So, it's been a little bit.  Life changes - new job, new baby - and personal challenges have kept me away from this blog for a while.  But today, I came across a piece in the Washington Post so completely ludicrous that it lured me out of semi-blogtirement and back to make this one post.  Will I be back with more after? Stay tuned.

The piece itself is by Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian freelance journalist and former Princeton professor of journalism.  Titled "Why Can't Israel Accept Other Religions and Cultures in the Holy Land?" it starts off biased and counterfactual from the headline and goes downhill from there.

Before we start demolishing this piece, piece by piece, it's worth making one point: Whether or not Kuttab wrote the headline himself, he certainly wasn't embarrassed by it.

So let's start with that atrocity of a headline, and some basic facts.  Israel does not have a Constitution, but its Supreme Court has recognized that freedom of religion in Israel is enshrined in Israel's Basic Law regarding Human Dignity (the "Basic Laws" essentially act as a Constitution).  That reality is reflected in the wide range of practicing religions represented in Israel: not just Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but the Baha'i Faith, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other, smaller religious groups.  The holiest site in Judaism, the Temple Mount, is administered by an Islamic Waqf, and Jews are barred from praying there - or even singing, closing one's eyes for too long, or other "religious displays."  So were Kuttab being intellectually honest, the remainder of the article should have been four words long:

"It can, and does."

Instead, we get this:

As a young boy growing up in Bethlehem, I was often excited when our family had company. My dad, a Christian clergyman, loved to take us and the guests to Hebron. Dad would take us to the Cave of the Machpela, situated within the Ibrahimi Mosque, where Abraham and his family are buried and would tell the story of how Abraham obeyed God’s calling even when it came to the request to sacrifice his own son. He would also tell us that the son in the Biblical story was Isaac, son of Sarah, while in the Koran the story refers to Ishmael, son of Hagar.

For us kids, the visit to Hebron, or al-Khalil in Arabic (the Arabic name means “companion,” in reference to Abraham being God’s companion), was never complete without purchasing some of the amazing grape products. Not only did we often buy grapes when they were in season, but Dad, who had a sweet tooth, always bought some delicious treats: dibess (grape molasses), quttain (dried figs) and my personal favorite, malban (dried sheets made of grape juice that stay tasty all year). We also loved the glass-making factories where skilled Hebronites made amazing glass creations while we watched.

 Well, this isn't a bad travel-log, I guess.

I mean, he leaves out the thousands of years of continuous Jewish presence in Hebron and the 1929 massacre of Jews that put an end to it until after 1967, but who can really complain about that?  Then he gets to the heart of his piece:

For me, the holy site and its cultural connection to Hebron are enough reasons to justify its recent designation as a World Heritage site by the the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

This is probably true!  Hebron ought to be a World Heritage site

The barbed wire, metal detectors with heavily armed soldiers and rowdy settlers make a visit now totally unpleasant.

Ah, here we go. Did you notice? Jews living in Hebron are the cause of problems.  In an essay titled "Why Can't Israel Accept Other Religions and Cultures," Kuttab brazenly argues that if the damned Jews would just have stayed out after they were massacred, Hebron would be so much better. And the barbed wire, metal detectors, and soldiers? They're there because Palestinians are so accepting of other cultures and religions that they keep attempting to welcome their Jewish neighbors with bullets and bombs.  Oddly enough, the Israeli army attempts to prevent that sort of thing.  Some of Hebron's Jews are equally odious.  But if all you read was Kuttab, you'd be forgiven for thinking that they weren't under constant threat.

Hebronites are also barred from many areas in parts of the old city, including Shuhada Street which the Israeli army bars Palestinians from using.

 Because, you see, Jews can't be Hebronites.  The real Hebronites are the Palestinians; after all, that 1929 massacre got rid of the pesky Jews who'd been there before. 

A massacre in the mosque by a Jewish settler who killed 29 Palestinian worshipers in 1994 justifies UNESCO’s decision also to label the old city of Hebron/al-Khalil as an endangered site.

Did you see that? A 23 year old incident, widely and vehemently condemned in Israeli society and which has never been (and may it continue to never be) repeated, is the best justification Kuttab can muster for a decision, this month, declaring the site to be "under threat."  That's as close to an admission as you'll get that the decision was obviously nuts.

Explaining the Problem With Daniel Larison's Explaination of the Problems with Israel's Self Defense Arguments

Writing in the American Conservative, Daniel Larison pens a "Me Too" response to Jonathan Chait's New York Magazine article castigating Israel's Gaza action (which deserves it's own response as well).  Larison's perspective suffers from a few glaring flaws:

Jonathan Chait explains why the latest Gaza military operation has made him less “pro-Israel” in certain respects:

Viewed in this context, the campaign of Israeli air strikes in Gaza becomes a horrifying indictment. It is not just that the unintended deaths of Palestinians is so disproportionate to any corresponding increase in security for the Israeli targets of Hamas’s air strikes. It is not just that Netanyahu is able to identify Hamas’s strategy — to create “telegenically dead Palestinians” — yet still proceeds to give Hamas exactly what it is after [bold mine-DL]. It is that Netanyahu and his coalition have no strategy of their own except endless counterinsurgency against the backdrop of a steadily deteriorating diplomatic position within the world and an inexorable demographic decline.

Chait is right about this.

The first, and most fundamental flaw in Larison's argument is one adopted from Chait (and Kerry, and many, many others): the assumption that there's another path readily available that Israel is spurning.  Drawing on Ben Birnbaum & Amir Tibon's must read piece in the Atlantic (seriously, I don't care where you stand on this, go read it), Chait (and by apparent accord, Larison) lays the blame for the collapse of peace negotiations on Netanyahu's refusal to cease building new homes in existing settlements.  But Birnbaum and Tibon make clear that a settlement freeze as a precondition for negotiating was off the table from the start ("Abbas demanded a total Israeli settlement freeze; Kerry said he could get him only a 'major slowdown.'").  The Palestinians instead demanded the release of 104 Palestinians who had murdered Israeli civilians before Oslo - not as a concession in exchange for anything tangible, but merely for agreeing to negotiate.  Despite grave misgivings, Netanyahu pushed his cabinet to release 80 of the 104 (those that were not Israeli citizens) - with prisoner releases in tranches, to ensure the Palestinians continued negotiating.  And he made clear that Israel would announce more than 2,000 new home tenders in the settlements.

Kerry, Birnbaum and Tibon report, misheard or misunderstood Netanyahu as agreeing to release all 104 - and communicated as much to the Palestinians.

