Guns and Butter Blog

By now, it should be obvious to most readers that the blog has not been updated for sometime. Unfortunatley, my new day job keeps me extremely busy. For the near future, I will not be able to blog much (my partners are welcome to continue to post, however).

Thank you, readers, for visiting Guns and Butter Blog.

Among the many odd bits of education I’ve picked up here and there, I’ve had the pleasure of receiving some very useful training in General Semantics – a rather obscure discipline that is very difficult to define, but which can be described as a system for promoting accuracy of thought and feeling. (One of my principle teachers was Robert Pula, who I just found out – thanks to Wikipedia’s wonderfully rich cross-referencing system – died two years ago. Rest in peace, Bob.) A good bit of my rather annoying analytical style can probably be attributed to my exposure to General Semantics almost thirty years ago.

One of the fundamental concepts of General Semantics is that the map is not the territory; the word is not the thing – meaning that our verbal and non-verbal representations of reality are, at best, just representations, and not reality itself.

If we want to think accurately, we need to be aware that it’s all too easy to use these representations in ways that radically distort our understanding of the world. For example, I frequently see some of my fellow Zionists saying and writing things like, “The Palestinians don’t want peace; they just want to destroy Israel.” The problem here is that there is no such “thing” as “the Palestinians”; several million people can be classified (more or less accurately) as Palestinians, and they lack even a means of expressing a majority opinion on this or any other subject. To talk about “the Palestinians” as if they were a unitary object with a single opinion on Israel – or, for that matter, on anything else – is non-sense. (I’ve written in this vein before; see the second paragraph of my response to A____ in “Strategic assets and white elephants”.)

Since – with our limited and imperfect senses – we can never perceive reality entire, all we have is representations: words, maps, and other abstractions from the reality that is “out there” but which remains forever inaccessible to us. If we want to get along well with the universe, we should seek the most accurate representations we can get: Someone trying to understand the Middle East can no more afford to think in terms of what “the Palestinians” think than an American long-distance bus driver can afford to use a map that shows New Jersey next to Idaho. Successful navigation requires maps that fit the territory.

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All of this brings me to one of this month’s existential crises in Israel: Yuli Tamir, our Minister of Education, has come under a barrage of criticism from the Right for her decision to order the inclusion of the “Green Line” (Israel’s pre-1967 de facto border, which was in fact an armistice line recognized by neither Israel nor its Arab neighbors as a legal border) in maps to be included in new elementary-school geography textbooks. According to some (but by no means all) Israeli Rightists and their supporters overseas, including the Green Line in our children’s maps will somehow turn them all into raging members of Peace Now and otherwise sap and impurify all of their precious bodily fluids.

This controversy highlights one of the more surreal absurdities in a region that possesses over 60% of the world’s proven absurdity reserves: Although the Green Line is a significant factor in our lives, it is entirely absent from most of our maps. Since a November 1967 government decision decreed that Israeli maps should show only the post-Six-Day-War cease-fire lines and not the previous borders, the Green Line has achieved a kind of massive, intrusive invisibility.

This might make some kind of sense if the Green Line were in fact irrelevant; but it isn’t. Not only is it still a major part of Israel’s history and a constant point of reference in the debate about an eventual settlement of the Israeli/Arab conflict; it’s also a significant influence on the day-to-day lives of many Israelis:

• Until about six years ago, Israelis living across the Green Line received reductions in their income taxes. Many Israelis think we still do, and resent us for it.


• People living across the Green Line (myself included) have an easier time obtaining gun licenses than otherwise-similar people living inside “Israel proper”.


• Many banks will not give mortgage loans on houses across the Green Line, or else will finance a lower percentage of a home’s purchase price than they would inside pre-1967 Israel.


• People living across the Green Line know that they can be evicted from their homes by their government, as a result of an eventual agreement with our Arab neighbors or else as part of a unilateral Israeli withdrawal. (When we bought our house, Vaguely Sinister Wife and I had to sign papers acknowledging this; in fact, according to what we signed the government can, at least in theory, evict us without compensation for the loss of our home.)


• As soon as you cross the Green Line from pre-1967 Israel, you come under military rather than civilian legal jurisdiction. This is easily forgotten, since Israelis living in the West Bank are normally dealt with by the Israeli legal system just as other Israelis are; but this is a privilege extended as a courtesy, and can be revoked at the government’s will. This means that if the government should decide to evict us from our homes, and should we decide to protest this decision, we could quickly find ourselves without the civil rights we normally take for granted; martial law is already in place, merely held in abeyance for us as long as it’s not needed.


• Stuff grown or manufactured by Jews across the Green Line is apt to be boycotted by members of the Enlightened Public overseas, and even by some Israelis.


• The Green Line features prominently in our social lives. Many people won’t visit me at home since I live on the “wrong” side of the Line by a couple of kilometers. (Others, of course, avoid me because they’re allergic to cat fluff, or simply because they don’t like me.)

