Don’t Feel Sorry for the Gazans

Supporters of Israel sometimes say that the people of Gaza deserve collective punishment because they support Hamas, which carried out terrorist attacks against Israel. Setting aside the fact that Hamas was not elected, Americans should be careful about claims that terrorism by a government justifies violent retaliation against a civilian population.

Hamas to Israel: Thank You, We’ll Have Another

Israel says it wants to eliminate Hamas specifically, and radical Islamism generally, in Gaza. Ironically, its war against the Gaza Strip, in which the vast majority of victims are innocent civilians, will only serve to recruit a bigger generation of angry Palestinians to the anti-occupation resistance.

Let’s Bond Over Dehumanization

Israel and its supporters blithely state, as if it were plainly obvious, that the only side Hamas in particular and Palestinians writ large will respond to is naked force, i.e., violence. The irony they miss is that their war against Gaza is a response to Hamas’ terrorist attack of October 7th. You can be sure that, when Hamas’ leadership hatched their plans for that attack, they also believed that Israel would never respond to anything other than brute force. Dehumanization is not the kind of common ground needed in the Middle East or anywhere else.

Israel Should Respond, Not React

            In the days and weeks and months and years after 9/11, when you questioned how the Bush Administration responded to the terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda, right-wing Republicans and liberal Democrats alike answered with a passive shrug. “Well,” they said, “we had to do something.

            Then you pressed about Bush’s specific responses—those somethings. Invading Afghanistan, which had nothing to do with 9/11. The USA-Patriot Act, which stripped away our rights and Congressmen didn’t bother to read. Guantánamo. Torture. Extraordinary rendition. Drones. Same reply: “We had to do something.”

Invading Iraq? Not that. Bush crossed his own line in the sand there.

Hamas’ violent incursion from the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip into Israel—re-read the preceding prepositional phrase, for it encapsulates the insanity of the situation—was instantly described as Israel’s 9/11. Like the United States 22 years ago, Israel is not responding. It is reacting.

            They (feel that they) have to do something. That (feeling) is understandable.

            However, logic is supposed to kick in next. Israelis should ask themselves: Do they really have to do something?

            Did we, following 9/11?

            If so, if something must be done, there are many options. Must “doing something” include military force?

            In 2007, at the height of the “war on terror,” Harvard convened a panel of experts in order to evaluate Bush’s post-9/11 actions. Participants were asked: “Are terrorists simply insane, barbaric, nihilistic, as others have theorized?” Obviously not. “Terrorists want three things, Harvard political science professor and terrorism specialist Louise Richardson said: “revenge, renown, and reaction.”

Richardson argued that “to assume that being tough on terrorism means being effective against it” is a mistake. Trying to defeat terrorists through military means, she said, allows them to achieve revenge, renown, and reaction—exactly what they want. “By declaring war on terrorism, we’re playing exactly into their hands. We’re conceding the very objective they are trying to achieve.” The war on terror killed nearly a million people and cost $8 trillion. What a waste! From Shanksville to Kabul to Baghdad to the Be’eri Kibbutz, neither terrorism as a tactic generally nor radical Islamist terrorism specifically has lost an inch of ground.

America’s number-one client state is repeating our error.

            “There is a sense of helplessness, but we are all now trying to become proactive,” Aviram Meir, whose nephew was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7th, told an Israeli reporter. “We have to do something.”

            A normal impulse.

            A normal impulse that should be resisted.

Human animals,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called members of Hamas as he, rather animalistically himself, announced that he would cut off food and water to 2.3 million people, 99.9999% of whom had no involvement in the Hamas attacks. His choice of words, so dehumanizing and redundant, is ironic. Taking a pause to think before you respond to sensory input—the difference between acting and reacting—is not only a big evolutionary advantage that human beings have over other animals, but the essence of what it means to be a civilized person.

Gallant and other Israelis howling for quick vengeance ought to refer to the psychologist Viktor Frankl, best known for “Man’s Search for Meaning,” a classic book informed by three years at Auschwitz. “Between stimulus and response,” Frankl wrote, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Gallant aside, even the animals we choose to keep near us have this trait. An animal suited for domestication, scientists say, does not panic when startled.

