Kill for Peace Updated* Prof. Paul Eidelberg Back in February 2005, I proposed on this program a new policy for Israel: “Kill for Peace.” “Kill for peace” means (a) kill the leadership of the enemy, and (b) devastate the enemy enough to eliminate his incentive towage war. In the long run, this will result in fewer Jewish as well as fewer enemy casualties. But the military objective must be nothing short of victory. 1. Israel’s three-week military “Operation Cast Lead” in the Gaza stopped short of this objective when Barack Obama became President in January 2009. The following month, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected Prime Minister, and four months later he endorsed a Palestinian state. Did he understand—did anyone understand—that that endorsement means that Israel had virtually lost the war PLO chief Yasser Arafat started in September 2000? An update of my 2005 report is needed. Again I will cite Ralph PetersFighting for the Future (1999), adding insights from his sequel Beyond Terror (2002). 2. Peters, a retired American army Intelligence officer, who traveled and studied in dozens of countries, worked in the U.S. Executive office. He is an outstanding military theorist. What he says about U.S. foreign policy failings very much applies to Israel. 3. If there is a single power the U.S. underestimates it’s the power of collective hatred. This hatred animates Israel’s enemies: the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority and Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. Neither Americans nor Jews understand the “delicious appeal of hatred.” They do not understand “that man is a killer.” Peters recalls the genocides and massacres of the twentieth century, not only in Nazi Germany, but also in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and Iraq, to name only a few. He sees that at least a minority of human beings “enjoy killing.” Although that minority may be small, “it does not take many enthusiastic killers to trigger a genocidal war.” Israel’s enemies consist of such killers. 4. Peters faults U.S. governments for sending soldiers into conflicts in which the rules imposed on them leave them practically defenseless, or ensure unnecessary casualties. Think of Iraq, but also of Israel’s Second War in Lebanon. Peters wisely points out: “current military ethics are the least humane thing about us”! It’s a futile and fatal ethics, for despite the extraordinary measures the Israel Defense Forces took to avoid collateral damage in Operation Cast Lead, Israel was condemned by the UN Human Rights Council for war crimes! Yes, and Hamas is rearming. 5. American and Israeli governments play by civilized rules, some encoded in our own laws or in international laws, others in long-established customs. Our enemies don’t give a damn about our laws and customs. They use women and children as human shields. 6. Americans and Israelis have become “talk-talk” and “word-oriented” people while we face “action-oriented” enemies. Under the Obama dispensation, U.S. officials can’t even use such words as “jihadists” or “Muslim extremists”! Although Israel has not sunk to this level of stupidity, Netanyahu’s policy of “reciprocity” suggests that Arabs are like us, that they want peace, even though their leaders have repeatedly said, “peace means the destruction of Israel.” 7. Of profound significance, Peters scorns the moral relativism of academia and the moral cowardice underlying “political correctness.” He boldly describes Islam’s rulers as “Bigoted, hopelessly corrupt, close-minded, uneducated, psychologically infantile, self-important, and incapable of dealing not only with the demands and developments of the twenty-first century, but even with the demands of the twentieth….” He remarks that “the stasis of Islamic civilization is the most colossal failure of our time …” Islam, he avows, is “a civilization that is anti-meritocratic, that oppresses and torments women, that mocks the rule of law, neglects education, and lacks a work ethic.” “Flawlessly intolerant and blithely cruel, the Islamic world does far more harm to its own people than it has done … to the West.” Peters’ mind is free, discerning, strong, proud. 8. Cultural relativism emasculates the West, prevents the West from affirming its moral superiority. “We even use the wrong words to describe the Arabs who kill us.” We call them “terrorists” so often that the word has lost shock-value as well as strategic meaning. Peters calls them “warriors,” because he wants us to take terrorists more seriously. He speaks of different types of warriors, because if we don’t understand the enemy, we won’t win the war against them. a. One pool of warriors comes from the underclass, a male who has no stake in peace, a loser with little education and little legal earning power. It’s easy to recruit such warriors. These warriors are bloody savages. b. A second pool of warriors consists of young boys and young men who join and fight for the Arab cause, and whose savagery increases with the duration of the conflict. c. A third pool of warriors consists of opportunists who profit from the conflict. They traffic in arms and drugs. This was evident in Yasser Arafat, who was called a “moderate” by wishful thinking Jews and Americans. So they now regard Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas. d. A fourth pool of warriors consists of true believers like Osama bin Laden. These warriors fight out of religious conviction, and become infected with bloodlust. They are the products of a failed civilization that blames the Americans and Zionism for Islam’s inability to adapt to modernity. They burn with resentment and the desire for revenge. 