At the ensuing negotiations, tensions rose when, among other things, Israel followed through on the deal and, after releasing the second wave of prisoners, announced settlement construction.  The Palestinians erupted, and essentially ended discussions then and there; from that point forward, Kerry's goal was only to negotiate a framework.  Even there, Netanyahu was flexible and engaged:

After decades of railing against any mention of the 1967 lines, Netanyahu accepted that “[t]he new secure and recognized border between Israel and Palestine will be negotiated based on the 1967 lines with mutual agreed swaps.” Said one Israeli official: “If the Israeli public knew back in February that Netanyahu agreed to include this sentence in the framework, it would have created a political earthquake.”

Where didn't Netanyahu bend? The document would reference only Palestinian "aspirations" for a capital in Jerusalem, and the Palestinians would have to recognize Israel as a "Jewish State".

[An aside, here: if the two state solution revolves around the concept of "Two States for Two Peoples" (and it does) then this demand should not be controversial.]

The Palestinians, on the other hand, were moving nowhere.  Obama stepped in:

Obama tried his luck with the Palestinian leader. He reviewed the latest American proposals, some of which had been tilted in Abbas’s direction. (The document would now state categorically that there would be a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem.) “Don’t quibble with this detail or that detail,” Obama said. “The occupation will end. You will get a Palestinian state. You will never have an administration as committed to that as this one.” Abbas and Erekat were not impressed.

After the meeting, the Palestinian negotiator saw Susan Rice—Abbas’s favorite member of the Obama administration—in the hall. “Susan,” he said, “I see we’ve yet to succeed in making it clear to you that we Palestinians aren’t stupid.” Rice couldn’t believe it. “You Palestinians,” she told him, “can never see the fucking big picture.”

Bottom line (and again, read the whole article to watch the timeline): the Palestinians again walked away from promising negotiations because they couldn't live with even the most minor of concessions: acknowledging that Israel would exist as a Jewish state.  In the end, they opted to instead sign a unity deal with Hamas - a terror group responsible for indiscriminate attacks on Israelis and that has repeatedly pledged to destroy Israel - instead of attempting to make peace.

All of which brings us back to Larison (and Chait).  Both make two assumptions that lack any empirical support, but which are necessary to their belief that the path of negotiations is viable.  First, that there is a minimum position the Palestinians will accept (in terms of the contours of a Palestinian state) that overlaps the maximum Israel is willing to give (in terms of security needs).  The Palestinians' refusal to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state calls that assumption into serious question.

And second, that the result of a peace deal would actually be peace.  This seems like it should be obvious - a peace deal means peace, right? - but it isn't.  The Palestinians have too many armed groups operating independently, most of who have vocally, explicitly, and vehemently rejected the notion of any peace deal with Israel.  To my eyes (and, I think, any objective observer's) the most likely result of a peace deal would not be peace, but merely "slightly less war" - that is, war only from a portion of Palestinians, non-state actors, but war nonetheless.

[Another aside: All of this leaves me convinced that there are only two things that could make a peace deal more likely: (1) a Palestinian Altalena incident, in which a government monopoly on the use of force is established; and (2) a peace deal structured in such a way as to place incentives on Palestinians to prevent attacks on Israel, which would have the dual effect of making actual peace more likely and incentivizing the Israelis to take the risk in the first place].

But back to Larison and Chait, who complain that Israel's strategy has been reduced to "perpetual counterinsurgency."  The reality is, Israel is in a position of buying time - which is absolutely necessary if anyone has any hope of a deal in the future.  Israel can't (and shouldn't be expected to) live (let alone negotiate) with rocket fire targeting 80% of its population and threatening its economic lifeline (Ben Gurion) and attack tunnels (built with cement Israel allowed in for humanitarian purposes) threatening its population.

More - I remember, back in when I was in law school in the early 2000s, similar things being said about Operation Defensive Shield (Israel's military incursion into the West Bank that, along with the security fence, effectively ended the Second Intifada).  The reality is that by conclusively destroying the Palestinians' offensive capability within the West Bank, Israel set the stage for its withdrawal from Gaza and the easing of restrictions within the West Bank, and potentially for a future peace deal.  The significantly better lives of West Bank Palestinians v. Gaza Palestinians are one result of that action.  If Israel is allowed to proceed with its operation in Gaza until it determines an appropriate end point - rather than when one is forced on it by international pressure - it could achieve far more than merely buying time, and actually set the stage for a broader deal.  With Hamas' arsenal and attack tunnels destroyed, a demilitarization plan in place, and actual border control from the Egyptians, it could enable a period of peace and quite that could lead to prosperity and actual peace.

This is why I’ve found the predictable defenses of this operation to seem even more hollow and bankrupt than they seemed when they were being used to defend the use of force in 2008-09 or in 2006. The use of force isn’t just excessive. Force is being used with the knowledge that it will mostly kill civilians, whose deaths can then be perversely used to blame the entire conflict on the other side alone. At the same time, those deaths aren’t given the same weight or importance as the deaths of other innocents elsewhere, because the conventional “pro-Israel” view holds that all people in Gaza more or less deserve whatever happens to them. 

Here is where Larison goes seriously off the rails.  I won't get into whether the Israeli use of force is actually "excessive"; I've dealt with that in detail in multiple earlier posts.  The real problem here is Larison's mistaken notion that Israelis (or Israel's supporters) give less weight or importance to the deaths of innocents in Gaza, who are viewed as "deserving whatever happens to them."

Mr. Larison, that's simply not the case.  Most of us (any society or group will have its negative exceptions) are horrified and pained by the loss of innocent life.  As parents and human beings, the sight of dead and injured children is an abomination to us.  They matter deeply. 

But what they don't do is outweigh the need to respond to rocket fire and tunnels into Israeli territory.  That's not a reflection of how little weight is given to Gazan lives; it's a reflection of how much weight is given to Gazan attacks.  As moral human beings who understand that, what we demand of the IDF is that they respond to those attacks while minimizing civilian casualties to the extent possible.  So long as the IDF does that - and (as discussed in prior posts, they clearly do) - the moral burden (not the emotional burden) of those deaths that are unavoidable can be placed squarely on Hamas.

The current operation grew out of the government’s deception about who was responsible for the kidnapping of the three Israelis,

Now this is a slanderous calumny.  It is based on a Sheera Frankel Buzzfeed article replete with misrepresentations, such as the shift from Israeli sources saying "Hamas members did it, but not on direct orders of Hamas leadership" to "Hamas had nothing to do with it", and the description of a single Israeli intelligence officer as multiple "intelligence officers."

but even if the original claim had been entirely true it wouldn’t have warranted the massive overkill and collective punishment that have been going on for the last few weeks.

More to the point, the Gaza War has nothing to do with the kidnapping (except to the extent that the kidnapping was part of a chain of events that led to increased rocket fire). It is being waged to stop rocket fire at Israel and destroy attack tunnels into Israel - tunnels that captured Hamas fighters have revealed would have been used to stage a mass terror attack in Israel on Rosh Hashana, just over a month from now.  Again, the rockets at issue threaten 80% of Israel and Israel's economy, and the tunnels have been found under dining halls in civilian farming communities.  Describing a military response to that threat, which necessarily impacts civilians among which Hamas has embedded legitimate military targets, as "collective punishment" - as the odious Rashid Khalidi does in the New Yorker piece Larison links - is Orwellian.

Not only is the operation creating far greater evils than the ones it is supposed to remedy, but it is also difficult to identify what the purpose of the operation is. Waging war that inflicts disproportionate harm would be bad enough, but to wage a war that doesn’t seem to have any discernible strategic goal–or indeed any purpose besides raining devastation on a largely defenseless population–is inherently wrong. It’s not self-defense, and it makes a mockery of the idea of self-defense to claim otherwise.

Again, Larison seems to have no clue about Israel's actual military objectives, and no interest in identifying them.  They aren't hard to find.  Here's the BBC, who has somehow managed to figure out Israel's secret objectives: "one of its main objectives is to destroy tunnels used by militants to infiltrate Israel."  There's a video on that page in which a reporter quotes Netanyahu as saying "the operation will not end until the tunnels have been put out of action."  Earlier - before the scope of the tunnels became apparent, Ambassador Ron Dermer "accidentally" let the entire world in on Israel's secret goals: Israel's "objective [which is really] to end the rocket attacks - not just for a day or a week or two - and to give quiet to the residents of Israel."

So yes, Israel does have a clear strategic goal "beyond raining devastation", and it is pure and classic self-defense from rockets fired at Israeli towns and incursions into Israeli territory.  To steal an apt turn of phrase, it makes a mockery of the idea of self-defense to claim otherwise.

Debunking Noura Erekat

Noura Erekat - denier of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and right to defend its citizens from attacks - is at it again, and this time, she's found a relatively mainstream left-wing media outlet willing to give her odious views a wider platform: The Nation.  In a piece entitled Five Israeli Talking Points on Gaza - Debunked, Erekat repeats her claim that Israel has no right to self-defense, and goes on to address four other Israeli arguments (or, in some cases, her straw man version of them).  How does she do?  You decide.

Israel has killed almost 800 Palestinians in the past twenty-one days in the Gaza Strip alone; its onslaught continues. The UN estimates that more than 74 percent of those killed are civilians.

No.  The UN did not estimate that 74% of those killed are civilians.  The UN simply passes along estimates from two Palestinian NGOs (the Palestine Center for Human Rights - PCHR - and Al Mezan) and B'tselem.  Those organizations estimated that 74% of those killed were civilians. 

That distinction is important.  Not only has Hamas specifically instructed that all Palestinian casualties be described as civilians regardless of their "status in Jihad or [their] military rank" - instructions that have been followed by Palestinian media and NGOs - but PCHR has a history of identifying combatants as civilians. Al Mezan gets its numbers from PCHR, while B'tselem counts Hamas and Islamic Jihad members as civilians so long as they were not actively involved in fighting at the time of their death.

Indeed, objective analysis of the fatality statistics paints a very different picture.  First, Palestinian casualties are overwhelmingly males of fighting age; 32% of Palestinian dead are males aged 18-28, and another 10% are males aged 29-38.  That is a stark contrast to Gaza's population demographics as a whole; while males aged 18-38 make up 42% of the casualties, males aged 15-52 (a far wider range) make up only 26% of Gaza's population.  In contrast, women and children are dying at rates far lower than would be expected if Israeli strikes were random; children under 14 make up roughly 44% of Gaza's population, but only 15% of the casualties.  Women make up roughly 49% of Gaza's population, and only 21% of the casualties.  And as I've pointed out elsewhere, the IDF, despite operating in a densely populated area, is killing less than one Palestinian per strike - and that's not because of any defensive effort the Palestinians are making.

Again - this shouldn't have to be said, but it does - any civilian casualty is a tragedy.  Any innocent life cut short is to be mourned, and anyone who can see pictures or hear reports of dead or wounded children without being heartbroken is contemptible.

But the objective reality of the dead in Gaza is very, very different than the picture of indiscriminate slaughter that Erekat wishes to paint. 

That is to be expected in a population of 1.8 million where the number of Hamas members is approximately 15,000.

No.  Even just taking the 74% number at face value, and ignoring the portion of the dead Palestinians killed by Hamas directly (we'll get to that), this is very much not to be expected.  If Erekat thinks the numbers she cited support her claim, she is mathematically illiterate.  At 15,000/1,800,000, Hamas members are a grand total of 8 tenths of a percent of Gaza's population.  If Israel were randomly flailing away at civilian targets, we'd expect civilians to comprise roughly 99% of the dead.  Instead, combatants are more than 26 times as likely to be killed (again, using Erekat's inaccurate number) than would "be expected."

In other words, simple math unequivocally proves that Israel is not choosing its targets at random.     

Israel does not deny that it killed those Palestinians using modern aerial technology and precise weaponry courtesy of the world’s only superpower.

As a general matter, this is accurate; Israel does not deny that it killed many Palestinians using modern technology and precise weaponry.  But not all of the Palestinian casualties of this war died in Israeli strikes.  Well over 100 Hamas rockets fired at Israel have fallen short in Gaza, likely killing Palestinians given the absence of warning or shelter - as has happened in past conflicts, and as likely happened in Beit Hanoun.  Moreover, over two dozen of the "Palestinian casualties" listed were killed by Hamas as "collaborators."

In fact, it does not even deny that they are civilians.

Again, Erekat's sentence contains a nugget of truth: Israel does not deny that it has killed Palestinian civilians.  But Israel absolutely has rejected the Palestinian claims about how many civilians are among the dead.  For example, in the battle in Shuja'iya last Sunday, Palestinians claimed most of the dead were civilians, while Israel said most of the dead were gunmen.  Given Hamas' explicit instructions that combatants be referred to as civilians, and the documented instances of that in fact happening, I'm inclined to believe the IDF over Hamas.  Erekat, obviously, is not - and she is free to call the IDF liars if she wants.  But she is not free to claim that Israel agrees with Hamas' mendacious civilian count when, as a matter of basic fact, it does not.

