Monday, January 05, 2009

Overwhelming Force is the Only Way to Fight Terrorists

So Israel invades Gaza and the world thinks they’re overreacting, that they are employing a disproportionate response to the Hamas rockets. Which begs the question, what would have been a proportionate response?

When the Allies fought Hitler, they bombed Germany’s cities indiscriminately, nearly every night for years, seeking to inflict the maximum number of casualties, nearly all of whom were civilians. In Dresden and Hamburg, which they bombed toward the end of the war when it was already clear that Germany was toast, they killed more than half a million civilians in just a few evenings. Truman, of course, dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killings about 350,000.

Ah, but Hamas is not Germany and Gaza is not Japan, you say. These were formidable military machines and maximum force had to be deployed against them. That made sense. But what’s a couple of rockets? And Hamas is a joke anyway. Get over it.

This gets to the very heart of the matter. The world perceives the Palestinians as weak and the Israelis as strong, when in reality terrorist organizations are much stronger than any democracy. Democracies make themselves weak by subscribing to humane standards of fighting. No matter how strong their tanks, they won’t send them crashing into kindergartens. No matter how powerful their jets, they won’t deploy them against hospitals. No matter how formidable their artillery, they won’ use them against shopping malls teeming with families.

But the terrorists are all-powerful. Unconstrained by any tinge of moral restraint, they will kill pregnant women, dismember infants, and detonate the infirm. They kill whom they want, when they want, and for as long as they want. Remember the brutal decapitation of Daniel Perl and the all-powerful posture of the terrorist killers who slit his throat? Those who live outside moral restraints are possessed of a godlike power to define right and wrong and to take life as they see fit. It is one of the reasons that people have always been drawn to evil. Going over to the dark side, as Darth Vader discovered, is much more powerful than being on the side of the light. Decency is incredibly limiting, while wickedness gives people an inordinate sense of dominance. Witness the constant stream of statements coming out from the Hamas leadership. Every day we hear how they’re ‘going to make Gaza an Israeli graveyard,’ they’re transform their streets into ‘rivers of Israeli blood,’ or some such other blather than connotes their perception of themselves as all-powerful deities with the power to strike millions at their command.

Which is why there can be no compromise with terrorism and the only proportionality that can be used in fighting cold-blooded killers is overwhelming, maximum force. They can only be fought to the death. Their megalomaniacal sense of power precludes the possibility of compromise. Proportionality is not a concept that can be employed in fighting those whose belief in their own power is unlimited. Morality and a respect for innocent civilian life is the only constraint that should limit a democracy in fighting those who operate without any constraints.

It’s bad enough that democracies have one hand tied behind their backs by their willful and laudable submission to moral constraints. The other hand, the military arm, must therefore compensate by employing every available means to crush the terrorists utterly. Nations must, of course, protect innocent civilians lives and minimize, to the greatest degree possible, collateral harm to innocent bystanders. But short of this, nations must bring all their power to bear on extinguishing the dark night of terrorism. When the body has cancer, the medical profession deploys every means at its disposal to eradicate it. There is no proportionality. Radiation, chemotherapy, and anything else that works is sent into the battle by humane doctors who seek to eradicate a disease that will snuff out life.

I should add that the destruction of Hamas is far more for the benefit of the Palestinians than the Israelis. It is the Palestinians that must live under the barbaric cruelty of an organization that terrorizes its citizens even more than its enemies.

One of my friends in the media was talking to me about how Israel is just as bad as Hamas, just as culpable as the terrorists. Rather than engage in a useless debate, I employed a variation on JFK’s argument in the famous Ich Bin Ein Berliner speech of June, 1963. OK, they’re the same, I said. So I suppose given the choice of living under Israeli or Hamas control, you would just flip a coin? No, he said, he would never live under Hamas, under any circumstances whatsoever. So much for the two sides being equal. Which is why Israel’s one million Arab citizens did not elect to live under the control of either the Palestinian Authority or Hamas, even though they had every opportunity of voting with their feet and leaving Israeli governance for Palestinian governance once those two regimes were established. In Israel they may have their complaints. But they can protest the government, petition the Supreme Court, and enjoy every freedom. Under Palestinian control they face summary execution for merely being of being collaborators, as we are seeing in the current conflict in Gaza, without so much as even a makeshift hearing.

And this argument is what gives the lie to all those who claim that their opposition to Israel is motivated by their caring for the Palestinians. If they really did care they would never want a radical, hate-filled organization that teaches young Palestinians that their highest calling in life is to blow themselves up to even survive. They would want real peace and prosperity for the Palestinians. For that matter, whoever claims to care about the Arabs throughout the Middle East should protest them having to live under the House of Saud, Bashir Al Assad, Hezbollah, and other assorted Arab governments who are the great enemies of Arab human rights, Arab press freedoms, and Arab political liberty.

Or maybe they really don’t care all that much about the Palestinians and just have an irrational dislike of Israel.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the founder of This World: The Jewish Values Network. His new book, The Kosher Sutra: Eight Sacred Secrets to Rediscovering Desire and Reigniting Passion for Life is being published this week by HarperOne. http://www.shmuley.com