9. Negotiation with warriors is sheer folly. We should not negotiate with warriors until they surrender. Until then, they must be killed. Nevertheless, foolish and feckless American and Israeli leaders would have us believe that all men want peace, that all conflicts can be resolved through compromise and understanding. But contrary to Obama’s and Netanyahu’s rhetoric, warriors have no stake in peace, would be bored by peace, would lose honor or be out of a job with peace. You find such warriors in Fatah, Hamas, and Hezbollah. 10. To compound the moral obscurantism, both liberals and conservatives talk about a war against terrorism when in truth it is a war against Islam, a culture that breeds terrorists. 11. Americans refuse to understand that certain human beings cannot accept that their culture is failing. As Syrian-born psychiatrist Wafa Sultan has affirmed, Muslims don’t realize that they have been conditioned by a hate-filled and pathological mode of thought and behavior. They want someone to blame for Islam’s failure, and they want revenge on that someone. 12. Western elites have been so stupefied by moral relativism that they cannot think of a failed culture like Islam. They don’t know how to confront “warriors whose sole motivation to refrain from killing is the fear of being killed”—nay, “since many of them love death, the only deterrent is to kill them in sufficient numbers before they kill us. You cannot bargain or compromise with warriors,” says Peters. You can’t “teach them a lesson.” 13. But such is the pervasive influence of moral relativism in democratic societies that American and Israeli leaders want to talk to their enemies. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they continue to believe that all men want peace. This is nonsense. 14. Like overindulged people in the West, Muslims have succumbed to the desire for material possession as a substitute for practical accomplishment. This has stunted the growth of Islamic culture. Peters sees this occurring in the American welfare class. He points out that the concept of “having” has been dissociated from the concept of “earning.” This fosters the notion of “victimization” in the Third World, a rhetorical weapon Muslims and liberal-leftists use against guilt-ridden colonialists and capitalists. Barack Obama is fueling this adolescent escape from responsibility. We are treating killers with compassion which only magnifies their contempt and bloodlust. 15. The policy of “kill for peace” requires devastating the enemy to an extent that will purge his incentive towage war. I am not contemplating the devastation the Allies inflicted on Hiroshima and Dresden. But bothJapan and Germany are now peace-loving democracies. 16. To conclude, ponder certain principles of Ralph Peters: a. Military commanders should extract a clear mission statement from decision makers. b. Impose rules of engagement that favor our forces, not the enemy. c. Deploy more combat power than you think you need, then increase it. d. Operate offensively, never passively or defensively, and operate continuously. e. Do the job fast. f. From first to last, fight and win the information war—on all fronts. 17. I would stress: eliminate the enemy’s leadership as soon as possible. 18. Last but not least, America’s and Israel’s political leaders should inspire our soldiers with the noble idea that we are fighting for the moral truths and spiritual values of Western civilization, the source of our freedom, our dignity, our scientific progress, and economic prosperity. ____________________ *Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, April 19, 2010. ================ TIME FOR ISRAEL AND AMERICA TO END THEIR POLICY OF RESTRAINT ++++++++++++ANOTHER EXAMPLE PAUL AND ME Mida K’Negged Mida Prof. Paul Eidelberg The State Israel is celebrating Independence Day—its sixty-second birthday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has congratulated the nation for its great accomplishments in science, technology, medicine, and the arts. Alas, not a word about the unprecedented growth of yeshivas—a veritable renaissance in Jewish learning—the return of hundreds of countless Jews to the Torah. The great rabbi Sa'adia Gaon has said Israel is a nation only in or by virtue of its Torah. Mr. Netanyahu’s failure to sanctify God’s Name on Independence Day is unsurprising. There is a price to be paid for this ingratitude. Notice that Israel, step by step, has been losing its independence, for which loss Israel’s prime minister is partly responsible. Mida K’negged mida or “measure for measure” is a basic Torah principle. Unfortunately, hardly anyone has connected Mr. Netanyahu’s June 14 endorsement of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria and his subsequent humiliation by Barack Obama. At their scheduled meeting in the White House on March 20, the president unceremoniously dumped the prime minister for dinner! This was not merely a personal insult. Obama displayed contempt for the State of Israel—America’s most reliable ally. The present writer had previously referred to Netanyahu’s endorsement of a Palestinian state in Israel’s heartland as a Hillul HaShem—a desecration of God’s Name. In my book A Jewish Philosophy of History(2004), I maintained that Israel’s current degradation may be traced to its government’s failure to translate the miracle of the Six-Day War of June 1967 into public policy. Before elaborating, ponder a few remarks from Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War. On Day One, in little more than half an hour, the Israel Air Force destroyed 204 