In short, the Green Line is important – historically, politically, legally, economically, and socially. So where the hell is it? An awful lot of Israelis have no idea.

By eliminating the Green Line from Israeli maps, our government did not eliminate the Green Line; all it accomplished was to create a lot of inaccurate maps and ignorant Israelis. If we intend to navigate our future successfully, we need to know where the Green Line is and what the Green Line is. So let the maps be reprinted; let the Green Line show forth in all its wriggly and impractical glory! And when, eventually, it really does become merely a fact of history, let it enjoy an honorable, dignified – and visible – retirement.


* This is a rather wretched play on the title of the seminal – and rather impenetrable – textbook of General Semantics, Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski. I apologize abjectly – although I suspect that Korzybski would have approved of it.



(This post can also be found at You’ll Come for the Terrorism....)

Categories: Israel.

On 8 December, media watchdog HonestReporting came out with a special report on the new – and already discredited – United Nations Human Rights Council. The report is worth a read, although there’s not much there to surprise anyone who follows the United Nations and its relationship with Israel.

As I dutifully read through the report, slightly bored and mildly depressed, if not astonished, by the hypocrisy of the U.N.’s supposed human-rights establishment, I came across the following sentence:

On November 15, 19 Palestinian civilians were killed when an Israeli artillery shell veered off course, missing its intended military target.

Alarm bells began to ring. My boredom vanished. I suddenly felt that old familiar tingle in my typing fingers (all ten of them). Wasn’t HonestReporting going a bit beyond the facts here?

I very recently wrote about the Beit Hanoun tragedy, although in writing that essay I didn’t investigate the details of how Israeli artillery managed to be off-target by several hundred meters. (I was more interested in the applicability of “international law” to the incident, rather than the technical aspect of what went wrong.) Still, I remembered enough about the incident to be suspicious: HonestReporting’s description didn’t ring quite true.

The first problem here was the word “veered”. (The immediate picture that came to my mind when reading that “an Israeli artillery shell veered off course” was an ancient cartoon sequence of some guy firing off a rocket, which then, predictably, did a loop-the-loop and hit him in the butt.) If the tragedy happened because a shell “veered off course”, we are meant to assume that it had been aimed correctly and somehow took a wrong turn in mid-flight. Now this might indeed happen with a primitive rocket, and it nearly always happens when I hit a golf ball; but it doesn’t generally happen with artillery shells.

And indeed, some very quick research revealed that it didn’t happen. According to the IDF itself as well as to other reports, the shells flew straight enough, but were aimed inaccurately because of a malfunction in one circuit card of the artillery battery’s “Shilem” targeting system. The “Shilem” apparatus for this battery had been replaced five days before the Beit Hanoun tragedy; and according to at least one report, it had not been given a live-fire test before being used in the Beit Hanoun bombardment. The final report of the IDF investigation into the incident has not been released, so we don’t yet know why this particular device malfunctioned; the “Shilem” system has been in use for about 30 years and has an excellent record for reliability, which may have (perversely) contributed to the tragedy by allowing the system to be deployed with minimal post-installation testing before real-world use.

According to both the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz, seven shells were fired off-target, not just one. So even though a hardware failure was responsible for the death of nineteen innocent civilians, the operational procedures in use that day failed to correct the problem in an appropriately timely manner. (Apparently, part of the problem was that the same system that had made the mistake in the first place was also in charge of tracking where the shells hit – and it thought it was doing just fine.)

So: It was seven shells, not one. The shells didn’t change their minds in midair; they were aimed wrong by a defective system, under circumstances that remain unclear. And what about the “intended military target” of the shelling?

Here I was on firmer ground, since I had already written about the targeting of the Beit Hanoun bombardment. The actual target of the shelling was an open area that had been used on the previous day for launching Kassam rockets at Israel. Without repeating a long discussion of the targeting issue, I will only say that blithely referring to an open field as a “military target” is, at best, something of an exaggeration. The impression conveyed by the phrase “military target” is of something substantial – a weapons factory, a troop formation, or the like – rather than an open field that had been used for a military purpose on the previous day but might well be hosting a soccer game today. Even if the IDF had a more or less valid military intention in firing these shells at Beit Hanoun, the target was hardly an impressively military one.

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All of this may seem like a lot of bother about one sentence in an otherwise unobjectionable report written by an organization of whose goals I approve. But I think that this sentence highlights an important problem with many of the individuals and organizations that support Israel in the public sphere: the tendency to be just a little bit too convinced of Israeli righteousness, to be too fast to gloss over our own side’s transgressions, and thus to lose the trust of a skeptical world.

