Category Archives: War

This Time, Israel is Dead Wrong

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Terrorism, War

I’m a Zionist and proud. Look no further than the arguments I’ve advanced in defense of a beleaguered Israel over the years.

I believe Israel has a right to the land it bought from willing Arabs (Turks and locals) using private funds. Jews established a majority in a sliver of Israel they purchased fair and square. Upon that majority, a young UN conferred statehood, recognizing the Jewish people’s natural right to have non-coercively purchased land from those willing to sell it, and resettle a territory that had been barren. The Jewish State enshrined minority rights in its Declaration of Independence and in its laws and institutions.

Many impoverished idealistic Jews died warding off Arab attackers and draining swamps. The idea that prior to the Jewish state Muslims and Jews lived in harmony is a humbug. Defenseless pacifist Jews have always been victims of periodic Muslim onslaught. When Muhammad’s muse moved them, the indigenous (often nomadic) Arabs would pounce. The massacres of 1920, 1921, and 1929 are examples:

The targets were not Zionists who had dispossessed Arabs of their lands, but for the most part Jewish communities of the ‘old Yishuv,’ communities that had lived in Palestine for many hundreds of years. The pogroms were of the same general character as pogroms that had taken place sporadically in Palestine for hundreds of years, usually referred to euphemistically by Jews of Safed, Tiberias, Jerusalem and Hebron as ‘Meoraot’—’events.’ The worst massacres took place in Safed, Hebron, Jerusalem and Motza. Like the pogroms of past ages, these ‘disturbances’ featured angry crowds stirred up over a religious or other dispute, Imams preaching ‘Kill the Jews wherever you find them,’ and mobs screaming ‘Aleihum’ (get them) and ‘Itbach Al Yahood’—murder the Jews. In a few days, over a hundred Jews were murdered and several hundreds were wounded. [That’s in 1929.]

While there were indeed injustices against the local population after the Arab countries attacked Israel in 1948, these were sporadic, not systematic. The charge of planned ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is bogus.

I hold that the “society” that sends suicide bombers into Israel proper is a savage and atrophying one—not because of Israel or America, but because of its own values and sources of inspirations. Ditto that state-within-a-state, Hezbollah.

I am fully aware of the staged set-ups in the war in Lebanon. The Jenin “massacre” fable and the Mohammed Al-Dura case are among the more notorious hoaxes perpetrated by propagandizing Arabs on the West.

However, the hoaxes do not explain away a devastated Lebanon—destruction so wanton it must turn the stomach of any honest human being.

The ongoing frauds, long an arrow in the Arab quiver, do not resurrect the 900 Lebanese dead, nor restore close to one million homeless to their obliterated homes.

You can discount what the hard-left, the far-right, and the far-gone libertarians say about Israel, if you like. Because their positions are intransigent—Israel evil; Arabs good—they can be said to evince ingrained bias.

But given my long-standing pro-Israel position, you cannot discard my stance.

And it is this: It is impossible to finesse Israel’s wrongs. The Israeli Air Force’s shock-and-awe has been barbaric. Instead of starting with precision, “deep-penetration” operations, Israel began with brute force, turning Lebanon into a parking lot and its inhabitants into homeless people.

I repeat what I said two weeks back, “Hezbollah (and Hamas) target civilians and hide among them. Although necessary, this fact, however, is not sufficient to exempt Israel from responsibility for its direct actions. For those, Israel can’t shirk accountability. It can’t claim it didn’t intend to take out civilians when Israeli generals can both see and foresee the devastating results of their bombardments.”

Any principled human being devoted to justice and freedom has to be repulsed by what Israel has done and is busy doing.

Letter of the Week By Stephen Browne

Barely A Blog, War

Stephen W. Browne’s letter is BAB’s Letter of the Week. Stephen is an academic, an English teacher, a writer, and an advocate for liberty. He writes:

This question your column raises is not abstract to me, nor can I “ revel in the joys of killing non-combatants. I visited Belgrade shortly after the bombing of that charming city, and while I was flabbergasted by the precision of the bombing, I found out that one stray had killed two little girls in a family close to me.

The question: Disturbing analyses of World War II seem to show that bombing of cities was militarily ineffective and probably did nothing to shorten the war (see Freeman Dyson’s memoirs of working in bomb damage assessment). But, does anyone want to win a war with their cities in rubble and the enemy’s intact? If one does, what prevents the enemy from being encouraged to gear up for another try later?

