La Boucle d'Occam

Points de vue

- I said Israel should be ashamed – now I am the one who is ashamed, Daniel Sugarman (The Jewish Chronicle) - "the criticism I paid more attention to was from people who pointed out that it was absurd to deal in hypotheticals. I’d said that surely there must be a way the protestors could be stopped without shooting live ammunition at them – that Israel, with its incredible technological capabilities, must be capable of developing a way. That was a cry of anguish, but it was not an argument. If no such technology currently exists, then it was absurd of me to blame the IDF for not magically willing it into existence. The traditional crowd stopping technology would not have worked effectively. Rubber bullets are only short range. The same with water cannons. And with tens of thousands of people rushing the border, this would have been extremely unlikely to work effectively. The border would have been broken through".
https://www.thejc.com/comment/comment/i-said-israel-should-be-ashamed-of-its-actions-on-the-gaza-border-now-i-am-the-one-who-is-ashamed-1.464233
   "It’s never easy to say you’re sorry. To admit you’re wrong. To announce publicly, “I made a mistake”. But to apologise when that apology comes bound up with what is, perhaps, the most intractable conflict on earth, makes it a thousand times harder.  But that is what I am. Sorry.
    A few days ago I wrote a column about the latest round of violence on the border with Gaza. It was a cry from the heart. I love Israel. I have always loved it, and cannot envision a time when I will not love it.  But in my office, I sit near a television set. And on Monday, I saw the following, side by side. On the left, in Jerusalem, I saw happy faces. Self-congratulatory faces. I saw the Prime Minister of Israel talking about how the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem was a big step towards peace.  And on the right, simultaneously, in Gaza, I saw tear gas, and smoke, and bullets.
     And it was in this context that I wrote my piece, which was an extremely personal one. I wrote it in anguish. I wrote it making clear that I despised Hamas and all it stood for. But I also wrote the following:
   “Every bullet Israel fires, every life Israel takes, makes this situation worse. There are ways to disperse crowds which do not include live fire. But the IDF has made an active choice to fire live rounds and kill scores of people. You cannot tell me that Israel, a land of technological miracles which have to be seen to be truly believed, is incapable of coming up with a way of incapacitating protestors that does not include gunning dozens of them down. But no. In front of the entire world, Israel keeps shooting, and protestors, including very young protestors, keep dying. You may tell me that Hamas wants these deaths, wants to create martyrs, wants to fill the hearts of the people of Gaza with rage against Israel because the alternative is for people to look at their lives in Gaza and rage against Hamas. But if you tell me that, why are you not asking yourselves why Israel is so willingly giving Hamas exactly what it wishes?”
    I received a lot of praise for my piece, from people I admire greatly, as well as from a great many unexpected sources, including from within the Jewish community. I also received a lot of criticism. I got called a traitor, and that most vile of all insults a Jew can bestow or receive, a “Kapo”. People also wrote pieces in response. I was told that, as a Jew not currently living in Israel, my greatest worry was whether Starbucks would have almond-soya milk for my latte.
    But the criticism I paid more attention to was from people who pointed out that it was absurd to deal in hypotheticals. I’d said that surely there must be a way the protestors could be stopped without shooting live ammunition at them – that Israel, with its incredible technological capabilities, must be capable of developing a way. That was a cry of anguish, but it was not an argument. If no such technology currently exists, then it was absurd of me to blame the IDF for not magically willing it into existence. The traditional crowd stopping technology would not have worked effectively. Rubber bullets are only short range. The same with water cannons. And with tens of thousands of people rushing the border, this would have been extremely unlikely to work effectively. The border would have been broken through. And then, without much of a doubt, a lot of people in Israel would have died.  That was, after all, Hamas’s stated aim.
    But what really affected me the most was yesterday, when a Hamas operative went on television and claimed that, of the 62 people killed in the last two days, fifty were Hamas operatives. Islamic Jihad claimed three more, meaning that over 80 percent of the people who were killed while trying to breach the border were members of terrorist organisations whose direct aim is to bring death and suffering into Israel. [...]
