An enemy or not an enemy *UPDATED*
Bookworm on Mar 03 2008 at 11:51 am | Filed under: Israel, Palestinians
My father, who was a veteran of World War II and the Israeli War of Independence, was still alive during the first Gulf War. I vividly remember his comment that it was idiotic how much the press made of how nice Americans were and how our troops were so good that they didn’t want to hurt the enemy. He said, “You fight wars to win. That was the problem in Vietnam. The Americans never fought to win.” My Dad was not talking about burning down all the buildings, slaughtering all the citizens, destroying the food crops and sowing the fields with salt. Instead, he was saying that treating a war as a police action, where you’re trying to be a bit punitive without a clear goal in mind (their surrender, your victory), is a waste of time and lives, both in the short and in the long term.
I thought of that when I read this morning that the Israelis, after two days of banging away, had already withdrawn from Gaza. Keep in mind that Israel didn’t go into Gaza on a whim. She went in because the Gazans had been launching thousands of rockets against Israel. I don’t know about you, but I see what the Gazans did as as an act of war. Certainly we would consider that we were at War if Canada suddenly went berzerk and launched thousands of missiles at US soil. In the face of this war and the murderous intent behind it, Israel retaliated by taking out some buildings and killing 70 people. After the yada, yada about each death being a tragedy, reconsider those 70 people, and keep in mind that they come from a society that doesn’t celebrate life, but celebrates death — it sees death as a religious martyrdom, a civic duty, and a useful propaganda tool. So, while family and friends may mourn the death of the individual, Gaza as a whole has to be delighted that the sole consequence for a year of unlimited missile firing into Israel was 70 propaganda moments. Yay!
Israel continue to be on the receiving end of those rocket launches until (a) she takes seriously the fact that you don’t defeat an enemy with the war equivalent of lashes with a wet noodle, and (b) she begins to understand that these limited incursions, rather than demoralizing Gazans, give them hope. And while the Gazan rocket launches, so far, have been somewhat limited in their scope, merely killing or wounding a few of the citizens that Israel values most when they are alive, not dead,that’s going to change one of these days. The rockets will get bigger and stronger and will be able to travel further (certainly with Iran and Syria’s help). Even if they don’t get better, there’s going to be a lucky hit on a nursery school or crowded apartment building. And then, even as Israel mourns her dead, the Gazans will be dancing in the street.
UPDATE: Alan Dershowitz looks at the Muslim death-cult to which I allude, above:
As more women and children are recruited by their mothers and their religious leaders to become suicide bombers, more women and children will be shot at — some mistakenly. That too is part of the grand plan of our enemies. They want us to kill their civilians, who they also consider martyrs, because when we accidentally kill a civilian, they win in the court of public opinion. One Western diplomat called this the “harsh arithmetic of pain,” whereby civilian casualties on both sides “play in their favor.” Democracies lose, both politically and emotionally, when they kill civilians, even inadvertently. As Golda Meir once put it: “We can perhaps someday forgive you for killing our children, but we cannot forgive you for making us kill your children.”
Civilian casualties also increase when terrorists operate from within civilian enclaves and hide behind human shields. This relatively new phenomenon undercuts the second basic premise of conventional warfare: Combatants can easily be distinguished from noncombatants. Has Zahra Maladan become a combatant by urging her son to blow himself up? Have the religious leaders who preach a culture of death lost their status as noncombatants? What about “civilians” who willingly allow themselves to be used as human shields? Or their homes as launching pads for terrorist rockets?
The traditional sharp distinction between soldiers in uniform and civilians in nonmilitary garb has given way to a continuum. At the more civilian end are babies and true noncombatants; at the more military end are the religious leaders who incite mass murder; in the middle are ordinary citizens who facilitate, finance or encourage terrorism. There are no hard and fast lines of demarcation, and mistakes are inevitable — as the terrorists well understand.
UPDATE II: This LGF post exposes the dual enemies Israel faces, in the media and amongst the Palestinians, and explains why polite “police actions” will never quiet either the Palestinians or the press.