This is not a rhetorical question, I don’t know the answer. When I was young, I had all the answers to ethical dilemmas, now all I seem to have are disturbing questions. I miss those answers

War-Withdrawal Syndrome (WWS)

Democracy, Iraq, Neoconservatism, War

Neoconservatives are suffering from War-Withdrawal Syndrome (I just made that up; it’s not yet in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). We haven’t launched one in quite a while and they’re growing restless watching Israel steal their thunder. “Where is our cowboy president,” they’ve been groaning lately.

The main complaint assorted Beltway types make is that the President hasn’t been sticking his nose as much into affairs not his or ours. Come to think of it, that’s not entirely true. The other day I was watching news while on the awful elliptical at the gym (were it not necessary to cross train to keep strong for outdoor running, you’d never catch me in the place), when I almost fell off laughing.

With Putin at his side, Bush launched into a lecture—albeit a watered-down one—about democracy. Then he stepped into the doggie doo-doo of Democracies: Iraq. To illustrate his “point,” he mentioned the wonders of that “democracy” (minus the 150 people plus dead daily). Putin shot back as quick as a whip: “I would not wish for a democracy such as Iraq’s.”

In any case, WWS is easily cured. For neocons expressing a yen for war and framing any lack of aggression as appeasement, I recommend special camps. Ship—em over to Iraq, for a couple of months (as needed) in the war zone.

Israel’s War is Not Ours

Islam, Israel, Middle East, Neoconservatism, War

It’s ominous to hear prominent American neoconservatives speak of Israel’s war as our own and the conflagration in the region as the commencement of WWIII. “What’s under attack,” writes William Kristol, “is liberal democratic civilization.”

It’s ominous but not surprising. Hyping a war as a symbolic war gives it momentum—and facilitates its expansion beyond regional confines.

Iran and Syria’s involvement in instigating the recent aggression against Israel is, moreover, hard to ascertain. We know only that both countries are “paymasters” to Hezbollah and Hamas; we have no way of knowing they ordered the attacks, which were, incidentally, the culmination of ongoing and incessant aggression against Israel.

Even if Iran and Syria ordered the hostilities, it by no means warrants an American intervention on Israel’s behalf. It falls to that presumably sovereign country to defend herself, as she is quite capable of doing.

Israelis, as I’ve contended for a while, are stupid and rudderless. To their great credit, this idiocy is because they are no longer a pioneer nation, but a modern people. They want to get on with the productive business of making money and having fun. They would rather head for the beach than the battlefront. Conversely, too many Arabs are still stuck in that pre-modern destructive phase, which accounts for their zeal, savagery, and affinity for terror as a way of life.

(Classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises didn’t go as far as to say that the “Mohammedan countries” were barbaric, but he did genteelly point out that there was a reason the East—far and near—had not contributed anything to “the intellectual effort of mankind” for centuries. You cannot force the culture of freedom and individual rights where it never arose, and where the legal framework that would protect private wealth and guard against confiscation by the rulers is missing.)

In their stupidity, Israelis have conflated America’s unlimited worldwide war on terror with their narrowly delimited battle for survival, conducted since the inception of the Jewish State. Kristol, in particular, argues that Israel’s battle has morphed from an “Arab-Israeli conflict” to an “Islamist-Israeli war.” Maybe so, but it’s still the same struggle for survival—one that is diminished and tainted by the Israeli leadership’s insistence on hitching their cause to the American crusade.

Of course, Kristol’s formulation lends itself nicely to the notion that we must help Israelis in their war. A coherent recognition that Israel is engaged in a just war against war lords that seek her demise is one thing—it has moral clarity. The same moral suasion ought to ensure we avoid mistaking Hamas and Hezbollah’s relative military weakness for moral innocence. The policy prescriptions that we ought to follow are another matter entirely.

Neoconservatives tend to make artificial ideological distinctions, such as Israel’s “old” war with the Arabs vs. her “new” war with “Islamofascists.” These distinctions appear to help conflate our own interests with Israel’s. As far as I can see, Palestinians and their leaders have always channeled Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem. Al-Husseini, Arafat’s hero, “supported the Nazis, and especially their program for the mass murder of the Jews. He visited numerous death camps and encouraged Hitler to extend the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jews of North Africa and Palestine.” How Hamas and Hezbollah’s enterprise differs from his quest, bequeathed to Arafat, is unclear to me.

What I am clear on is the imperative not to be swept up with the neoconservative’s total-war talk.