False Moral Equivalence: Israel and Palestine
Sat June 21st, 2003 17:50 MSTAt a social gathering the other night, I was shocked that most of those present saw a moral equivalence (at least) between the actions of the Palestinian suicide bombers and the Israeli government. In fact, the general atmosphere was hostile to Israel and sympathetic to the Palestinians. This among a group of otherwise intelligent people.
This seems to be either collosal ignorance or moral blindness of the worst kind. To me, it illustrates how our society has fallen.
The suicide bombers intentionally target innocents. They use weapons designed to create maximum suffering (for example, coating the shrapnel with rat poison to cause excess bleeding). They attempt to kill as many women and children as possible.
They are proud of this. How many of their admirers truly believe that combatants should target civilians? These same admirers usually condemn the US for accidently killing civilians in Iraq (even as many of the fondly consider WW-II to be honorable, even though the west killed millions of civilians by bombing their cities). Hypocrisy is the currency of modern moral discourse!
The purpose of these acts of terrorism are either to gain independence from occupation (if you believe the Palestinian Authority) or to drive the Jews from Palestine (the often stated goal of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the actual goal of the PA).
On the other hand, the Israelis are trying to defend themselves, while miniimizing the killing of innocents. They don’t always succeed. However, the intent of their effort is easy to determine - they use precision missiles (usually Hellfires) with small warheads to target their quarry.
If they really want to kill innocent Palestinians, they need only turn loose their artillery batteries or bombers on Palestinian towns… but they don’t - even when the Palestinians use rocket artillery against Israeli civilians. Sometimes the Israelis use telephone bombs that can only kill the target. Today they risked troops in hostile terrority, killing a terrorist leader by accurate gunfire.
Israel’s purpose is self defense - to end terrorism. No serious observer believes that the Israeli government would be killing any Palestinians in the absence of terrorism.
And yet, somehow, the Israelis are condemned.
Of course, the Israelis are condemned as occupiers, as if this justifies the intentional killing of innocents. And indeed, they did conquer the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, but only after having twice been viciously attacked from them by large Arab armies bent on the extinction of Israel. Most Israeli’s, with the exception of some religious groups, do not want to occupy the territories. They rightly view it as a huge economic cost to hold a land full of hostile people. Hardly the goals of a democratic state.
But even if the Israeli’s were imperialist occupiers, would the murder of innocents be justified? Should we support Native Americans if they decide to start blowing up school buses in the US? It is *exactly* equivalent (except for the time period of 55 vs 120 years).
Had the Israelis been prescient, they might have realized that conquering the West Bank would lead to decades of conflict and terrorism. They might have been wiser to throw the Palestinians all the way back to Jordan, or to immediately return the West Bank to Jordan. But they didn’t do that - because they are not that kind of people. They are not imperialists - they just want a safe homeland.
Another excuse is that Israel kills Palestinian civilians. And, of course, they do, but not on purpose. Their targets are the terrorists who hide among the civilians. If a mass murderer hides among a large number of innocent civilians, and is surrounded by a large protective force, what sort of crime is it to target that murderer? The same laws of war which require combatants to minimize harm to innocents recognize that innocents cannot be completely protected.
The Palestinians have chosen to follow various despots. Yassir Arafat, not even a Palestinian, is worshipped like a god, even though he steals vast sums of money from them and sacrifices their lives to his personal interests. Hamas encourages children to strap on bomb vests and kill other children, and Hamas is even more popular than the Palestinian Authority. Both groups, and many others, helped by many Arab governments, continuously broadcast and print the most vile anti-Israeli and anti-American propaganda, ensuring that the hatred is passed on to their children.
By any rational observation, current Palestinian society is violently insane. If it were a person, it would be locked up and kept in restraints! As a people, it should be condemned, not supported. Those who provide support to the Palestinian terrorists, especially the Arab countries and the Europeans, have the blood of many innocents on their hands.
They feel no guilt.
I fully agree with you. The first thing that the Palestinians start screaming about when the Israelis target terrorists is that “innocent women and children were killed”. Yet this is exactly who the Palestinians specifically target-not unintended targets, but INTENDED targets. Unfortunately, I don’t think the peace process will ever succeed because many of the extremists who target Israelis have eliminating Israel as a country as their agenda. And because the US supports Israel as a state the Arab World is critical of the United States.
it amazes me beyond words when i hear people laud the palestinian behavior with respect to terrorism. when this kind of thing happens in the united states, ie, oklahoma city (timothy mcVay), Columbine high school, etc, etc, ad nauseum, (although granted, it happens for different reasons), we do not praise the killers. instead we aid the families, comfort victims who survive, bury our dead with dignity and find justice for the killers when we catch them (instead of turning them over for experimentation by dr. kevorkian).
there is no praise for our home grown killers.
and there should be no praise for foreign killers of the innocent.
israel has always striven to be humane. contrary to popular misrepresentation, the land the jews settled was purchased, not stolen. when the war of independence erupted, the jews asked/begged the arabs whom they’d lived with for decades to stay, promising not to harm them. but they fled because other arabs warned them that they were going to push the jews and those who helped them into the sea. post war, those who fled would still have been welcomed back. they didn’t need to stay in refugee camps. but they chose to because they were afraid. understandably, but where are they today? did their fellow arabs welcome them into their lands and homes? no. they are still in refugee camps, mostly.
as for american indians…. and holding a good share of cree blood in my veins, a part of me wishes that we had deported the white man when he/she first arrived. but no, we welcomed them, helped them and gave them food when they were starving…. in a way…. you could say that we set the tone for the behavior of the united states toward refugees…..think about it.
please make text black on white background so it is easier to print
thank you
In making the moral superiority claim, Israel’s apologists are either shamelessly denying the irrefutable evidence of wholesale slaughter in the Palestinian territories and are simply lying, or they are asserting that some forms of murder are morally superior to other forms of murder. Just listen to your divine leaders to understand your moral superiority to slaughter Palestinians:
“Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war… We are very far from any moral hesitations when concerned with the national struggle.
First and foremost, terror is for us a part of the political war appropriate for the circumstances of today…”
Yitzhak Shamir
Israeli Prime Minister, Zionist terrorist
in an August 1943 article titled “Terror”, written for Hazit
the journal of Lehi, the terrorist organization he belonged to.