I got into an email exchange with a Jewish friend who happens to be progressive on every issue except Israel.
He did not defend the killing of the babies in Gaza but came awfully close. He wrote that “while I share your horror about those Palestinian children, they were not intentionally targeted by the IDF. The goal was the kill militants not kids. That makes a difference, no?”
No.
I rewrote his sentence this way, ”while I share your horror about those Israeli children, they were not intentionally targeted by the Palestinians. The goal was to kill soldiers not kids. That makes a difference, no?”
Still NO.
I added: “To those kids who are gone forever and, even more, to their parents who will never get over the deaths of their kids, the the intention of the person who sent the missile or bomb is irrelevant. If a child is killed by a drunk driver, does it matter that the driver was drunk and would never have intended to kill a child?”
I got no response.
I apply this logic to the killing of kids in Gaza, in Israel, on settlements and anywhere. Yes, there are accidents but is lobbing a missile into a populated area or carrying an explosive into a shopping mall ever an accident?
Yesterday, I posted a piece by a professor on the concept of just war. One key point jumped out at me. An attack is justified ONLY if every other means has been exhausted.
The Israeli government not only refuses to deal with Hamas, it even prevents the United States, the EU and whoever else it can from dealing with Hamas.
Suppose Netanyahu, instead of a military assault, asked a foreign government to find out exactly what Hamas wanted to end the shelling on southern Israel. The answer would have been precisely what Israel agreed to (although who knows if it intends to abide with the agreement?) in the cease-fire: lift the blockade, stop the assassinations, and get out of the border area called “no man’s land.”
Result: no dead kids or civilians of any kind.
The war was unjustifiable by any standard.
As Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat both said: the people you have to talk to in order to prevent war are your enemies not your friends. Is that so hard to grasp? Unless preventing war is not the goal at all.
Hamas has been engaging in low level violence to protest the blockade. Israel wants to make it clear to all their neighbors that a situation of long term low level violence will not be tolerated. Israel will force escalation.
I think another purpose of the war was to create a live fire demonstration using Israel’s defensive system. They wanted to test their defensive system against Iranian style missiles and Hamas had Iranian style missiles with ineffectual warheads.
The government of Israel isn’t interested in just war. It is interested in the best interest of the Israeli population.
Your point about exhaustion of alternatives is especially in point here, since the whole thing blew up when Israel executed the man with the truce in his pocket.. “We’ll kill when, where, who, and how we choose” is not a very moral statement. And a war merely to test new weapons (including Iron Dome) is even less moral. A preparation for Iran? Maybe. As to I-D, war stopped pretty briskly after Jerusalem and T-A were very, very slightly attacked.
What I find even more tragic, and something not too many are writing about, are the children who have survived their injuries, and many of the latter are horrific beyond words. Those “survivors”, and the children who have survived without sustaining injuries, this time at least, are scarred for life. Just like their parents and grandparents, the children born during earlier decades.
A group of Jewish resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto (1943) finally had enough of their 2-1/2 y/o starvation, overcrowding, catastrophic shortage of medical supplies, no jobs. No one in the entire world has condoned or tried to find excuses for their pitiful effort that killed some Germans, for which the Nazis retaliated with massive Jewish transports to concentration camps that continued late into 1944.
Today, the only difference vis a vis Gaza, and the Gaza resistance, is that no exodus to a concentration camp is necessary. Gaza -IS- an Israeli-made concentration camp. No gassings are required. American-made fighters drop misiles, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, even gas bombs. Some of the ordnance dropped during “Pillar of Offense” is so new that even the Gazans could not identify them. Gaza as a “living” military efficacy test field for Israeli and U.S. weaponry?
The Jewish WW2 nightmare finally ended after a few years. The Palestinians have no hope of seeing an end to their decades-long horror. American presidents and both parties have a ve$ted interest in maintaining the status quo.
Perhaps now is a time for an worldwide referendum condemning the Israeli governments and the cowardly governments who support them. Let’s not kid ourselves: the Palestinian Final Solution is a work-in-progress.
The Israeli government will not allow humanitarian food and medical supplies into Gaza. On the other hand there is a substantial, and growing, movement of diaspora Jews. Would it be possible for a plane-load of supplies delivered by Jews-only to cut thru the Israeli institutional intransigence? According to doctors at the Al-Shifa hospital most of the what they have to work with is wishful-thinking.