Israel’s propaganda machine, however, insists that these Palestinians wanted to die (“culture of martyrdom”), staged their own death (“telegenically dead”) or were the tragic victims of Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes (“human shielding”).

And out come the straw men.  Israel hasn't insisted that Palestinians want to die; Hamas did that.  And it's not just the Al Qassam brigades proudly announcing that.  Here's what "moderate" Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh had to say: "We are a people that love death for the sake of Allah as much as our enemies love life."

Nor has Israel suggested that Palestinians killed in Gaza "staged their own deaths" - though there is certainly more than enough evidence of Palestinians staging fake death scenes (complete with tubes of fake blood), or appropriating images of dead civilians from other conflicts (and even, laughably, from movies) as supposed Palestinian casualties.  But that's not what Prime Minister Netanyahu was referring to when he mentioned "telegenically dead" Palestinians.  No, what Netanyahu was referring to was Hamas' cynical calculation that pictures of dead Palestinians aids their war effort, and therefore their willingness to place Palestinian civilians in harm's way.

But I can understand why Erekat "misunderstood."  Here's Netanyahu's full quote as presented from the link Erekat included in her article:

Netanyahu said Palestinian members of Hamas “don’t care” about the casualties they have inflicted on their own people.

“These people are the worst terrorists — genocidal terrorists,” he said. “They call for the destruction of Israel and they call for the killing of every Jew, wherever they can find them.”

“They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can,” Netanyahu added. “They use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause. They want the more dead, the better.”

Wait.  On second thought, no, I really can't see how Erekat could have honestly read Netanyahu's quote as referring to "staged death scenes."  Netanyahu is clear as day: Hamas members (not all Palestinians) don't care about Palestinian casualties, because dead Palestinians help them build pressure on Israel.  Again, Erekat is free to disagree with Netanyahu; she is not free to place words in his mouth in an attempt to make her own argument appear stronger.  Erekat's willingness to outright lie if it helps her cause is telling - and should be remembered by readers as they evaluate her other arguments.

Finally, Erekat is correct that Israel has asserted that Hamas' deliberate decision to operate from within civilian institutions has led to Palestinian casualties.  But she is also downplaying the extent of Hamas' human shield policy.  Hamas has instructed Palestinians not to leave when Israel warns them of an impending attack.  Worse, Hamas has expressly encouraged Palestinians to go to sites where Israel intends to attack in order to act as human shields.  This isn't theoretical; it has actually happened, as in this report of seven dying and 25 wounded when they ran to attempt to shield a target after Israel had already launched its missile.

In all instances, the military power is blaming the victims for their own deaths, accusing them of devaluing life and attributing this disregard to cultural bankruptcy.  In effect, Israel—along with uncritical mainstream media that unquestionably accept this discourse—dehumanizes Palestinians, deprives them even of their victimhood and legitimizes egregious human rights and legal violations.

No.  Israel is blaming Hamas for innocent Palestinians' deaths, accusing them of devaluing life and attributing this disregard to moral bankruptcy.  Given Hamas' own words - "we love death as you love life" - and its actions, including opting to use tons of cement for attack tunnels rather than for construction of civilian institutions or even bomb shelters, Israel's position seems pretty well-founded.  Hamas, not Israel, dehumanizes Palestinians, turning them into fodder for its media war on Israel, cynically telling them to remain in targeted areas "regardless of the danger."

But enough of Erekat's mendacious opening; let's get to her promised "debunking" of Israel's arguments:

This is not the first time. The gruesome images of decapitated children’s bodies and stolen innocence on Gaza’s shores are a dreadful repeat of Israel’s assault on Gaza in November 2012 and winter 2008–09. Not only are the military tactics the same but so too are the public relations efforts and the faulty legal arguments that underpin the attacks. Mainstream media news anchors are inexplicably accepting these arguments as fact.

Below I address five of Israel’s recurring talking points. I hope this proves useful to newsmakers.

1) Israel is exercising its right to self-defense.

Unsurprisingly, Erekat starts with her well-worn (and utterly ridiculous) thesis that Israel has no legal right to defend itself from attacks on its civilians launched by Hamas from the Gaza Strip.  Erekat's claim is self-debunking; international law is the product of agreements among states, and no state would ever agree to a legal regime that would allow it to be attacked militarily but not allowed to defend itself.  That aside, Erekat's arguments are unpersuasive on their own merits.

As the occupying power of the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Territories more broadly, Israel has an obligation and a duty to protect the civilians under its occupation. It governs by military and law enforcement authority to maintain order, protect itself and protect the civilian population under its occupation. It cannot simultaneously occupy the territory, thus usurping the self-governing powers that would otherwise belong to Palestinians, and declare war upon them. These contradictory policies (occupying a land and then declaring war on it) make the Palestinian population doubly vulnerable.

As I've documented before, this argument suffers from multiple flaws.

First, as a matter of international law, Israel is not occupying Gaza.  Occupation, in international law, is defined as the actual control of and authority over territory by an outside army.  Israel unilaterally withdrew every soldier and settler from Gaza in 2005; since that time, Palestinians have made Gaza's laws, policed its streets, set its foreign and domestic policy, and controlled its territory.  Hamas - an organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel - is Gaza's elected government, and its men operate freely in Gaza.  Israel self-evidently has not exercised authority and control over the Gaza Strip over the last 9 years; if it had, there would not be 10,000 rockets in the Strip aimed at Israel and there wouldn't be tunnels from Gaza into Israel.  Nor is it enough to point to the blockade (imposed in January 2008, 2+ years after Israel withdrew).  Not only does Israel not control all of Gaza's borders (Gaza's southern border is shared with Egypt) but a blockade is a tool of war in international law.  If a blockade were enough to trigger occupation, then by Erekat's argument, it would immediately become illegal (as the blockading party could not make war on the blockaded - and thereby occupied - territory).

Second, Erekat's "an occupying entity can't make war on the land it occupies" thesis is rejected by the International Committee of the Red Cross.  According to the ICRC, an invading army is considered an occupier - with all of the duties that entails - whenever it exercises any control at all over any territory of another state, even if hostilities are ongoing.  In other words, an army can both be an occupier and at war.

