Five reasons why arms control is a dubious cause.

1.  The project supposes structures that aren't really there.  The world is not a nation state.  A nation can effectively prevent citizens from possessing machine guns - sometimes at least.   That might be a good thing.   But the world cannot prevent all nations from possessing horrible weapons of one sort of another.   The most that can happen is that some nations prevent other nations from possessing certain types of arms.   That's a dubious achievement.  It often creates a strategic imbalance.  There's no evidence that, in general, strategic imbalances  are a good thing.

2.  There is great effort expended to prevent "non-state actors" from possessing certain weapons, particularly 'advanced' weapons.  However at times it is morally imperative that non-state actors possess such weapons, because they are engaged in desperate defensive struggles against monstrous governments.  This was the case in Syria, where arms control aficionados triumphantly uncovered rebel arms channels and gloated over every unveiled MANPADS.  It is unclear whether their efforts actually did substantial harm.  That hardly makes their 'achievement' more defensible.

3.  Arms control campaigners make much of their success in 'banning' cluster munitions and mines.  Mines and cluster munitions are objectionable weapons in a very particular sense:  they lie around for decades and kill or maim innocents long after a conflict is over.  Clearing efforts have rightly  attracted admiring attention.  But these efforts have nothing to do with arms control.  As for the bans,  they are of very dubious value given the virtual impossibility of enforcement and the failure of major nations to ratify the treaty.  Non-signatories who produce cluster munitions include Brazil, China, Egypt, Greece, South Korea, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, and Turkey, India, Iran, North Korea, Singapore, Israel, Russia, and the US.  This doesn't even include non-signatories who stockpile but, they say, have never used the weapons:  Estonia, Finland, United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Argentina, Bahrain, Belarus, Cuba, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Mongolia, Oman, Qatar, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.  Those who insist that cluster munitions are "internationally outlawed" apparently have difficulties with the meanings of "internationally" and "outlawed".  The record on land mines is comparable.

4.  The focus on certain impressively nasty weapons is myopic.  Denied one means, cruel adversaries will find another.  Even if the ban were effective, nations and non-state actors would move to comparably awful devices:  in Syria, the régime uses barrel bombs, far too crude ever to eliminate.  Lacking land mines, the Islamic State has started manufacturing IEDs on an industrial scale.    Nation-states will always possess atrocious weaponry and they will invariably develop new horrors if the old ones are no longer considered acceptable.  Non-state actors do not need fancy weapons and will always have no trouble obtaining the basic tools of their trade, assault rifles, machine guns, mortars, rockets and other cheap, multi-purpose, easily portable devices.  Indeed some of the most awful atrocities in recent memory have been perpetrated with fire, chlorine gas, knives, machetes and clubs.  The idea that you are going to make the world a better place by tracking who has which MANPADS or who is developing what advanced missiles or who is shipping tanks to whom...  that's a non-starter.

5.  Arms control fanatics don't get that their verbal even-handedness doesn't undo the biased tilt of their efforts.  They often condemn, evenhandedly, arms proliferation of any sort, anywhere, whether in the developed world or in the conflict zones of Africa and the Middle East.   But there is not the slightest, tiniest chance that arms control efforts will blunt the impressive capacity of advanced nations to maim and kill innocent civilians, usually from safe distances - when drones are involved, with utter impunity.  The victims are consigned to irrelevance as 'collateral damage', with no prospect that the 'international community' will punish the perpetrators.  The only possible net effect of arms control measures is to increase the already enormous military dominance of great powers over small ones.  Arms control ideology rests on the tacit premise that this must be desirable.

One thing is certain:  making the dominant military powers even more dominant has so far done no good.  To the minimal extent that arms control has affected, for example, the Syrian régime, it hasn't cramped its reign of terror.  Indeed not a single monstrous ruler has ever come close to curtailing his atrocities because arms control "wonks" get nerdy about his supply chain.  Tyrants can always find the means to torture and kill.  Arms control efforts, if successful, do consistently deprive non-state actors of the means to resist their state opponents.  Sometimes this is desirable, sometimes an outrage.  It is dogma, not morality, to deny this.

Enough about "jihadis"!

We read how young Muslims in the West, indeed from all over the world, depart on jihad in Syria.  There they will join 'jihadis'.   'Jihadis' in Syria are examined and classified with an entomological precision that discovers myriad species of this genus.   The entomology is supplemented with a great deal of psychology intended to explain the pathologies and mental deficiencies that allow this plague to grow and flourish.    It's as if the whole process takes place in a realm devoid of normal (let alone decent) human beings.

Yet these people who go to Syria join with others there who have one thing in common.  Like Syrian Christians, atheists, secularist, and liberals, they fight the régime of Bashar al Assad.   So in one respect they are a lot better than all the analysts and patronizing commentators,  a lot more decent than the many millions of Westerners who, push come to shove, side with a regime which they themselves recognize as evil.   These millions, if they do not support Assad directly, favor attacking only his enemies and leaving him in peace.   Oddly enough the experts, pundits and 'world leaders' have never explained why this is less of a crime against humanity than the very worst work of the 'jihadis'.

But don't the 'jihadis' include, at least, ISIS?  No doubt by now some earnest declaration that ISIS is indescribably horrible and brutal is overdue.  Yet in the current political climate, the repugnance at ISIS is itself repugnant.

The pundits and ordinary moralists who rage against ISIS aren't merely indulging in hypocrisy or inconsistency, as when someone condemns, say, the colonial record of Spain but not of England.  They have actually thrown in their lot with Assad.  They have expressed, not some opinions about something over and done with, but rather their preference for a living, breathing monster.   They have delivered a blank cheque to the greatest evil they could find.  They inhabit democracies, where it is assumed that opinions matter, so that their preferences must be supposed to have some effect on policy.   The wave of disgust over ISIS encourages the West to continue its tacit cooperation with Assad.

