Michael J. Totten: Gaza and the Law of Armed Conflict
While much of the world engages in hand-wringing, placard-waving, teeth-gnashing, and rocket-launching over Israel’s “disproportionate” response to Hamas attacks from Gaza, it’s worth looking at what the doctrines of “proportionality” actually say.
Making the rounds is a two-year old quote from Lionel Beehner’s paper for the Council on Foreign Relations in which he summarizes the principle of proportionality as laid out by the 1907 Hague Conventions. “According to the doctrine, a state is legally allowed to unilaterally defend itself and right a wrong provided the response is proportional to the injury suffered. The response must also be immediate and necessary, refrain from targeting civilians, and require only enough force to reinstate the status quo ante.”
The precise wording of the doctrine can be found in Article 51, not Article 49 as Beehner writes, of the Draft Articles of the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts. “Countermeasures must be commensurate with the injury suffered, taking into account the gravity of the internationally wrongful act and the rights in question.”
This is vague and open to interpretation, as Beehner admits. And it’s further complicated by the fact that the doctrine was laid out at a time when war was fought between sovereign states with standing armies rather than asymmetrically between a sovereign state and a terrorist gang.
Proportion, as defined by Beehner and the Hague Conventions, is impossible between Israel and Hamas. The Israel Defense Forces are more professional, competent and technologically advanced than Hamas and will inflict greater damage as a matter of course. And Hamas’s war aim is entirely out of proportion to Israel’s. Israel wants to halt the incoming rocket fire, while Hamas seeks the destruction or evacuation of Israel.
Melanie Phillips: Refugees from whom?
So let’s get our head round this: Palestinians committed to the destruction of Israel fled from other Palestinians committed to the destruction of Israel into Israel, which is providing them with sanctuary and medical treatment, while the president of their putative state who bases his claim against Israel on its alleged refusal to admit Palestinian ‘refugees’ refused to allow actual Palestinian refugees fleeing Palestinian violence access to that same putative state, while Israel agonises over whether to grant them permanent asylum. Surreal, or what?
Barry Rubin: A Tale of Four Op-Eds: The Media’s Cooperation with Hamas’ PR Campaign
Hamas leaders now write op-eds in the leading American newspapers either concealing completely or greatly distorting their group’s aims. The newspapers are complicit in this process by accepting articles which either have nothing to do with the real Hamas or at least are full of demonstrable lies. While it can be argued that many op-eds contain untruths or that it is not the editors’ job to make such judgments, the Hamas pieces go far beyond the other op-eds being published.
Equally disturbing is that the fact that on this matter the op-ed pages are not really balanced. While these newspapers publish op-eds which criticize Hamas as part of an analysis of U.S. policy–say, a piece by Dennis Ross urging U.S. support for Fatah’s West Bank government–they do not seem to run op-eds that challenge directly Hamas’s misstatements or which provide a comprehensive look at the true nature and activities of Hamas.
Recently, the three main city-based newspapers in America ?the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times–ran op-eds by Hamas leaders. First, an identical article by Ahmed Yousef, an advisor to the man who had headed the Palestinian Authority, appeared the same day, June 27, in the Washington Post and New York Times.
This is an extremely unusual development and it turned out, according to Washington Post editors, that Hamas’s public relations’ agent had fooled them by not informing either newspaper that the other was publishing. It was not the last time that Hamas would fool them.The idea of the op-ed article is to let an individual or group express its opinion directly, without the mediation of the newspaper’s reporters or editors. In this sense, the Yousef pieces were not op-eds and should not have been published. The reason is that they had nothing whatsoever to do with the thoughts or actions of Hamas. They were, rather, merely free advertising copy.
Farfour Martyred
A predictable end to the Hamas TV series, starring Mickey Mouse lookalike: Farfour.
This is but the latest example of the moral cesspool that is Palestinian culture.
Charles Krauthammer: Last Chance for Abbas
Gaza is now run not by a conventional political party but by a movement that is revolutionary, Islamist and terrorist. Worse, Hamas is a client of Iran. Gaza now constitutes the farthest reach of the archipelago of Iranian proxies: Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mahdi Army (among others) in Iraq and the Alawite regime of Syria.
Larry Miller: The intifada and its defenders
Humorist Larry Miller is decidedly serious in his latest piece: Whosoever Blesses Them.
The Palestinians want their own country. There’s just one thing about that: There are no Palestinians. It’s a made up word. Israel was called Palestine for two thousand years. Like “Wiccan,” “Palestinian” sounds ancient but is really a modern invention. Before the Israelis won the land in war, Gaza was owned by Egypt, and there were no “Palestinians” then, and the West Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were no “Palestinians” then. As soon as the Jews took over and started growing oranges as big as basketballs, what do you know, say hello to the “Palestinians,” weeping for their deep bond with their lost “land” and “nation.” So for the sake of honesty, let’s not use the word “Palestinian” any more to describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy at our deaths until someone points out they’re being taped. Instead, let’s call them what they are: “Other Arabs From The Same General Area Who Are In Deep Denial About Never Being Able To Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal
Struggle And Death.” I know that’s a bit unwieldy to expect to see on CNN. How about this, then: “Adjacent Jew-Haters.”Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own country. Oops, just one more thing. No, they don’t. They could’ve had their own country any time in the last thirty years, especially two years ago at Camp David. But if you have your own country, you have to have traffic lights and garbage trucks and Chambers of Commerce, and, worse, you actually have to figure out some way to make a living. That’s no fun. No, they want what all the other Jew-Haters in the region want: Israel. They also want a big pile of dead Jews, of course–that’s where the real fun is–but mostly they want Israel. Why? For one thing, trying to destroy Israel–or “The Zionist Entity” as their textbooks call it–for the last fifty years has allowed the rulers of Arab countries to divert the attention of their own people away from the fact that they’re the blue-ribbon most illiterate, poorest, and tribally backward on God’s Earth, and if you’ve ever been around God’s Earth, you know that’s really saying something. It makes me roll my eyes every time one of our pundits waxes poetic about the great history and culture of the Muslim Mideast. Unless I’m missing something, the Arabs haven’t given anything to the world since Algebra, and, by the way, thanks a hell of a lot for that one.
Chew this around and spit it out: Five hundred million Arabs; five million Jews. Think of all the Arab countries as a football field, and Israel as a pack of matches sitting in the middle of it. And now these same folks swear that if Israel gives them half of that pack of matches, everyone will be pals. Really? Wow, what neat news. Hey, but what about the string of wars to obliterate the tiny country and the constant din of rabid blood oaths to drive every Jew into the sea? Oh, that? We were just kidding.
My friend Kevin Rooney made a gorgeous point the other day: Just reverse the numbers. Imagine five hundred million Jews and five million Arabs. I was stunned at the simple brilliance of it. Can anyone picture the Jews strapping belts of razor blades and dynamite to themselves? Of course not. Or marshalling every fiber and force at their disposal for generations to drive a tiny Arab state into the sea? Nonsense. Or dancing for joy at the murder of innocents? Impossible. Or spreading and believing horrible lies about the Arabs baking their bread with the blood of children? Disgusting. No, as you know, left to themselves in a world of peace, the worst Jews would ever do to people is debate them to death.
There’s nothing I can add to that, except: amen.