Third, imagine what Erekat's thesis would mean if true.  Assume for a moment that Israel was attacked from Jordan (a country even Erekat does not argue is occupied by Israel) rather than Gaza, in the exact same manner (rockets, tunnels), and with the exact same response (air strikes followed by a ground invasion, and with rockets and tunnel assaults continuing).  As discussed a second ago, according to the ICRC Israel would be considered an "occupier" of Jordan the moment the IDF controlled any ground within Jordan - even if hostilities were ongoing in that area.  Applying Erekat's thesis, here's the result: the Israelis are legally making war on Jordan (an unoccupied foreign country) until the moment its ground forces control a mile of Jordanian land.  At that point, Israel becomes an occupier, and can no longer make war on Jordan even if the Jordanian behavior had not changed.  Erekat's proposed doctrine leads to obviously absurd results, and is simply not what international law proscribes. 

The precarious and unstable conditions in the Gaza Strip from which Palestinians suffer are Israel’s responsibility. Israel argues that it can invoke the right to self-defense under international law as defined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. The International Court of Justice, however, rejected this faulty legal interpretation in its 2004 Advisory Opinion. The ICJ explained that an armed attack that would trigger Article 51 must be attributable to a sovereign state, but the armed attacks by Palestinians emerge from within Israel’s jurisdictional control.

Again, Erekat's position simply cannot be defended.  When the ICJ made its (poor) ruling in 2004 (without Israeli participation), Israel was indisputably occupying Gaza.  Since that time, Israel has not only withdrawn from Gaza, but Palestine has been recognized by the UN as an observer state.  That latter change makes Erekat's argument ridiculous: the ICC ruled that an armed attack that would trigger Article 51 must come from another state, and the UN has recognized Palestine - including Gaza - as another state.  Even under the ICC's warped logic, then, Israel has every right to defend itself under Article 51.

(More, it is worth noting that Article 51 does not grant states the right to self defense; rather, it expressly states that nothing in the UN Charter impairs Member States' preexisting "inherent right" of self-defense.  Thus, Erekat's argument is not that Article 51 somehow limits by agreement states' rights to self-defense to attacks from other states, but that states never had a right to defend themselves from military attack by non-state actors.  There is simply no support for this position in law or history).

Israel does have the right to defend itself against rocket attacks, but it must do so in accordance with occupation law and not other laws of war. Occupation law ensures greater protection for the civilian population. The other laws of war balance military advantage and civilian suffering. The statement that “no country would tolerate rocket fire from a neighboring country” is therefore both a diversion and baseless.
Israel denies Palestinians the right to govern and protect themselves, while simultaneously invoking the right to self-defense. This is a conundrum and a violation of international law, one that Israel deliberately created to evade accountability.

Here, too, Erekat goes too far.  While it is true that occupation law and the law of war are different, in that an occupying power cannot use military force or apply the laws of war in conducting policing operations (you can't send a tank after a bank robber), they aren't mutually exclusive, and the laws of war apply to acts of war.  As one scholar writing for the Red Cross put it, while the distinction between a situation calling for police action and one calling for military action can often rest on difficult technical details of control, it isn't always so hard to determine whether a military response is appropriate: "In very practical terms, RPGs (hand-held anti-tank grenade launchers), mortars, vehicle-borne or suicide bombs, and IEDs are not the weapons of ordinary criminals controllable through a law enforcement response."  In such circumstances, a military response governed by the laws of war - not the laws of occupation policing - is legal and appropriate, and that is clearly a judgment that applies to Hamas' launch of rockets at Israel.

2) Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.

Israel argues that its occupation of the Gaza Strip ended with the unilateral withdrawal of its settler population in 2005. It then declared the Gaza Strip to be “hostile territory” and declared war against its population.

Well, this is a fairly dramatic example of Erekat's attempt to mislead.  Though Erekat frames the action as consecutive - Israel withdrew and immediately declared Gaza "hostile territory" and went to war - the facts are otherwise.  As noted above, Israel withdrew in 2005 - and did not impose a full blockade on Gaza until 2008.  In the interim, Palestinians elected Hamas as the government of Gaza, which refused to accept prior agreements with Israel or renounce violence, electing instead to continue its genocidal war with Israel.   On June 25, 2006 - a year and a half before Israel imposed the blockade - Hamas operatives invaded Israel from Gaza and kidnapped Gilad Shalit (which was a war crime). Over 1,700 rockets were fired into Israel from Gaza in 2006.  It was only in September 2007 - after close to two years of attacks from Gaza, increasing rocket fire, and Hamas' coup against Fatah in Gaza - that Israel declared Gaza a hostile territory.

Neither the argument nor the statement is tenable. Despite removing 8,000 settlers and the military infrastructure that protected their illegal presence, Israel maintained effective control of the Gaza Strip and thus remains the occupying power as defined by Article 47 of the Hague Regulations. To date, Israel maintains control of the territory’s air space, territorial waters, electromagnetic sphere, population registry and the movement of all goods and people.

Erekat has a curious definition of "effective control."  As noted above, while Israel has blockaded Gaza - and, for good reason, closed its land links with Gaza - Gaza shares a border with Egypt and is governed by Palestinians.  Hamas itself has acknowledged that Gaza is not occupied: "'Against whom could we demonstrate in the Gaza Strip? When Gaza was occupied, that model was applicable,' [Hamas leader Mahmoud] Zahhar said."  Israel no more occupies Gaza through control of its airspace than the UN occupied Iraq in the 1990s when it imposed a no-fly zone there.  Erekat's list of complaints simply doesn't amount to occupation as a matter of international law.

Israel argues that the withdrawal from Gaza demonstrates that ending the occupation will not bring peace. Some have gone so far as to say that Palestinians squandered their opportunity to build heaven in order to build a terrorist haven instead. These arguments aim to obfuscate Israel’s responsibilities in the Gaza Strip, as well as the West Bank.

On the subject of obfuscating, it's important to point out here that Erekat has no response to this argument.  She does not say "no, the Palestinians couldn't have turned Gaza into a flourishing society" had they chosen peaceful institution-building and economic development rather than continued war, does not deny that the Palestinians have used the Gaza withdrawal to build a base for increased attacks on Israel and Israeli civilians, and does not argue that Israel ought to reasonably expect anything different should it withdraw from the West Bank.  Instead, she waves her hands, and offers no more than a "yes, but ..."  OK, the Palestinians took Israel's withdrawal and used it as a means of launching attacks covering 80% of Israel's population within the pre-67 borders, but (Erekat says) that's an irrelevant distraction.