Hamas’ October 7th operation was meticulously researched and planned. It is not even slightly likely that Hamas leadership did not foresee the Israeli response that we are seeing: a brutal bombing campaign followed by a massive ground invasion determined to replace the Hamas government with a puppet regime. Rule one of strategy: when you find yourself following a predictable set of actions, your enemy is winning.

Perhaps Hamas, like the Iraqi resistance in Fallujah, has rigged Gaza with boobytraps. Maybe Sunni Hamas has a regional ex deus machina up its sleeve, like a game-changing promise from Shia Hezbollah open up a second front against Israel, and/or a commitment from Syria, which could point to Israeli bombing of its civilian airports as casi bellis. And/or Hamas is playing a long game, in which Israel’s Geneva Conventions-shattering bombings of schools and hospitals, targeting of Palestinian children and other forms of internationally-proscribed collective punishment erase the memory of the atrocities committed by Hamas and decisively turn the world against the Jewish state.

If I were sitting in an Israeli war room planning my nation’s next move, I’d be worried sick about these possibilities/probabilities.

I would argue: there’s no rush to invade Gaza. Vengeance is a dish best served cold or at least after time to think.

There are numerous other options.

Israel could turn the power back on, let food and water back in and beef up its lame security along its border with Gaza. It could treat the attacks as a police matter and demand that Hamas turn over suspects for prosecution. It could jumpstart negotiations to finalize a two-state solution, which everyone knows is the only viable long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It could embrace the wisdom of Nelson Mandela, who understood that a cycle of violence would never end unless one side, the side in charge that happened to be the African National Congress after he was elected president, declared amnesty so the country could move past apartheid. And if it finally did—after careful consideration—decide to invade Gaza, it could so with full knowledge and understanding of what form of governance would follow Hamas.

            Nothing is stupider than the blind urge to do something, anything, whatever, after an act of terror. Nothing leads to worse responses.

“We have to defend. We have to do something.” Those are the words of Maisa Khader, a 38-year-old chemist, in 2021. She was Palestinian, attending a pro-Hamas rally in Gaza. She was angry about Israel’s latest bombing blitz against the people of Gaza.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

 

 

DMZ America Podcast #120: Hamas Goes to War with Israel

Hamas fighters swarmed into Israel from the Occupied Gaza Strip, which has been subjected to a grinding economic blockade since 2007, killing Israeli civilians and soldiers and taking hostages. Political cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ramifications of what Israelis are calling their 9/11. Scott, an ardent defender of Israel, tries to find common ground with Ted, who supports Palestine’s independence struggle.

Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast:

DMZ America Podcast Ep120: Hamas Goes to War with Israel

Clueless on Gaza

            Six weeks after 9/11, I thought I perceived a “new American thoughtfulness” in response to the attacks against New York and Washington.

            “For the first time in memory, Americans are reconsidering the wisdom of supporting an Israel whose reactions to Palestinian terrorism is itself increasingly indistinguishable from terrorism,” my syndicated column for October 23, 2001 reads.

“No one wants to cave in to those who massacred thousands of our fellow citizens. But the alternative is even less attractive,” I wrote. “If we refuse to even consider the possibility that our actions abroad are sometimes less than decent and honorable, we can look forward to more such attacks in the future.”

What a fool I was! Poor hapless thoughtfulness never stood a chance against the bloodthirsty and jingoistic neoconservative foreign policy that has since held sway.

Now it’s Israel’s turn to confront the blowback from years of suppression and repression of a population of Muslims who predictably determined that “enough is enough,” consequences be damned. Israelis are already describing last weekend’s incursion and rocket attacks from Hamas-governed Gaza Strip as their version of 9/11.

Expect Israelis, as Americans did 22 years ago, to wallow in denial. Why do they hate little old us so much? Then comes more military barbarism, Bibi Netanyahu promises. The bombings will resume until morale improves.

That approach worked so well for us in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Two million stateless people live in the hot, overcrowded, impoverished Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, subject to an Israeli blockade since 2007. Egypt, in partnership with Israel, prevents people and goods from crossing Gaza’s southern border. 70% of Gazans are refugees expelled from their homes by Jewish invaders in 1948.

