Friday, July 11, 2014
From Ian:
Sarah Honig: Eerily déjà vu
Sarah Honig: Eerily déjà vu
Directly below is an op-ed I wrote in 1990, right after the murder in Rishon Lezion of seven Arab itinerant laborers by Ami Popper (who’s still doing life and who unlike homicidal Arabs hasn’t been released to ransom hostages or to win a presumed peace-partner’s goodwill).Getting the law right on the Israel-Hamas conflict
"Unlike our own, Arab society is unbothered by the pluralistic niceties of moral-relativism. Allah is exclusively on their side and they are the only interpreters of his will. The murder of Jews is divinely decreed and this isn’t only Hamas ideology.
By this precept, Jews must die and have no right to resist. That’s their lot. Not only do they possess no right to avenge, they posses no right to self-defense, to at all fight. Their very existence is a provocation, a casus belli.
This is key to understanding today’s Mideast. It’s axiomatic that Arabs have the right to inflict incalculable harm on all Jews – and to do so in the most sadistically inventive ways – but the Jews’ attempts to deflect such blows are evil, outrageous and deserving of merciless punishment.
Failure to admit how selective Arab rules of warfare are precludes making sense of anything in our region and dooms to failure any so-called peace drives and mediation initiatives. The tragedy is that not only is the fundamental asymmetry between Jewish and Arab mindsets not comprehended abroad, but there’s no inclination to even consider it. Worse yet – one-sided ferocious Arab indignation inevitably arouses empathy overseas."
International law has quite a lot to say about the latest violence that has flared up between Israel and Hamas. So do the media. Unfortunately, they rarely match, leading to unfortunate — and sometimes egregious — misrepresentations. In an age when both real and perceived violations of international law have a substantial effect on the legitimacy of state action, getting it wrong is way more than just bad journalism.How the Liberal West Turned on Israel
The core purpose of the law of war — a centuries-old framework regulating conduct during wartime — is to protect civilians and minimize suffering during wartime. In any conflict, all parties — states, rebel groups, terrorist organizations — have obligations to minimize harm to civilians. For each party, these obligations take two primary forms: protecting civilians in the areas where it is attacking, and protecting its own civilians from the consequences of attacks by the enemy party. Attacking parties must 1) attack only enemy personnel and objects; 2) refrain from any indiscriminate attacks; 3) refrain from attacks in which the expected civilian casualties will be excessive in light of the military value of the target; and 4) provide warnings for civilians of attacks where feasible. In their own territory, militaries and armed groups must refrain from locating military objectives in densely populated areas and take other steps to keep civilians out of harm's way. Specifically, the law also criminalizes the use of civilians as human shields.
The Middle East is exploding in mayhem and savagery. The region’s system of nation states is disappearing before our eyes, perhaps to be replaced by one or more jihadist movements pledged to the destruction of Western civilization. In the upheavals to come, only one civilizational force, one stable democracy, has the will and the means to fight back and to defend the values of the liberal West. It is the tiny nation state of Israel.The difference between a society that sanctifies life and one that worships death
A key moment in this development occurred at a private dinner party in 2001, when Daniel Bernard, France’s ambassador to England, was overheard remarking that “All the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country Israel. Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of those people?” That ugly episode is, in turn, the starting point of a slim ebook by Joshua Muravchik, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, published last January under the title Liberal Oasis: The Truth about Israel. An important contribution in its own right, Liberal Oasis is also an indispensable companion piece to Muravchik’s newly released Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel. Together, the two add up to a powerful indictment of the West’s serial moral failures regarding Israel and the Middle East conflict.
Almost a hundred years ago, as the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey was staring out of the windows of the London Foreign Office on a hot summer’s day, he remarked “the lamps are going out all over Europe, we may not see them lit again in our lifetime.” The occasion was of course the eve of the First World War – Grey’s worrying prediction was to be proven unnervingly accurate.
Today there is no need for such terrible prophecies. In the maelstrom that is the modern Middle East, the lamps have already gone out. Spring has skipped two seasons and beckoned a dark and cold Winter that has lasted three years. Aggressive Iranian designs have left the beleaguered people of Lebanon and Syria stricken by bloodshed and continued strife, leading to one of the worst humanitarian disasters of our time. Radical Sunni extremists have poured into the deserts of Syria and Iraq to take advantage of the vacuum left by weak and discredited governments.
ISIS’s declaration of a ‘Caliphate’ in Iraq has been celebrated with mass summary public executions. ISIS also poses the single greatest threat to the heroic Kurdish people who have long deserved an independent sovereign territory of their own. As Douglas Murray of the Spectator has put it, it is as if the collective Islamic world has declared a ’30 Years War’ on itself.
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