June 14, 2006 | Scripps Howard News Service
Bashing Israel
Authored by Jay Ambrose
Visit Israel, listen to speakers who have served or are now serving in top positions in the Israeli Defense Force, and you quickly learn that Israelis are doing their best to cope with Palestinian terrorists while preserving their own decency, their own sense of humanity.
It's not easy, considering the nature of an enemy that focuses on the deliberate killing of civilians, and it's not paying dividends in how much of the world views self-defense tactics without which Israeli blood would flow even more than it has.
The latest excuse for Israel-bashing in the Arab world, America, Europe and elsewhere has been a Gaza Strip tragedy in which seven members of a vacationing family and one other person were killed at a beach. Before looking at the details, look at the larger story of how Israel acquired the Gaza Strip in 1967's Six Day War when Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria futilely sought to eliminate the tiny nation – even now just 7 million people – once and for all.
Israel won that war with a virtual snap of the fingers and hung onto the conquered land as a buffer against future threats. It allowed settlements and established military bases in the Gaza Strip, but in 2005, unilaterally withdrew, moving Israeli settlers out and dismantling the bases. Control was ceded to Palestinians, some of whom have shown their gratitude by launching homemade “Qassam” missiles across the border at the inhabitants of nearby Israeli villages.
Israel could have said, “Oh, ho, hum, what difference does it make that these terrorist thugs are doing their best to kill our people,” but chose instead to shell some of the sites. The Palestinian claim is that one of those artillery bombardments killed the vacationers, and Israel at first said it may have made a terrible mistake. Upon further examination, Israel now says it is not responsible. Because the Palestinians have disallowed the kind of thoroughgoing inspections that might clarify the issue, instead letting just one man see evidence that could have been doctored, the suspicion has to be that it was some sort of Palestinian error that resulted in the deaths.
The gross unfairness in the criticisms Israel has nevertheless endured is that the military ordinarily bends over backwards to avoid civilian casualties, even in some situations where it is put at life-threatening disadvantages by its reticence. David Benjamin, a legal advisor to the Israeli Defense Force, made as much clear in a talk at Tel Aviv University to visiting fellows of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Since September of 2000, he said, Israel has been subject to 24,000 attacks, not in classic battlefield situations, not by combatants wearing uniforms, but by terrorists who often use civilians as cover and observe no rules of warfare. Israel, he says, does observe rules and four basic principles – only attack out of military necessity, only aim at military targets, make sure any risk to civilians is proportional to military advantage and avoid any unnecessary suffering.
Legal advisers must authorize virtually every Israeli attack before it takes place, the nation's supreme court supervises everything the military does and soldiers are required to disobey orders that are manifestly illegal, Benjamin told us. Benjamin was far from the only speakers to emphasize to our group that legal, moral and pragmatic considerations argue against any excess in warding off harm. The commander of the Ashdod Navy Base said he wanted to avoid killing even terrorists themselves, for moral reasons as well as the fear that the relatives of slain terrorists will be “the next terrorists.” Said this military leader, “We respect life.”
That's not to say that Israel will not fight when it has to – the terrorist Hamas organization that now governs the Palestinians has intensified attacks since the beach incident, and Israel has struck back fast and hard. None of this is to say, either, that Israel has never gone further than it absolutely had to. Many Israelis themselves insist the military has.
But it is difficult to spend much time among the citizens of this land without seeing that they are aiming to survive not just physically, but morally, as caring, civilized human beings, while under constant assault by a murderous enemy that wishes as many of them dead as possible.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado.