Ramadi, Gaza, and Western Hypocrisy - by Evelyn Gordon

...if those officials retain even a shred of intellectual integrity, the recent devastation of Ramadi during a joint Western/Iraqi effort to retake the city leaves them only two options: either hand themselves over to the International Criminal Court as suspected war criminals, or publicly apologize to Israel for all the slurs they hurled at it over far less extensive damage.

Evelyn Gordon..
Analysis from Israel..
14 January '16..

During the Hamas-Israel war of 2014, both Obama Administration officials and their European counterparts repeatedly accused Israel of excessive force over the “massive” destruction of civilian property in Gaza. But if those officials retain even a shred of intellectual integrity, the recent devastation of Ramadi during a joint Western/Iraqi effort to retake the city leaves them only two options: either hand themselves over to the International Criminal Court as suspected war criminals, or publicly apologize to Israel for all the slurs they hurled at it over far less extensive damage.

As the New York Times reported last week, the successful recapture of Ramadi from the Islamic State left the city “in ruins.” Reporter Ben Hubbard described one neighborhood as “a panorama of wreckage so vast that it was unclear where the original buildings had stood.” The city has no electricity or running water, and “Many streets had been erased or remained covered in rubble or blocked by trenches used in the fighting.” When Hubbard asked an Iraqi officer how residents would return to their homes, the officer replied, “Homes? There are no homes.”

Indeed, a different Iraqi officer told the Associated Press “that more than half of the city’s buildings have been destroyed, including government offices, markets, and houses.”

This is devastation orders of magnitude greater than what Gaza suffered. According to UN figures, 9,465 homes in Gaza were completely destroyed and another 9,644 badly damaged, out of a total of roughly 319,000 (the latter figure is my own calculation based on official Palestinian statistics: Dividing Gaza’s total population of 1.82 million by its average household size of 5.7 people gives you 319,000 households). Thus even according to the UN – which traditionally exaggerates Palestinian casualties and damage – only about 6 percent of Gaza’s homes were destroyed or badly damaged. That’s a far cry from “more than half of the city” in Ramadi.

But the reasons for the destruction, in both places, are no less significant than its scope. One, as Hubbard noted, is the inherent difficulty “of dislodging a group that stitches itself into the urban fabric of communities it seizes by occupying homes, digging tunnels, and laying extensive explosives.” In Ramadi, he reported, Islamic State built tunnels under the streets and planted explosives in roads and buildings. Indeed, “Entire areas are considered no-go zones because they have yet to be searched for booby traps left by the jihadists.”

These are the same tactics Hamas used in Gaza: Tunnels, booby traps, and weapons stockpiles were placed in and under civilian buildings on a massive scale. On July 30, 2014, for instance, three Israeli soldiers were killed by “an explosion at a booby-trapped UNRWA health clinic that housed a tunnel entry shaft,” the Times of Israel reported. At the same press briefing where those deaths were announced, an Israeli officer said Hamas had thus far detonated more than 1,000 bombs, destroying “thousands of buildings” in Gaza. As an example, he cited a street the army searched the previous night in which 19 out of 28 buildings were booby-trapped.

But in Gaza, both the Obama administration and European officials blamed Israel for the ensuing destruction. In Ramadi, in contrast, both American and Iraqi officials quite sensibly “placed blame for the city’s destruction on the jihadists, who mined roads and buildings.”

Double Standards and Delusional Warfare

...The West expects Israel to live up to impossible moral standards that it does not set for anyone ‎else -- not even for itself. The West's own moral standards are clearly flexible and can be ‎lowered when reality requires it. Only Israel is supposed to live up to the impossible standard of ‎that delusional concept of humane warfare, according to which no civilians are ever hurt and ‎no blood is ever spilled. ‎

Judith Bergman..
Israel Hayom..
12 August '15..

The double standard to which Western countries hold Israel is well-known. Not just from the ‎endless condemnation of Israel at the U.N., but because an official representative of one of the ‎largest Western blocs of nations, EU Ambassador to Israel Jesper Vahr, made a now-‎infamous statement last year during a panel discussion on relations between Israel and Europe. ‎

‎"Israel should insist that we discriminate, that we apply double standards, this is because you are ‎one of us," Vahr said. "Israel should want to be held to European standards, not Middle Eastern ‎ones. So I think you have the right to insist that we apply double standards and put you to the ‎same standards as all the rest of the countries in the European context."‎

This is an extremely common sentiment, certainly not reserved for Europe, and one that ‎journalists in the mainstream media are not shy to use as an "excuse" for subjecting Israel to a ‎kind of scrutiny that practically everyone else on the planet is exempted from. ‎

It is therefore worthwhile to look at the moral standards that the West holds itself up to. Certainly, if the West claims that all it is doing is to hold Israel to its own moral standards, it is relevant to ask whether the West lives up to those standards itself.‎