planes—half of Egypt’s air force—all but nine of them on the ground (while destroying six Egyptian air fields, four in Sinai and two in Egypt). “The Israelis were stunned. No one ever imagined that a single squadron could neutralize an entire air base.” On Day Two, Col. Avraham Adan, watching the rout of the Egyptian army, was “stupefied.” “You ride past burnt-out vehicles and suddenly you see this immense army, too numerous to count, spread out of a vast area as far as your eyes can see … It was not a pleasant feeling, seeing that gigantic enemy and realizing that you’re only a single battalion of tanks.” Moshe Dayan was no less puzzled: “Though Israel had gained command of the skies, Egypt’s cities were not bombed, and the Egyptian armored units at the front could have fought even without air support” (ibid.). Gen. Avraham Yoffe: “There was no planning before the war about what the army would do beyond the al-’Arish-Jabal Libni axis, not even a discussion. Nobody believed that we could have accomplished more or that the [Egyptian] collapse would be so swift” (ibid.). But as we read in Leviticus 26:8: “Five of you shall chase away a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight …” Serious recognition of the miracle required the government to declare Jewish sovereignty over Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, which Israel repossession along with the Sinai and the Golan Heights. But to fully appreciate this miracle, a brief survey of contemporary circumstances is in order. In June 1967 the United States was bogged down in Vietnam and was very much concerned about Soviet expansion in the Middle East in general, and Soviet penetration of the oil-rich Persian Gulf in particular (on which the entire economy of the West, indeed, the world depends). Recall that Egypt and Syria and Libya were then Soviet clients, and that Egypt had sought to gain control of strategically situated Yemen. Recall, too, that Israel employed French planes and weaponry in its stunning victory over Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. That victory awakened Washington to Israel’s strategic value, for it resulted in the closing of the Suez Canal to the Soviet Black Sea fleet. This important arm of the Soviet navy was then compelled to sail through the Straits of Gibraltar and around the Cape of Good Hope in order to project Soviet power along the east African littoral and in the Indian Ocean, the sea-lanes of oil tankers from the Persian Gulf. Israel’s superb air force could also help protect NATO’s southern flank in the eastern Mediterranean. America needed a strong and stable ally in the volatile region of the Middle East. A minuscule Israel, confined to its precarious 1949 armistice lines, could hardly serve this function. Accordingly, in a now declassified secret memorandum dated June 27, 1967, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended that Israel retain control of the Judean and Samarian mountain ridges overlooking its vulnerable population centers on the coastal plain, as well as control of Gaza, the Golan Heights, and a portion of the southern Sinai to secure Israel’s access to the Red Sea through the Strait of Tiran. Viewed in this light, only a feckless and faithless government would trivialize the historical significance of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War by not declaring Jewish sovereignty over Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. In fact, it was entitled to do so both under Israeli and international law (as Howard Grief has shown in his monumental work The Legal Foundations and Borders of Israel under International Law). In any event, ever since Yitzhak Rabin signed the Israel-PLO Agreement of September 1993, Israeli prime ministers have been engaged in undoing the miracle of the Six-Day War. Has it been left for Benjamin Netanyahu to complete this Hillul HaShem? A terrible thought to contemplate on Israel’s Independence Day.
By Bernard J. Shapiro (2001)
Freeman Center For Strategic Studies
"He who is merciful when he should be cruel will in the end be cruel when he should be merciful."...Midrash Samuel (Jewish rabbinic text from early Middle Ages)
From the very early days of the Haganah and continuing with the emerging Israel Defense Forces (IDF), there was a policy of self-restraint or havlagah. This policy mandated that defenders could only return fire, hold their positions, and never to engage in counter-terror. This policy was based on the false premise that the Arab masses did not support the war against the Yishuv (the Jewish population before independence) and then the State of Israel and would be brought into the conflict if Israeli forces were too aggressive.
There were some good and practical reasons for restraint in the early days. There was legitimate fear that the British would cut off immigration if the Jews were to go on the offensive against the Arabs. Havlagah was essentially a Haganah (Labor/Socialist) policy and many supporters of Jabotinsky's Revisionist Zionist movement broke off from them to form fighting units (Irgun Zvai Leumi and Stern) unrestrained by that policy.
The modern IDF was dominated by Labor and quickly adopted the policy of restraint and the concept of "purity of arms" as its official doctrine. The later reinforced the former by adding that a soldier should never have to obey an illegal order to commit some atrocity. The enemy, including prisoners of war, should be treated with dignity and civilian populations should be spared as much harm as possible, even if this causes greater Israeli casualties. There was some flexibility in this strict moral code.