Email This Post To A Friend
5 Responses to “An enemy or not an enemy *UPDATED*”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Some of the things I read surpasses all of my understanding. One I read seemed to be calculating the response solely based upon the number of casualties. It seems to be that an act of war is not an act of war unless it kills enough people. What a strange concept.
After the yada, yada about each death being a tragedy
The death of an enemy of humanity is never a tragedy, Book. All rules have exemptions.
I have said this before and I will say it again. Israelis and Jews in general and in the specific, lack bloodlust. The desire to kill and destroy one’s enemies is sealed off by Judaism’s teachings and history. Making them the target of choice for people throughout history that wish to attack a group but don’t want to face being attacked by that group.
It may have been indeed true that God chose the Jews as the Chosen Ones, simply in order to demonstrate to us, the rest of humanity, the price of weakness and meekness. So that people can freely choose to survive or not, with no excuse that they were mislead into things.
It is simply not normal that any group of people, especially a tight knit community that is the Jews, can suffer so many attacks without striking back in kind. America is one thing, we have no more terrorist attacks on US soil that reminds us of what we are fighting. Israel is reminded of that every day and has been reminded of who they are fighting for the last 2 milleniums. Individual Israelis prove the gamut of the human spectrum. But Israel as a nation with a national character is inevitably without the fire of destruction. Jews can create but they refuse to learn the arts of destruction. Thus ensuring that the creations of Jews are always temporary and ephemeral. Everytime they worked to build a future in one country, they would get kicked out and have to start over precisely because the Jews refuse to learn the arts of destruction.
America is what she is only because Americans did not refuse to learn the arts of creation and destruction. A nation or an individual is never complete without knowing and studying and practicing both. That’s why the Islamic war against humanity would have been an easy enemy to destroy had not the West been weakened by the sabotage of the Soviets and Communism. THe Islamic war for Hell is focused on death, not life, because they refuse to learn arts of creation, choosing instead to devote their energies to destruction alone.
When I say “learn” I am also including learning through doing.
Greetings:
The infantry experience tends to simplify things. Once I asked my favorite platoon sergeant where he preferred to shoot the bad guys. His answer was, succinctly, “In the back.”
I’m a little late to this comment thread, but it deals with a subject of importance. So take this for what it’s worth.
I may be wrong about this citation, but I believe the following theory comes from a history professor, Robert Bates. The theory is that fundamental cultural changes are often the result of an overwhelmingly destructive military defeat. The war must have been one in which the vast majority of the population was purposefully, and in the main, willingly incorporated, physically and mentally, into the war effort. Thus, a defeat under these conditions is an indisputable and profound national failure. It reaches all the way to the most elemental level of national culture, which leads the defeated nation into a fundamental reorganization of its society.
Let’s take Germany as the most recent example. WWI was a military defeat, but it did not involve a thorough societal re-examination. Since German soldiers still occupied part of France at war’s end, it was easier to look afterwards for scapegoats, i.e. new enemies, than examine the weaknesses of Prussian military heritage and culture. After WWII, that escape valve no longer existed. Germans were forced to examine how their culture had led them to the cul de sac of military defeat and societal humiliation. The German culture has changed profoundly in the last 60 years. One more ancillary point is that the collapse of East Germany was not a profound moral and ethical defeat for its citizens and, as a consequence, the socialist Left Party (from areas which were once East Germany) is gaining ground within the West German citizenry already receptive to restraints on nationalist and individualist ideas (a consequence of WWII). A similar story could be told regarding Japan.
The point of this story is that the Israeli-Arab conflict in Palestine – I fear – is one which will only be resolved by the cleansing of all-out war and the realignment of the defeated culture along lines dictated by the values reflective of the winning side. There simply seems no escape from this eventuality when one of the competing sides cannot – from a honor-shame cultural perspective – abide the continued physical existence of the other. Unfortunately, much tragedy is yet to be written in the affairs of that part of the world.