On Michael Walzer, Gaza, and the Lebanon War: Responds
Walzer, Michael
JERRY SLATER'S polemic is notable most of all for its exaggerations. I am indeed a supporter of Israel, and only wish that I was as eminent, authoritative, prominent, well known, and influential...
...I have opposed Israel's settlement policy since the first settlement was founded almost forty years ago...
...It's not smart to pretend that they don't mean what they say...
...It was rushed into print while Human Rights Watch was "continuing to investigate allegations that Hezbollah is shielding its military personnel and material by locating them in civilian homes or areas...
...Liberal and left Israelis, who share Slater's hope, and my own, for a two-state solution to the ArabIsraeli conflict, made very similar arguments...
...Israel's political and military leaders were trying to hold down the number of Israeli casualties (750 soldiers were killed in 1982, roughly 120 in 2006), but they also wanted to hold down the number of Lebanese casualties...
...But there was something new in the Lebanon case: the extent of Sunni and secular Arab support for Israel at the beginning of the war, which continued until it became clear that Israel was not going to win the decisive victory for which many Arabs hoped...
...So here is my first disagreement with Slater: I think that Israel faces an existential threat that is not of its own making...
...His claim is that Israel deliberately acted to "punish" the civilian population of South Lebanon and of the Shiite suburbs of Beirut in order to bring pressure on Hezbollah to withdraw its forces from the South...
...But any attack on Hezbollah installations would have been punishing for the civilian population, given how Hezbollah located its installations...
...The withdrawal from Gaza was an experiment aimed at building support for further withdrawals...
...Its most important finding, however, was that there were "no cases [among the cases studied] in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields...
...indeed, he never mentions them again...
...Still, every civilian death is a terrible thing, and we need to ask who was responsible for the many innocent men, women, and children who died in the fighting...
...Slater minimizes them throughout his piece, as when he says that Hezbollah is committed to Israel's destruction "at least on the ideological level"— by which he means, it's really just talk...
...But I am afraid that Islamic militants give every sign of believing in the old left maxim about the unity of theory and practice...
...The report deals with something less than 15 percent of the civilian deaths in the war...
...But I also argued at that time that when Vietcong guerrillas fired at American troops from peasant villages, the Americans had a right to respond, and "the innocent deaths that result from this kind of fighting are the responsibility of the guerrillas and their civilian supporters...
...This was the defense offered by an Israeli official: "The strike against the building was carried out in accordance with the policy of General Command, [which] determines that Israeli Defense Forces are permitted to open fire against suspicious structures within villages whose inhabitants have been warned . . ." Other Israeli officials described a different policy, but let's focus on this one, which is undoubtedly very bad...
...Anyway, we have other evidence on this subject, which is as available to Slater as it is to me: Secretary General Kofi Annan's messages to the Security Council, based on infor1 02 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 mation supplied by UN forces on the ground, "reporting in detail," Annan says, "about military and militia actions in southern Lebanon...
...SLATER TREATS last summer's war as one more in a series of virtually identical events: the same attack again and again...
...There has certainly been "disruption" since then, and impoverishment, and immiseration...
...And it needs its critics so that its response to those denials and threats is held within the necessary moral limits...
...Slater accuses me of applying different (and lower) standards to Israeli war-making than I apply in other cases...
...Many journalists reported the same thing...
...Fire is not so easily made "free...
...What the war did in fact was to confirm the risks...
...The settler movement had just received a stinging, perhaps fatal, political defeat, and the Kadima-Labor government was committed to large-scale withdrawals from the West Bank...
...He would also consider the statements of calmer and more moderate generals such as Omar Bradley and George Marshall...
...it was begun with largescale strategic ambitions, not only for the defeat of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the South (a limited war for that purpose would have been justified) but also for regime change in Beirut...
...This was exactly the criticism that I made of the American policy of creating "free-fire zones" in Vietnam in the 1960s...
...the commitment doesn't affect political practice...
