Is it immoral for Israel to retaliate against Gaza?

Mr Rosenbaum, perhaps inadvertently, opens up a “pandora’s box” which he may wish he had left shut. For many years I have questioned the moral obligation of the State of Israel to comply with international law.

Mr. Rosenbaum concedes the legality of Israel’s responses to Hamas/Palestinian/Hezbollah/whatever (let’s call them HPHW for short) but argues that, because Israel’s responses are so effective they raise issues of disproprortionality and thus immorality in responding as such.

This raises two points I would like to address.

First, we live in the first time in history…at least since Biblical times…that the Jewish People have been able to defend themselves effectively against the marauding, slaughters, pogroms and other atrocities they have suffered throughout history simply because they were Jews. Expulsions From Iberia, forced conversions, confiscation of property, non-access to courts, repeated pogroms all over Europe as well as the Holocaust itself never raised issues of disproportionality or morality, at least not in time to prevent them from happening. There is, for example, ample evidence that Polish diplomats placed detailed reports on the desk of FDR during WWII of the Holocaust going on inside Poland and he chose to remain silent and do nothing. A recent piece on the BBC reported how British and the BBC deliberately chose, for ” strategic ressons”, to remain silent about warning Hungarian Jews in 1944 about what would happen to them once the Germans occupied their country. As a result, the Hungarian Jews were not warned and remained in place when the Nazis arrived. Within just a few months over 500,000 of the 800,000 pre-war population of Hungarian Jews had been murdered. We also know that after the war the British intercepted Jewish survivors of the Holocaust as they attempted to sail to Palestine, rounded them up and “housed” back in the same concentration camps from which they had emerged.

Now, finally, when Israel can defend itself effectively…indeed in such a way as that any normal attacker should actually be deterred…and now that such defence is, as Mr. Rosenbaum concedes, legal…now we must (or are reduced to) question its morality. Mr. Rosenbaum’s questions of immorality in the Israeli response fall a bit flat.

But my second question goes a bit deeper. Mr. Rosenbaum wants to examine the morality of Israel taking advantage of international law to its benefit, so lets look at the bigger picture. What is Israel’s moral obligation to comply with ANY international law?

When has international law ever been applied to benefit or protect Israel or the Jewish People? Obviously, international law as a set of norms has evolved slowly. In many ways it is quite recent. It is safe to say that throughout history such law as existed rarely benefitted Jews. Laws were applied against them, or they were not permitted to take advantage of laws which could help them. There were many examples by which Jewish bankers, for example, would be prohibited from suing to collect debts owing to them. Jews in many countries were second class citizens and unable to take advantage of laws of general application…Ottoman Turks are said to have been good to the Jews why? Because they didn’t slaughter them….but they did not allow them equal treatment.

International law has been bent, folded and mutilated in order to attack Israel and the Jews. Look at such ICJ decisions as The Wall case, which sought to prohibit Israel from passive defence of its population. Look at the Goldstone Report. If you do not want to accept Israeli criticism of the report read Justice Goldstone’s own recantation of the report that bears his name to see how international law was systematically abused, manipulated and mutated in order to provide another foundation for attacking Israel. Or look at the so-called Human Rights Council of the UN which is simply another fountain of anti-semitism but one cloaked by international law.

And look at today. International law is NOT silent on the issue of the illegality of TARGETING civilians as a tactic/strategy, or using one’s own civilians as human shields. It is illegal, yet the silence of the world in the face of repeated rocket attacks aimed at Israeli civilians is in brutal contrast to the cacophony raised when Israel tries to protect itself from such attacks by trying to remove the rockets hidden behind human shields. As I have commented here before, Israelis never suffer collateral damage as do the Palestinians because what the Israelis, and the rest of the civilized world, defines as “collateral damage” the HPHW define as “targets”. An alien landing on our planet could be forgiven for concluding that such attacks against Israelis were permitted and even condoned…such a being would no doubt be surprised that the state of international law ran completely opposite to the news coverage and commentary about the situation.

So the question arises about Israel’s moral obligation to comply with international law. Of course it is a State and has a legal obligation, but Mr. Rosenbaum has raised the issue of morality and that is a different question.

If international law is not applied to Israel, and if Israel is not permitted to take advantage of any such laws as may benefit it, then how may we conclude that Israel has a MORAL obligation to comply with any such law? I am interested in the response.

One other question if we want to look at the respective morality of Israel vs HPHW. Imagine if Israel decided that it would protect its installations from HPHW attacks by hiding them behind human shields…how effective a tactic would that be? Wouldn’t it, instead, make things just that much easier for the HPHW?

I know this is a long “comment” but Mr. Rosenbaum has raised issues that require more than a “sound bite” to address.

Blaise on November 25, 2012 at 2:22 PM