To be clear, this effect is not diminished by 'even-handed', verbal indignation about the Syrian régime.  (The French actually get praised for practicing this at a national level.)   It couldn't be clearer that the West is determined to fight ISIS from as much safety as possible, because it couldn't be clearer that that's what Western electorates want.   "Keeping our brave young men and women safe" requires using every anti-ISIS force available.  It means not only using Iran, Assad's chief backer, but also Assad himself, who is given free reign to bomb civilians and is rewarded by the occasional 'allied' air strike in support of his battles with ISIS, for example in Deir Ezzor.  So if you get all horrified about both ISIS and Assad, the net effect is to bolster support for Assad.

But forget the public and consider the decision-makers, as well as the top-level political scientists (like Stephen Walt and Zbigniew Brzezinski), think tankers and columnists.  They all help to determine and reflect the Obama administration's view, which must be understood to suppose that acting against Assad is, well, adolescent.  So, he castrates children a bit, ties prisoners to dead bodies a bit, pokes out eyes a bit and so on.  We are encouraged to grow up and get over it, so we can see the political realities, the strategic necessities, the real-world choices that occupy the minds of grown-up political animals.  Why then is it not even more immature to go on about the lesser crimes of IS?   Cynicism and hyper-realism may be rationally defensible, but not if it is selective.  So I won't declare how I really do utterly deplore what ISIS does.   Better to suggest that genuine realism requires a grown-up attitude about 'jihadis'.

Jihadis are people.  Many are not 'foreigners' - odd how xenophobic bigotry becomes a hallmark of decency when commenting on Syria.  These human beings took up arms long before some Islamic guy said something that might or might not be Islamic.  In Syria, they emerged from the struggle against the Syrian régime.

The story has been told many times. The Syrian revolution began as something the West could like.  Largely middle class liberals, plus at worst some radical leftists and lower-class urbanites, mounted huge peaceful demonstrations.  When the demonstrators discovered that dignified or joyous protests, no matter how courageous, could not really stand up to artillery fire and machine guns, some resorted to armed struggle.  Assad succeeded, if not in turning the whole conflict sectarian, at least in recruiting sectarian gangs to commit unspeakable atrocities against whole areas containing rebel elements.  As the armed revolutionaries were forced to set up operations outside the large cities, the whole country suffered these attacks.

The composition of the armed rebellion changed.  The nice Western types weren't able to protect the population against Assad.  The attacks had to be countered.   The expanded resistance could come only from the long-suppressed forces that had resisted and plotted against the Assad régime for decades - the Muslim Brotherhood and many new, small, fighting units, all Islamists.  Many of these fighters embraced the very conservative ethos of the countryside from which they came.  They grew, not because primarily because naughty Arabs financed them, but because in costly, heroic operations, they captured weapons from the enemy.  And from all over the world, Islamist governments and individuals felt compelled to help.

Well, the West was having none of that.   These folks were not for freedom and democracy, but for a thoroughly Islamic state.   Yet the Syrians, even the secular liberals and certainly even the most moderate Islamists, were indeed having some of that.  They were fighting side by side with these 'extremists' and were not about to treat them as enemies.  They might even let some arms go their way.

From then on, unbeknownst even to itself,  the West definitively abandoned even the secular liberals, who from then on would receive only a conscience-salving dribble of support.  These rebels just couldn't be trusted.  From then on it literally did not matter what Assad did, how spectacularly he broke every constraint associated with civilization.   The West wouldn't permit his overthrow because to do so would inevitably empower Islamists, including extreme Islamists.  That's what mattered.

Long story short, the moderates wilted; the extremists got more extreme; and the very most extreme understandably struck out not only against Assad, but against any rebels in any way associated with the criminal complacency of the West.  ISIS, which began as a not entirely insane resistance movement against the US and its stooges in Iraq, deteriorated into what it is today.  In other words, ISIS became a disaster because, as the analysts never tired of telling us, we had to beware of the 'jihadis' in Syria.

Suppose the West hadn't been so wary.   Suppose, two or three years ago, the West had been able to accept that the cause of secular liberalism in Syria was lost, but had nonetheless devoted whole-hearted, extensive, military support to the rebels, including the Islamists'.  Part of that scenario isn't speculation but a certainty.  Assad would be gone.  Equally certain, some sort of Islamist régime would have replaced him.

Then there are uncertainties - would there be sectarian slaughter?  would Syria become some hotbed of terrorism spawning attacks on the West?  The realization of these risks provoked an irrational response in the West, parallel to its panic about Islamists.  Normally if you're preoccupied with a risk, you consider how to address it.   In this case that would mean considering how to strengthen moderate (though largely Islamist) forces.   Given the West's virtually unlimited capacity for strengthening forces, this hardly seems impossible, even difficult.  But the West, instead, treated Islamist extremism, unlike the secularist extremism of Assad, as something too icky to manage.   As so often with irrational responses, this only brought much more of the feared outcome.   As the Syrian revolution faltered, extreme Islamism flourished.

The inability to accept an Islamist future for Syria lies at the heart of Western support for Assad.  It began by licensing his atrocities.   It continued and continues by assuring that Western support for Assad opponents remains trivial in comparison to what Iran and Russia provide to the régime.  And today it is ratified by indiscriminate fussing about jihad and jihadis.

Here is where the hysteria about young people going on jihad to Syria gets nasty.  It yokes a stampede of patronizing outrage to the destruction of the Syrian revolution.  No distinction is made between going to fight with the revolution's radical-Islamist ally, Jabhat al Nusra, and its far more extreme enemy, IS.  Yet the difference could hardly be more important.

ISIS aside, Jabhat al Nusra is by far the most successful opponent of Assad.  It's now a bit unusual even to hear it named; it has become "Syria's- al-Qaeda" affiliate, a perfectly accurate and entirely misleading description.  Jabhat-al-Nusra is, to put it mildly, socially conservative.  It's kind of against freedom and democracy.  It commits some atrocities and mounts some attacks on anti-Assad forces, for various localized reasons.  That's to say it's not one bit worse that any Western-backed force or indeed than the West itself.   A beheading from 5000 feet - absolutely inevitable and expected "collateral damage" - is just as brutal as a beheading at ground level.  It's also more 'senseless' and 'arbitrary'.

