This is a must read by Professor Jerome Slater, of the State University of New York at Buffalo, which just appeared in International Security, the Quarterly Journal of the Belfer Center at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
The article is about the 2008-9 Gaza war known as “Cast Lead” but just as the television program MASH was ostensibly about the Korean War but REALLY about Vietnam, this piece is about the war that took place last week. I could not resist printing the conclusion. But you must read the whole piece.
Here is the link, which, for some reason isn’t live. Just copy it and read. This could be the definitive piece on the morality and even legality of this horrible war.
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/project/58/quarterly_journal.html
Cast Lead violated every major principle of just war morality. Israel did not have a just cause in Cast Lead, despite the (largely ineffective) Palestinian terrorist attacks on its territory, for one can hardly divorce those attacks from the context of more than forty years of Israeli occupation, repression, and killings; the destruction of governmental, economic, public health, educational, and other societal institutions and infrastructures; the deliberate impoverishment of the Gazan people; the drastic restrictions on the importation of food, coldly calculated by the Israeli government so that they would fall short of causing mass starvation but be highly punitive; and the various humiliations, often deliberate, inflicted on the civilian population as a matter of routine.
To be sure, because the Palestinian armed resistance to the Israeli occupation frequently has taken the form of terrorism, the argument that Israel still could not claim a just cause or a right of self-defense is necessarily morally complex. For example, some have argued that no state can ignore terrorist attacks on its territory, and this is undoubtedly true if understood as a statement of the facts of life. As a moral argument, however, it would be far more persuasive if Israel had no way to end terrorism other than the use of massive force.
As I have demonstrated, even if Israel had a genuine claim to the just cause principle of self-defense, Cast Lead would have violated another crucial just war requirement—that the use of force is allowable only as a last resort after all nonviolent alternatives have been exhausted. As the record shows, Israel broke a series of cease-fires with Hamas and refused even to explore Hamas’s offers for a long-term truce and possibly even for a political settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Its methods aside, Operation Cast Lead was a war crime, the crime of international aggression. It also violated every principle governing morally acceptable methods of warfare, because Israel’s deliberate destruction of Gazan political, economic, and societal infrastructures and institutions was, at a minimum, grossly indiscriminate. The overwhelming evidence of how Israel has implemented the iron wall strategy throughout its history, as well as the unrefuted and detailed evidence of its behavior in Cast Lead, makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that Israel’s policies in Gaza constituted an intentional violation of the most important and widely accepted moral principle that seeks to minimize the destructiveness of warfare: that innocent civilians may never be the intended object of military attack whether directly or indirectly, as in attacks on civilian institutions and infrastructures.
So how do you think Israel should go about dealing with rocket launching sites in Gaza?
Still not answering the question. How should Israel deal with the rockets?
If the state of “Israel” would not exist, certainly in its current apartheid state, that, “question”, which reads more like an accusation, would not be necessary.
Please read my post, “It’s Party-time in the City… tonight.”, to understand what is truely being shot into Occupied Palestine by some of her indigenous people. Okay?
The problem is that you fail to acknowledge the extremism on both sides. I’ve read your post, now read mine:
http://deadstate.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/human-shields-the-cynical-and-immoral-politics-of-the-israel-palestinian-conflict-2/
DeadState;
I’ve tried to comment at least five times.. keeps getting lost…
Later, after I get some work done, I will respond (or try to) again.
I have read your post and there are a few points I take exception with– and will have to wait til later. Thank you for understanding..
Really?
No, not dodging the question; my computer keeps flipping out and changing the page on me, losing my comments. so do not assume to know me or why I say anything. That’s very presumptuous.
Now, as to your idiotic question about extremism– on BOTH sides? You’re wrong.
If you just take Cast-Lead Ops, and then this horrific Op Pillar of Cloud (original name, and you should consider what that means), and ignore all of the murders by Israel, in between, I can see how you reach your conclusions.
But, let’s just look at the past year and what’s been done TO Palestine, as opposed to Israel.
In the year leading up to this horror, Israel MURDERED sixty-nine Palestinians. They killed five in the West Bank and seriously injured scores more (including internationals). In Gaza, however, they murdered sixty-four civilians, and again; injured, maimed, many seriously, scores more.
