Gaza: a bare-bones moral assessment

The following attempts a systematic, unsparing look at the moral rights and wrongs of the Gaza war.  There's no discussion of international law, because laws can be morally good or bad, and whether something accords with a law doesn't tell us much about moral right and wrong.

People talk a lot about moral diversity but if any right is well-recognized across times and places, it's self-defense.  It's of course central to the Gaza conflict.

Self-defense needn't apply only to immediate, swift and obvious threats.   Suppose we live in the desert, and you gradually deprive me of water without which my crops will fail and I will die.  That is a threat to my existence, and I have a right to defend myself against it.

What that right allows me to do depends on my alternatives.  I'm probably obliged to choose the least destructive or harmful alternative available to me.   I can't go and kill you if just filling in your drainage ditch will put a permanent end to the threat.

This restriction on self-defense is often questioned.   If you are posing a mortal threat to me, some say I needn't make nice calculations about what response is least destructive.   So what alternatives need be considered before adopting a radical one is a bit uncertain.

Now apply these generalities, not simply to the Gazans, but to the Palestinians.  Their fates are inextricably intertwined.  It would be irrational for either party to suppose that, if one is the object of a mortal threat, the other isn't.

Are the Palestinians faced with such a threat?  That seems to be the case.   Its obvious manifestation might be the occupation, but it has deeper origins.  They relate to the founding principles and institutions of Israel.

Israel was founded as, implemented as, and intended as a 'Jewish state'.  The Israeli government and a very solid majority of the Israeli people are deeply committed to this idea.  What does that mean?

In this context 'Jewish' has a quasi-racial definition:  'Jews' from anywhere, whether or not they profess or practice the Jewish religion, are entitled to citizenship.  This kinship notion of 'Jewish' ultimately relies on whether or not your ancestors were considered Jews.   Since these ancestors too may not have professed or practiced Judaism, the criterion makes tacit reference to biological traits.  This distinguishes it from the citizenship criteria of other states whose rules grant entitlement to those whose parents had nationality based on their language or place of residence.

The theory is complemented by the reality.   Israel is a Jewish state in a sense which has nothing whatever to do with religion.  Its citizenship policies solicit and embrace immigration according to criteria which have nothing to do with belief, place of birth or language, but only with lineage.

So much for 'Jewish'.  What about 'state'?  A state, according to the conventions of political science, is an entity that holds a monopoly on violence in a certain geographical area.  That means that the state alone decides everything, including who lives and who dies, in the area it controls.  Whoever controls that state therefore has the power of life and death over whoever lives there.  In a Jewish state, it is Jews who control the state.   So in the Jewish state, Jews have the power of life and death over everyone, Jewish or non-Jewish, who lives there.  When Jews are selected on quasi-biological criteria, the Jewish state's operating principle is something very close to racial sovereignty.

What then of the non-Jews who live in Israel or in the occupied territories?  Within Israel, it does not matter what rights Palestinians receive at the good pleasure of the Jewish rulers or for that matter, the Israeli electorate. (After all, Jewish sovereignty implies, in Israel, the preservation of a Jewish majority.) Since the state is committed to maintaining Jewish sovereignty, it is committed to the preservation of Jewish sovereignty.  Non-Jews, whatever their rights, must therefore accept that their very life is in the hands of Jews.  Jews decide whether they live or die.  As for those Palestinians living in the occupied territories, their position is if anything worse.  They live under the full force of the state without enjoying even the fragile rights that they would possess as Israeli citizens.

Is living under Israeli rule a mortal threat to non-Jews?  Someone might reasonably suppose so.  In democracies, your life is said to be in the hands of an electorate to which you yourself belong, and this is supposed to mitigate the threat.  In Israel, belonging to the electorate does not mitigate the threat, because the state guarantees that you fall outside the ultimate decision-making process:  it guarantees that elections will not take sovereignty out of the hands of the Jews.

Someone might think this argument a bit over-dramatic, a bit too one-sidedly theoretical.  After all, nowhere is it written that Israeli Jews have the power of life and death over non-Jews:  that's just an inference from definitions of 'Jewish' and 'sovereignty'.  So if non-Jews are living under a mortal threat - which would of course activate rights of self-defense - that might require more than a look at Israel's principles.

If so, well, more is abundantly available.  It isn't primarily about the long history of violence, some of it initiated by Palestinians.  It's about land and resources.

Israel (and before it the Zionists), to an ever-increasing extent, have been after the land and resources that support the Palestinians' existence.  Perhaps at some point in the past, this objective wasn't enough of a reality to constitute a mortal threat.  That point was certainly passed with the start of the occupation or its accompanying settlement policy.  Before then, before 1967, it might be said that Israel left the Palestinians enough to live on, and had no intention to take more.   Today, and long before today, no one can say that.