Organizations like HonestReporting bill themselves as guardians of the truth – in HonestReporting’s own words, “Promoting fairness. Ensuring accuracy. Effecting change.” If these organizations want to achieve anything, they need to be seen as more than just pro-Israel propaganda mouthpieces. It’s fine to be pro-Israel – many people, myself included, are immediately suspicious of anyone who claims complete neutrality – but if you’re billing yourself as a guardian of accuracy and an opponent of media bias, you need to be scrupulously accurate yourself and try hard not to be swayed by your own biases.

On this occasion – and, I’m afraid, on many others – HonestReporting has let its sympathy for Israel overrule its professed dedication to accuracy, and thus has damaged its own effectiveness.


(This post can also be found at You’ll come for the terrorism....)

Categories: Israel, Palestine, Middle East, War Crimes.

Of all the English-language columnists in the Israeli press, there is only one who consistently writes stuff that I wish I’d written myself: Haaretz’s Bradley Burston. I don’t always fully agree with him – he’s generally a bit to my left politically – but he’s always thoughtful, and, unlike many Haaretz writers, he’s never so doctrinaire as to render himself irrelevant.

Of course, there’s no point in writing a blog post simply to tell the world (OK, a very very small portion of the world) that you agree with something; to blog is to quibble, after all. So my lead paragraph is there simply to soften you up for what follows: a detailed disagreement with Bradley Burston.

In his recent column “We can’t be war criminals, we’re Palestinian”, Burston quite correctly argues that Palestinian use of Kassam rockets against Israeli towns constitutes a war crime; and he brings in Human Rights Watch to back up his claim. So far, so good; but Burston also invokes HRW to support his contention that Israel committed a war crime in its shelling of Beit Hanoun, which resulted in the tragic killing of nineteen noncombatant Palestinian civilians. I believe that it is unfair to “convict” Israel of war crimes in this manner, despite the fact that I do not have a great deal of confidence in our military and political leaders’ wisdom or motives; and I wrote Bradley Burston to explain why (correspondence is reproduced with Mr. Burston’s permission):

Dear Mr. Burston:

As happens annoyingly often, you’ve written a column that I wish I’d written myself. Thanks for the good writing and the astute analysis.

I have one quibble with your argument regarding recent events in Beit Hanoun: You seem overly ready to convict the IDF of a war crime in the killing of 19 Palestinian noncombatants, considering that the law on the subject is highly ambiguous.

International law indeed requires that military attacks be directed only at military targets. Human Rights Watch contends that the standards used by the IDF in aiming and timing its artillery attacks are such as to constitute a war crime; but I don’t think they successfully make that case. The problem is that while international law does require certain intentions in targeting, the relevant treaties do not establish any particular standard for “quality control” in executing attacks; that is, there is no well-defined boundary between “legitimate” unintentional killing of civilians and illegitimate attacks carried out with reckless disregard for civilian deaths.

Lacking such a standard, there is no reliable way to judge the IDF’s shelling of Gaza on purely objective grounds.

According to HRW, “the IDF confirmed that it had fired 12 artillery shells at the site, having missed its intended target 500 meters away.” It would seem to me that if the shells that killed the Athamna family fell 500 meters from their designated target, the prima facie interpretation of the incident is that it was a tragic but non-criminal error. Since the legality of an attack is based on its intention (that is, its target) the attack does not become a war crime simply because of an error in aiming weapons – as long as a good-faith effort was made to procure accurate weapons and aim them properly.

HRW further claims that “the evidence suggests that Israel’s day-old information that homemade rockets had been launched from the area, with no specific information that rockets continued to be launched from the area, was an insufficient basis for considering the area attacked to be a legitimate military target.” This claim is problematic for two reasons: first, requiring “specific information” about Kassam firing in “real time” would make most forms of military interdiction of such firing virtually impossible, as Kassam crews arrive, set up their launcher, fire their rocket, and leave again within a very short span of time. The best that can possibly be done is to identify areas that are routinely used for firing Kassams and are not overly close to civilian dwellings or facilities, and then to try to time interdiction fire to achieve best results with minimum risk to the innocent. The second problem with HRW’s claim is that it is completely irrelevant: If the IDF artillery was off-target by 500 meters, the timing of the shelling was not the primary cause of the tragedy. Presumably, had the shells been aimed accurately, tragedy would have been averted even if nobody was firing Kassams from the target zone at the time.

Ultimately, the determination of whether the IDF shelling of Beit Hanoun constituted a war crime can be made only on somewhat subjective grounds:

• Did the IDF procure and use weapons that are normally considered accurate and reliable?


• Did the IDF select targets taking proper account of the accuracy and precision of its weapons?


• Did the IDF properly train its artillery crews to avoid targeting errors?


• Did the IDF select targets based upon the best intelligence that could practicably be obtained?


• Did the IDF select what it believed to be the best available tactics for combating Kassam fire while minimizing danger to innocent Palestinians?

And lastly - and perhaps most importantly:

• Did the IDF express and promote an attitude of proper care to avoid killing noncombatant civilians whenever possible?

