The Guardian Again: No Comprehension of Israel Behavior, but They Sure Nailed Hamas's

Been a busy couple of days, and with respect to those who suggested I take on Dennis Kucinich's Huff-Post rant, that piece was so deranged, and so devoid of any logical argument or structure beyond "Israel Bad, Hamas Good," and so poorly written, that there wasn't much to say beyond "my God, please stop writing articles."

The Guardian's editorial today, while similar in some ways, is also different:

The worst thing about the fighting in Gaza and the dismal toll of civilian casualties each day brings is that this battle is not really about military objectives, but about prestige, pride and national self-image.  If you were to ask how these justify the deaths of women and children or, for that matter, uniformed soldiers, the answer would be that they do not, but that this is how violence is so often driven in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.   

The intention is to achieve a psychological dominance over the opponent and an unchallenged command over your own constituency. Both Israel's super-modern military and Hamas's poor-man's army perform less in a theatre of war than in a theatre for their own inhabitants, seeming to have to prove, again and again, that they are the champions of their respective peoples. 

The editorial starts from the same place Kucinich does: Israel has no military reason for going into Gaza - or at least, any military reason is just a fig leaf.  Rockets from Gaza?  Sure, the Guardian acknowledges (as we'll see in a bit), they've killed a few people, close businesses, traumatize Israeli civilians . . . but really, they're just "useless fireworks".  Tunnels that exit into Israel, from which Hamas has mounted assaults on Israeli soldiers and civilians?  A nuisance (again, as we'll see) that can be better dealt with by simply keeping an eye on them.  No need for all this hurly-burly; just live with the violence from Gaza.

And because there's no military objective, the Israeli claim to self-defense, and issues of necessity and distinction and proportionality can simply be swept aside with a dismissive wave.  After all, if the only reason you're fighting is ego, then even a single civilian casualty is a war crime; civilian death in a strike at a military objective is only legal if the anticipated civilian casualties are proportional to the concrete military advantage of that strike.  If the advantage is purely psychological, the proportional number of civilian deaths is a flat zero.

But let's put those issues aside for a moment, and turn to them once we reach the portion of the Guardian's editorial that deals squarely with rockets and tunnels, which the editorial does go on to do.  Instead, let's stop and do something the Guardian editorial inexplicably does not do in any real detail - and examine the applicability to Hamas of the Guardian's "no military objectives, this is about prestige, pride, and self-image" frame.

Because here, it actually fits perfectly.

What is Hamas' military objective?  It has none.  While it's leaders are unapologetically genocidal and care very little about the lives of their own people, they aren't stupid.  They understand that rocket fire isn't going to cause Israel to turn and run, and they know that while they can make life for Israelis miserable, they can't wipe Israel off the map.  And they have to know that firing rockets, and confirming that they view all truces as temporary breaks in fighting whose main value is in allowing them to rearm for the next battle, isn't going to convince Israel to "lift the blockade" and thereby enable Hamas to obtain better weapons for the next round.

So what is motivating it?  Prestige, pride, and self-image.  A movement that defines itself as "the resistance" must "resist" (read "attack Israelis") - regardless of whether it can accomplish anything meaningful, and regardless of the cost to Palestinians - or its self definition becomes meaningless. Worse yet, rival groups may take the "mantle of resistance" from you.  That's why so many Western commentators argue that all fighting helps strengthen Hamas, regardless of the results on the ground.  "Sure, they've lost fighters, and tunnels that took years and millions to dig, and a huge chunk of their arsenal.  But boy are their resistance credentials burnished and shiny!"

So yes, for Hamas, there is no military objective at all, and it's merely engaged in attack theater for the consumption of its constituency.

Israel?  Not so much.

In all the years they have been swooping over the border like useless fireworks, the primitive rockets that Hamas fires at Israel have killed hardly anybody. They scare people, close supermarkets, disrupt business and increase insurance premiums. Of course it is hard to live under even a remote threat, and the damage done to young children especially should not be underestimated. But this is not the blitz, or anything like it.

Lets get that last bit out of the way first.  No, it's not "the blitz, or anything like it."  The blitz involved over 100 attacks on Britain's cities over the course of 267 days by a top-tier air force, including 57 consecutive nights, and killed 40,000 British civilians.  So no, thank God, Israel is not suffering anything akin to the blitz.  (Not that Hamas wouldn't do just that, if they could).