For some years now, it has been clear that Israel intends to keep building settlements and therefore to keep confiscating Palestinian land and resources.   Is it also clear that non-Jewish inhabitants of Israeli-controlled territory have no ultimate say in the matter.  It is clear that the 'internationally community', cowed by Israel and paralysed by America's UN veto, will do nothing to stop the process.  It has also been abundantly clear the Israel is committed to supporting the process with the very effective violence it has placed in the hands, as it likes to say, 'of the Jewish people'.   Finally it is clear  that sentiment within Israel itself has no prospect even of moderating the pace of expropriation.

This doesn't add up to absolute certainty that the Palestinians are faced with a mortal threat.  Who knows?  maybe peace, love and understanding will break out tomorrow, just as, perhaps, the person holding a knife at your throat may suddenly break down in tearful remorse.  However it's more than enough for rational Palestinians to perceive, with ample justification, just such a threat.  This threat is particularly ominous because it originates from a state that has proclaimed rights of racial sovereignty over the Palestinians. In these circumstances, the right to self-defense is very extensive.  The threatened person may use whatever means he has, including violence, in his defense, provided only that he has no grounds to believe there's a readily available alternative.

How specifically does this apply to current events?  Palestinian actions against the continual menace of the settlements and the occupation must be judged according to whether the Palestinians have rational grounds for believing there are less violent and indiscriminate alternatives readily available.   The alternatives must also be at least as effective in countering the threat, that is, in slowing Israel's relentless expropriation drive.

I leave that argument to others.  Ideally these others would be both experts in asymmetric warfare and intimately familiar with Palestinian realities.   Given the increasing savagery of Israeli policies, Israel's apparent immunity from international sanction, and above all the truly enormous disparity of Israeli and Palestinian power, I would not bet on the fortunes of those who presume to moralize about Palestinian conduct.  What's clear is that even if some Palestinian attacks prove to be unjustified, Israel has no right to a violent response.  You may be unjustified in attacking me, but I have no right to violence if I can simply withdraw from the scene.  Indeed Israel's continual and illegitimate appeal to violent self-defense, coupled with its increasingly savage appetite for collective punishment, only add weight to the Palestinian perception of a mortal threat.

This assessment is based on the narrowest of moral assumptions, a basic right of self-defense.  It makes no appeal to human rights, which Very Important People formulated in the past century and which they love to apply 'even-handedly' to both sides.  It doesn't consider other rights, such as resistance to non-lethal oppression.  Still it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Israel hasn't a shred of justification for its actions.

Is anything to be done about Israel?

(this is the original English text of an email interview on Israel and especially the Boycott/Divest-ment/Sanctions movment.  An Italian translation appeared 21 July 2014 in Il Secolo XIX) 

Do you agree with Mr. Chomsky when he says that parallels drawn between campaigns against Israel and apartheid-era South Africa are misleading?

Which are in your opinion the differences between this two cases?

-- Chomsky is correct when he says that Cuban intervention in Angola played a significant role in ending Apartheid.  So did the township violence.  The effect of BDS in South Africa has been exaggerated.  But so what?  The situation of the Palestinians and of black South Africans under apartheid have practically nothing in common except that they are cases of oppression.   Internally and externally, Israel is in a much, much stronger position that the Boers ever were.   Moreover there was never any shortage of land or resources in South Africa; there was always enough for all.

Beyond that I am like others, a bit unclear just what Chomsky's objections are.   There is a lot of worrying about the right of return, which in any case isn't always part of BDS demands.  (I wonder if Chomsky is even arguing in good faith when he brings this up.)  But the demands and therefore the right of return don't matter in the least.  What matters is to make Israel uncomfortable or, ideally, to actually harm its economy.  This isn't a little game about small matters; it's about Palestinian survival.   It's time to stop fussing about what sort of impression BDS might make on Jews, or Israel, or Western governments.  None of these parties are going to make some momentous decision that offers up a solution in a blaze of moral grandeur.  This is about putting pressure on Israel, period.  Israel complains bitterly about BDS.  That's all the justification the movement needs.   As for Chomsky's apparent but obscure concern about how BDS might affect the Palestinians, well, the Palestinians are completely screwed if Israel doesn't get pressured.  It's hard to see how some concern about BDS could outweigh that simple fact.

Members of the BDS say that the movement is merely 9-years-old, while the BDS in South Africa was already 30 years old when it started to have success in the 80s. Do you think it can only be a matter of time?

