2018
Elder of Ziyon
The price even a non-intentional
embrace of anti-Israel propaganda places on the believer was brought
home to me during a recent conversation with a good friend, whose
opinion I respect on all matters, who was aghast at the bloodletting
at the Gaza border over the last month.
Interestingly, she was willing to
accept that the thousands of rockets shot from Gaza into Israel over
the last decade constitutes acts of war, and was even willing to
believe that Hamas was responsible for civilian casualties on its own
side if it placed its rockets in civilian locations. And, with a
little cross-examination, she was ready to give up her original
assertion that the tunnels Hamas has been digging incessantly into
Israel were not a means of civilian resupply, but rather tools of
war.
But neither of these understandings
could budge her from the opinion that Israel’s use of live fire to
protect its border with Gaza was appropriate or legitimate. “You
don’t shoot people,” she kept coming back to. In other words,
she believes that the IDF has the right and responsibility to arrest,
detain and do whatever other non-lethal things it could to protect
the people it defends from harm, but that shooting should be a last
resort to be applied only when actual lives are in danger.
Now keep in mind that my interlocutor
is a decent and moral person, as well as being highly intelligent.
But as we went through a series of logic-based arguments regarding
the difference between war and crime fighting, the fact that a
majority of those killed were jihadi fighters, or nature of the Hamas
regime and its primary role in creating Gaza’s misery, I was
clearly unable to shake her of the belief that undergirded her
primary response to current events: that you shouldn’t shoot people
if you don’t have to.
And you know what? She’s right! In
the ordinary course of life, and even in policing and warfare, you
shouldn’t shoot people if other effective choices are available.
But given that non-shooting options, like the construction of a
separation barrier in the West Bank (which all but eliminated
casualties from both terror and the fight against it) has become
Exhibit A for the Israel = Apartheid propaganda slur, it’s not at
all clear that promises to judge Israel less harshly if it does
something to defend itself other than what it’s doing right now
will ever be kept.
Getting back to Gaza, it continues to
surprise me just how many false things one must believe to accept the
anti-Israel narrative. For instance, images and video that
incontestably show the violent nature of the Hamas-inspired marches
is on display for all to see. But this must be put aside in order to
declare the marches and the marchers “peaceful,” or non-violence
must be redefined to make room for Molotov cocktails, incendiaries,
swastikas, and the occasional live ammunition.
One must also believe that even if
rocket fire and the digging of infiltration tunnels – the primary
activity of those who govern Gaza – might be warlike, this new
tactic (charging the border week after week) is peaceful.
And I won’t even mention the things
that didn’t come up in our conversation, such as Hamas’ attitude
and behavior towards women, gays and religious minorities (never mind
its medieval beliefs about Jews), things that should appall anyone
who believes in the rights of such groups to not suffer humiliation,
torture and death – not to mention the rights of the individual to
live as he or she likes.
In trying to understand how good and
smart people can believe bad and stupid things, I keep coming back to
the concept of ruthlessness. While you can see a description of the
phenomena here,
and a much longer one in this
series, it is easiest to sum up the concept with its most vivid
example.
After World War I, the loss of a
generation left the nations of Europe exhausted, demoralized and
ready to consider any alternative superior to war. In theory, this
laid the groundwork for finding new ways to settle disputes other
than armed conflict. But, in one of history’s typical ironies, it
also meant anyone ready to trigger another war would have enormous
leverage over those who wanted to avoid war at all cost.
Thus, Adolf Hitler’s choice to
threaten to reignite the continent if his territorial demands were
not meant was not the act of a crazy monster, but rather the rational
calculation of a ruthless actor who was ready to do every day what
others could not even contemplate.
Today, when war
is even more destructive and attitudes towards it even more hostile,
most people can’t contemplate that this beast called ruthlessness
still drives the decision making of political actors. Accepting that
Israel’s enemies deliberately put their own civilians at risk in
order to either kill or malign Jews and maintain power means
accepting that ruthless actors are still doing things that decent
people have trouble even imagining.
And one way of not thinking about
something that puts your whole world view in jeopardy (especially a
world view which hopes for an end to armed conflict altogether) is to
strip away the dark corners of reality, replacing difficult moral
choices – especially those that arise when faced with a ruthless
foe – with comforting bromides, like “shooting people is bad.”
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