    I wrote that, by killing the Palestinians running towards them, the IDF was giving Hamas exactly what it wished for – martyrs for the cause. I failed to acknowledge that, either way, Israel would be giving Hamas what it wanted. Shoot at those charging at you and Hamas would have its martyrs. Fail to shoot and Hamas would break through the barrier and bring suffering and death – its stated aim - to Israelis living only a few hundred metres away from that barrier. The march may have originally been, as it was declared to be, about Palestinians returning to the homes they had to leave 70 years before. But Hamas’s aim was far more straightforward - “We will take down the border and we will tear out their hearts from their bodies.”
    I wrote in my previous article that Israel was a regional powerhouse, and that it was strong enough to take criticism from Jews in the Diaspora. I still believe it is strong enough to do so. I just don’t believe that my criticism of it was valid. [...]"

- If You Call the Gaza Death Toll 'Disproportionate,' How Many Israelis Have to Die for the Sake of Symmetry?, Eric H. Yoffie (Haaretz) - "I looked long and hard at the question of whether or not Israel’s military had alternative means available to contain the demonstrators. Multiple commentators have argued that non-lethal methods of restraint would have been sufficient and greatly reduced the death toll. But this argument seems to me more a wish than a reality".
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-do-israelis-have-to-die-so-gaza-s-death-toll-isn-t-disproportionate-1.6094271
   "The death toll in Gaza has left me reeling. Many of the dead were innocents; some were children. Each and every death was tragic, rending the heart.
    And the questions had to be asked: Who was to blame? Was Israel the guilty party? Had the Israeli army acted carelessly, shooting hastily into crowds of helpless civilian protestors? Or, even worse, were the killings an intentional act of cruelty, intended to teach a lesson to the hated Hamas enemy? For some, the answers were easy. [...]
    Charges of disproportionality are among the most common leveled against Israel in her long struggle against Hamas, and they are among the most infuriating. Are Goldberg and Cassidy suggesting that if there were a lot more Israeli dead, and a hundred Jewish bodies were strewn across the desert in southern Israel, then Israel’s action would be acceptable, or at least more readily forgiven? If not directly stated, that is what is implied.
    Such a thing could happen easily enough, of course. If the fence were breached and a single terrorist were to reach one of the civilian towns or settlements that have long been the intended targets of Hamas rockets and tunnels, the Israeli and Hamas death tolls might quickly "balance out."
    But Israel will not sacrifice a single life in these long-suffering towns without a fight. Neither will Israelis permit an Israeli soldier or civilian to be kidnapped without doing their utmost to stop it. That is why Israel will do what she must to repel these mobs, and it is a moral obscenity for Goldberg and Cassidy to propose that she should do otherwise. And if either of them was a resident of a town near Gaza, they would be quick to demand - just as the current residents do - that Israel’s military do no less.
    I should note that as an American Jewish liberal, I am a fan of both Goldberg and Cassidy, not to mention a regular viewer of MSNBC. And so I found myself asking whether my sympathies for Israel had skewed my thinking.  After all, we can all be victims of our ideological straightjackets, and Professor Glaude was right about one thing: Babies had died. And minimizing these deaths is unacceptable to me, as both an American and a Jew.
    I therefore looked long and hard at the question of whether or not Israel’s military had alternative means available to contain the demonstrators. Multiple commentators have argued that non-lethal methods of restraint would have been sufficient and greatly reduced the death toll.
    But this argument seems to me more a wish than a reality. The rules of engagement were not a secret. Israel is a small country, her army is a people’s army, and its preparations for the May 13 demonstrations were widely reported in the media.
    What one learns from reviewing this material is that 40,000 to 50,000 determined protestors - the number at the height of the protest - cannot be contained with water hoses or conventional crowd control.
    All reports indicate that Israel’s training of its soldiers was intense, instructions were detailed, and experienced officers were in command.  Shoot-to-kill was not a first resort but an absolute last resort.
    Nonetheless, if resorting to deadly force had been ruled out, a breach of the fence by thousands of demonstrators was likely inevitable. And the result would have been chaos, terror, and locking down all of southern Israel. No Israeli government, of the right or the left, could tolerate such an outcome. 