---  In a way.  I'm surprised at the speed with which BDS has grown.  But as in South Africa, BDS can at most contribute to any real solution - and to an unknown extent - not provide one.  So it's not a matter of when BDS will, say, end the occupation.  It certainly won't on its own.  To repeat, its role is to pressure Israel, because only pressuring Israel can produce results.  Since BDS is already exerting pressure on Israel, it has already had some success.  That's more than can be said for many other pro-Palestinian initiatives, and more than enough to justify the movement.

The whole discussion of BDS proceeds, as is so often the case, as if the Israel-Palestine conflict was something to be settled between Westerners and Israel, with the Palestinians as an audience of victims and the rest of the Middle East completely out of the picture.  This is annoyingly antiquated.  The West is now too weak, too terminally timid, and too irresolute to do anything much about Israel.  If there is any solution it will come from within the Middle East.  That means Turkey and, if there is drastic change, Egypt, Syria, and perhaps Jordan.  Iraq, Iran and the Gulf States can play a role if any of these nearby powers become active.  When Israel believes that the wishes of its neighbours are worth considering, things will change, and not before.

Change doesn't require any of these nations become much stronger but it does require Israel to believe that might well happen.  Frankly the new element most likely to push things along is if some Middle Eastern power stated its intention to develop nuclear weapons.   In any case efforts to change Israel should look far more at the Middle East itself and not at feckless Western governments or the paralytic United Nations.  BDS is a positive development because it at least aims to pressure Israel itself, rather than to 'demand' that Western powers take actions they are never going to take.

You are one of the few critical voice of Israel, what do you think of this initiative that call Jewish academics to condemn the actions of Israel in Gaza? http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/handful-israeli-academics-responds-call-condemn-gaza-slaughter

--  It's hard to say.  I tend to think it's not utterly useless because Israelis seem very sensitive to criticism, so the initiative might have an effect on their morale.  But it has nothing to do with initiating any useful dialogue within Israel.  If we know anything we know Israel's commitment to settlement expansion increases with the passage of time, and that dissident voices within Israel are mere voices, without influence.  So if the call is useful, it is in its potential to cause discomfort, not any potential to change minds.  In addition I'm a bit uncomfortable with the antiquated suggestion that Jews in particular speak with special moral authority about Israel.

Finally I don't think you can still say there are 'few critical voices'.   On the contrary criticism of Israel, even revulsion against its cruelties, is more widespread than ever before.  Only in certain limited North American environments does it even seem otherwise.  What a pity that Israel has lost the battle of public opinion only when it is too strong to care about public opinion any more.

By chance do you know and you have any opinion about the newest spokesperson of Hamas, Azmi Bishara?

--  I'm sorry, I know nothing about him and wouldn't venture an opinion if I did.  I don't feel in any position to evaluate the Palestinian leadership or even Palestinian strategies and I'm surprised by others' confidence.  The Palestinians presumably have a much more fine-grained understanding of Israeli strategies and intentions, as well of course of the Palestinians' own needs and tolerances.   I'm not sure why someone outside Palestine would suppose they know better.  We outsiders are much better situated to understand the West and we can have a good knowledge of Israel's stature in the world.  That seems a more profitable point of departure than any attempt to second-guess Palestinian political developments.

'Realism' for fantasists: one state, two states, and Palestine

We keep hearing that a two-state solution for the Israel/Palestine conflict is 'dead' or 'an illusion'. The way forward, we're told, leads to a single state in Palestine. This line was featured in a New York Times op-ed by Ian S. Lustick.   It had already gained sanctity from the endorsement of Tony Judt and some expatriate Palestinian academics.  If only the Palestinians who must live in the occupied territories had the luxury of immersing themselves in such fantasies!

There is a tiny grain of truth in the 'one-state' blather.  Negotiations for an independent Palestinian state won't go anywhere in the foreseeable future.  This lends initial plausibility to the idea that 'the two-state solution' is dead.  But this appearance of plausibility rests on a non-sequitur.  Negotiations, successful or unsuccessful, are of course not a 'solution', nor does anyone think that.  The 'solution'  referred to is an independent Palestinian state.  But the emergence of such a state does not require negotiation; it only requires Israeli withdrawal.  So it does not follow that the failure of negotiations excludes the emergence of independent Palestinian state.  So it does not follow that the failure of negotiations means the failure of 'the two-state solution'.

The one-staters' sophistry finds company in the bogus 'alternatives' they offer.  These resurrect, in one form or another, the tired idea of a binational state.  Binationalism went nowhere in the 1930s and is far, far less plausible today.