As Prime Minister Netanyahu once explained, Israel must ensure that it does not “get another Gaza in Judea and Samaria…. I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”

Again, Erekat offers no reason to disagree with Netanyahu's assessment.  Though it only lasted a day, Hamas just shut down air travel to Israel - a country that survives on air travel - by launching a rocket from Gaza that landed within a mile of Ben Gurion Airport.  Withdrawal from the West Bank, which overlooks Ben Gurion would make that far easier to repeat.  Particularly in light of continuing Palestinian rejection of Israel's right to exist and Hamas pledges to fight to Israel's destruction, Israel's security concerns are easy to understand.  Whether or not Netanyahu's solution to those concerns is the right one is open to debate; the reasonableness of the concerns themselves is not.

Palestinians have yet to experience a day of self-governance. Israel immediately imposed a siege upon the Gaza Strip when Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006 and tightened it severely when Hamas routed Fatah in June 2007.

Three points here.  First, Erekat is simply lying when she says Israel "imposed a siege" on Gaza in January 2006; as noted and documented with links above, Israel did not blockade Gaza until 2008 and did not begin restricting the flow of goods to Gaza until mid-2007, long after Hamas had responded to the Israeli withdrawal with further attacks.  What happened immediately after Hamas' election in 2006 was the redirection of aid money to ensure it was not used to fund a terror group.  And it was not Israel who redirected aid money, but the Quartet: the U.S., U.N., EU and Russia.

Second, what Erekat drily describes as Hamas' "rout" of Fatah was not a political beating: it was the round-up and murder of Fatah members by Hamas, complete with defenestration (note, by the way, the descriptions of Palestinian attacks on Gaza hospitals used by Hamas and Fatah as combat areas).

Third, Erekat also lies when claiming that Palestinians haven't experienced self-governance.  No less than Human Rights Watch - no friend to Israel - identified Hamas as the "governing authority in the Gaza Strip."

The siege has created a “humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip. Inhabitants will not be able to access clean water, electricity or tend to even the most urgent medical needs. The World Health Organization explains that the Gaza Strip will be unlivable by 2020. Not only did Israel not end its occupation, it has created a situation in which Palestinians cannot survive in the long-term.

 Erekat cites an Oxford professor's Guardian article in support of the claim that the blockade created a "humanitarian catastrophe" in Gaza.  Here's what the deputy head of the Red Cross in Gaza had to say about that claim:

"There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. If you go to the supermarket, there are products. There are restaurants and a nice beach. The problem is mainly in maintenance of infrastructure and in access to goods, concrete for example,” Redmatn said."

Of course, since then, two wars have further damaged Gaza's infrastructure and uprooted lives, and created a humanitarian crisis.  The solution to that is obvious: stop trying to kill Israelis.

3) This Israeli operation, among others, was caused by rocket fire from Gaza.

Israel claims that its current and past wars against the Palestinian population in Gaza have been in response to rocket fire. Empirical evidence from 2008, 2012 and 2014 refute that claim. First, according to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the greatest reduction of rocket fire came through diplomatic rather than military means. This chart demonstrates the correlation between Israel’s military attacks upon the Gaza Strip and Hamas militant activity. Hamas rocket fire increases in response to Israeli military attacks and decreases in direct correlation to them. Cease-fires have brought the greatest security to the region.

This position is laughable, because the cited chart demonstrates that the cease-fires Erekat points to as "bringing calm" were imposed as a result of Israeli military operations - and those military operations have been in response to rocket fire 

During the four months of the Egyptian-negotiated cease-fire in 2008, Palestinian militants reduced the number of rockets to zero or single digits from the Gaza Strip. Despite this relative security and calm, Israel broke the cease-fire to begin the notorious aerial and ground offensive that killed 1,400 Palestinians in twenty-two days.

The notion that Israel should have been happy with "only 10 or 20" rockets aimed at its citizens per month - happy enough to ignore the terrorists firing those rockets, rather than responding to them, which responses Erekat calls "breaking the cease fire" - is absurd.

In November 2012, Israel’s extrajudicial assassination of Ahmad Jabari, the chief of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza, while he was reviewing terms for a diplomatic solution, again broke the cease-fire that precipitated the eight-day aerial offensive that killed 132 Palestinians.

Again, the notion that the killing of "the chief of the military wing of a terrorist organization" ought to be described as an "extrajudicial assassination" is telling.  So is Erekat's description of an attack that occurred on November 14, 2012 as "breaking the cease fire" when on October 24 alone, over 80 rockets and mortars were fired from Gaza at Israel.  As others have said in the context of this round of fighting, Erekat's definition of 'cease fire' appears to be "Israel ceases and Palestinians fire."  The simple fact is that as shown by Erekat's own Electronic Intifada chart, rocket and mortar attacks significantly decrease after Israel responds to them forcefully.

Immediately preceding Israel’s most recent operation, Hamas rocket and mortar attacks did not threaten Israel. Israel deliberately provoked this war with Hamas.  Without producing a shred of evidence, it accused the political faction of kidnapping and murdering three settlers near Hebron. Four weeks and almost 700 lives later, Israel has yet to produce any evidence demonstrating Hamas’s involvement. During ten days of Operation Brother’s Keeper in the West Bank, Israel arrested approximately 800 Palestinians without charge or trial, killed nine civilians and raided nearly 1,300 residential, commercial and public buildings. Its military operation targeted Hamas members released during the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in 2011. It’s these Israeli provocations that precipitated the Hamas rocket fire to which Israel claims left it with no choice but a gruesome military operation.

Again, this is replete with outright falsehoods.  First, the three children whose kidnap and murder Erekat brushes aside were not "settlers"; Naftali Fraenkel lived in Nof Ayalon and Eyal Yifrach lived in El'ad; both are well within the borders of pre-1967 Israel (the third, Gil'ad Shaar, lived in the settlement of Talmon).  Second, the evidence linking Hamas operatives to the kidnappings is extensive - indeed, sufficient for Palestinian policemen to acknowledge it.

In any event, it doesn't matter in the slightest.  Even if "these Israeli provocations precipitated the Hamas rocket fire," Erekat acknowledges that Hamas was firing barrages of rockets at Israeli towns.  Given her prior acknowledgement that these barrages are war crimes, Erekat cannot possibly be arguing that Hamas was justified in attempting to murder Israeli civilians, regardless of what it was responding to.  And given the admitted rocket fire at its civilians, Israel had an absolute obligation to defend them. 

4) Israel avoids civilian casualties, but Hamas aims to kill civilians.

Now this is a straw man.  Israel has never claimed to avoid all civilian casualties - merely to do what it could to minimize civilian casualties.  As an objective look at the statistics makes clear, Israel has done just that.