Yet the very same analysts and policy makers who want us to grow up about Western and Assadist atrocities insist on an infantile approach to Jabhat al Nusra.  On other occasions and in a different mood, they tell us that "Al Qaeda affiliate" doesn't imply even vaguely serious efforts to hurt Western targets.  But suppose otherwise.  For the last 8000 years or so, and as recently as World War II, political decision-makers have made alliances with parties who, in other circumstances, would want or even will want them dead.  Sometimes these decision-makers have found, like the British, French and Germans, that the alliances can even extinguish murderous inclinations.  And for the last 8000 years, realists have understood that sometimes people talk trash, make threats that aren't to be taken seriously.

Recently all this accumulated knowledge has been effaced by an obsession with keeping appearances - especially within democracies.  What will people think, how will they vote, if we associate with people who might hurt us in the future, or people who have said bad things about us?   To allow such fears to steer policy is, very simply, to let quite small domestic policy concerns trump often quite large foreign ones.  After all, elections almost always turn on domestic, not foreign concerns.

No doubt realism will continue to drive Syria policy - very likely selective realism.  If the West wants to consign the Syrian people to hell for the sake of appearances, so be it.  The damage to Western interests won't be incalculable.   Even if ferocious Islamists conquered the whole Middle East, oil would continue to flow and business would likely be much as usual.  Less certain is whether the West can do well once its reputation as a cowardly and treacherous is firmly cemented.   No one can calculate that risk.  The only certainty is that foggy moralizing about jihadis won't reduce it.

Terror of terror: Syria pays the price

The Charlie Hebdo attacks have provoked visions of highly trained foreign fighters returning from Syria to carry out assaults on Western targets.  Intelligence services, it seems, must be on the highest alert for such 'radicalized' returnees.  Apparently this is because none of the Charlie Hebdo attackers ever set foot in Syria or were 'affiliated', however tenuously, with any Syrian organization.

Lest this might not be idiocy after all, consider whether it might even matter if Syria is a source of training and radicalization.

Training

The Charlie Hebdo attacks, like the Kosher supermarket attacks and the previous striking terror attack in Kenya, used AK-47 assault rifles and similar weaponry.  These weapons are all but ubiquitous and so is the relatively simple 'training' required to operate them.

Terrorists might use more sophisticated weapons which might require more sophisticated training.  Is this likely?  More sophisticated weapons - modern MANPADS and anti-tank systems, for instance - have been widely available for decades.  There have been radicals, from the IRA to extreme fundamentalists, who possessed them.  In the last century, they even figured one or two unsuccessful attacks on Western targets.  However Bin Laden and other terrorists who spook the West have pretty consistently advocated and used the simplest weapons, obtainable anywhere without crossing borders.  Oklahoma City used home-made explosives; 9-11 used box cutters. The attacks in Madrid used dynamite.  In London homemade bombs requiring "minimal training" were produced.  The Boston Marathon bombers used black powder and pressure cookers. Such 'training' as these weapons require is accessible online (*). So it's hard to see how the more sophisticated weaponry obtainable in Syria and elsewhere is going to increase the threat substantially.

But suppose serious training in weaponry and techniques is required after all.  Quite possibly that could happen in Syria.  What's more, some extremists have tried to go there. The question then is, so what?

Should a potential terrorist desire weapons training, he or she would have many choices even if Syria didn't exist.  Prime destinations would include Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya and Afghanistan.  Only slightly less convenient, there are regions of Algeria, Mali, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Very likely one could also train in, for example, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Colombia.  There must be many more areas, given that the very expert Chechens don't seem to need any of those mentioned.  Another great place to receive weapons training of all types is the US, where the 9-11 pilots learned to fly. To suppose that Syria could make any difference amid this embarras de richesses is an exercise in either self-deception or bad faith.

Radicalization

What then of the endlessly repeated warning about how 'foreign fighters' are being 'radicalized' in Syria?  No doubt some Syrian returnees are among the many likely to carry out attacks.  But the idea that they were unlikely to do so before they went to Syria, or that they were radicalized there, is ludicrous.

Suppose you leave your relatively safe and comfortable life in the West to fight abroad.  You brave numerous dangers to join extreme fundamentalist groups who declare that their members seek martyrdom, and who do indeed die in large numbers.  There could hardly be more compelling evidence that you've been radicalized already, like the many who've been involved in terror attacks yet never set foot in the Middle East.  It's not just that departure to fight abroad is an expression rather than a cause of radicalization.  It's also that were a departure necessary, the availability of Syria wouldn't matter.

Most of the places where you could train are also places where that could fight and get radicalized. What's more, many thousands have been radicalized where training and fighting are currently more difficult - for example the Gulf States, Egypt, and Algeria: you could be radicalized there and fight elsewhere.  It's hard to see how someone radical enough to fight in Syria would not be radical enough to travel to these alternative destinations.  In this context too, Syria makes no difference.

One wonders what exactly makes people think otherwise.  We hear so much about the importance of 'ideas' or ideology or radical preachers.  But you'd hardly need to travel abroad to be exposed to such influences.  Not to mention the many proponents of these doctrines in the West, there's this internet thing...

The 'returning foreign fighters' version of radicalization may even involve travel in the wrong direction.  Sayyid Qutb - whom many suppose the source of Al Qaeda's ideology - had a radicalizing epiphany in 1948.  It didn't happen in the Middle East.  It happened in Greely, Colorado, when he was scandalized by a church dance which included the tune "Baby It's Cold Outside".

Addressing the causes

Since terrorists typically use simple weapons which require simple training, the means to mount attacks are always there.  So are attackers.  If one imam estimates there are 120 violent extremists in one suburb of Sydney, Australia, it's safe to say there are thousands of angry people in the West, and many more outside it, who have the disposition to mount attacks - who are 'radicalized'. Their numbers dwarf the few who have actually fought in Syria or indeed anywhere else.  From a security standpoint, foreign fighters returning from Syria are coals to Newcastle.  All this suggests the only cure for terrorism lies in addressing its causes.