Are Israelis meant to have some incentive to destroy their current state and embrace binationalism?  One 'reason' offered is that Israel is in some portentous, usually cultural sense, 'doomed'.  Why anyone other than a terminally idealistic Zionist or obsessive philo-semite should give a shit whether Israel is doomed in this sense is beyond me.  Israel is about as un-doomed as a country can be.  Far from being an American client, as Chomsky robotically insists, it is one of the most powerful countries in the world.

Israel is all but invulnerable militarily.  It has a large and sophisticated nuclear arsenal which, via missiles and submarines, it can deliver destruction anywhere in the world.  It has an extensive satellite network to direct its operations.  It is not only an exporter but an innovative developer of conventional weaponry, from the world's most advanced tank-protection systems to the very latest in fighter electronics.  Many advanced US defence systems use Israeli components.  The Palestinians, in recent years, have proven incapable of presenting the slightest challenge to Israeli security.  Hizbollah, its greatest enemy, is now preoccupied elsewhere, after which it will be in no shape to make Israel do anything at all.  Whatever the future of Syria, the idea that it will continue to be a source of sophisticated weaponry for Hizbollah ia a non-starter.   Israel has already shown in two air strikes on Damascus that it will not tolerate transfers of such equipment, and - now that the EU has declared Hezbollah a terrorist organization - it will have plenty of international support for that objective.  Besides, the Syrian conflict has driven a wedge between Hezbollah and Hamas, its closest ally in Palestine.

Israel's military strength comes with an ace in the hole against economic sanctions.  The world, including Middle Eastern countries, India and China, thirsts for Israeli defense exports, which hardly makes sanctions likely.  But that is not the whole picture.  For years, Israel has held back its most advanced and potentially lucrative products.  Any serious attempt to constrain Israel economically would result in the end of this restraint.  This wouldn't just be a gold mine; it would also constitute the most serious proliferation threat.  Any real economic assault on Israel would therefore be ineffective - and unthinkable.  The boycott movement has scored some successes and makes some sense, because it pressures Israel directly instead of trying to influence feckless Western governments.  But such grass-roots boycotts have never wrought change on their own, and there is no reason to suppose this one will be any different.

Israel is also, for similar reasons, strong politically.  True, it  has essentially lost the battle for world opinion.  Even the US executive branch is fed up with Israel, and Europe has seen Israel's true colours for some time now.  But this doesn't matter in the least because, for the reasons given above, none of these countries poses the slightest threat to Israel nor has any inclination of put serious pressure on Israel.  That is why Israel treats the world with contempt.  It can afford to.

So much for external pressure.  What then of the internal pressures that allegedly kill the two-state solution?

There is the 'demographic bomb';  Palestinians will eventually outnumber Jews in Israel.  It is a miracle of wishful thinking to suppose that this makes a 'one-state' solution anything but less likely.  Jews run Israel and they want to keep it that way.  If the bomb ever explodes, they can avoid its damage.  They can  institute a two-state solution in which the West Bank settlers come to Israel and large numbers of Palestinians are persuaded or 'persuaded' to move to Palestine.  Israel is entirely capable of this response.  One might add that many Israeli Palestinians seem pretty comfortable in the Jewish state and certainly prefer it to a miserable life in the West Bank or, heaven forbid, Gaza.  They don't pose a huge threat.

As for the Jews in Israel, of course there is no support whatever for a one-state solution:  this is  plain fact.  But the Jews control the state.  So there will be no one-state solution unless Jewish support grows exponentially.  But there is no reason for that to happen.  As we've seen, there's no appreciable external threat nor prospect of appreciable external pressure.  Internally, there are some economic problems, but this again is a case for a two-state rather than a one-state solution, because it is expensive and inefficient to maintain and defend hundreds of thousands of spoilt-brat settlers in the West Bank.  Certainly creating a new nation with millions of impoverished Palestinians demanding their rights will never be seen as some sort of economic incentive for a single-state.  As for the idea that such a state has become more likely because Israel is in cultural decline, or has lost its democratic or Zionist vision, that's just infantile.  It is precisely this decline or loss of vision that renders ridiculous the notion that Israelis will abolish their state in a quest for spiritual redemption.  Israeli's don;'t want to be redeemed; that's what the decline is all about.

What Israeli Jews do want, in a big way, is Israel.  Their idea of Israel is inseparable from the reality of Israel- that it is in its structure, purpose and foundations, a Jewish state.  For Israelis, to give up the Jewish state would be to give up Israel:  they have made this more than clear.  So one-staters must commit to the idea that although Israelis don't want to give up the occupied territories, half of what they have, they will give up Israel, all of what they have.  This is madness.