The blockade has caused unbearable suffering. Gaza’s 50% unemployment rate is the highest in the world, worse than Afghanistan. Four out of five residents live under the poverty line. The water is filthy, in large part because Israel has destroyed hundreds of wells. Port closures, road blocks and Israeli bombing campaigns have sucked tens of billions of dollars out of the economy.

“The blockade restricts the import of goods, including electronic and computer equipment, that could be used to make weapons and prevents most people from leaving the territory,” reports The New York Times. Because hospitals are short of X-ray machines and other medical equipment and travel via Israel to better-equipped facilities in the Fatah-administered, Israeli-occupied West Bank is severely restricted by “a lengthy, bureaucratic regime of permits,” patients die needlessly, according to the World Bank.

Thanks to Israel, Gaza, surrounded by 40 miles of a 20-feet-high, sensor-equipped underground wall topped with razor wire and hundreds of cameras, radar and sensors, and sea wall that features sonar and remote-controlled aquatic weapons to intercept boats and submarines, has become the world’s biggest concentration camp.

Insanely, the U.S. and its Western allies think that what Israel is doing is normal. “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” Biden Administration national security adviser Jake Sullivan said last week. Even though Israel has the farthest-right-wing government in its history Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest exporter of Wahhabi jihadism, was moving closer to normalizing relations. The war is crazy. But not as crazy as the “peace.”

None of this is to endorse Hamas’ obscene actions on Saturday, which include shooting civilians, taking some hostage and parading and abusing the semi-nude body of a woman killed by Hamas fighters while attending a concert. Although it’s also obscene to hold a rave three miles from the perimeter of a concentration camp.

Nor must one support all of Hamas’ stated impetuses for Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, like the alleged “desecration” by Jewish visitors of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque. You don’t kill hundreds of people over access to a building because a religion—which, by definition, is a fiction—claims it’s “holy.”

Following 16 years of vicious oppression, the only shocking aspects of this war are timing and scale. What took Hamas so long? Why wasn’t the assault bigger?

When assessing whether an act is ethically or morally justified, the first question to ask yourself is: would I do the same thing if I were in the position of the person or persons carrying it out? Stealing is a crime. We nevertheless identify with Victor Hugo’s protagonist Jean Valjean when he heists a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving child. You’d make the same decision.

Bank robbery is a crime. Most people, me included and I assume you as well, would never choose to commit that act. So we judge adults who hold up banks harshly.

Gazans faced a choice.

They could obey Israel and its supporters. They could suffer, chafe under occupation, dodge bombs and bullets, starve, watch their friends and neighbors die, with no end in sight as the world keeps ignoring them.

They could stage protest marches that no important media outlet would cover, write firm-but-polite letters to the editor no one would publish and post to social media accounts no one would read. As they engaged in peaceful protest, they would keep starving and dying.

Or they could confront the Israelis with violence.

You can argue that violence is never the answer. You can claim that you’d be docile,  that you’d live under blockade and occupation, never taking up arms or cheering those who do.

Go on, judge the Gazans. We both know you’d do the same exact thing if you were them.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

Magnificent Anti-American Jihadis

Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and other distressed banks have been done in by rapid increases in interest rates by the Federal Reserve Bank. These commercial banks had long positions in Treasury obligations that lost value as interest rates went up. With monetary friends like these…

Culture of Life

The right-wingers who comprise the majority of the pro-life movement are only consistent in one respect. On issue after issue, they have no respect for life. Their hypocrisy leads one to suspect that they are more interested in controlling women than saving lives.

Terror Comes to America

America’s use of drones against foreign countries is the epitome of might-makes-right policy. It’s extrajudicial, it’s an act of war, it’s brazen murder without justification. The US gets away with it for one simple reason: no one can stop it. And American citizens never put themselves in the position of being the victims, only the perpetrators. What if that were to change? One day it no doubt will.

Happy 9/11 Day

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 left a bunch of ridiculous legacies that pretty much everyone with an ounce of sanity agrees we should let go. For example, let’s get rid of the TSA and go back to the old days of airport security. And let’s stop saying that we have to do something before we think about what to do.

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