    Does this mean that Israel is blameless? Not at all. The misery in Gaza has reached intolerable levels, and while Israel is not the sole, or even the primary villain here, it must share responsibility with others for the suffering of her neighbors. [...]"

- Gaza’s Miseries Have Palestinian Authors, Bret Stephens (The New York Times) - "The mystery of Middle East politics is why Palestinians have so long been exempted from these ordinary moral judgments".
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/opinion/gaza-palestinians-protests.html
   "For the third time in two weeks, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have set fire to the Kerem Shalom border crossing, through which they get medicine, fuel and other humanitarian essentials from Israel. Soon we’ll surely hear a great deal about the misery of Gaza. Try not to forget that the authors of that misery are also the presumptive victims.
    There’s a pattern here — harm yourself, blame the other — and it deserves to be highlighted amid the torrent of morally blind, historically illiterate criticism to which Israelis are subjected every time they defend themselves against violent Palestinian attack.
    In 1970, Israel set up an industrial zone along the border with Gaza to promote economic cooperation and provide Palestinians with jobs. It had to be shut down in 2004 amid multiple terrorist attacks that left 11 Israelis dead.
    In 2005, Jewish-American donors forked over $14 million dollars to pay for greenhouses that had been used by Israeli settlers until the government of Ariel Sharon withdrew from the Strip. Palestinians looted dozens of the greenhouses almost immediately upon Israel’s exit.
    In 2007, Hamas took control of Gaza in a bloody coup against its rivals in the Fatah faction. Since then, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups in the Strip have fired nearly 10,000 rockets and mortars from Gaza into Israel — all the while denouncing an economic “blockade” that is Israel’s refusal to feed the mouth that bites it. (Egypt and the Palestinian Authority also participate in the same blockade, to zero international censure.)
    In 2014 Israel discovered that Hamas had built 32 tunnels under the Gaza border to kidnap or kill Israelis. “The average tunnel requires 350 truckloads of construction supplies,” The Wall Street Journal reported, “enough to build 86 homes, seven mosques, six schools or 19 medical clinics.” Estimated cost of tunnels: $90 million.
    Want to understand why Gaza is so poor? See above.
    Which brings us to the grotesque spectacle along Gaza’s border over the past several weeks, in which thousands of Palestinians have tried to breach the fence and force their way into Israel, often at the cost of their lives. What is the ostensible purpose of what Palestinians call “the Great Return March”?
    That’s no mystery. This week, The Times published an op-ed by Ahmed Abu Artema, one of the organizers of the march. “We are intent on continuing our struggle until Israel recognizes our right to return to our homes and land from which we were expelled,” he writes, referring to homes and land within Israel’s original borders.
    His objection isn’t to the “occupation” as usually defined by Western liberals, namely Israel’s acquisition of territories following the 1967 Six Day War. It’s to the existence of Israel itself. Sympathize with him all you like, but at least notice that his politics demand the elimination of the Jewish state. Notice, also, the old pattern at work: Avow and pursue Israel’s destruction, then plead for pity and aid when your plans lead to ruin.
    The world now demands that Jerusalem account for every bullet fired at the demonstrators, without offering a single practical alternative for dealing with the crisis.
    But where is the outrage that Hamas kept urging Palestinians to move toward the fence, having been amply forewarned by Israel of the mortal risk? Or that protest organizers encouraged women to lead the charges on the fence because, as The Times’s Declan Walsh reported, “Israeli soldiers might be less likely to fire on women”? Or that Palestinian children as young as 7 were dispatched to try to breach the fence? Or that the protests ended after Israel warned Hamas’s leaders, whose preferred hide-outs include Gaza’s hospital, that their own lives were at risk?
    Elsewhere in the world, this sort of behavior would be called reckless endangerment. It would be condemned as self-destructive, cowardly and almost bottomlessly cynical. The mystery of Middle East politics is why Palestinians have so long been exempted from these ordinary moral judgments. [...] Why is nothing expected of Palestinians, and everything forgiven, while everything is expected of Israelis, and nothing forgiven?