...Because Slater doesn't take the threat of the rockets seriously (well, he says that they are a "serious matter," but this is a throwaway line, never followed up), he doesn't have to tell us what Israel should have done instead of what it did...
...How to deal with that opposition is a subject he never addresses...
...Two states will never be the result of the one-sided politics he displays in this polemic...
...I have agreements and disagreements with them, but the agreements are far more important...
...policy toward Israel/ Palestine won't change unless American Jews support the change...
...By contrast, an attack by Islamic radicals on farms, factories, and schools in Israel is all-too-easy to imagine...
...So Slater's indictment is another exaggeration— of the evidence and, almost certainly, of the actual fighting...
...Their cruelty should certainly be condemned...
...Those that were not should be criticized (I will come to them in a ARGUMENTS moment), but that kind of critique requires a much closer look at how the war was fought, on both sides, than Slater attempts...
...I am indeed a supporter of Israel, and only wish that I was as eminent, authoritative, prominent, well known, and influential as he says I am—for then I would be a far more useful supporter than I have been...
...Rocket attacks and military raids from Gaza were certain to make those withdrawals more difficult, if not impossible— and they were probably intended to do exactly that, because the current architects of Palestinian policy are fiercely opposed to the two-state solution that Slater and I favor...
...they are the result of the Intifada and its terrorism (which Slater can barely bring himself to mention) and of the harsh Israeli reaction...
...The threat arises in large part from transformations in the 100 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 Islamic world, manifest in places like Algeria, Pakistan, and Iran, where religious ferment and fanaticism cannot be attributed to Zionist crimes or even to "the political power of the American Jewish community...
...And it was fought with great cruelty: as Slater says, some ten thousand civilians were killed in the twelve days of fighting...
...Israel needs its supporters, because it is the only state in the world whose legitimacy is widely denied and whose destruction is publicly advocated and threatened...
...they are indiscriminate in time as well as space...
...The most wrongful act on the Israeli side was the use of cluster bombs in South Lebanon in the last days before the cease-fire...
...But cluster bombs also leave behind a large number of unexploded bomblets, which kill people long after the war is over...
...They too are not well served by Slater's polemic, which is much too generous in "explaining" the policies that they oppose and must continue to oppose...
...Against him I want to argue that last summer's war was not a wrongful act...
...From some of them, surely, though not from the Hezbollah perspective that Slater privileges, peace, prosperity, and co-existence with Israel would look very attractive...
...That last sentence fits the Israeli case exactly...
...Luckily, very few civilians were killed or injured because of the prior evacuation of the villages that were attacked...
...I do not like Jerry Slater's attempt to distinguish me from my friends Alan Dershowitz and Martin Peretz (I don't know Abraham Foxman...
...A report from Human Rights Watch is Slater's most important piece of evidence against this claim...
...But then at the end of his piece, Slater overestimates the threat to Israel's existence, blaming it on the Lebanon War, which greatly "increased the risks of an ultimate, unthinkable catastrophe...
...And however much one criticizes the harshness, one has to admit that it is reactive...
...It would be a small help along the way if critics of Israel like Slater conveyed this message to their Palestinian friends—with the appropriate mix of defense and critique...
...Annan is no friend of Israel...
...That result could not have been unintended...
...And what about their counterparts in the Arab world, who are rarely heard...
...We also know that Israel spent the weeks between the cease-fire and its withdrawal from Lebanese territory blowing up bunkers, tunnels, and storage rooms in the villages it controlled—villages that Human Rights Watch presumably did not visit...
...I would also be a more useful critic...
...The economic resources were certainly available...
...He quotes its key conclusions, which are indeed disturbing, but he omits all the qualifications—like a prosecuting attorney making a case, who isn't interested in figuring out what really happened...
...But it is the critical subject...
...But Lebanon is a divided country...
