Five Bogus Criticisms of Israel
By Professor Bradley Ruffle -- Beer Sheva, Israel
In the war between Israel and Hamas, the battle for the hearts and minds of the world ought to be a slam-dunk victory for Israel. A free, multicultural, liberal society is pitted against a radical Islamic terrorist group bent on the extermination of all those who oppose their jihadist vision. And yet, the world condemns the modern liberal democracy of Israel and embraces the terrorists' intolerance and death culture, much like it did when Israel fought the Hezbollah terrorist group in 2006.
So, why do the world's sympathies lie overwhelmingly with the Palestinians?
The "Israel as occupier" narrative became inapposite in 2005 when Israel uprooted its settlements in the Gaza Strip and turned over Gaza's keys to the Palestinians. Notwithstanding, within hours of Israel's complete withdrawal, Palestinian rocket fire resumed. Israel ignored the rockets. Not surprisingly, the rocket fire continued unabated until, more than 3,000 rockets later, the government decided that too many was enough, bringing us to the conflict at hand.
Demographics and the natural affinities they engender provide one clue for understanding the imbalance in world opinion. With 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide and a meager 14 million Jews, Muslims outnumber Jews by more than 100 to 1. In addition, Israel has no oil, while the Arab states possess more than their share.
Here I explore the Palestinians' success in injecting the public debate with slogans and concepts seemingly supportive of their cause. My purpose is to expose the erroneous reasoning that underlies five pervasive criticisms of Israel. To do so, I rely on straightforward logic and common sense.
1. "The Palestinians are the weaker side of the conflict and therefore deserve our sympathy and support"
In sports, cheering for the weaker team (the underdog) makes sense. A match in which the stronger team's victory is a foregone conclusion is without suspense and no fun to watch. Dirt poor lottery winners are a more satisfying outcome than a multi-millionaire who holds the winning ticket.
However, the weaker side of an international conflict is not inherently the more worthy, moral or deserving claimant. In fact, closer inspect leads to the opposite conclusion. It is not by chance that the weak region or country is weak, while the strong region or country became so. Successful countries achieve their status through well-functioning economic institutions like well-defined property and ownership rights and a legal system to champion such institutions. These institutions promote the development of technology, goods and services and encourage long-term investment in infrastructure like roads, a public transportation network and education. Poor countries, by contrast, fail to provide the basic conditions and certainty necessary to encourage private investment. Their governments are often corrupt, choosing to pocket funds rather than invest in their citizens.
This analysis is particularly pertinent for understanding the power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Israel has spent the past 60 years of its modern existence investing massively in construction, education, health services, transportation and, by necessity of its hostile neighbors, its military. Consequently, it has transformed what began as a subsistence agricultural economy into an advanced scientific and technological powerhouse at the forefront of numerous modern industries. For this, Israel deserves our congratulations for resources put to good use, not our scorn.
Corrupt Palestinian leaders, by contrast, have squandered their resources and opportunities to provide their citizens with better lives. The elite leadership lives like kings indifferent to their subjects' abject poverty. Although we may pity the Palestinian people for their plight and wish them a brighter future, supporting their leadership in a conflict against Israel dooms their fate to even greater desperation.
2. "The Israeli army has claimed many times more victims than Hamas has"
The number of victims on each side of the conflict is a simple enough statistic to fit into a headline that can be understood by all. Yet its simplicity masks more meaningful measures and, worse still, distorts incentives.
First, a total body count does not categorize the number of victims by terrorists, soldiers and civilians. The extermination of a terrorist about to launch a rocket aimed at an urban center would be considered a blessing in most folks' accounting.
Second, counting bodies encourages ruthless regimes that care little for their people to make no effort to protect them. More perverse still, the public's reliance on this misleading statistic encourages Hamas to place Palestinian children in the line of fire. Hamas and the Hezbollah are infamous for launching their missiles at Israel from local schools and crowded residential neighborhoods and placing children on rooftops of buildings in which terrorists hide.
By contrast, Israel has adopted numerous life-saving measures to minimize the number of casualties from hostile neighboring attacks. For instance, all Israeli villages and cities - Jewish and Arab alike - within range of Hamas or Hezbollah have air missile sirens that alert the population to impending missile attacks on their city. These sirens can also be heard on radio broadcasts. Civilians then make their way to the nearest bomb shelter either in their neighborhood, workplace, lobby of their apartment building or right in their home. Iraq's missile attacks on Israel during the First Gulf War in 1991 prompted the government to legislate that one room in each new home must be a hermitic bomb shelter. My family and I now sleep in our apartment's bomb shelter.
3. "Israel uses disproportionate force against the Palestinians"
I haven't the faintest idea how to deter terrorism without relying on "disproportionate force" either in the quality or quantity of the response.