(This last question is really the key: If the IDF acted with the proper attitude and intentions, it is innocent of war crimes even if some soldiers botched an operation or equipment malfunctioned; but if the IDF exhibited reckless disregard for the lives of innocent civilians – or, indeed, intended that innocent civilians be killed – then Beit Hanoun was a war crime.)

I cannot confidently assert that the IDF is entirely innocent regarding the Beit Hanoun tragedy; I simply do not know the answers to the questions I’ve asked above. (I’m fairly sure that the IDF’s artillery is normally accurate and reliable; but as I have yet to see an explanation of why the shells were fired inaccurately, I’ll assume that even this question remains open for now.) But until and unless answers to these questions do become available, it is unfair to “convict” the IDF of a war crime in Beit Hanoun. There is, I believe, a reasonably high probability that the shells were fired off-target due to legitimate (i.e. non-reckless) human error; and if this is the case, no war crime took place even given the sad results of the shelling.


Best regards,


-Don Radlauer

Bradley Burston responded thus:

Thanks very much, Don, for your thoughtful letter. I believe that the crime here was not that of the gun crew, nor of the spotters, but of [Israeli Defense Minister Amir] Peretz and senior officers in the Southern Command and the General Staff, who lobbied for and gave the green light to artillery shelling even though more accurate means were available, and even though they had been warned – both by precedent in Gaza and Lebanon, and by predecessors in senior posts – that something very much like Beit Hanun was a very likely possibility.

Best regards,

Bradley

To which I responded:

Dear Bradley -

Thanks for your kind response.

Indeed, if Peretz and the relevant IDF commanders believed that more precise means were available to combat Kassam launches, the decision to use artillery was problematic – and perhaps even criminal. That leaves us with two key questions:

1. What information did Peretz and the generals have regarding the likelihood of a Beit-Hanoun-style disaster based on extensive use of artillery, particularly in comparison to the risks involved in using alternative means? What information did they have regarding the effectiveness of the various means of attack, as well as the risk to our own forces (e.g. from in-person operations)? (It may also be relevant to consider that if the Beit Hanoun disaster occurred because of human error, other methods of attack might be equally prone to human error.)


2. Assuming that the answer to (1) would lead a reasonable person (generally defined as someone closely resembling me) to choose something other than artillery, why did our military leaders choose artillery?

I’m not sure that there really are measures available to the IDF that would effectively combat Kassams without endangering Palestinian civilians – particularly given that (as I see it) a large part of the motivation behind the Kassams is to provoke Israeli responses that would lead, sooner or later, to a Beit-Hanoun-style “massacre”. What method do you think would be both effective and safe?

At the same time, I must admit that I don’t have a great deal of confidence in the decision-making abilities of our political or military leaders; too often they seem to be playing to the local audience (which, judged by Haaretz or JPost forum participants, is rather bloodthirsty) rather than understanding the implications of their decisions in a broader context. But lacking a detailed answer to the questions above, I’m still not convinced that Beit Hanoun was a war crime, as opposed to a sad and stupid – but non-criminal - fuck-up.


Best,

-Don

That is as far as our discussion progressed. I’ve done a little further research, just to clarify where the lines are drawn regarding what is a war crime and what is not. It seems that the subject is a rather complex one: the Hague and Geneva Conventions do not draw precise boundaries between legitimate warfare (which is never a clean business, rules or no) and war crime; and there is a substantial gulf between the strict interpretation of the various Conventions advocated by Human Rights Watch and other NGO’s active in the field, and the much looser interpretation reflected in the actual history of war-crime prosecutions.

As both Burston and I have pointed out, it’s quite common – and wrong – for parties perceived as the “underdog” to be given a pass regarding the rules of war. “Enlightened Public Opinion” is quick to condemn Western governments for any perceived violation of the rules (shooting at mosques, for example), but is strangely silent when Third World irregular forces commit flagrant violations of the same rules (like hiding combatants and arms in the aforementioned mosques, drawing the Western forces’ fire). This inconsistency undermines the principles on which international law is based; if the rules of war are to have any meaning at all, they must apply to all combatants equally.

There is no real question, then, that Palestinian Kassam attacks and Hezbollah’s Katyushas fired at northern Israel are war crimes, regardless of the legitimacy of Israel’s military tactics. Weapons that cannot be aimed precisely enough to hit military targets are of use only to terrorize and kill civilians; and the use of such a weapon is thus a clear sign of the intent to attack civilian targets – precisely what the Conventions forbid.

But just as Israel’s military tactics, legitimate or not, do not justify our opponents’ violations of the rules of warfare, our opponents’ illegitimate tactics do not justify violations on our part.