We'll see that the causes themselves are no surprise.  What's astonishing - and politically significant - are what pundits, experts and politicians say are causes.  Their explanations are remarkable for how little they explain.  No wonder we often hear that terrorism is a disease - like ebola, perhaps, or like cancer - whose causes, it seems, have little to do with the environments in which those afflicted actually live.

Thus we hear that extremists groups find recruits among various populations - but why these and not others?  We hear that some become extremists through travel to various destinations - but why does this change them, in just what crucial way?  We hear that some fall prey to ideologies or religions - but why do they listen and why are they convinced? Some blame sectarianism - but why are sectarian conflicts acute enough to produce just this result?  We hear the problem is failed states - but why would a failed state project attackers Westward?  We hear US tactics are to blame - but why would mere tactics produce just these sorts of responses rather than others?  We hear everything but that the conditions of daily life play a role.

The conditions of daily life aren't good.  In Syria and Egypt, for example, the average monthly disposable salary ($251.75 and $264.33, respectively) ranks below the Philippines, Burma, Laos and Papua New Guinea - far, far lower than Thailand, Peru, Kenya, and India.  Afghanistan's is of course lower still, less than Ethiopia's.  In the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index, Syria and Egypt rank below Venezuela, Indonesia, Peru, the Philippines and the Dominican Republic.  These figures are bad but not catastrophic.  They also don't reflect the brutally enforced hierarchy of wealth in the Middle East.

Some analysts attribute the turmoil in the Middle East to the "suppression of dissent".  This seems to refer to penalties imposed on middle class bloggers, journalists, and facebook posters.  But this suppression is nothing compared to what the lower classes of the Middle East experience all their lives.  No one hears about them.  They don't become martyrs in the media.  They simply live under a capricious, cruel authority which takes delight in humiliating them.  Their position, all in all, is a bit like southern American blacks in the 1940s or 1950s, except that repression is almost entirely in the hands of the police and army, not volunteer organizations like the Klan.

This authority is at the service of the moneyed classes.  To take an old example from Egypt, here's an incident recounted to me by its beneficiary.  A man is convicted of theft from a businessman's firm.  He threatens the businessman in court.  An attending police officer takes the businessman aside and says, "Don't worry, sir, he will never leave jail alive."  This is the kind of service that the better-off, whether they want it or not, know to expect.  That knowledge is reflected in the arrogance or obliviousness with which they treat the poor who attend to their needs and whims.

By themselves, the trials of daily life don't account for terrorism.  Combined with the shrinking of alternatives & the shameful record of secularism, they do.  Rebellion against the conditions of existence may have been inevitable, but its embrace of extremism is the West's work of decades.  Every single movement for the sort of radical change that could actually improve the majority's lot was rejected.  Moreover, all the very worst manifestations of secularism were at best tolerated, but usually supported.

In the first place, the West has been hostile to both secularist and moderate alternatives.  It's usually had a hand in their suppression.  Communism wouldn't do.  Arab nationalism wasn't good enough either.  It greatest and most successful exponent, Nasser, was undone by the Western-sponsored and secularist state of Israel.  Moderate Islam, in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been taken to be extreme and ruthlessly suppressed by the entrenched élites it threatened.  The alternative in whose foundation the West was most extensively involved is Lebanon, whose failure is patent in its atrocious civil conflicts.  The secularist state of Algeria has continued to function only after an equally atrocious period of civil strife.  We are encouraged to look at Middle Eastern extremists as irrational or bigoted fanatics.  Perhaps they are, but it's hard to see what alternatives are live options in the eyes of a rational individual desiring serious change in the Middle East.  This is not to insist that moderate Islamic régimes will actually do a great deal for the have-nots, only that they seem the most likely to do so.

In the second place there is the secularist record.  Most Westerners don't even acknowledge its existence; the category seems too broad.  But it's unclear how a narrower conception would improve the picture.  Secularism at its best is thought to reside in the Western democracies, and that doesn't seem to help.

It would be irrational to regard Western secularism as a positive force in the Middle East or indeed in the world.  The West has of course achieved much, as did, for example, Stalin and Mao.  But it has at one point or another supported all but one of the worst Middle Eastern régimes in recent memory, from the Shah of Iran to Saddam Hussein to the Egyptian military.  The sole exception, Assad, is hardly an exception any more: indeed the secular world has been from the very start resolute in its resolve to do nothing about him.  The West has also contribted to such delightful examples of good government as Pinochet, the Duvaliers, Bokassa and Idi Amin, not to mention apartheid South Africa. So a rational individual would not even have to look at the broader secularist record, which includes literally every great atrocity in the last hundred years, from the Nazis to Pol Pot to Rwanda and the Congo.  Nothing in the career of Western secularism suggests it offers the slightest prospect for improving the daily lives of the region's poor.  In fact the Middle Eastern states most prosperous and peaceful, and least noxious to their own citizens, are the near-theocratic Gulf States.  These may be awful governments but, it must be said, Western influence has set the bar awfully low.

So there is much more to the origins of terror than fanaticism.  Perhaps it would be worth heeding Professor Alireza Doostdar of the University of Chicago Divinity School when he has problems with analyses that

seem to assume that ISIS is a causa sui phenomenon that has suddenly materialized out of the thin ether of an evil doctrine. ...ISIS emerged from the fires of war, occupation, killing, torture, and disenfranchisement. It did not need to sell its doctrine to win recruits. It needed above all to prove itself effective against its foes.

           

We might listen to him even though he is so bold as to ask:

...could it be that a sense of compassion for suffering fellow humans or of altruistic duty ...has prefigured their receptiveness to a call to arms to aid a people they consider to be oppressed?