In this same year, how many Israelis were injured or killed by this so-called rocket-fore? Zero. Absolutely zero \\
Regarding Hamas and firing qassams (which have no war-head and, of late, have NO explosive powder, even..), you are presuming that all qassams sent into what really is occupied Palestine (Settlements, which are far from being just neighborhoods), came from Hamas. This is not true. Hamas has been struggling to get all resistance fighters to stop firing these pipes with wings into the territory. Yet, Hamas is not able to stop all. They have arrested and jailed some, just as any nation should, and who does Bibi bomb, as one of the first (aside from infants and toddlers))? Well, that would be the police stations. If Bibi wants Peace, and Hamas is jailing those who would fire qassams into the stolen land, why would he bomb the police, set-up by Hamas to ensure others follow the laws.
You must also go back to who militarized (to an extent, though not enough to hurt anyone) Hamas. It was Israel. Prior to this, Hamas was solely a religious organization, not firing weapons because they did not have weapons.
So, do not take the nakbas on Palestine, particularly Gaza, as isolated cases. They continue while the world turns a blind eye. But, the people of Gaza are still burying their dead, all throughout these years, and with each funeral, Israel is creating blowback.. which they use to kill off more Palestinians, so they can point at them and say, “You see? These are the TERRORISTS!! This is what we, the poor put-upon Jews have to put up with.”
And you buy into it as do so many others.
It turns my stomach.
Stop the daily bombardments of Gaza.
Stop the periodic punitive actions a la ‘cast lead(foot)’ and ‘pillar of offense’.
Stop using misiles, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, gas bombs.
Stop bombing ambulances.
Stop the Israeli snipers from shooting Palestinian women and children at point-blank and any other range.
Stop using Palestinians as human shields.
Stop bulldozing Palestinian homes.
Stop the theft of Palestinian properties.
Stop the deliberate water and electricity shortages.
Stop tolerating the barbarity of the settlers emptying their sewage onto lower lying Palestinian villages.
Stop the israeli tanks from firing on stone-throwing kids.
Stop the separate laws for Israelis (civil) and Palestinians (military).
Stop the torture or Palestinians in israeli prisons.
Stop uprooting Palestinian olive trees.
Stop the destruction of Palestinian farms and businesses.
Stop building “for Jews only” roads.
Stop the daily border and airport harassment.
Stop the “for Palestinians only” permits to move around their own 3.5 millennia old country.
Stop the expansion of the separation wall.
Stop the theft of the world’s good-will supplies.
Stop the Israeli army from protecting the settlers who attack with weapons their Palestinian neighbors.
Stop the discrimination of Palestinian students.
Stop the Israeli army from destroying Palestinian homes commandeered for sniping duties.
Stop the Israeli army from defecating and urinating in Palestinian homes commandeered for sniping duties. (Really, Israelis are not taught basic social skills?)
(More if requested.)
The above “Stop…” laundry list is a reply to Deadstate: “Still not answering the question. How should Israel deal with the rockets?”
Agreed. But you’re dodging the question. In the realtime event of Hamas launching rockets into Sderot, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, how should Israel respond? It’s a simple question.
They, the “israelis” should simply shut-down the settlements (or vacate them) and leave for other ground, which Palestine actually agreed to back in 1967.
As long as “israel” (stolen from the bible to convince others of their god-fgven right to the land) keeps bulldozing Palestinian homes, taking Palestinian land, encroaching with their movable borders into Palestine, this will not stop.
Add to it; Israel does not stop murdering Palestinians, and you have a recipe for blowback or for freedom.resistance fighters. Who would not expect this?
Yet the zionist state has most of the world convinced how they are right and Palestinians are savages.
This simply is not the case.
There is one SURE way for Israel to stop qassams; they must stop, first, murdering civilians in Gaza and the rest of Palestine.
Stop assuming it is, “Hamas”, too (wow, brainwashed, much?). Hamas has been the most sane in this life of terror. Hamas has actually been trying to get people to stop, but when your family has been murdered by the state (esp one which does not belong there, anyway), what would YOU DO?
I believe I would take up whatever arms I could make or procure and fight back. I would resist. I mean; really??