Hamas has crude weapons technology that lacks any targeting capability. As such, Hamas rocket attacks ipso facto violate the principle of distinction because all of its attacks are indiscriminate. This is not contested.  Israel, however, would not be any more tolerant of Hamas if it strictly targeted military objects, as we have witnessed of late. Israel considers Hamas and any form of its resistance, armed or otherwise, to be illegitimate.

While it's nice of Erekat to concede that Hamas and other Palestinians have engaged in over 3,500 war crimes in the past three weeks alone, what in the world is she talking about relating to Israel?  When did we witness Hamas targeting strictly military objects so that Erekat can reach a conclusion about Israel's likely response would have been?

Here's the reality.  If Hamas were targeting only military objects, it is highly unlikely that Israel would be in or otherwise attacking Gaza.  While no country would be "tolerant" of a group that attacked its soldiers, Israeli life would be able to go on as normal and Israel would be able to shift resources to defending its soldiers and other military objects, rendering such attacks highly unlikely to succeed.  Thus, while Israel would undoubtedly fire back at those attempting to attack it, and might even conduct limited raids into Gaza in response to attacks into Israel, a broad offensive of the type that puts civilians in Gaza at increased risk would not be in the cards.

In contrast, Israel has the eleventh most powerful military in the world, certainly the strongest by far in the Middle East, and is a nuclear power that has not ratified the non-proliferation agreement and has precise weapons technology. With the use of drones, F-16s and an arsenal of modern weapon technology, Israel has the ability to target single individuals and therefore to avoid civilian casualties. But rather than avoid them, Israel has repeatedly targeted civilians as part of its military operations.

And here, again, is the outright lie.  The notion that Israel - or any country - is in possession of weapons capable of limiting casualties to individual targets, without any possible collateral damage, is ludicrous.  Such weapons do not exist, and have never been used in any battlefield in history.  Weapons powerful enough to destroy command and control buildings, cars, armor, and weapons depots, by definition, cannot also be impotent enough to entirely avoid civilian casualties.  And that ignores other factors that can cause casualties - such as systems failure or human error causing weapons to go off target, faulty intelligence misidentifying a target, or otherwise.

But Erekat's argument is important, and deserves attention.  Essentially, she argues, Israel must be perfect.  As a "powerful military" with "precise weapons technology" (and a nuclear power, though why that is relevant Erekat doesn't bother to say), Israel should be expected and required to kill only combatants.  Though international law recognizes that civilian death is inevitable and legal when attacking military targets, and governed only by questions of proportionality (that is, how important the target is versus how extensive the harm to civilians), Erekat discards that standard and imposes a higher (and physically impossible) standard on Israel.

As one writer put it, this is the "Batman Rules of War":

No matter the provocation, no matter the number of victims the Joker kills, no matter the danger to his own life, Batman will never take a life.

Of course, the police can kill in self-defense, but Batman takes on different rules that apply only to him.  He is so skilled, so methodical, that he has no need to kill even when his life is threatened.

It's an ideal - both moral, and of the physical prowess that the moral ideal depends on - that exists, and can only exist, in a comic book. One no flesh and blood human being, or army, could ever live up to.  Which is why the only combatant to which it has ever been applied, even in theory, is Israel.

That is not the law.  It also should not be the law, as it would create obviously perverse incentives.  A doctrine that prohibits attack on combatants if any civilians are killed will simply ensure that combatants attack only from within civilian populations.

The Dahiya Doctrine is central to these operations and refers to Israel’s indiscriminateattacks on Lebanon in 2006. Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot said that this would be applied elsewhere:

What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. […] We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.

Again, Erekat simply distorts a quote from an Israeli general, ripping it free from its context and underlying facts, to paint a false picture.  Israel's Dahiya Doctrine has a simple premise: if opposing forces build their military installations in civilian institutions, Israel will treat those installations as military targets, not civilian targets.  Thus, from Erekat's link: "Dahiya is a neighborhood in Beirut which can only be accessed by card-carrying Hizbullah members. During the 2006 war, the IDF bombed large apartment buildings in the neighborhood since they were also used as Hizbullah command-and-control centers, and were built over Hizbullah bunkers." 

Again, this is very plainly legal as a matter of international law, which provides that the presence of civilians at military targets shall not be used to render those targets immune from attack.  Any other rule would simply incentivize combatants to place military installations in civilian areas, resulting in further loss of civilian life.

Israel has kept true to this promise. The 2009 UN Fact-Finding Mission to the Gaza Conflict, better known as the Goldstone Mission, concluded “from a review of the facts on the ground that it witnessed for itself that what was prescribed as the best strategy [Dahiya Doctrine] appears to have been precisely what was put into practice.”
According to the National Lawyers Guild, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Israel directly targeted civilians or recklessly caused civilian deaths during Operation Cast Lead. Far from avoiding the deaths of civilians, Israel effectively considers them legitimate targets.

In considering the Goldstone Mission's conclusion that Israel targeted civilians, it's important to keep two things in mind:

1) The Goldstone Mission did not have access to Israel or the IDF, and therefore was unable to review any evidence relating to the IDF's targeting decisions;

2) After reviewing the IDF's published investigation of incidents involving civilian casualties, the report's author and namesake, Judge Richard Goldstone, openly stated that Israel did not have a policy of targeting civilians and that the Goldstone Report "would have been a different document" had that information been available to the mission.

5) Hamas hides its weapons in homes, mosques and schools and uses human shields.

This is arguably one of Israel’s most insidious claims, because it blames Palestinians for their own death and deprives them of even their victimhood. Israel made the same argument in its war against Lebanon in 2006 and in its war against Palestinians in 2008. Notwithstanding its military cartoon sketches, Israel has yet to prove that Hamas has used civilian infrastructure to store military weapons.

This is, again, an outright lie.  Here, for example, is the Washington Post, off-handedly describing Shifa Hospital as Hamas' de facto headquarters. One French-Palestinian journalist, in an article deleted soon after it was noticed, described his interrogation by Hamas fighters in their command post adjacent to Shifa Hospital's emergency room.  Contrary to the linked MondoWeiss article cited by Erekat, not only has the IDF claimed that Wafa hospital was similarly used as a base for attacks and command center, but the IDF's video of the strike on Wafa appears to confirm that claim, with massive secondary explosions after the IDF strike indicating the presence of weapons storage.  Here is the Washington Post's Gaza correspondent reporting a scene he saw himself: Hamas fighters using a humanitarian cease fire to move rockets into a mosque.  UNRWA twice announced that it was outraged by the discovery of rockets stored in their schools (and then promptly turned the rockets over to Hamas to be used against Israel).  As I've noted before, BBC video of Israeli strikes on "civilian" homes show massive secondary explosions.  IDF video clearly shows Hamas fighters repeatedly using ambulances for transport.  The IDF has posted extensive video documenting the locations in which it has found weapons.