Criminal law operates on the basis that to deter crime the punishment must exceed the criminal's benefit from the crime; otherwise, crime pays. Deterrence of terrorism is no different. To induce Hamas to end their attacks on Israel, the cost they incur must exceed the benefits from successful terrorist operations. To achieve this, the Israeli army makes use of its technological sophistication to conduct pinpoint assassinations from the air. This force is qualitatively disproportionate or superior to the less accurate rockets that Hamas fires.
Elsewhere, I've written about an alternative response to terrorism based on quantitative disproportionate force. The idea is that Israel builds an automatic rocket-launching system. Each time Hamas, Hezbollah or any other group or nation launches a rocket at Israel, this system detects the rocket and launches N rockets of the same variety back at the enemy. N needs to be a number greater than one to achieve deterrence.
I suspect the world would be equally outraged at my solution because the world doesn't appreciate the necessity of disproportionate force to deter terrorism. Instead, many suggest that Israel's response needs to be "balanced". A balanced response would be appropriate if the conflict was between two societies with similar values, intentions and regard for human life. However, Hamas' aspirations to kill as many civilians (while Israel takes every precaution to ensure the safety of Palestinians civilians) compel Israel to employ disproportionate force against Hamas operatives to put a stop to their wanton violence as soon as possible.
4. "Israel's military response perpetuates the cycle of violence"
Critics apparently anticipate Israel to take it on the chin. Against a terrorist organization whose charter calls for the "obliteration" of Israel, a non-response is not a viable long-term strategy.
The cycle of violence argument suggests that Israel is to blame for entering an interminable spiral of death and destruction anytime it defends itself. Yet Israel's peace with Jordan and Egypt shows that the cycle of violence can be broken. These two Muslim nations ended their wars against Israel when their leadership accepted Israel's existence and abandoned the Arab mantra of "pushing Israel into the sea". Only when the Palestinian people demand of their leadership to recognize and respect Israel will the cycle of violence stop.
5. "Israel is committing genocide in Gaza"
This charge is a red flag. Anyone who claims that Israel is or has in any of its previous conflicts attempted genocide is either ignorant of the meaning of the word - direct them to a dictionary and point out that Hamas' targeting of densely populated civilian centers aptly fits the definition - or hopelessly full of hate and a toxic ideology aimed at Israel. Don't waste your time trying to change this person's mind. No amount of logic, reasoning or historical facts will succeed.
My hope is that the above rebuttals to commonly heard criticisms of Israel will help replace the public's slogans and knee-jerk reactions with more thoughtful, reasoned arguments. Such progress will benefit Israel, its supporters and, ultimately, the Palestinians.
My own criticism of Israel is that this initiative comes nearly four years too late. Israel needed to respond to the very first rocket. A non-response encouraged the next 2,999-plus rockets. Terrorism, like any other bad behavior, exists because it is tolerated.
The author is an economics professor at Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel. Much of his research focuses on rational explanations for seemingly irrational behaviors, like gift giving, religious observance and terrorism.
1. To compare the nation state of Israel to the Palestinian Authority is ludicrous. Israel is a country subsidized by 4 billion dollars per year from the US and has benefited from over 60 years of such subsidies. The PA, on the other hand, is a captive entity, little more than a county government with no control over it's borders, imports, exports, electromagnetic spectrum, population registry etc. Israel completely controls all these aspects and more, including the movement of people and goods within the West Bank though a network of hundreds of checkpoints, and Israeli-only and Arab-only roads. Gaza, of course is almost completely cut off from the world by Israel, and the duly elected Palestinian government has not been recognized. Keep in mind that most of the vaunted agriculture and technology in Israel that Prof. Ruffle applauds is located on land that was confiscated from people who fled to Gaza and the West Bank and never allowed to return.
2. The Israeli disregard for non-Jewish life is well documented whether in war or controlling demonstrations and riots. One need only look at the weekly non-violent Biilin demonstrations against the separation barrier. Rubber bullets and live fire are used, despite the fact that the IDF sits on the other side of the fence from the protesters. However not one bullet was fired by police or the IDF during the recent Hebron riots by Jewish settlers.
Israel publishes a body count of terror murders each year. However the most bizarre thing about the recent Gaza 'war' is that it was conducted against a captive population, completely imprisoned within the strip, and fired on by F16s and other high tech military hardware against which they had no defense. These are the facts. Imagine if a fence had been thrown up around the greater Tel Aviv area before the scud missiles rained down in 1991, or if the residents of Northern Galilee were restrained from traveling south during the last Lebanon war.
3. See last paragraph above.
4. Israel doesn't need to take it on the chin. But it does need to either permit a viable and sovereign state to emerge on the lands occupied since 1967, or prepare itself for demands for one state and a South Africa-like solution. We are almost past the point of no return with the West Bank settlements.
5. Dictionary definitions aside, Genocide as defined by the UN and international law is multi-faceted. As adopted by Resolution 260 (III) A of the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948:
Article 2
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
* (a) Killing members of the group;
* (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
* (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
* (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
* (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
I would say that Israel is in violation of article 2a, b, and c