On Aug. 3, the British newspaper The Guardian reported, under the headline "Hundreds of ‎civilians killed in U.S.-led airstrikes on ISIS [Islamic State] targets," "credible reports" of at least 459 non‎combatant deaths, including 100 children, in 52 airstrikes. The "credible reports" were collected ‎by a new project, run by journalists, which calls itself "Airwars." On its website, Airwars claims ‎to be "a collaborative, not-for-profit transparency project aimed both at tracking and archiving ‎the international air war against Islamic State, in both Iraq and Syria. With a dozen nations ‎reportedly bombing -- along with the air forces of Iraq, Iran and Syria -- there is a pressing public ‎interest need for independent, trustworthy monitoring."‎

The U.S. led coalition has launched over 5,700 airstrikes at Islamic State targets in the campaign, which ‎has lasted almost one year.‎

The point here is not to question the legitimacy of destroying Islamic State -- which is more than overdue ‎‎-- although one can certainly question whether the air campaign serves any purpose other than ‎easing the bad conscience of the West in the face of the mass rape and executions by the organization of ‎civilians in the territories that they have captured. ‎

The point is that the West has killed thousands of civilians by way of collateral damage in the ‎various military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since Sept. 11, 2001. It has killed hundreds, if not ‎thousands, of civilians in the so-called "drone wars" that the U.S. (primarily under President Barack ‎Obama) has been, and still is, conducting in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. And ‎now it turns out that at least 459 civilians have been killed in strikes against Islamic State. ‎

What this means is that the West does not even come close to meeting the high moral standards ‎that it sets for Israel. When Vahr nonchalantly stated that he thought Israel ‎should "have the right to insist that we apply double standards and put you to the same ‎standards as all the rest of the countries in the European context" he conveniently "forgot" this ‎small detail. ‎

Hamas’s Entry to Fourth Generation Warfare

...As Western nations stir from their slumber to confront the Islamic State and its forces, they have lessons to learn from Israel’s experience in the Gaza conflict. Asymmetrical conflicts and asymmetrical morality of the Fourth Generation armies cannot be fought with outdated methods, tactics and rules.

Lenny Ben-David..
Times of Israel..
10 September '14..

Let us not forget: Hamas agreed so far only to a ceasefire. For now, the agreement is no armistice, nor a return to the status quo ante. Negotiations on some very tough issues have not even begun.

But it is time to ask and answer some very tough questions about Hamas’ conduct of the two month war:

- Why did Hamas reject and break so many ceasefire attempts?

- Why did Hamas persist in firing rockets into Israel, despite its inability to break through Israel’s Iron Dome defense?

- Why was Hamas so callous about the fate of Gazan civilians, and so determined to kill Israeli civilians, an obvious war crime?

- Is Hamas a ragtag band of terrorists or a well-disciplined and trained conventional army?

- How is Hamas connected to external forces – not just Iran, the source of so much anti-Israel activity around the world, nor Qatar, the Moslem Brotherhood’s financier, but to the black-flagged scourges of the Middle East such as ISIS, al Qaeda, Palestine Islamic Jihad, Jabhat el Nusra, Hizbullah, and their hydra spores?

- Is Hamas the same as ISIS, as claimed by Israeli leaders?

- And lastly, who “won” the Hamas war?

After Israel’s experience fighting fought Hamas in the 2008 Gaza “Cast Lead” campaign, the 2012 Gaza “Pillar of Defense” operation, and Hezbollah in the 2006 Second Lebanon War, observers may not be fully aware that Israel is engaged in a totally new kind of warfare. Yes, Israel’s tanks and armored personnel carriers returned to the battlefield in 2014. Yes, Israeli technological advances swatted Hamas rockets like flies, destroyed anti-tank rockets in mid-flight, and enabled pilots to pinpoint their munitions with unprecedented precision. And as much as humanly possible, Gazan civilians were relatively safe from the Israeli army, accompanied by drones and military lawyers recording every step.

“Asymmetrical conflict” is the term military analysts coined years ago for wars fought between national armies and non-state military forces. The description certainly fits the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s or the Afghan Taliban conflict. Other terms applied are “guerrilla warfare,” “civil war,” or “insurgency,” where the combatants’ goal is usually to capture territory or replace the local or national government. The conflicts are generally confined to the boundaries of a national entity.

Asymmetrical Morality and Asymmetrical Victory

In recent years, however, some military circles have identified a new form of asymmetrical conflict, one that defines the current conflicts swirling from the Sinai and Gaza to Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. It is not only asymmetric in its tactics and weaponry; this warfare is characterized by asymmetrical morality and asymmetrical definitions of “victory.” In military jargon, the new methods of combat are called “Fourth Generation Warfare.”

This warfare is conducted by decentralized, transnational armies that are well-financed and well-armed by countries such as Iran and Qatar. They use terrorist tactics and are trained in camps reported to be in Afghanistan, Sinai, Somalia, Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, and Pakistan. For some forces, such as Hamas, the Palestine Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, the training and rocketry are provided by Iran and the Iranian National Guard Corps.

The Fourth Generation fighters are very well-versed in modern modes of social media and public relations. Witness Hamas’ well-documented manipulation and intimidation of the Western press in Gaza. If decades ago the terrorist goal was to “kill one, frighten 1,000,” today’s ISIS method focuses its video cameras on its goal of “behead one and frighten one million” to post on its Facebook accounts viewed around the world. The YouTube videos of the recent beheadings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff were not some grainy amateur production; they were filmed from various angles and edited with titles, graphics and music inserted.