But so what?  How many dead Israelis do there need to be before the Guardian would consider "stopping Palestinians from launching rockets at Israeli civilians" to be a legitimate military objective?  Apparently, 40+ isn't enough; why, that's "hardly anybody" (especially to the deceased's loved ones).  How many injured?  How many children with PTSD?  How many homes and businesses and kindergartens destroyed by military assault must a nation suffer before the Guardian would concede that yes, maybe stopping that assault would be a legitimate military goal.

The Guardian doesn't answer, and the sense here is that so long as the killed, injured, traumatized and destroyed are Israelis, the answer is "eleventy-billion" (which is not even a real number).  That it doesn't matter how many Israelis are harmed - stopping the harm is never an acceptable military goal for Israel.  Maybe that's a product of Guardian editor Seumas Milne's shameful rejection of any Israeli right to self defense, or maybe there's another explanation; either way, it's not a very persuasive argument.

And as for "useless fireworks" and "primitive rockets," events have a funny way of making the Guardian's editorial stance look absurd.   Set aside that the "primitive rockets" actually include military grade Syrian M302s, Chinese WS-1Es, and Iranian Fajr 5 and Grad rockets, in addition to locally manufactured Qassams.  Today - the same day the Guardian dismissed those rockets as a threat - one came sufficiently close to Ben Gurion airport that the FAA has banned all US flights to Israel.  Now, maybe the Guardian uses unusually powerful fireworks for their office party, but generally speaking, "useless fireworks" don't pose a sufficiently credible threat to commercial airlines to require flight cancellations.

What is true of the rockets is equally true of a newer threat, the Hamas tunnels dug to funnel raiding parties into Israeli territory. These raiders have, except in the case in 2006 when an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, was kidnapped, almost always been intercepted and killed, usually with no losses on the Israeli side.

Here, again, the Guardian simply disregards risks to Israel as though they are irrelevant.  Oh, the terrorists infiltrating into Israel have "almost always" been caught - except that one time they kidnapped an Israeli, held him for 5 years, then traded him for 1,027 convicted terrorists who had murdered Israelis, many of whom, once released, went back to killing Israelis?  And the assault this week, which resulted in two dead Israeli soldiers.  And is Israel supposed to assume that it will continue to "almost always" catch the terrorists infiltrating through tunnels, and that those who make it through won't do serious harm?  That's an absurd position to take - especially given the attempt by 10 heavily armed infiltrators to assault a civilian farming community just this past week.

The tunnels have not justified the huge cost in labour and building materials which Hamas has invested in them. From a rational Israeli point of view, it would be better to let Hamas go on wasting its time with tunnels while perfecting ways of spotting the raiders than to crash into Gaza in full strength to destroy the underground network physically.

Sure - that makes sense.  As long as you're willing to ignore the realities of warfare.  In war, the attacker has the advantage of initiative - the ability to determine the time and place of the attack, the number of forces to devote.  "There is always a time lag between the initiation of an offensive action and the beginning of effective response of the defender" - because the defender has to first detect the attack, assess the threat, determine a response, and move forces to effect the response.  As Frederick the Great put it, "he who defends everything, defends nothing"; there will always be weak points in defense, and diversionary attacks can cause a defender to mis-position forces at the critical moment.  Thus, "increases in mobility make breakthroughs more likely and therefore generally favor offense." 

In other words, the Guardian's rope-a-dope strategy all but guarantees that, eventually, Hamas will succeed in launching a mass attack on an Israeli town.  The risks outweigh the benefits, by far.

But this is unfortunately not a rational argument. Israeli doctrine, as it has come to operate, lays down that any threat to the populace, however small, must be met by overwhelming force. Israeli politics punishes leaders who ignore this principle.

Ah, the arrogance of distance.  Safe in King's Cross, the Guardian's editors are perfectly content to risk the lives of Israelis - so content, in fact, that they deride any contrary view as irrational.  Those damned Israelis, in contrast, are irrational enough to demand that their government not risk their lives unnecessarily, and to decline to elect those who ignore that demand.