I agree with everything you say here, and the last paragraph in particular is a good idea. I would like to see some way in which Israel and Judaism could be separated. I realize that sounds daft, but I would like to see what we call diaspora Jews (which btw is a misuse of the term. They are simply people living in various places around the world as are we all, not people who have spread out from the now-contested area)–anyhow I would like to see Jews outside of Israel view it and its policies in the way we look at any country. If a groundswell of this kind of perspective could begin to grow, it might be very helpful in moving things along.
Point taken. I will refrain from the use of the confusing term “diaspora” in connection with Jews. If the misapplied term offended anyone, I apologize. Altho’ the term does apply to those who, in substantial numbers and over the years, were born and having had lived in Israel, were lucky to have the option to seek out more peaceful lands. But overall, you’re correct. Thanks for putting me right.
Not meant as a criticism. I hadn’t really thought about it until, for some reason I looked at it in your sentence and thought, that’s one of the problems (this whole right of “return” thing for instance). Netanyahu is one in a long line who have deliberately tried to make all Jews feel like a diaspora, as though they all really belong to Israel, as a way of stirring up worldwide jingoism. And it’s really not a diaspora at all any more than you could talk about a Presbyterian diaspora out of Edinburgh. And I thought, if we could start to disengage the folks around the world who are Jewish from the identification with Israel, it might help.
Martha, your last reply does not show a ‘Reply’ button, so here is my response:
It would appear that my original use of the term ‘diaspora’ was correct. Consider
this from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedi a.org/wiki/Diaspora): “the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland” or “people dispersed by whatever cause to more than one location”, or “people settled far from their ancestral homelands”.
Therefore, and pursuant to the above quote, the term includes Presbyterians from Edinburgh, as well as the majority of Jews (excluding Israeli Jews) and also, inter alia, descendants of African slaves.
In fact, the definition has been expanded: “Recently, scholarship has distinguished between different kinds of diaspora, based on its causes such as imperialism, trade or labor migrations, or by the kind of social coherence within the diaspora community and its ties to the ancestral lands. Some diaspora communities maintain strong political ties with their homeland. Other qualities that may be typical of many diasporas are thoughts of return, relationships with other communities in the diaspora, and lack of full assimilation into the host country. (Same source as above.)
But most Jewish families did not come from what is now Israel and never had anything to do with it. Just as most Presbyterians had nothing to do with Edinburgh. It’s simply the place where the institution was founded. Europe before WWII was full of Jewish families who had lived there as long as their gentile neighbors. To say that either Jews or Presbyterians have a “birthright” to the land where their institution was founded is equally artificial in both cases. There is no diaspora involved–no spreading out from a single point of origin–it is simply being used as a sentimental construct to justify a modern political land grab.
Martha Baine, if you go back far enough, like 1600 or so years, then yes, the Jewish Diaspora came from what is now Israel or Palestine. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora It’s not as if we Jews were originally Europeans. However, I would assume a lot of interbreeding with Europeans “whitened” our skin. The Jews in Ethiopia have darker skin, for instance.
Most individuals only know what the American media has been feeding them for decades, lies about the situation in the region and i place that on squarely our pathetic media. But thanks to the new media and what is available, the so called media can no longer control that medium.
The unvarnished truth M J.
No dispute from any of the usual suspects is interesting….
“I got no response.” and “Unless preventing war is not the goal at all.” Israel has never negotiated in good faith and never told the truth about its aims. The only conclusion one can draw from watching the decades of destruction is that the goal is genocide, and of course they will never tell the truth about that.
Well said and I agree 100%. This war could have been prevented a long time ago, just shows you who is in control and the extent of the power that Netanyahu holds.
Someone who should know better said to me this week that “no country would allow rockets to be fired on their citizens and do nothing about it” as if that made it OK, from a moral point of view, to attack Gaza. Israelis and friends of Israel desperately want to believe that their actions as moral and pure, and Hamas as wicked and evil. When Hamas kills Israelis it does so because of its evil motivations and therefore that is inexcusable, but when Israel kills Gazans that is excusable because Israel’s motivations were not evil. Therefore Israel is OK. I’d be less upset if supporters of Israel would tell me that the attack on Gaza was Israel’s best military option, or that it was Israel’s best political option, but they don’t ever make those claims.
That’s because they know it’s wrong, which makes the situation ever more depressing. There is no moral justification behind what the Israeli government is doing, and honestly, I think it is going to get a lot worse.
I like the way ya rephrased his query, after all the is no honorable way to exterminate kids!