If we are to use the strict “NGO interpretation” of the rules of war (which is the interpretation Bradley Burston and I were using in our exchange of letters), it’s possible that some Israeli actions against Palestinian or Lebanese targets might have been criminal; as mentioned above, it all hinges on what information and alternatives were available to commanders, and how they made the decisions they made. However, it is also important to note that in the real world, nobody has ever been prosecuted for war crimes based on this interpretation of the law. An extensive Wikipedia list of prominent prosecuted and un-prosecuted war crimes does not include a single case in which civilians were killed as a consequence of a botched – or even reckless – attack on a military target. Every one of the war crimes listed was a deliberate attack on civilians, with no military justification.

I try (albeit not hard enough) to be a person of principle, and I aspire to live in a nation governed by principle. I would be much happier with my government if I felt that its every decision took into account the rights of noncombatant civilians as well as Israel’s military and political needs – although I do feel that our record could be a lot worse than it is, considering the dangers we face. Like Bradley Burston, I feel very uncomfortable with incidents like the Beit Hanoun tragedy: even if the killing of innocent civilians was not intentional, it was predictable given the number of shells we were firing in close proximity to densely populated areas. But I still think Burston is wrong to classify Beit Hanoun as a war crime.

Words are powerful things. If Israel is accused of committing war crimes – by Israelis, no less! – we are being compared to the Nazis, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and the rest of the monsters. To be classified as part of this group is to lose all legitimacy among right-thinking people worldwide; and Israel is desperately in need of all the legitimacy it can get. But while the Katyushas and Kassams fit comfortably into the list of acknowledged war crimes, Israel’s actions in Lebanon and Gaza do not.

The kind of even-handedness practiced by Human Rights Watch and Bradley Burston is certainly better than accusations made against Israel alone; but even this “fairness” seems terribly unfair considering that our adversaries have committed war crimes according to all legitimate definitions of the term, while Israel has committed war crimes – if at all – only according to an interpretation of the rules of war that exists only in the minds of human-rights NGO’s, and has never seen the inside of a court of law.


(This post can also be found at You’ll Come for the Terrorism….)

Categories: Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Middle East, War Crimes.

My last Seattle Times column (original link here; as before, please note that I do not get to pick the title):

An Asian American in D.C.: adjustment and assimilation

James J. Na

It has been about a year since I left Seattle for a Northern Virginia exurb in a fit of political angst, and the time allows for a bit of measured reflection about the change.

When I lived in Seattle, one of the city's facets to which I quickly grew accustomed was the integration of Asian Americans into the city's mainstream life. This was not surprising, of course. While Seattle does not boast a large number of Asians in absolute terms, they form the largest nonwhite population at over 13 percent of the total — a rarity outside Hawaii.

This was, after all, the city of Bruce Lee. Not only has Seattle had a long history of Asian immigration, the tech boom also attracted a large number of Asian professionals to the area, reinforcing the existing trend.

I have lived in many different parts of the country since I came to the United States 20 years ago, from mega-urban New York to rural Iowa, and the metro Seattle area was the only place where I saw real-estate ads featuring AM/WF couples (that's Asian male/white female, in classifieds lingo) — something indicative, if anecdotally, of assimilation at a visceral level.

Some of the same dynamics are at work in the fast-growing exurbs of Northern Virginia where I now live. The area has had explosive growth in the past several years, fueled by a strong economy, especially in the tech sector and the defense industry, as well as a business-friendly regulatory environment. What was once a sleepy rural area (perhaps akin to the outer Eastside of the Seattle area) now boasts affluent, ethnically diverse communities.

Closer-in suburbs of the District of Columbia and D.C. itself, however, are a different story. There is a large Asian population in the immediate suburbs of D.C., but it tends to congregate (or self-segregate) by national origin, following the classic early immigration pattern. In D.C. itself, the Asian population is less than 3 percent, and plays a seemingly small role in the cultural and political life of the city.

Indeed, when I attend functions and meetings in D.C., I am often struck by the almost total absence of Asian faces. Certainly there are notable exceptions — Elaine Chao, the Labor Department secretary, Norman Mineta, the former transportation secretary, and the enduring Sen. Daniel Inouye from Hawaii, as well as up-and-coming Congressman Bobby Jindal from Louisiana, are recognizable faces around the city, as is the ex-"neocon" Francis Fukuyama — but the general trend at the working level is in stark contrast to that of Seattle.

One acquaintance attributed this to institutional racism against nonwhites in the city. That explanation might be tempting, given the persistent feel of a small Southern city beneath the surface of the political hub that is D.C. But the real answer, I suspect, is more complex.

The city's life is overwhelmingly dominated by the industry of politics, which, unlike information technology, is an old business. It requires, by nature, discretion and even secrecy. Where trust and loyalty are at such a high premium, nepotism and clannishness are often rational responses, given that family and friends are generally more trustworthy than outsiders, however capable or intelligent.

