(part 2)

In most parts of the world, the first words learned by toddlers are “mommy” and “daddy.” In Sderot, they are “red alert.” The police chief of Sderot showed me hundreds of rocket fragments that had been recovered. Many bore the name of the terrorist group that had fired the deadly missiles. Although firing deliberately to kill civilians is a war crime, the terrorists who fired at the civilians of Sderot were proud enough of their crimes to “sign” their murderous weapons. They know that in the real world in which we live, they will never be prosecuted for their murders and attempted murders.

Barack Obama reacted to what he had seen in Sderot by saying that if his two daughters were exposed to rocket attacks in their own homes, he would do everything in his power to stop such attacks. I hope and believe that President Obama will take the same position he did as candidate Obama.

The residents of Sderot were demanding that their nation take action to protect them. Most seem to agree with the Israeli decision to end its occupation of the Gaza Strip, to withdraw its soldiers and settlers despite the reality that during the occupation, rocket attacks increased against the residents of Sderot. But Israel’s post-occupation military options were limited, since Hamas deliberately fires its deadly rockets from densely populated urban areas, and the Israeli Army has a strict policy of trying to avoid civilian casualties.

The firing of rockets at civilians from densely populated civilian areas is the newest tactic in the war between terrorists who love death and democracies that love life. The terrorists have learned how to exploit the morality of democracies against those who do not want to kill civilians, even enemy civilians. In one recent incident, Israeli intelligence learned that a particular house was being used to manufacture and store rockets. It was a clear military target since their rockets were being fired at Israeli civilians. But the house was also being lived in by a family. So the Israeli military phoned the house, informed the owner that it was a military target, and gave him thirty minutes to leave with his family before the house was attacked. The owner called Hamas, which immediately sent dozens of mothers carrying babies to stand on the roof of the house. Hamas knew that Israel would never fire at a home with civilians in it. They also knew that if, by some fluke, the Israeli authorities did not learn that there were civilians in the house, and fired on it, Hamas would win a public relations victory by displaying the dead civilians to the media. In this case, Israel did learn of the civilians and withheld its fire. The rockets that were spared destruction by the human shields were then used against Israeli civilians.

(to be continued)

(Part 4)

On Sunday, I spoke to the Air Force General, now retired, who worked on the planning of the attack. He told me of the intelligence and planning that had gone into preparing for the contingency that the military option might become necessary. The Israeli Air Force had pinpointed with precision the exact locations of Hamas structures, in an effort to minimize civilian casualties. Even Hamas sources acknowledged that the vast majority of those killed have been Hamas terrorists though some civilian casualties are inevitable when–as BBC’s Rushdi Abou Alouf, who is certainly not pro Israel–reported that “the Hamas security compounds are in the middle of the city.” Indeed his home balcony from which he observed the bombing of a compound was 20 meters from that military target.

There have been three types of international response to the Israeli military actions against the Hamas rockets. Not surprisingly, Iran, Hamas, and other knee-jerk Israeli-bashers have argued that the Hamas rocket attacks against Israeli civilians are entirely legitimate, and that the Israeli counterattacks are war crimes. Equally unsurprising is the response of the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, and others who, at least when it comes to Israel, see a moral and legal equivalence between terrorists who target civilians and a democracy that responds by targeting the terrorists.

The most dangerous of the three responses is not the Iranian-Hamas absurdity, which is largely ignored by thinking and moral people, but the United Nations and European Union response, which equate the willful murder of civilians with legitimate self-defense pursuant to Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. This false moral equivalence only encourages terrorists to persist in their unlawful actions against civilians. The United States has it exactly right by placing the blame on Hamas, while urging Israel to do everything possible to minimize civilian casualties.

There are some who claim that Israel has violated the principle of proportionality by killing so many more Hamas terrorists than the number of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas rockets. That is an absurd misapplication of the concept of proportionality for at least two reasons.

First, there is no legal equivalence between the deliberate killing of innocent civilians and the deliberate killings of Hamas combatants. Under the laws of war, any number of combatants can be killed to prevent the killing of even one innocent civilian.

Second, proportionality is not measured by the number of civilians actually killed, but rather by the risk of civilian death and the intentions of those targeting civilians. Hamas seeks to kill as many civilians as it can. It aims its rockets in the general direction of schools, hospitals, playgrounds and other entirely civilian targets. The fact that it has not killed as many civilians as it would have liked to is a tribute to Israel’s enormous devotion of resources to the building of shelters and to the construction of early warning systems.

Hamas, on the other hand, refuses to build shelters, precisely because it wants to maximize the number of Palestinian civilians inadvertently killed by Israel’s military actions. It knows, from experience, that when it forces Israel to take military actions that result in the deaths of even a small number of innocent Palestinian civilians, many in the international community will condemn Israel. Israel understands this sad reality as well, and goes to enormous lengths to reduce the number of civilian casualties, even to the point of foregoing legitimate targets that are too close to civilian areas. Accordingly, Israel’s actions satisfy the principle of proportionality as well as the principle of self-defense against armed attack.

Until and unless the United Nations and the rest of the international community recognize that Hamas is committing three war crimes–targetting Israeli civilians, using their own civilians as human shields and seeking the destruction of a member state of the United Nations–and that Israel is acting in self-defense and out of military necessity, the conflict will continue and perhaps escalate. If Israel succeeds in destroying the terrorist organization Hamas, it may well lay the foundation for a real peace between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. But if Hamas persists in its capacity to target increasing numbers of Israeli citizens, Israel will have no choice but to persist in its self-defense efforts.

No democracy would do otherwise.

(the end)

Islamic fundamentalism is indeed a problem. I really hope that Islamic fundamentalism won’t gain ascendancy in our beloved country.

We should support progressive and liberal Muslim leaders. I’ve met some really charming progressive Muslim scholars from Indonesia. Those are the type we should support.

An editorial from the Jerusalem Post online:

A Moral War

‘For pacifists who believe that all wars are immoral, Israel’s self-defense operation against Hamas in Gaza is necessarily wrong. To such people we invoke the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Confronted by a movement that amalgamates fascism with religious extremism and a genocidal platform, our moral imperative demands Jewish self-defense.

Few of the voices slamming Israel for conducting an “immoral” war in Gaza are those of pacifists.

Take Riyad Mansour, Mahmoud Abbas’s man at the UN. He claimed on CNN that “3,000 Palestinians had been killed or injured” in Gaza, then denounced Israel’s “targeting 1.5 million Palestinians” as “immoral” and a “crime against humanity.”

Even as Mansour was pontificating, Hamas gunmen in Gaza were shooting Fatah activists in the knees as a preventive security measure lest they take advantage of the unstable situation.

In the West Bank, meanwhile, Mansour’s Fatah has been ruthlessly hunting down Hamas members to keep the Islamists from seizing power there when Abbas’s presidential term expires next week.

Far from there being “3,000 killed and wounded,” more like 500 have been killed – 400 of them Hamas “militants,” according to Palestinian Arab and UN sources inside Gaza cited by the Associated Press. Israeli sources put the Palestinian civilian death toll at some 50.

Pointing this out does not diminish the dreadful loss of dozens of innocent Palestinian lives in a week’s worth of fighting. It does show, however, that the IDF continues to do everything possible to avoid “collateral damage.” But its prime mandate is to protect the lives of Israeli civilians and minimize risks to our citizen-soldiers. ‘

(Part 1 – to be continued)