Israel’s Right to Fight
There is No Moral Equivalence Between Israel and Hamas
As I write, Israel is preparing for an invasion of the Gaza Strip, with 360,000 soldiers massing on the border of the densely populated enclave. Less than a week ago, Hamas breached Israel’s frontier and slaughtered over 1,200 of its people. To put that death toll into context, it is as if 44,000 Americans were massacred in a terror attack in one day — 15 times the death toll from September 11.
Yet already, criticism of Israel is mounting. The U.N. urges restraint. Human-rights groups bemoan the deaths of Gazans, while self-proclaimed progressives applaud the Hamas attack, calling the terrorists righteous revolutionaries and blaming their actions on a history of Israeli oppression. Both sides are at fault, moderates say. Recrimination is bad. Violence only breeds more violence. Israel needs to negotiate with Hamas. What these statements imply is that there is some moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel, that deaths are deaths, regardless of the intention or cause.
This, or course, is nonsense. I deplore the treatment of Palestinians by Israel, the West Bank settlements, the far-right takeover of Israel’s government. But as reprehensible as these actions have been, they pale in comparison to the crimes that Hamas and its fellow jihadists — as well as other Arab nations — have done to Israel and, in fact, to their own people. Unlike Syria, which dropped poison gas on civilians, or Saudi Arabia, which murdered and dismembered a dissident, or Iran, which beat to death a woman for not wearing a hijab, Israel has never committed such atrocities. Despite imprisoning convicted terrorists, many of whom had murdered civilians, Israel has carried out one execution in its history — that of Adolph Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust.
Israel is warning Gazans to evacuate the north of the territory as the invasion nears, an obvious effort to spare as many civilian lives as possible in advance of what will certainly be a brutal incursion. But what warning did Hamas give to the young people it slaughtered at a music festival in Israel, or to the people it murdered at point-blank range, or to the elderly woman in a wheelchair taken hostage? As deplorable as the term collateral damage may be, there is a bright moral line between that and the deliberate slaughter of civilians.
Well-meaning people decry the siege of Gaza and ask, where are these people to go, where can they seek refuge? One answer: to Egypt. Israel has long been censured for its blockade of Gaza, but few mentioned that Cairo has closed its border as well. Even now, as Gazans flee south to the Rafah crossing, Egypt tightens its security and lets few refugees enter. And as Israel cuts off essential supplies to Gazans, which of their Arab neighbors have come to their aid? None.
Friends and acquaintances censure Israeli retaliation and say reprisals against Gaza are disproportionate. To them, I offer this thought experiment. Imagine that a terrorist organization has taken control of Mexico and launched a surprise attack on the U.S. Thousands of terrorists have crossed the border into California, killing civilians and taking hostages, while their compatriots in northern Mexico fire missiles at San Diego. Their justification: California and the rest of the U.S. Southwest were stolen from Mexico in the spurious Mexican-American War of 1848 — precisely a century before Israeli independence. How would Washington react? If the response to 9/11 is any indication, with a bombing campaign that would level Mexico City and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. Few Americans would question the ethics of this retaliation.
I do not take the forced evacuation of Palestinian civilians lightly. Though I was never a refugee, I share that generational trauma. My ancestors were born in the Pale of Settlement, the westernmost area of the Russian Empire where Jews were allowed to live. Luckily, they fled decades before World War II. If not, they would have been the first to face the German blizkrieg. As the Wehrmacht swept over the Pale, the Nazi leaders mobilized the Einsatzgruppen, death squads that herded Jews to the edge of ravines where thousands — old men and women, children, mothers with infants — were machine-gunned to death. Those innocent civilians were not warned that this slaughter was imminent, nor were they given a chance to flee.
Like anyone with even a modicum of morality, I long for peace and dream of the day when, in the words of Isaiah, “nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” But I fear that I won’t live to see that day. I can only pray that my son will.