           

To look honestly at the causes of 'terror' is also to see how pointless all the fuss is about groups 'linked to' or 'affiliated with' Al Qaeda or the Islamic State.  These groups don't exist because someone swooped down from Afghanistan and created them ex nihilo, membership and all.  They exist because all over the world, impoverished, unemployed and frustrated individuals can find no other outlet for their anger and aspirations than extremist organizations.  Yes, much of the leadership of these organizations is middle class - for whatever reason, so it has been with radical organizations throughout modern history.  But without the lower-class base, these organizations would go nowhere, like the German radicals of the 60s and 70s.

Even if the weak secularist movements in the region had serious plans for social change, by now, as the Syrian example shows, they haven't the tiniest chance of success without the support of Islamists.  But this means these movements can expect no serious Western support, because the West will never break its habit of shunning even moderate Islamists on the grounds they they might not be moderate.

These causes of extremism aren't done with, like a tornado's damage.  They're ongoing.  It's not merely that they account for the rise of extremism; it's that they continue to feed its existence.  Increased security measures have seen nothing but increased success for extreme Islamists and there is no reason to think this will change.  Naturally it would be absurd to suppose that the West would actually try to help the poor of the Middle East by supporting the Islamist alternative.  It is only slightly less unlikely that the West will at least, belatedly, put an end to Assad's régime, thereby starting to improve the secularist record.  But that seems to be the least costly and most promising anti-terror measure that the West could take - even if, indirectly, it helps "the Islamists".

---

(*)  "Recipes for preparing these explosives are available through a number of internet sites, not all of which are terrorist sites."  http://www.army.gov.au/Our-future/Publications/Australian-Army-Journal/Past-editions/~/media/Files/Our%20future/LWSC%20Publications/AAJ/2013Autumn/05-NicheThreatOrganicPerox.pdf

Hard Choices

Sometimes the defeats of the 'Arab Spring' revolutions are blamed on 'lack of unity'.  Little serious attention is devoted to just why unity is lacking.  All too often the problem involves no mere disposition to fractiousness but a tragic inability to make hard choices.   What's more, the worse things get, the harder it becomes to acknowledge even that there's a hard choice to be made.  That failure to choose can breed elaborate self-deception and wishful thinking.

In Syria the hard choice is between radical Islamists and Assad.  The reality is stark.  The US, in a perpetual panic about arms falling into Islamist hands, was never inclined to give serious aid to an anti-Assad revolution.  When IS routed the American/Iranian proxy forces in Iraq, this disinclination solidified into certainty.  Syria's rebels would be aided only against IS.  US plans for the rebels complement its air campaign strategy, which US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel explicitly said would help Assad. The US have moved from not intending to overthrow Assad to intending not to overthrow him.

The US betrayal of Syrian rebels left radical Islamists as the only real alternative to those genuinely committed to destroying the régime.   Secularist forces clearly would not, on their own, be up to the job; indeed their very survival is questionable. (Here is an only slightly too pessimistic overview of the military situation.)  The only way to beat Assad is to ally with radical Islamists and especially Jabhat al Nusra, whose forces were in many areas by far the most effective.

For secularists the choice is hard for three reasons.   First, while Jabhat al Nusra professes no desire to impose its views on others,  it has an ultraconservative agenda.  If dominant, it would establish a state which rejected all liberal ideals and imposed draconian restrictions, most of all on women and minorities.  It would transform Syria into a society which secularists found unlivable.   Second, and worse, quite possibly a majority of Syrians have much the same inclinations.  Third, by now US attacks on radical Islamists have provoked increasingly bitter FSA-Jabhat-al-Nusra fighting in which some secular activists have lost friends and relatives.  For many secularists, an alliance with Jabhat al Nusra is an abomination promising an abhorrent future.

The alternative, the only other alternative, is Assad.  It is very unlikely that even an alliance with Jabhat al Nusra could destroy the régime; it is utterly out of the question that the secularists alone could do so. Allying with IS is also out of the question because (unlike in Iraq) IS prefers attacking the secularists to allying with them.  So an alliance with radical Islamists, in the form of JAN, is the only live option.  To reject it is to facilitate the survival of Assad.  No 'being against', no detestation of Assad can mask that reality.  The rejection entails the survival.    Indeed the secularists' alignment with the US now discredits them so thoroughly that they can at most hope for a minor role in Syria's future.  There is no nicely sanitized, Western-democratic third way.

Secular activists who reject Jabhat al Nusra have therefore in effect chosen Assad.  In their convictions they're as anti-Assad as ever.  Yet it's easy to see signs, not even of 'cognitive dissonance', but of their true if very unwilling allegiance.

I will not point to individuals who exemplify this stance for two reasons.  First, it would be deplorable to criticize people whose desperation and personal loss have led them down what can only be described as the wrong path.  Second, few individuals espouse all or exactly the views discussed:  it is more a composite tendency than one found in particular activists.  But those interested won't have trouble finding relevant examples.  In what follows, "the activists" just refers to some who share some of the attitudes described.

It shows in several ways.  They insist that the US is backing "the rebels" after all.  One alleged piece of evidence for this fantasy predominates: don't the Americans provide the opposition fighting Assad with "advanced" TOW anti-tank guided missiles?  These missiles are not advanced; they have been replaced in contemporary armies by more modern versions or by different systems altogether.*  But the qualitative issues weigh less heavily than the quantitative ones.

Here's what it looks like when the US or, as the activists now obediently say, "the Coalition", seriously backs a fighting force that it wants to win:

“The cargo plane contains 5,000 anti-tank missiles to help the Peshmerga forces in the fight against IS militants,” a Czech military official told Czech media.

"Earlier this year, the Czech government approved the delivery of 10 million rounds of ammunition for Kalashnikov assault rifles, eight million rounds for machine guns, 5,000 for rocket-propelled grenades and 5,000 hand grenades for Kurdish fighters."

Of course that's not the sole large arms delivery, nor are arms deliveries the half of it.  In days, "the Coalition" somehow managed to provide the Kurds with substantial air cover in the form of strikes coordinated with Kurdish fighters on the ground.   It is perhaps no coincidence that the Kurds' relationship to Assad has been described as a "de facto alliance". 

Kurdish leaders say said that the support they receive is inadequate.  If so, there are no words for the level of supply to anti-Assad rebels, who still sometimes have to fight with improvised trebuchets, and this after four years.

The TOW missiles are a case in point.  They are supplied to 'vetted' rebel groups with the caution better suited to feeding a cage full of rats.   Each firing of each TOW missile has to be recorded on video.  Here's what (according to meticulous arms tracker Elliott Higgins) the tally looks like in recent months:

April                9

May                16

June                16

July                 37

August            35

September      44

October          58

November      26

This is America's bounty for the rebels.  The supplies are not for a force whose opponents, like IS, have no air cover and who are being bombed daily with genuinely advanced precision munitions on the basis of a state-of-the-art military intelligence system.   No, these supplies are for a force confronting the Syrian régime, an enemy with far more fighters than IS plus an air force that inflicts devastating damage on rebels and civilians daily.

The rebels' reaction to this situation has in some cases moved from indignation to apologetics born, I think, of disgust and despair.

Activists used to seethe with rage.  Now they excuse the Obama administration with fictions and absurdities.   The US, it's said, 'has its own agenda' - which you might as well say of Assad - and after all, the US is fighting the rebels' enemy, "the Islamists".  Jabhat al Nusra now becomes "Al Qaeda", even though security specialists say that "Al Qaeda" is more a brand than an organization, even though it's well known that many joined Jabhat al Nusra simply because it was the best or only anti-Assad force in their region, even though Jabhat al Nusra hasn't given the slightest indication they're new Bin Ladens, even though their aggression against the US-aligned opposition comes after the US bombed them. (Before that there were only the minor feuds common throughout the Syrian conflict.)  Syrian activists cover their choice of Assad with the sort of willful or feigned ignorance associated with the worst American bigots.

To this nonsense they add a falsehood now so thoroughly exposed that it must count as a lie:  that IS and the régime are at least de facto allies; that they "don't fight" one another.  This represents a lame attempt to make attacks on IS something like attacks on Assad.  The only problem is that even the US hasn't the gall to embrace such a transparent excuse.  It would be no more absurd to say that, in the fight against IS, it is the rebels who are Assad's de facto allies.

On top of this, activists do what seems impossible; they look at the course of the war through rose-colored glasses.  Aleppo is strangled, the clearest of indicators that the US isn't interested in supporting the rebels against Assad - no matter, we're told that things aren't going so badly after all.  And then there is the south, where the rebels, it seems, are eternally making decisive gains.  However it's quite clear that the régime isn't serious about keeping the south and that the rebels haven't the slightest chance of marching into Damascus from there.  No, the war is not going well for the rebels.  The US knows and couldn't care less.

Nor is the US deeply concerned to hide its real agenda, which is to construct a proxy force from scratch, entirely devoted to fighting IS.  (It would therefore be simply wrong to call this force 'rebels'.)  Its recruits are to be trained and vetted with the utmost care.  This leisurely meticulousness shows an indifference to Syrians' agony that contrasts vividly with the outraged attention devoted to the Yazidis, the Kurds, the Christians, or indeed any minority not at war with Assad.

The overall strategic picture fits suspiciously well with US objectives.  The rebels are supplied with just enough to keep Assad from wiping them out except possibly in Aleppo.  One can only speculate on why this is allowed to happen, but here's a guess.  The US wants both the régime and the rebels exhausted enough to come to some truce or agreement, so that all their resources are turned against IS.  Since the US has explicitly stated that its attack on IS helps Assad and that it is not interested in overthrowing him by force, the guess is hardly a wild one.

Not long ago Syrians repeatedly said they fight alone.  They still fight alone.  America is not their friend or ally.  As it fights one of their enemies, it strengthens another with far more Syrian blood on its hands.  What's more, the US' fight against IS is only incidentally connected to the fate of Syria's revolutionaries.  It will continue whether or not the rebels survive and certainly whether or not activists become pro-US fanboys.

The activists know this.  Their embrace of American treachery isn't about America, it's about their inability to choose sides.  Syria will remain Assad's torture chamber or it will become an Islamist state repugnant to secularist ideals.  This is a hard choice but it is also an obvious choice:  the Islamist state is far, far better than Assad.  And the embrace of illusions can only facilitate an Assadist victory.

-----

*  Here's a rule of thumb.  When referring to arms delivered to non-Arabs, "advanced"  and "sophisticated" mean advanced and sophisticated.  When referring to arms delivered to Arabs, they mean "obsolescent but still serviceable".

US Syria policy is the symptom. Aftermathophobia is the disease

There are many good explanations for US policy failures.  Ignorance, stupidity, arrogance all play a part, as do more specific desires to control various happenings in various parts of the world.  But what all these failures have in common is a certain sort of naÏve cowardice, a fear of ever encountering any bad consequences of any decision.  I call this aftermathophobia.

Perhaps the fear is not so much of the consequences themselves as of what Americans will think of them:  US foreign policy is increasingly determined by what will play well or badly in the next election.  The increase may be due to America's realization that events abroad affect their interests even less than previously imagined.  Assuming America ever wants to influence anything or anyone abroad, this has gone too far.  The contempt of American 'power' has become pervasive and overwhelming - a shame, because America's love for vile régimes has faded and the US might actually do some good abroad.  An understanding of aftermathophobia might help push the US in better directions - and at the same time drag it out of virtual helplessness on the international scene.

The US showed the world how to manage an aftermath with the post-World-War-II Marshall Plan, a resounding success.  It went downhill from there as the decline in America's military fortunes bred an acute failure of nerve.  Korea, an ambiguous 'draw', at least produced a stable, prosperous South Korea, not least because the US was again prepared to station large forces there for decades.  Then the defeat in Vietnam gave way to an aftermath entirely out of America's control, not only there but in Laos and Cambodia.  This disaster apparently spawned a pathologically broad and deep fear of bad outcomes, complemented by an incorrigible desire to minimize painful losses by substituting money for blood.

