Did Israel Act In Defense?

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(By Andrew MacKie-Mason)

A friend sent me this opinion article from the Michigan Daily (the University of Michigan's student paper) by Shlomo Dalezman, Jonathan Garshofsky, and Molly Rosen. Unfortunately, there are issues right from the start of this article that undermine its credibility.

Between Saturday, Nov. 10 and Wednesday, Nov. 14, various terrorist groups led by Hamas fired more than 100 rockets from the Gaza Strip into civilian areas in Israel without justifiable provocation.

One should be suspicious of any claim that tries to say who "started" any "individual" fight within the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The interpretation is bold, but woefully short on the facts, especially for a claim that is the primary underpinning for the rest of the article. A closer look at the timeline tells a different story. Should we say that it starts with Palestinian rocket fire on November 10th? Or should we look back at the four Palestinians killed by Israeli tanks that same day? Or should we look earlier that day at the two Israeli soldiers severely injured by a Palestinian anti-tank missile?

Or should we go back to November 8th, to the Israeli tanks and bulldozer that crossed the border into Gaza, triggering a fight that killed a 12- or 13-year-old Palestinian child? Or should we go back even further to November 4th, when Israeli security forces shot an unarmed, mentally disturbed Palestinian man who strayed too close to the border, and then prevented Palestinian medical teams from reaching and caring for the man as he lay dying? Or should we take a broader look at the overall death tolls in 2012: 25 Israelis killed by Palestinians, 314 Palestinians killed by Israel?

Pretending that the rocket launches which began on November 12 were unprovoked and the start of the conflict makes for a nice clean narrative. But reality is nowhere near so clean.

In response, Israel launched a successful targeted assassination of Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari on Wednesday. Jabari was responsible for planning numerous terrorist attacks, as well as the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

The characterization of Jabari as a clear evil serves an obvious political purpose, but a more honest article would have acknowledged the other pictures of Jabari's role in the conflict. He appears to have been involved in serious peace talks with Israel at the time he was killed, as well as recently acting to prevent rocket fire from Gaza into Israel. I don't know which image of Jabari is more accurate, but I doubt the authors of the Michigan Daily article know either. I do know which image was more useful for their political ends.

This also suggests that the targeted assassination of Jabari was Israel's first response to unilateral Palestinian aggression from November 10th to November 14th. That's far from the truth, however:

• On November 10th, Israel tanks killed four Palestinians and injured 38 more, one of whom died three days later. Israel also attacked a Palestinian rocket crew killing one person. Additional Israeli action on the same day killed one person, and injured 11 more, including a 10-year-old child.
• On November 11th, Israeli attacks killed one Palestinian civilian and injured dozens. Another Palestinian was injured in artillery fire, and one person was killed.
• On November 12th, Israeli launched aerial assaults on three targets with no casualties.

None of these actions are deemed worthy of mention by Dalezman, Garshofsky, and Rosen. Instead, they pretend that the assassination of Jabari was the first Israeli action.

In fact, the assassination of Jabari is the only Israeli action that the authors bring up, other than a vague reference to Operation Pillar of Defense that contains no specifics. They say:

Since the assassination on Wednesday, Hamas terrorists have fired more than 800 rockets, striking numerous Israeli cities. Warning sirens blared across cities within range of Gaza, allowing Israeli civilians only seven seconds to seek cover before impact. For the first time in more than 20 years, warning sirens were sounded in Israel’s largest and most vibrant city, Tel Aviv.

But they ignore the following events:

• On November 14th, the operation that killed Jabari also struck another 19 targets in Gaza. Israeli strikes killed 8 Palestinians (including a 65-year-old man, a pregnant 19-year-old, a 7-year-old girl, and an 8-month-old boy) and wounded 90.
• On November 15th, Israel killed 11 Palestinians (including two toddlers) and injured 15. That evening, Israel had attacked a total of 250 sites in Gaza since the operation began, and the Palestinians had fired 274 rockets. In the next few hours, Israel hit another 70 targets.

The Atlantic's timeline ends on the 15th. Between then and when the Michigan students published their article on the 18th, Israel no doubt launched many more attacks.

The recent Hamas rocket fire is the latest escalation between the group, classified by the U.S. government as a terrorist organizaation [sic], and Israel.

The authors do not present an argument for classifying Hamas as a terrorist organization, which they do several times throughout the piece. Instead, they rely on the United States' classification, as though America is a neutral party in the conflict. As we all ought to know, that is hardly the case. Perhaps Hamas is rightly categorized as a group of terrorists, but the authors do not say anything to convince me of that. It's worth noting (as the authors do not) that our ally Turkey does not consider Hamas a terrorist group, and it's also worth pointing out (as the authors again do not) that Hamas is a political party and the elected government of Gaza.

Israel is certainly not perfect. Still, every country has a right and a responsibility to protect its civilians and defend itself as a sovereign nation.

The authors say nothing, of course, about whether Gaza similarly has the right and responsibility to protect its civilians and defend itself (this is an example of Zionist's selective use of the notion of self-defense). They do keep harping on the fact that Israel is a "sovereign nation" as though this provides a relevant distinction from the Palestinians, but they say nothing to justify the idea that the right to self-defense is dependent upon the formalism of being a sovereign nation.

Israel is asking for nothing outrageous, only an end to violence and a call for peace and safety. Yet, how can there be an end to the violence when Hamas’s charter explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel?

This is a deceptively simple description of Israel's goals. In reality, they similarly do not recognize the legitimacy of Hamas, and (in terms of the broader conflict) seek to hold onto land illegally seized from Palestinians in a war of aggression and in later settlements (even if one accepts the legitimacy of the founding of Israel and the land initially given to it.)

Know that Israel is not only fighting for the safety of its citizens, but also for the hope that one day Hamas will abandon its arms and its extremist agenda and join Israel in the process towards peace.

This is a particularly ironic bit of the article, since the authors do not acknowledge that Jabari was apparently engaged in negotiations about a long-term peace plan when the Israeli government decided to assassinate him.

 Dalezman, Garshofsky, and Rosen say "we must question what we see, hear and know." This advice is perhaps best applied to the picture of the conflict that they themselves present.