Downplaying Hamas
The persistence of rationalizing terrorism against Israel
18 February 2009
Whenever Israel responds to terrorist attacks, it can rely on international
bureaucrats, liberal politicians, and humanitarian aid groups to criticize
the Jewish state for its
"disproportionate<http://city-journal.org/2009/eon0109ag.html>"
response. The reaction to Operation Cast Lead—launched in late December
after three years of incessant rocket attacks on Israeli population
centers—has been even harsher than the reaction to Israel's response to the
Second Intifada of the early 2000s. Back then, Palestinian terrorism's
preferred method was dispatching suicide bombers to buses and cafés. The
carnage these attacks wrought, visible almost daily, made Israel's case for
self-defense more reasonable in the eyes of Americans who had recently
witnessed the immolation of 3,000 of their own countrymen.
When Israel erected a security fence and imposed a blockade on the Gaza
Strip following its withdrawal from the territory in 2005, Palestinian
terrorists had to find other means of killing Jews. Hamas chose crude
rockets, which, while occasionally injuring and even killing Israeli
civilians, were not nearly as lethal as men detonating themselves in crowded
shopping malls. Because of this supposed asymmetry in the metrics of the
decades-old Arab-Israel conflict, commentators from around the world have
declared Israel's response to Hamas's provocations "disproportionate." Yet
the attempt to downplay the significance of Hamas terrorism and the
expectation that Israel not respond militarily obscure the real suffering of
individual Israelis, as well as the strategic cost to Israel of unanswered
aggression.
In order to make the "disproportionate" argument, Israel's critics must
first minimize the threat that Israel responded to in the first place.
"Before proceeding, let me state that the Gaza rocket attacks are human
rights crimes, and Israel has the right to defend itself," *Mother
Jones*writer David Corn wrote—before proceeding to explain why Israel
*didn't* have a right to defend itself: "But that does not mean that in
retaliation for about a dozen deaths caused by the rockets from 2004 on, the
Israeli Defense Force ought to blow up schools and hospitals in Gaza and
kill scores of civilians." Note how casually Corn dismisses the cold-blooded
and unprovoked murder of 12 innocent people, as if they were expendable in
the greater quest for a nonexistent "peace process" with a terrorist
organization constitutionally committed to Israel's destruction. Note, too,
that Corn neglects to mention that the Israeli military takes great pains to
avoid civilian casualties. Israel does so not only on moral grounds, but
because it understands that too many people like Corn eagerly await the next
opportunity to hold it to an outrageous double standard.
Lamenting the greater number of Palestinian civilian casualties (due almost
entirely to the Hamas practice of placing its weaponry and soldiers in
hospitals and schools, and to its use of women and children as human
shields) is a perennial tactic of Israel's critics. The logic of their
position dictates that Israel should wait until some critical mass of its
own civilians is killed before eventually fighting back. But over the past
several weeks, the critics have developed a new piece of rhetoric: the Hamas
actions that provoked Israel were merely a nuisance. Writing in *The
American Prospect*, Dana Goldstein described Hamas's "rocket fire" as
"rag-tag," making the militants who delivered some 7,000 rockets over a
period of just over three years sound like the Little Rascals. Matthew
Yglesias of the Center for American Progress made that comparison even more
explicit, recounting an anecdote in which a "kid" had thrown a rock at him
while he was riding his bike around Washington, D.C. The punk missed. "I
suppose if he'd hit me in just the right way I could have been knocked down
and injured," Yglesias acknowledged. But even if Yglesias had been hit,
"obviously it wouldn't have been right for me to stop, get off my bike, pull
a bazooka out of my bag, and blow the houses from which the rock emanated to
smithereens while shouting 'self-defense!' and 'double-effect!'"
Analogies are perilous instruments. Despite Yglesias's insistence that he
wasn't making an analogy, his comparison, if you will, is preposterous. As *
Reason*'s Michael Moynihan pointed
out<http://www.reason.com/blog/show/131015.html>,
for Yglesias's rough-neighborhood allegory to approximate the reality of
what was happening with Hamas and Israel, there would have to be hundreds of
kids throwing dozens of rocks and causing actual damage—not just the terror
that comes from being the possible victim of a hurled stone, but death,
maiming, damage to property, and trauma (a recent study found that most of
the children aged 4 to 18 in Sderot—the Israeli town most affected by
Hamas's rocket attacks—suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome). For
Yglesias, however, it seems that a terrorist organization's launching
rockets into sovereign territory just isn't that big a deal and that the
Israelis ought to suck it up.
Such minimization of Israeli suffering abounds. A *Guardian* news
report<http://www.mg.co.za/article/2007-09-20-hostilities-resumed>referred
to the rocket attacks as a "manageable irritant." Pat Buchanan
compared Gaza with a concentration camp and waved off "these little rockets
that didn't kill anybody" (he's wrong, of course). Writing in Canada's
*National
Post*, Jeet Heer
described<http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/01/09/jeet-heer-israel-struggles-with-youth-wing-of-the-diaspora.aspx>Hamas
as "a raggedy half-starved guerrilla force whose homemade missiles are
usually as dangerous as firecrackers." And missing in all of these analyses
is mention of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal whom Hamas kidnapped in
2006 and whose captivity it has rubbed in the face of the Israeli public
ever since.
For their "disproportionate" argument to make sense, Israel's detractors
have had to minimize, to an almost comical extent, what its citizens have
had to endure over the past three years. They portray a bona fide war
crime—the deliberate firing of rockets into civilian areas—as a minor
irritant no more threatening or bothersome than black ice or a loud
neighbor. But does one really expect that Pat Buchanan would sit still even
if his neighbors, say, played rap music at all hours of the night? If
Matthew Yglesias's neighbors began firing bullets—sporadically and
imprecisely—into his
"flophouse<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/fashion/09bloghouse.html>,"
wouldn't he, a proud supporter of the Second Amendment, have the right to
draw his own weapon and fire back in self-defense?
These may be "irritating" questions for those who criticize, from the
comfort of their keyboards thousands of miles away, the actions of a
beleaguered democracy under siege from terrorists—terrorists suborned, in
turn, by a theocratic regime building a nuclear capacity with the express
aim of wiping that democracy from the face of the earth. But they are hardly
as irritating as Hamas's war crimes, or the pedants who excuse them.
*James Kirchick is an assistant editor of *The New Republic.
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