...Indeed, I condemned the actions that Gur defends when they were being carried out, in an April 8, 1978, article in the New Republic, in which I wrote that "[Israeli] air power and artillery were used in ways that turned civilians into targets, killing innocent people and driving thousands from their homes . . " Still, I would not take Gur's bluster as a full and factual account of Israeli war-making—just as, I am sure, Slater would not take the bluster of George Patton or Curtis LeMay as a full and factual account of American war-making...
...It seems that the Zionist dream of normality has been realized at least to this extent: Israel has some cruel and stupid generals...
...CONSIDER NOW the attack on the apartment house in Qana, in which twentynine civilians were killed...
...Slater's statement that it was "widely understood" in Israel that the only purpose of the Gaza withdrawal "was to consolidate the occupation of the West Bank" is simply untrue: that was not the purpose of the withdrawal, and Israelis sensibly did not understand it that way...
...The invasion of 1982 was Sharon's war...
...I am more or less repeating their mixed defense and critique of the war...
...I want to acknowledge that this article was included in a set of press clippings sent by the staff of Human Rights Watch to its board...
...And the war was fought with much greater care than in 1982, which is why the fighting, which lasted three times as long, produced only onetenth the number of civilian deaths...
...government would support a rapid move toward PalDISSENT / Winter 2007 .103 ARGUMENTS estinian statehood, whatever American Jews wanted (most of them would favor the move) and whatever their lobbyists in Washington were saying (some of them would oppose the move...
...I don't doubt its wrongness...
...Imagine that the same amount of money had been invested in economic development and education: what would have happened then...
...the necessary social base was present—but the political will was not...
...But the attacks that produced the punishment were aimed, mostly, at legitimate military targets...
...104 n DISSENT / Winter 2007...
...But before I come to that, a quick word about General Mordechai Gur and his blustery pronouncements about the Israeli "incursion" into Lebanon in 1978, which Slater quotes with such relish...
...But his polemic will not advance their cause, for they cannot avoid confronting the threats to Israel's existence that he waves aside...
...The sea blockade, the frequent closure of the border crossings, and the military attacks—all these would end immediately if there were no rockets flying into Israel from the Gaza Strip and no terrorist organizations operating openly in its cities...
...Again and again they announce their intentions...
...But the critics, if they are to be useful, must get the denials and threats right...
...others warned that it almost certainly would not...
...Some Israeli strategists certainly hoped that the punishment of the civilian population would have a good political effect...
...But consider the political situation in Israel at the time of the Hamas and Hezbollah raids...
...One might wonder about the character of its visits after reading an article in the Irish Times (August 2006) by Lara Marlowe, reporting from Nabatiyeh: "The smiling Hezbollah men who lurked in doorways or walked casually through town seemed invisible to . . . a team from Human Rights Watch who visited Qana yesterday...
...His criticism of Israel would be more just and more persuasive if he showed any willingness to look for the Israeli equivalents of those last two...
...What Slater calls the continuing occupation of Gaza after the on-the-ground withdrawal is a response to the sad failure of the Palestinians to make the most of the withdrawal...
...Warning the inhabitants of a village that their homes have been turned into military targets and that they should therefore leave does not free the attacking forces from the need to make reasonable efforts to see that they have in fact left (there apparently were no such efforts in the Qana case...
...he thinks that there was no need to do anything at all...
...Just for the record, here is an example of Hezbollah "ideology" from its leader, Hassan Nasrallah: "Israel . . . is an aggressive, illegal, and illegitimate entity, which has no future . . . Its destiny is manifest in our motto, Death to Israel...
...But these are not the issues that Slater raises...
...nor were the attacks on rocket sites and Hezbollah bunkers and storage rooms, with the qualifications I have already expressed, indiscriminate...
...Slater writes that I must look at things from a Lebanese perspective...
...In 2002, the UN published a report on "Arab Human Development," which included statistics on health and life expectancy in Occupied Palestine, dating from 2000 or the years immediately before...
...My second disagreement with Slater has to do with the occupation...
...The truth is that my political and moral judgments are boringly consistent...