    That’s a question to which one can easily guess the answer. In the meantime, it’s worth considering the harm Western indulgence has done to Palestinian aspirations. No decent Palestinian society can emerge from the culture of victimhood, violence and fatalism symbolized by these protests. No worthy Palestinian government can emerge if the international community continues to indulge the corrupt, anti-Semitic autocrats of the Palestinian Authority or fails to condemn and sanction the despotic killers of Hamas. And no Palestinian economy will ever flourish through repeated acts of self-harm and destructive provocation.
    If Palestinians want to build a worthy, proud and prosperous nation, they could do worse than try to learn from the one next door. That begins by forswearing forever their attempts to destroy it."

- Falling for Hamas’s Split-Screen Fallacy, Matti Friedman (The New York Times) - "The press coverage on Monday was a major Hamas success in a war whose battlefield isn’t really Gaza, but the brains of foreign audiences".
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/opinion/hamas-israel-media-protests.html
   "During my years in the international press here in Israel, long before the bloody events of this week, I came to respect Hamas for its keen ability to tell a story. [...]
    The way to do this in Gaza, in the absence of any Israeli soldiers inside the territory, is to try to cross the Israeli border, which everyone understands is defended with lethal force and is easy to film.
    About 40,000 people answered a call to show up. Many of them, some armed, rushed the border fence. Many Israelis, myself included, were horrified to see the number of fatalities reach 60.
    Most Western viewers experienced these events through a visual storytelling tool: a split screen. On one side was the opening of the American embassy in Jerusalem in the presence of Ivanka Trump, evangelical Christian allies of the White House and Israel’s current political leadership — an event many here found curious and distant from our national life. On the other side was the terrible violence in the desperately poor and isolated territory. The juxtaposition was disturbing.
    The attempts to breach the Gaza fence, which Palestinians call the March of Return, began in March and have the stated goal of erasing the border as a step toward erasing Israel. A central organizer, the Hamas leader Yehya Sinwar, exhorted participants on camera in Arabic to “tear out the hearts” of Israelis. But on Monday the enterprise was rebranded as a protest against the embassy opening, with which it was meticulously timed to coincide. The split screen, and the idea that people were dying in Gaza because of Donald Trump, was what Hamas was looking for.
    The press coverage on Monday was a major Hamas success in a war whose battlefield isn’t really Gaza, but the brains of foreign audiences.
    Israeli soldiers facing Gaza have no good choices. They can warn people off with tear gas or rubber bullets, which are often inaccurate and ineffective, and if that doesn’t work, they can use live fire. Or they can hold their fire to spare lives and allow a breach, in which case thousands of people will surge into Israel, some of whom — the soldiers won’t know which — will be armed fighters. [...] If such a breach occurs, the death toll will be higher. And Hamas’s tactic, having proved itself, would likely be repeated by Israel’s enemies on its borders with Syria and Lebanon.
    Knowledgeable people can debate the best way to deal with this threat. Could a different response have reduced the death toll? Or would a more aggressive response deter further actions of this kind and save lives in the long run? What are the open-fire orders on the India-Pakistan border, for example? Is there something Israel could have done to defuse things beforehand?
    These are good questions. But anyone following the response abroad saw that this wasn’t what was being discussed. As is often the case where Israel is concerned, things quickly became hysterical and divorced from the events themselves. [...]
    For someone looking out from here, that’s the real split-screen effect: On one side, a complicated human tragedy in a corner of a region spinning out of control. On the other, a venomous and simplistic story, a symptom of these venomous and simplistic times."

- World must tell Gaza’s Hamas-abused masses the truth: There will be no ‘return’, David Horovitz (ToI) - "In truth, as their organizers made plain from day one, the mass border protests are being mounted not against the “occupation” of Gaza, or the blockade on Gaza. [...] “March of Return.” It’s right there in the name. The people of Gaza are being mobilized by their terrorist rulers for a “return.” They are being assured by their leadership that this “return” is imminent. That their “homeland” will soon be restored. That the Nakba will be reversed. And that those of them who lose their lives in violence at the border in the cause of that “return” will find their place in paradise as martyrs to their divinely blessed struggle".
https://www.timesofisrael.com/world-must-tell-gazas-hamas-abused-masses-the-truth-there-will-be-no-return/