Thus, it is not that there is significant racism against Asians. It is, rather, that the system erects a high barrier against late entrants, and Asian Americans tend to be late arrivals, particularly in political terms (a friend familiar with the entertainment industry observed something similar, and perhaps not coincidentally, politics is said to be show business for ugly people).

Two factors, however, increasingly mitigate this situation. One is, simply, time. As younger Asian Americans make their way into politics, slowly but surely, they are accompanied by their own social networks while integrating into the overall system.

The other is technology. Politics may be an ancient business, but it is not immune to technological changes. The advent of the Internet, the blog-osphere and indeed the fabled "net-roots" are diffusing political power. Running a leading blog about Korea, as I did, for example, can sometimes open doors that might otherwise require years of work at think tanks or on the Hill.

Washington, D.C., might not ever look like Seattle, and the basic human drive for political power will not change, but the forces of assimilation are ever present for Asian Americans — even at the epicenter of national political power.

Maybe Michael Savage isn't a phony, but David Klinghoffer has given us a good reason to suspect that extremely-over-the-top talk radio host Savage is not the bent-out-of-shape right-winger that he claims to be. I've never taken to Savage's program, and it's long been my hunch that his whole thing is a contrived act. I have long had a difficult time taking him seriously. Anyway, as Klinghoffer reveals, Savage recently gave a generous campaign contribution to Jerry Browne for California Attorney General. That Savage would give money to Governor Moonbeam strenghten's my long-held hunch.

American support for Israel has long been a loaded political issue. Whatever difficulty the United States faces, opponents of Israel find some way to claim that it’s all because of U.S. involvement with Israel. America’s bogged down in Iraq? Well, Bush and his guiding neocons sent the troops in just to protect Israel, right? America’s economy isn’t in great shape? Well, what can you expect when Israel soaks up untold billions in American aid? Oil shortages? Let’s not even get started. And since 9/11, everyone’s thinking about terrorism – and, as usual, it’s all Israel’s fault.

I wasn’t entirely surprised, then, to receive the following question:

If we (America) ditched Israel, wouldn’t that solve all our terrorism problems?

Here’s my response:

The short answer: No.

The medium-length answer: No, it wouldn’t, for various reasons.

First, not all terrorism emanates from the Moslem world (although Islamist terrorism is definitely the flavor of the month nowadays). Anything that would be perceived as a major victory for Islamist terrorists would encourage not only further Islamist terrorism, but also non-Islamist terrorism. It’s a very bad idea to hand any terrorist, anywhere, a major victory, unless the compensating benefits are enormous. Appeasing terrorists does not reduce terrorism – it encourages terrorism.


Second, not all Islamist terrorism has anything to do with Israel. In fact, most of the Islamist terror directed at targets outside Israel is organized, inspired, and sponsored by al-Qaeda (including its many offshoots) and Iran – and neither of these is primarily concerned with Israel. (Both, of course, dislike us, and Iran in particular does sponsor a great deal of anti-Israel terrorism; but both have agendas far beyond opposition to Israel. Al-Qaeda, in particular, is widely viewed in the Arab world as having publicly adopted opposition to Israel as an opportunistic attempt to cash in on the general anti-Israel sentiment in the region.)

Radical Islamic groups perceive themselves as being immersed in a global struggle against “infidels” – a “clash of civilizations”, to borrow a phrase. In this view, Israel is certainly one of the insults inflicted on the Islamic world by the West, but it is hardly the only one, or even the most important one. Were Israel magically to disappear tomorrow, the Islamic world would still be mostly poor, backward, ignorant, envious, and led by incompetent despots; and the West, with the United States as its largest, richest, most powerful, and most “decadent” member, would still be the enemy.

Terrorism, in my view, results from a combination of real – and, more importantly, perceived – grievances, and an ideology that focuses attention on these grievances, promotes violence as a “solution” to them, discourages societal introspection, and dehumanizes “the other”. Once a society has embraced terrorism as a strategy to cope with its self-perceived problems, I believe that a dynamic is established that is very difficult to eliminate; and in particular, I don’t believe that removing the ostensible external causes of grievance is likely to have a significant effect in reducing terrorism emanating from such societies. It’s simply too easy to find new grievances.


Third, eliminating U.S. support for Israel would not eliminate Israel itself – and would cause a great deal of damage to the United States. Israel, while small, is relatively prosperous and technologically advanced, with a per-capita GDP (according to the CIA estimate for 2005) of almost $25,000 and a total GDP of well over $100 billion. This means that U.S. aid to Israel, at about $2 billion per year, represents less than 2 percent of our annual GDP; and in fact, this overstates the importance of this aid, since much of it consists of credits that we must use to purchase U.S.-manufactured military hardware that we would otherwise make – and export – ourselves. In effect, then, the bottom-line value to Israel of the aid it receives from the United States is far less than the official amount of that aid; and for the same reason, the real financial cost to the U.S. of this aid is much lower than it appears. So while losing this U.S. aid would be costly to Israel, it would hardly be fatal to us. (Further, U.S. weapons that are known to be used by Israel are considered to be especially attractive to other international buyers; thus, having Israel as a major export customer brings substantial financial rewards to the U.S. defense industry.)