When the US saw the failure of its client army in Vietnam, it responded by deploying more American troops.  This failed.  Since then the US had adopted the bizarre strategy of dogged reliance on client armies while reducing US troop support.  In Afghanistan, over many years now, the US has saved American lives by relying on laughably unreliable proxies, as if these client troops could count for anything in the forces deployed against the Taliban.  In Iraq it avoided an aftermath altogether by refusing to enter Baghdad in the first Gulf War:  that this led to a gruesome strangling of the country and many thousands of civilian deaths mattered little.  In the second Gulf War it relied again on client forces and never committed the resources even to maintain basic control of its conquest, with the terrible results we see today.  No matter, it seems.  American lives were saved.

This fixation on saving of American lives has all but displaced consideration of policy objectives.  It entirely eclipses concern for the lives of anyone else.  It has propelled the fear of bad consequences to ridiculous extremes.  America now abhors bad consequences even when the risk to Americans is negligible, far less than in its militarily modest Afghan and Iraqi adventures.  Take note of how ludicrous this fear has become.

For one thing, it's apparently now gospel that the US should never pursue any alternative that might lead to arms falling into the wrong hands.  American leaders and analysts, perhaps too far removed from the realities of warfare, can't get over its sloppy unpredictables.  We never hear the end of how the US armed Bin Laden with, among other things, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.  Is that because these weapons enabled him to mount the 9-11 attacks with, um, a few box-cutters?  Are we obsessed with the knapsacks used in the July 7th bombings in London and the Madrid attacks?  Is it really supposed that, had we just not armed Bin Laden, all would be well in Afghanistan, where the Taliban is doing just fine without the benefit of American equipment?  American strategizing has been reduced to a childish sort of score-keeping, where real disasters like the second Iraq war are as nothing compared to even the most distant prospect of Americans, however few, being killed with American weapons.

The full idiocy of the obsession with arms emerges with the concern that IS now has American weapons.  Why does it have them?  Because it captured them from the government.  In civil wars, the insurgents typically do capture their weapons from the government.  So unless you don't arm governments at all, some weapons you provide will fall likely into insurgent hands.  Why is this any particular concern?  Would it somehow be better if the government had been armed with non-American weapons and the dreaded insurgents wielded them instead?

Another childish obsession that guides US policy is 'trust'.  We must have trusted allies.  What sort of trust is expected?  Eternal love?  In the world wars, the various allied powers had a more mature attitude.  The Americans, British and French allied with the Soviet Union yet fully believed the Soviets had the intention and quite possibly the means to destroy them.  The Soviets had the same sort of beliefs about their allies.  Both judged it best to ward off one threat of destruction now and deal with another possibly resulting threat later.  They made specific preparations to do this.  In other words, they dealt with the fact that, of course, their allies were not entirely to be trusted.  They saw the prospect of friends becoming enemies as an eventuality to be confronted, not as some terminally humiliating faux-pas.

Instead of planning to deal with the undesirable consequences of a strategy, the U.S. now looks for a strategy without undesirable consequences.  This is not an adult approach to foreign policy.  Indeed it is not an adult approach to policy of any kind and it's not one practiced in domestic politics.  Obama's Medicare policies, for example, are full of measures designed to avert potential undesirable consequences: one of them is that small businesses get tax credits to avoid excessively high health insurance premium costs.  No one stops building transportation links even though we know new links mean more usage and more fatal accidents.  But in the Middle East, you don't deal with dangers or disadvantages.  You run from them.  You search for a future which, however unlikely or horrific, has great potential to protect you from the accusation that you've 'done stupid shit'.

How does this phobic behavior surface in the US' Syria policy?

It is this phobia which makes the US fixated on creating its own *trustworthy* client force in Syria, despite the fact that it has failed miserably to create such forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.  This ponderous, useless effort reflects a desire to be certain there will be no bad consequences from supporting the rebels.  The same phobia accounts for the disastrous strikes on Jabhat al Nusra, dedicated fighters against Assad.  On the US' own account, the bombing campaign cannot but benefit him.  That doesn't matter to the Americans because so many rebel groups are 'untrustworthy'.  However much this helps Assad, however much horror it causes and prolongs, however much it encourages anti-American extremism, however much it undermines the prospects of regional stability - none of this matters.  All that matters is that America does nothing whatsoever that could possibly have some bad results.

Of course this caution is myopic. America's decisions don't avoid bad consequences; they just make sure the bad consequences don't obviously proceed directly from American actions.  For example, the US doesn't provide serious support to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) because it doesn't want to empower the Islamists within the group, or the more radical Islamists outside the group.  It's horrified to see a mere handful of FSA weapons appear in 'extremist' hands.  The result?  The FSA is crippled.  The extremists provide, therefore, the best defense against Assad.  They gain adherents.  They capture far more weapons, 'advanced', 'heavy' and otherwise from the régime than they would ever have acquired from the FSA.  Indeed there is not a single type of American-supplied weapon that has fallen into IS' hands, from tanks to anti-tank missiles to heavy artillery and small arms, that IS did not possess in abundance before its rise to power.  Almost all of it was captured from government bases.

But what of the future?  Even the US knows the rebels that dumping the rebels would cement its growing reputation for weakness, cowardice and betrayal, not to mention signing on to destabilizing horror.  But what if supporting the FSA will just lead to sectarian-fueled chaos?  Again, no matter that such an outcome is equally likely if the US does not support the FSA.  But what matters to the US is not the outcome, but that the outcome is produced while the US stands on the sidelines.  No matter that the decision to stand on the sidelines is just as much a decision and just as much responsible for the results.  What matters that it will be a bit harder to blame the government for those results come the next election.

This phobic approach produces paralysis when, as is usually the case, all options raise at least the chance of bad consequences.   All possible bad consequences, avoidable or unavoidable, are taken to be fixed quantities, deal-breakers.  All possible good consequences count for nothing.  If an option raises even a chance at anything bad, even if all options have that taint, it counts as a 'bad option'.  Bad options are to be avoided, so the result is aimless fussing about how there are no good options.