And since the Guardian is positioning this as a matter of Israeli politics, it's worth pointing out just who - other than horrible, right wing bogeyman Benjamin Netanyahu, of course - is on board with Israeli self defense:

Yossi Beilin, architect of the Oslo accords and founder of the far left Meretz party, who told the Independent that if Hamas rejected a cease fire (which it did) a ground incursion would make sense.  Tzipi Livni, "leader of the Israeli peace camp." Amram Mitzna, who proposed Israel withdraw unilaterally from the West Bank and supports J Street.  In other words, this isn't a political issue.  Left and right, Israelis understand that this is a war that must be fought.

Hamas, similarly, had no military reason for going to war. But it was slipping politically, having lost its Egyptian patron and its other allies. It had been forced into a government of national unity with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, with a promise of financial help and the prospect of a lifting of Israeli and Egyptian restrictions on trade.

This is the sum-total of the Guardian's comments about Hamas.

Israel could have seen the new government, a potentially useful consequence of the failure of secretary of state John Kerry's efforts to broker a peace settlement, as an opportunity to contain Hamas politically. Having the PLO back in Gaza would have been a much better way of stopping the rockets and the tunnels than a military campaign. Instead, Israel opposed the reconciliation government, and then used the abduction and murder of three yeshiva students as a pretext for a roundup of Hamas people in the West Bank. Hamas saw itself cornered with no way out except to fight.

I'm sorry, but on what planet was Israel supposed to see Hamas entering into a unity government of the West Bank as an unreconstructed terror group as a good thing?  I mean it's not like we haven't heard the "having Hamas in government will force it to moderate" line of argument before. It didn't work in 2007, and it wasn't likely to work in 2014.

Nevertheless, Israel did not reject the unity government out of hand; as President Peres put it, Israel would accept the unity government if Hamas accepted the Quartet's conditions: recognize Israel, renounce violence, and accept prior agreements.  Hamas flatly refused.  So what exactly was Israel supposed to do - welcome a government that did not recognize Israel, expressly advocated terrorism against Israeli civilians, and saw all prior agreements as null and void?  How would that have helped?

Hamas took on Israel militarily in the hope of a ceasefire which would bring in money, lift the restrictions, and above all show Gazans that it could still defend their interests.

Which is why it's critical to deny Hamas each of these victories.  Allowing Hamas to "bring in money [and] lift the restrictions" by the simple expedient of attempting to murder Israeli civilians would - self evidently - reward that behavior, and incentivize it in the future.

This terrible little war, largely pointless in its political aims and cruel beyond words on civilians, must be ended quickly. John Kerry, recognising the urgency of the situation, has flown to the Middle East. He has an even more complicated task than after earlier Gaza clashes. For a start, Egypt is no longer trusted by Hamas as a mediator, yet its agreement is vital if movement is to be restored on the Sinai border. The Palestinians want Qatar or Turkey instead. Then, in parallel with work on a ceasefire, there need to be negotiations between Hamas and the PLO to restore their strained unity government, while Israel needs to fundamentally reconsider its hostile attitude to such a government. Unless there is a broader agreement, the rockets and the tunnels will sooner or later reappear. And then it will be time for another war.

Look, I'm a parent.  Dealing with temper tantrums is hard, and there's always a temptation to just stop the tantrum by giving the kid what they want; fine, have the damn dessert, just stop screaming in the middle of the restaurant!  But long term, all that does is teach the kid that having a tantrum is a sure way to get what they want - which means a hell of a lot more tantrums in the future.

Obviously, it's not a perfect analogy.  Innocents - children! - are dying in Gaza (and Israel), and the temptation to "just make it stop" is understandable.  But long term, reinforcing the idea that violence works only guarantees more violence in the future.  Just look at the results of the Shalit deal - and Hamas' determination to repeat its success.  The idea that the way to end violence in Gaza is to bribe Hamas for engaging in it is as stupid today as it was when Chamberlain declared "peace in our time" or when business owners paid protection.  Reward violence, and the inevitable result is not peace, but more violence.

So yes, let's hope this war ends quickly.  But not until Israel has succeeded in degrading the military threat posed by Hamas.  And the best way to prevent another war is to insist on the resolution the EU has endorsed: the disarming of Palestinian terror groups.  In other words - meeting Israel's legitimate military objectives.  You know - the ones the Guardian denies exist.