Were the U.S. to “ditch” Israel, the political and military cost to America would be substantial. While losing U.S. diplomatic support would be painful and difficult for Israel, being perceived as having abandoned one of its closest allies would be terribly damaging to America’s reputation for loyalty and trustworthiness. It would also leave the U.S. without a single strong, stable, genuinely friendly, and reliable ally in the Middle East.


In short, I don’t believe that abandoning support for Israel would in any way help to reduce terror attacks on the United States; in fact, I believe that such a move would only encourage terror organizations and their supporters to continue targeting the U.S. If America’s antagonists believe that America is weak and inconstant, they will redouble their efforts. Nothing is as encouraging as success.


(This post can also be found at the newly-retitled You'll Come for the Terrorism....)

Categories: Israel, Middle East, Terrorism.

This month saw another thwarting of American efforts to fight radical Islamicist terrorists by a federal judge. "The Terrorist Lawyer," Lynne Stewart was given a mere twenty-eight MONTH sentence for her conviction for breaking federal law and prison regulations. She illegally passed on a message from her convicted client, the Blind Sheikh, urging his Islamic Group jihad-mates to end their ceasefire. U.S. District Court Judge John Koeltl, a Clinton appointee, praised Stewart at the sentencing for her "public service" and gave her a disgustingly light sentence.

Federal prosecutors asked for thirty YEARS, a sentence much closer to what Stewart deserved. But she hasn't yet served a day, nor will she while her case is on appeal to the Second Circuit. I've blogged about Stewart many times before. Sadly, this case now comes in a long line of letdowns at the hands of federal trial court judges.

Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who squared off against Stewart in the first World Trade Center Bombing case, gives us his take on this injustice at NRO. Here's one insightful paragraph:

Lynne Stewart’s sentencing is our crystal ball for the return of September 10th America. Indeed, as noted here yesterday, it even featured a plea for mercy from former top Clinton Justice Department official Jo Ann Harris, who championed an anti-American activist lawyer (unanimously convicted of terrorism offenses by a jury of twelve New Yorkers) while deriding the government’s efforts as “unwarranted overkill.”

As it turns out, the folks who take the law enforcement approach to Islamicist terrorists doesn't believe in being tough on crime. Call it the soft-on-crime approach to terrorism.

In the President's corner we have people who take 9/11 and the threat from Islamicist terrorists seriously, believing we need to vigorously take the war to the terrorists. But on the left we have a wretched alliance between people who see 9/11 and the fight against Islamicist terrorists terrorists as a mere law enforcement matter and other people who believe that 9/11 was actually perpetrated by the U.S. government, that no Islamicist terrorist threat exists beyond what we have created, and that the President is the real terrorist. The groups in that alliance might not share the same ultimate purposes and outlook on things, but they share the dislike of our efforts to take Islamicist terrorists seriously and share the same tactics to undermine the war effort.

At least I admire the candor. Law Professor Sandford Levison doesn't like the U.S. Constitution. Rather than change it Cass Sunstein-style (i.e., through planned judicial imperialism leading to a court-created New New Deal on steroids society), the good professor appears bent on dismantling the entire constitutional system and giving us an ingenious system that happens to look like something out of...old Europe! Somehow, I don't know that's what my ancestors got on the boats to America for.

The anti-constitutional views of law professor Sanford Levison are the focus of Phillip Klein's recent AmSpec article "Constitutional Mulligan." I haven't read Prof. Levison's new book disparaging our constitution, but the self-descrived "strong Democrat" has a recent LA Times op-ed that is also available for public viewing. Suffice to say, if the Democratic Party were to take the learned legal academic's views to heart, they would find themselves living in political oblivion for a long, long time.

It's not earth-shattering news to realize that our constitution has anti-democratic elements as well as democratic elements. (I'm using small "d"s on purpose here.) But we've always known that about the U.S. Constitution. We long struggle to understand how separation-of-powers, bicameralism, the electoral college, federalism, and independent courts are to play themselves out in our system based upon consent of the governed and rule by the majority through frequent democratic elections. At times--if not most of the time--many Americans strongly disagree with one another about how our constitution is to work. But most of us like the one we have.

In their good sense the American people like our constitution far more than they might happen to presently dislike those we have put in power. In any event, I will take the stability that our democratically-elected republican system provides over raw majoritarianism any day of the week. Let other countries have unstable parliamentary systems; I prefer a presidential, federal system.

An American law professor with old Europe envy? That isn't exactly the stuff to make the big papers stop the presses. But Prof. Levison's misguided views are plenty good for giving us all a good chuckle. Maybe there is something more sinister at work in the minds of such professors. Yet, for now I'll simply have a few laughs.