This policy of restraint may have been practical during the pre-state days and even during the early years of Israeli independence. These periods were characterized by weakness and relative dependence on foreign goodwill. Following the Six Day War in 1967, the need for havlagah decreased and the damage it caused began to become more evident. Israel became the preeminent power in the Middle East, yet failed to grasp the strategic opportunities that came with such dominance. Here are some of the historical highlights of the failed policy of restraint:
1. Following the Six Day War (1967) and the capture of Jerusalem, Moshe Dayan turned over control of Judaism's most sacred place, the Temple Mount, to Moslem authorities. He did it to appease their sensibilities to the Israeli capture of the city. Jewish rights were ignored to please the defeated Arabs, who had plotted our destruction. Dayan also prevented a mass exodus of Arabs from YESHA, which ultimately led to the problems we face today.
2. During the War of Attrition with Egypt (1969-70), the Israeli forces adopted primarily a defensive posture. They built a system of bunkers (The Bar Lev Line) along the Suez Canal. Israeli soldiers were heavily pounded daily by Egyptian artillery. Finally they began to use aircraft to strike targets deep into Egypt. The policy of restraint kept them from striking anything but military and minor economic targets. Israeli soldiers died because the government was inhibited from causing Egypt 'real' pain.
3. The Yom Kippur War of 1973 is a classic example of restraint run amok. Israeli military intelligence did not fail to recognize the approaching danger as has been the common account. In fact, Israel's leaders made the political decision not to utilize the great power of the IDF to crush the Egyptian and Syrian armies that they KNEW were planning to attack. Thousands of Israeli soldiers died needlessly.
4. The Camp David Accord with Egypt was another example of the failure to exert Israeli power. The oil fields of Sinai would have given Israel economic independence from America. The cost of redeployment from Sinai placed Israel in almost permanent debt to American diplomacy (often pro-Arab). Did Israel achieve anything worthwhile at Camp David? I think not and believe history will bear me out. Egypt has become one of the most ant-Semitic and hostile Arab countries in the world. As a result of Camp David, the Egyptian army now threatens Israel, having been equipped with the most modern American weapons.
5. During the War in Lebanon (1982), the IDF reached Beirut and then failed to complete the destruction of the PLO. Our enemies were allowed to escape and prepare to fight another day. Why didn't the Israeli Navy sink the ships loaded with PLO troops (including Arafat) as they fled Beirut? RESTRAINT!
6. In 1987 the intifada began and the Israeli forces showed great restraint and thus were incapable of crushing it. Of course, Israel received no credit in the Western media for such restraint. The failure to defeat this uprising began a process of demoralization among the Israeli population.
7. The Persian Gulf War (1991) and the SCUD attacks on Israel led to further demoralization. The failure to adequately respond to Iraq's aggression and the humiliating sealed rooms, led to a rapid decline in Israeli morale and desire to defend itself. More and more Israelis began to feel impotent, weak and fatigued with the continuous battle for survival. The Oslo Accords were the logical outcome of this depression and feeling that they could not sustain the struggle.
8. The Oslo Accords (1993) were the ultimate failure of the policy of restraint. Israel like America actually was very powerful. The IDF was unequaled in the Middle East while the US was the most powerful nation in the world. Yet despite this power, Israel's leaders, were ready to grant equal status to a band of murderers and ultimately create a state of "Palestine" which would challenge its right to the Land and its capital of Jerusalem.
9. Israeli forces in Lebanon should have been given a free hand to 'punish' all those who facilitate attacks on them including Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. There should be no more agreements that tie Israeli hands.
The damage caused by havlagah (restraint) has been immense and it far past time to reverse that policy. Americans have been viciously attacked in Africa, Yeman, and Saudi Arabia. The attempt to try to criminalize terrorism has been a dreadful mistake. Terrorism is sponsored by states who allow their territory and funds to help the organization of terrorist. The Oslo agreement allowed Arafat to set up terrorist headquarters near Israel's heartland. From there he sent terrorists to attack Israel.With plausible deniability he claims "he is not responsible."
Dr. Aaron Lerner of the Independent Media Review & Analysis in Israel reports that Palestinians are celebrating attacks against USA across the West Bank Israel Radio reported this afternoon that young Palestinians across the West Bank are celebrating the terrorist attacks against the USA - waving Palestinian flags and handing out candy. There are reports of shooting in some places but it is not clear if it is Palestinian police trying to clear streets of celebrants or Palestinians shooting in the air. The largest crowd, according to Israel Radio, is in the Balata refugee camp.
The American State Department policy of equating terrorist and defender equally must stop. This kind of moral equivalency allows the terrorist to believe he can do no wrong.
Both America and Israel must massively and disproportionately retaliate for terrorist attacks. The murderers of Americans and Israelis must be stopped. It is not impossible but it will be a long and difficult battle.
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Bernard J. Shapiro is Executive Director of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies and editor of THE MACCABEAN ONLINE, its monthly Internet magazine.
Monday 19 April 2010
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