I do not believe sarasvatia has dodged the question. Nor have I.
The best way to deal with “rocket attacks”, which harm nobody, is to stop abusing the people of Palestine.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Okay?
Okay. I agree that Israel should stop abusing the people of Palestine. But you are saying that for Hamas to fire rockets at civilians is acceptable. That’s the contradiction I’m pointing out.
I am saying, why do you suggest they must behave contrary to human nature?
Why should Gazans and all Palestinians put up with the horrors they are dealt, via Israel? Why should they not protect their homes and families?
Why do you expect more of them than you do of the fourth-largest (fourth most well-armed) military nation in the world? Palestine does not have any sort of military. And you are expecting them to just sit there while more of their land is stolen, their homes bulldozed and built upon, and their children murdered?
That is an irrational expectation.
Why do you think this is okay?? Do you think Palestinians should just pray and all will be fine? Why do you think Israel continues to kill more Palestinians all of these years? It is to elicit a response, which happens to be in the form of metal-pipes with wings, which (as Peres or Olmers– I cannot recall which, but was an Israeli- said, recently, “hit open-fields, by design”) rarely hit and hardly injure anyone/
I do not understand why anyone believes Palestinians must ignore all of the crimes perpetrated and perpetuated against them. How can they? Why should they?
Be realistic!
Palestinian rockets were a RESPONSE to Israel’s execution of a Gaza child playing soccer and the, 2 days later, Israeli missile attack on a Palestinian peace negotiator in his car, on his way home, from Israel. That makes Israel the offensive aggressor, and the Palestinians – the defenders. Kind of like the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 vis a vis the Nazis. That’s why and how the Jews had won the world’s, sadly, short-lived, respect.
Pay attention to your own politicians such as “Abba Eban, a former Labor Party foreign minister: “The picture that emerges is of an ISRAEL WANTONLY INFLICTING EVERY POSSIBLE MEASURE OF DEATH AND ANGUISH ON CIVILIAN POPULATIONS in a mood REMINISCENT OF REGIMES which NEITHER Mr. Begin nor I would DARE TO MENTION BY NAME.” (quote from Jerome Slater’s, “Just War Moral Philosophy and the 2008–09 Israeli Campaign in Gaza”). [emphasis added]
For MUCH more read the above-referenced Harvard paper, if you dare.
Or in the immortal words of Albert Einstein:
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Truly, Sarasvatia.
It’s what I’ve been saying since I finally opened my own eyes to what Palestine deals with, daily. It took Cast-Lead ops and Jewish Voice for Peace, telling me the truth and letting me know it was not antisemitic to finally look at this truth, for me to get it.
The problem, for Israel, is that when we do open our eyes we see them for what they are: the true terrorists of the mid-east.
And we are ever sickened by our country and all western countries handing weapons of mass-destruction to the animals who rain them down on a civilian population. How I wish all Westerners would finally comprehend this truth. Yet I don’t know how to wake-up all.
I have gotten notes, in YouTube and in twitter, from past-zionists who have gotten it, though. I never expected that people would look again, based on anything I said.., yet some good is coming from my words as well as the words of others… Keep speaking out as I know the world can be a more peaceful place.
Allow Palestinians to join the U.N. as a member state, receive humanitarian aid and export goods so they can build their economy and live their lives with dignity. In other words, stop the occupation.
Or, one could simply do a copy and paste.. rather than posting the link. If the worry is to give credit where due, simply copy OP’s author (name) and other info, including where ir was originally posted.
That’s easy enough.
Hmm… how do I know that the above response is not meant as sabotage? An to top it all, the final instruction to delete the message after reading it, and presumably after also following its instructions. Hmm…or am I just getting paranoid?
MJ:
To activate a link in WP: first click to open EDIT (to the right of “Leave a comment”):
then, in the ribbon above the text box:
- click to activate the Visual tab (one of two on the R-hand side just above the ribbon),
- then click the LINK icon (upper row, 6th from right),
- then, into the just-opened pop up, input the http link into the (upper row) URL box,
- then click ADD LINK (in lower/right corner), [the pop up will close]
- the click UPDATE.
Hope it works.
Then take two aspirins and delete this Reply (since it’s unrelated to the article).