I just answered an AllExperts.com question relating to to supposed inadvisability of Israeli territorial “concessions” to our Arab neighbors. The question is one that comes up rather often in discussions of Israeli policy and politics; so I think my answer may be worth sharing.

A____ quoted another AllExperts expert, who had written a fairly thorough description of the Arab world’s hostility to Israel, then asked:

If the Arabs do not want a binational solution or any form of peace, then they will not stop until Israel is fully destroyed; so doesn’t giving them land just speed up the “wiping israel off the face of the earth” process?

Dear A____ -

I don’t know who your other expert is - I didn’t see him on the list of experts in “my” category. I also don’t know exactly what question you asked him, so it’s hard to comment on his answer. It seems factual enough, as far as it goes; but I can’t say whether it’s actually a useful answer to any particular question.

In response to your question, I’d like first to point out that there is a big difference between talking about “the Arab states”, as your other expert did, and talking about “the Arabs”, as you did. “The Arab states” refers to a relatively small group of countries (or, more accurately, governments) with known histories and policies, such that it’s possible to say definite and verifiable things about them. For example, I can say that among the Arab countries near Israel, only Egypt and Jordan have made peace with Israel and recognize its existence, and know that I’m saying something true. On the other hand, to say that “the Arabs do not want any form of peace with Israel” is to assume that all Arabs think exactly the same way - a gross over-generalization. There are many millions of Arabs, and among those millions of people there is a great deal of diversity of opinion. We should all get out of the habit of talking about “the Arabs” as if they were all alike, just as we should expect others to avoid making sweeping generalizations about “the Jews”.

Second, I believe you’re making one of the classic mistakes about Israeli policy regarding territorial withdrawal. You’re assuming that all land Israel holds is an asset, such that any time we “give” land to the Palestinians (or the Syrians, or the Lebanese, or whoever) we are strengthening them and weakening ourselves. If this were true, obviously it would be important to retain as much land as possible, and to make territorial concessions (if we made them at all) only in return for very substantial benefits.

Indeed, this assumption is true in certain cases. The Golan Heights, for example, has genuine strategic importance for Israel - both in regard to our water supply and in direct military terms. Giving up the Golan Heights and returning to the international border - or worse, the 4 June 1967 de facto border, which had some Israeli land under Syrian control - would genuinely weaken us, and thus it would make sense to make this concession only in return for full, reliable, and permanent peace with Syria and other local Arab states.

On the other hand, I see no reason to view Israel’s former settlements in the Gaza Strip as an asset to Israel: they were hugely costly to defend, and the only people who benefited from them were a few farmers who made substantial profits by using cheap Palestinian and Thai labor, and irrigated their crops with heavily-subsidized water. As far as I’m concerned, getting out of the Gaza Strip made Israel stronger and more viable, not less; and while the Palestinians certainly “spin” our withdrawal as a victory for them, I believe that in the long run the Disengagement was a victory for Israel. (All this has nothing to do with the issue of how much compensation should have been paid to our former Gaza Strip settlers and how well or badly their resettlement has been handled; the fact that I believe the Disengagement was a good idea doesn’t mean I think the Disengagement was carried out perfectly.)

Similarly, I support retaining some parts of the West Bank, in order to strengthen Israel’s strategic position compared to the pre-1967 situation; but I see no reason that Israel should retain all the small settlements scattered through the entire West Bank, where a few thousand settlers live among two million Palestinians. Many of these small settlements are very costly to defend, and do not provide any compensating benefit to Israel. How is such a settlement an asset to Israel? Why does closing down such a settlement aid the process of “wiping Israel off the map”?

In short, I believe that certain pieces of land are genuine assets, while other pieces of land are “white elephants” in the technical sense: that is, supposed “assets” that in fact cost far more to maintain than they yield in benefits. (Remember that white elephants were given by the King of Thailand to his enemies: they were holy so they couldn't be used for work, they were a gift from the King so they couldn’t be discarded, and they cost a great deal to feed!)

It seems to me that the best way for Israel to survive is to focus less on how horrible “the Arabs” are, and instead focus on how we can strengthen ourselves. What can we do to improve our economy (which in turn supports our military and our educational system)? What can we do to increase our internal cohesiveness? How can we manage our affairs so that we can exist within some vaguely rational border as a democratic state with a solid Jewish majority? If Israel does a good job of strengthening itself - which mostly means strengthening its own population and institutions - nobody is going to be able to “wipe us off the face of the earth”, at least not without using nuclear weapons and presumably facing a massive retaliation in kind. But if we fixate on control of land as the sole criterion for security, we are going to neglect other factors which are in reality much more critical to our long-term survival.


Best regards,

-Don Radlauer


(This post can also be found at On the Contrary: Don’s Mideast Musings.)

Categories: Israel, Middle East, Arabs, Disengagement, Occupation.