...American foreign policy is determined by American interests and American sympathies, and if the Palestinians looked as if they wanted a state alongside Israel, and nothing more than that, it would be in our interest to help create such a state, and the project would enlist our sympathies...
...There are other objections—strategic, political, and prudential—that can and should be made to Israeli conduct of the war, and there are objections that can and should be made to Israeli diplomacy since the war: it is time to renew the project of withdrawal from the West Bank and to challenge the Palestinians to police their present and future borders...
...These bombs, used in a village rather than on a battlefield, are inherently indiscriminate...
...In ARGUMENTS its many tables and charts, Palestine consistently ranked high among Arab states, up with oil-rich Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates...
...It was very much in Israel's interest, and I would have thought in the interests of the Palestinians, to make Gaza an economic and social success...
...If the leaders of the Palestinians renounced terrorism and repressed the terrorists in their midst, the U.S...
...He does say that rocket attacks on Israeli civilians "certainly complicate matters when we judge the overall moral issue," but he shows no interest in working his way through the complications...
...it is the responsibility of soldiers not to impose risks of that sort on the civilian population...
...MICHAEL WALZER is the co-editor of Dissent...
...And no one in the world (I doubt that Slater is an exception here) would expect an Israeli attack, in the absence of rockets and bunkers, on flourishing farms, factories, and schools in South Lebanon...
...But Slater is mistaken when he blames the occupation for the victory of Hamas and for "the ever-worsening repression" and deepening misery of the Palestinian people...
...I hope that is true of Slater too, but the reference at the end of his piece to the political power of American Jews leaves me wondering...
...Those are my comrades, and they should be Slater's comrades too...
...Our third disagreement has to do with the conduct of the Lebanon War...
...nonetheless, he explicitly affirmed in several of his messages (July 30 and August 11) that Hezbollah was "endangering civilians on its own side by firing [rockets] from the midst of heavily populated areas...
...The daily humiliation of the checkpoints, the steady encroachment by the settlers on Palestinian land and water, the fantasies of annexation and transfer—I have never made excuses for any of this...
...Slater attributes this absence of political will, or better, the presence of a hostile political will, to the continuing occupation of the West Bank...
...the demonstrations on the Arab street this time around were no different from earlier and equally extravagant displays of hatred for Israel...
...Hezbollah's rockets came from Iran, which did not invest hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars in the network of fortifications across South Lebanon in order to deter an Israeli attack...
...A final word...
...there are many Lebanese perspectives...
...He is playing with a very dangerous trope here, and he must know the dangers...
...It is not right to suggest that U.S...
...In the meantime, the report acknowledged that "Hezbollah occasionally did store weapons in or near civilian homes and [its] fighters placed rocket launchers within populated areas...
...He obviously did not look back at Just and Unjust Wars, a book he claims to admire, from which I have just been quoting...
...Let's look at just one item on his list: "the disruption of public and private health systems...
...But they are not the result of the occupation...
...But surely that concessionary statement about "occasionally" storing weapons in homes means that there were at least some cases...
...Slater dismisses the Israeli claim that the larger part of the responsibility falls on Hezbollah because its militants built their bunkers and storage rooms in the towns and villages of South Lebanon and fired their rockets from those same towns and villages thus putting civilians at risk in any Israeli counterattack...
...In fact, there is a radical disjunction between Israel's two big Lebanon wars...
...In 2006, Israel's war aims were limited to the South: the goal was to reduce significantly DISSENT / Winter 2007 n 101 ARGUMENTS Hezbollah's military strength, to bring the Lebanese army down to the Israeli border, and to strengthen its hand with a robust UN force...
...Had Slater been concerned in 2000 with the state of Arab health systems, he could have busied himself almost anywhere from Morocco to Iraq, but not in Palestine, where health standards were relatively high—and this after thirty-three years of occupation...
...he was very critical of its "disproportionate" response to the initial Hezbollah raid...
Vol. 54 • January 2007 • No. 1
