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.