Given this extensive evidence, the question is obvious: "If this isn't proof, what is?"

The two cases where Hamas indeed stored weapons in UNRWA schools, the schools were empty. UNRWA discovered the rockets and publicly condemned the violation of its sanctity.

Ah, I see - it's ok to use civilian schools for military purposes if the schools are vacant.  First, no, it is not.  International law prohibits it, which is but one reason why even UNRWA condemned Hamas for the practice.  Second, even without all of the above evidence, the assumption that these are the only instances in which Hamas has violated the laws of war by militarizing civilian institutions is clearly unwarranted.  By Erekat's own admission, Hamas has shown an utter disregard for the laws of war, both in its attacks on Israel and in the placement of its own weapons.  On what basis, then, can she assume that these are isolated incidents?  (And again, as the extensive links above document, they are not).

International human rights organizations that have investigated these claims have determined that they are not true. It attributed the high death toll in Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon to Israel’s indiscriminate attacks. Human Rights Watch notes:

The evidence Human Rights Watch uncovered in its on-the-ground investigations refutes [Israel’s] argument…we found strong evidence that Hezbollah stored most of its rockets in bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields and valleys, that in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started, and that Hezbollah fired the vast majority of its rockets from pre-prepared positions outside villages.

In fact, only Israeli soldiers have systematically used Palestinians as human shields. Since Israel’s incursion into the West Bank in 2002, it has used Palestinians as human shields by tying young Palestinians onto the hoods of their cars or forcing them to go into a home where a potential militant may be hiding.

Again, as documented above, Hamas has expressly adopted and encouraged the use of human shields as a tactic.  While some Israeli soldiers have used Palestinians as human shields, such violations of the laws of war are prosecuted and punished by Israel.

Contrary to the caricatures of pro-Hamas ideologues such as Erekat, Israel's defenders do not pretend that Israel or its army are perfect.  As in any society, there are bad actors in Israel as well - soldiers who commit war crimes, whether out of fear, or stress, or simple evil.  But there is a difference between the acts of individuals - acts that are condemned, investigated, and punished - and the policy of a society.  While there have been Israelis guilty of war crimes in the past - and no doubt there are some guilty of war crimes in this action - Israel itself is not, and it acts appropriately to punish those criminals it can identify.  Hamas, in contrast, glories in war crimes as a policy, and celebrates them as a victory.

Even assuming that Israel’s claims were plausible, humanitarian law obligates Israel to avoid civilian casualties that “would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” A belligerent force must verify whether civilian or civilian infrastructure qualifies as a military objective. In the case of doubt, “whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.”

This is true but irrelevant.  Given the extensive embedding of military objectives in civilian institutions, the "concrete and direct military advantage anticipated" from attacking those military objectives is that it enables Israel to degrade and destroy Hamas' capacity to launch cross-border attacks at Israeli civilians; forgoing attacks on such targets would eliminate any ability of the IDF to achieve its operational goals.  As such, there is no indication that civilian casualties in such attacks are excessive in relation to the goal of protecting Israeli civilians from indiscriminate attacks and guarding Israeli sovereignty within its borders.

In the over thee weeks of its military operation, Israel has demolished 3,175 homes, at least a dozen with families inside; destroyed five hospitals and six clinics; partially damaged sixty-four mosques and two churches; partially to completely destroyed eight government ministries; injured 4,620; and killed over 700 Palestinians. At plain sight, these numbers indicate Israel’s egregious violations of humanitarian law, ones that amount to war crimes.

Again, Erekat makes the loser's lament the focus of her argument: "look how badly I am being beaten; clearly there's something wrong here."  But no, those statistics do not "at plain sight" indicate violations of humanitarian law.  To the contrary, the ratio of casualties to Israeli attacks (less than 1 death per 8 air strikes), and Israel's extensive efforts to warn civilians of such attacks, makes clear that Israel is doing all it can to minimize civilian casualties while attacking the military objectives embedded into Gaza's civilian infrastructure.

Beyond the body count and reference to law, which is a product of power, the question to ask is, What is Israel’s end goal?

This isn't a hard question to answer: Israel's goal is to eliminate the capacity of Palestinian terror groups to launch attacks on Israel's civilians, via rocket and, especially, cross-border tunnel.

What if Hamas and Islamic Jihad dug tunnels beneath the entirety of the Gaza Strip—they clearly did not, but let us assume they did for the sake of argument. According to Israel’s logic, all of Gaza’s 1.8 million Palestinians are therefore human shields for being born Palestinian in Gaza. The solution is to destroy the 360-kilometer square strip of land and to expect a watching world to accept this catastrophic loss as incidental.

Erekat's counter-factual hypothetical is nonsense.  The problem is not that Hamas and Islamic Jihad dig tunnels beneath Gaza.  The problem is that they dig tunnels beneath Israel, including tunnels leading into communal dining halls in Israeli farming towns.

And if Erekat's hypothetical were real, and the hypothetical tunnels used to make war on Israel?  Then Israel would be within its rights to take all military steps necessary to protect its civilians, while minimizing, to the extent possible, the harm to Gaza's civilians.  That would no doubt require the full-scale reconquest of Gaza and house-to-house firefights to locate and destroy the tunnels.  It would also no doubt lead to massive loss of Palestinian life, as well as Israeli life.  So let us all hope that it never comes to that.

This is possible only by framing and accepting the dehumanization of Palestinian life. Despite the absurdity of this proposal, it is precisely what Israeli society is urging its military leadership to do.

Not so.  It is possible only by understanding that a State's first duty is to protect its citizens, and that while the loss of innocent life among the citizens of a party attacking the state is tragic, and horrible, and to be avoided if at all possible, it cannot trump the State's duty to its citizens.  Again, Gaza's civilians would be in no danger at all if attacks on Israeli citizens ceased.  But if they do not, it is morally repugnant to suggest that Israel ought to simply live with attacks on its civilians because responding to such attacks will endanger civilians in the territory of the attacker.

Israel cannot bomb Palestinians into submission, and it certainly cannot bomb them into peace.

No, Israel cannot do either.  But if the Palestinians do not choose peace themselves, then Israel can and must do what it can to minimize the threat to Israeli civilians - even at the cost of Palestinian lives.

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.