Bleating that "there are no good options" is infantile; it's like expressing outrage at the discovery of an imperfect world.  Grown-ups refine their assessment of bad options.  They seek ways to make bad consequences less likely and good ones, moreso.

In Syria, for example, it won't do just to moan about how there are so many groups, so disunited, so unreliable, so cozy with 'extremists'.  Of course there is disunity; of course there are extremists; of course the moderates associate with extremists; of  course they're so impure that some of their weapons may end up in extremist hands.  But disunity and extremism are far from fixed phenomena.  Observers on the ground have noted that many Syrians side with extremists as the only option for fighting Assad in their area, not to mention the only way to get enough of a salary to feed a family.  The 'extremists' themselves are not all human bogey-men.  They include the sixteen year old kid who loves Al Qaeda "but also George Bush".  They also include the many who change allegiance as soon another group provides greater hope of security and well-being.  So an adult perspective on aiding the FSA would be to understand that half-ass assistance has bad consequences, while serious aid makes these consequences much less probable.  If the FSA is built into the most powerful group, one which can pay decent salaries, there will be less 'disunity' because more people will gravitate towards the most powerful, well-funded alternative.  And with serious aid, the US is in a much better position to demand good governance in rebel-held areas, which again will bring more adherents.  This sort of support will also make 'extremists' less extremist, because the US will be seen as a real help.

Of course none of this will even in the best circumstances guarantee that Syria will be run by squeaky clean secularist lovers of Freedom and Democracy.  Some of the reasons go back to when the US started getting hysterical about possible aftermaths.  Since the 1950s, no indigenous movement for fundamental change, no attempt to overthrow ossified old orders, has been good enough for the West. They couldn't stomach the communists in Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan.  They couldn't handle the Arab nationalists and their 'Arab socialism'.  Now they abhor Islamists, 'political Islam'.  Yet political Islam is the only credible alternative left now that, partly thanks to American fears about bad outcomes, secularism has produced little but the most blood-thirsty, politically vacuous governments in the region's history.  So yes, even if the US takes a first step towards amending the disgraceful secularist record, it is not likely to produce a régime in love with Western democracy.

Yet Western concern about aftermaths is almost comical.  The idea seems to be that disaster looms if the West isn't free to 'build nations'.  Yet there is little reason to see tragedy in the region's future falling from Western hands.  The places where the West really was forced to leave, where some dreaded local solution was imposed on the West by force of arms, also count as some of the few places where, from a strictly Western point of view, the aftermath has worked out very well.  The French defeat in Algeria brought nothing but excellent and mutually profitable relations between Algeria and France.  The American defeat in Vietnam has evolved into such good relations that America has just approved arms sales to that country.  And what of the dreaded domino effect that did in fact envelop Laos and Cambodia?  Not that Western interests were at stake, but the horrors of Pol Pot were stopped, not by the West but by the dastardly Vietnamese communists.  Today Laos and Cambodia must be among the nations that pose the least worry for America and its allies.  Contrast this with the places where the West had limitless opportunity to indulge its fantasies of 'nation-building'!

Perhaps then it is time to learn something from what international politics was in the days of Metternich and Bismark, before Woodrow Wilson imposed a blundering American Protestantism on its practice.  The old-school diplomats didn't go fussing about the 'values' of other nations.  Unlike some of the cheerleaders for colonial  empires, they didn't want to promote their own 'values'.  This doesn't mean the West needs to emulate their callousness and brutality.  Perhaps, though, it's time to realize that problems go away only when there is fundamental change, and fundamental change most often comes from forces more radical than those who bleat about 'freedom and democracy'.  In particular it seems clear that, having destroyed or connived at destruction of the left in the Middle East, the West likely has no choice but to  accept Islamist solutions if there's any hope for an end to the domination of ossified élites, and the oppression that breeds extremist responses.  Arm the rebels in Syria, with full knowledge that the outcome may bring some 'bad guys' to power.  Don't suppose that the bankrupt strategies of client armies supplemented by timid injections of American ground forces are better than the less risky policy of supporting local forces but letting them choose their own futures. And do grow up about 'bad guys'.

James Foley: An outrageous death among many others

Of course the outrage is justified.  It's not hypocritical either, but it's narrowly focused.  We don't exactly accept comparable brutalities like those committed by Western powers.  However we're so used to them, we omit them from any moral balance sheet.

The brutalities are the oldest of old news: when the US conducts air strikes, it knows with certainty that civilians will be killed.  It conducts them anyway.  As result, living innocents get their arms torn off, their eyes blasted away, their legs severed.   The US also knows some of these people aren't adults.  They are children.  (These acts of the Obama régime are no worse than many acts of many other régimes, North and South, East and West, throughout recent history.)

Again, to be clear:  the US acts with certain knowledge of the atrocious mutilations and killings that will result from its actions.  If I blow up a house when I know I will shred or squash to death several innocent people, it doesn't really matter if I just 'intended' or 'wanted' to kill a someone I considered a very bad person.  I am judged a murderer and held responsible for these crimes.   That's a judgment often and rightly visited on Israel, with appropriate repugnance.   But I never, I mean never, see that holding-a-dead-rat-by-the-tail disgust at the US among those who vent their outrage at Foley's killers.

IS commits in-your-face atrocities.  The US commits off-stage atrocities.  The US victims suffer exactly the same agonies, are just as human, just as innocent, and end up just as maimed or dead.  They gush blood; their guts spill out into the dust. If you cannot maintain ongoing repugnance at US actions - and I'm not saying you should - don't get all shocked by IS actions.  It's not a good idea.  Better to understand that no, not everyone is outraged at Foley's death, quite the contrary, and they are no more morally skewed than you are.   Unlike you, they do keep in mind what the US has done off-stage, and how its lovely decent Western allies hardly make a peep about it, and about how the lovely sensitive Western public is equally unperturbed.

To bear that in mind is maybe an important step in promoting a world in which James Foley doesn't meet a brutal death at brutal hands.  To reduce brutality probably requires an honest understanding of what it is.

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.