Some suppose that it is now 'impossible' for Israel to give up the occupied territories, because the West Bank settlers are too deeply entrenched.  Nothing supports this nonsense.  The same could have been said  of Gaza, where the settlers after some tough talk and a lot more breast-beating, left like sheep.  In Algeria, settlers were much more deeply entrenched, for far longer, than are the Jews in the West Bank:  they left.  In sub-Saharan Africa, settlers, vowing to fight to the death, have either left or submitted to the rule of the formerly colonized.  The day after Israel withdraws its forces from the occupied territories, the same scenario will play itself out.   This is so obvious one questions the good faith of those who peddle one-state solutions.  After all, the salient feature of these 'solutions' is that they leave the settlers in place,  threatened by at most the vague prospect that someone will eventually get specific about their fate.  How convenient.

In the face of all this, some contrive to dream that somehow, somehow, a single state of peace and love can prevail in Palestine.  They think of South Africa.  The apartheid régime in South Africa did not fall because Nelson Mandela filled the land with his spirit.  International pressure played a small part.  A much larger part was Boer fear, after some reverses to Cuban troops in Angola, that the military balance with its neighbours would eventually tilt against South Africa.  The largest part of all was Boer inability to control raging internal violence, both against whites and between Zulus and Xhosa.  Moreover South Africa is a much larger, richer country with plenty of land for all, and most of its non-white population - who vastly outnumber the whites - hasn't been there for thousands of years.  The comparisons with South Africa are valueless.  More appropriate would be a comparison with Lebanon, another small state with antagonistic populations of similar size and a history of armed conflict.  The comparison, drenched with Palestinian blood, is hardly encouraging.   Why would anyone believe that forcing deeply antagonistic populations to coexist within a single state is a recipe for removing the antagonism?

Behind the invocation of South Africa is a blind,  dogmatic sort of faith in non-violence, and a misunderstanding of its very modest achievements.  Neither Gandhi nor Martin Luther King offer useful tactical lessons to the Palestinians.  If Gandhi played a role in Indian independence, he played a role in ushering in one of the greatest slaughters of modern times, and indeed it was the first stirrings of this slaughter that did much to convince the British it was time to leave.  Martin Luther King achieved much, but only with the armed and active support of the federal government.  Nothing comparable applies to Palestine.

Incredibly, Lustick also offers up Algeria as some sort of lesson in resistance for the Palestinian - as if they had anything like the Algerians' resources.   Though the French did contain the Algerian revolt, the Algerian revolutionaries retained large forces supported by much of the Arab world on Algeria's borders.  Unlike Israel, France was exhausted by the conflict and  no one thought the fight was over.  Unlike Israel, France was torn apart by the most ferocious opposition to the war: in February 1962, Parisians in their hundreds of thousands turned out to bury nine anti-war demonstrators killed by police .  Moreover the French left Algeria in largely because the settlers mounted a military-supported terrorist campaign that had real prospects of toppling the French government in a coup such as nearly succeeded in 1958.   Finally, though Algeria was officially part of France, not one person considered it the French homeland.  Palestinians face far more commitment, unity, and indeed raw power, with far less.

Lustick suggests that eventually a Palestinian state could eventually emerge from a single state as did Ireland from the UK.  Why, you might ask, does he prefer that to having two states without a one-state interval?  apparently because the Irish process was 'organic' as opposed to negotiated by diplomats.(*)  'Organic' in this case seems to mean 'involving centuries of misery and bloody conflict'. Lustick has the long-distance courage to see a slaughter of Palestinians in the occupied territories as progress. He thinks that if negotiations stopped and the PLO collapsed, Israel would have trouble controlling the bloody chaos that ensued, and this would bring an end to US unconditional support for Israel.   But Israel doesn't need unconditional US support, and the idea that America will stand up to bloody repression is truly comical in the midst of the Syrian catastrophe.   However it's nice to see that   And why?  Because Israel will be 'stigmatized'!  Yeah, that'll teach 'em!

No doubt a two-state solution is very unlikely.  The best hope would be that resurgent Arab and Turkish power convinced Israel its occupied territories were more trouble than they were worth.   But if the two-state solution is unlikely, a one-state solution is unlikelier still.  If the Israelis are under little pressure to withdraw from the occupied territories, this will hardly encourage them to give up control of Israel itself.  That some seem to suppose otherwise is only a testimony to rampant self-delusion.

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*  Israel's  un-negotiated withdrawals - total from Lebanon, partial from Gaza - don't seem to have made it into Lustick's consciousness.