The Question of Morality and Warfare in Gaza

The moral dilemma here is fairly clear. Choosing not to fire at the Hamas missile site may have saved the lives of Palestinian children who were near the weapon. But what would we think about that decision had the missile that had been spared on account of the presence of the Palestinians kids landed on a school, a school bus or a home in Tel Aviv where Israeli children might be hurt or killed? Unless you believe, as many of Israel’s critics apparently do, that Israelis deserve to be killed but that Palestinians ought to be treated as out-of-bounds for any military action, this is an immoral equation.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
17 November '12..

In Alana’s post about Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s conference call this morning, she reported his comments about the difficulty of trying to fight a war against an immoral foe while preserving your own morality:

The ambassador said Israel has destroyed many of Hamas’s long-range missiles in its first-stage air strikes, but that they couldn’t be completely successful “because of considerations of collateral damage.” In one case, an Israeli pilot refrained from striking a long-range missile because the pilot noticed children in the vicinity, Oren said. That missile was later launched into Tel Aviv.

The action of that Israeli pilot must be seen as praiseworthy since it showed that even in the midst of a conflict in which his country’s security is at risk, that officer was still concerned about saving the lives of Palestinian children. Even if Hamas hides its forces behind civilians, the rules of engagement for Israel’s soldiers require them not to deliberately place innocents at risk even if it confers a military advantage on the terrorists. That is the sort of decision that is in accord with the values that democratic Israel prizes as well as those of Judaism. But this anecdote raises more questions than it answers. It may, in fact, be an apt metaphor for the problems that Israel faces in its conflict with Hamas. One needn’t be a bloodthirsty militarist or be indifferent to morality or to the dictates of international opinion to understand that the consequences of such a policy may not always advance humanitarian goals.

The moral dilemma here is fairly clear. Choosing not to fire at the Hamas missile site may have saved the lives of Palestinian children who were near the weapon. But what would we think about that decision had the missile that had been spared on account of the presence of the Palestinians kids landed on a school, a school bus or a home in Tel Aviv where Israeli children might be hurt or killed? Unless you believe, as many of Israel’s critics apparently do, that Israelis deserve to be killed but that Palestinians ought to be treated as out-of-bounds for any military action, this is an immoral equation.

Roth - Just one of the ways in which a terror war is different from conventional war

Ashdod yesterday:  An Israeli woman 
surveys the damage to her store 
following a rocket attack from the
 nearby Gaza Strip.
 Image source: Uriel Sinai/Getty Images 

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
13 March '12..

We'll start with what might seem an irrelevant news report from less than an hour ago:

A 15 year old Palestinian teenager from Gaza has been transported to Israel for emergency medical treatment in an Israeli hospital. He was seriously injured while preparing to launch a Palestinian Qassam rocket at Israeli civilians in southern Israel, when the rocket suddenly malfunctioned and exploded. The explosion took place in the Shuja'iyya district of Gaza city.

[Source and hit tip: Jameel @ The Muqata]

Next we'll get on to the don'ts. We don't mean to lecture here on how terrorists don't wear uniforms, or that they deliberately, consistently and almost exclusively target civilians and don't seek strategic or military goals, or that they don't answer to governments who then have to answer for their actions (though in the case of the Palestinian Arab terror groups, they not only don't lack a government but they actually have two, one in Ramallah and the other in Gaza City).

No, what we mean is that in terror warfare, there's no universally agreed definition of what makes it terror in the first place. And as a consequence, it's not universally agreed when the terror has passed or what it produced.

(Read full "Just one of the ways in which a terror war is different from conventional war")

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Roth - Manipulating public opinion is as important to the terrorist strategy as firing rockets and here's why and how

Gaza: Terrorist operating his rocket launcher
from behind Palestinian Arab human shield
[Image Source]. Why is this constant truth
not expressed in the reports that reach
mainstream media news-consumers? Is it
irrelevant tothe casualty figures?

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
12 March '12..



More than a million Israelis are now four days into a recurring nightmare: air raid sirens at intervals of some hours, and sometimes of minutes. Indiscriminate, ongoing firing of lethal-payload missiles into their cities, farms, villages, buses, schools and homes round the clock. And it's being done by semi-organized groups of thugs whose sole reason for existing is to do exactly this.

This, as we have written before, is an asymmetric war. Meaning, our side chooses to fight by the rules that govern relations between countries, while theirs conducts war by the rules that you find in effect throughout the Arab world.

Are we being prejudiced in saying something that everyone with eyes can see? The death toll from the Arab version of warfare - the one where you direct anti-missile batteries and tank fire at your own citizens, Syrian-style or as the Yemeni regime does - speaks for itself and is pretty instructive. Yesterday alone, the Syrian government, the one with a seat at the United Nations and at UNESCO, murdered some fifty Syrian women and Syrian children according to the Christian Science Monitor, while CNN says 45 Syrians were killed by Syrian government forces in one city alone, Homs.

Goldstone: Asymmetric legal warfare

Elder of Ziyon
27 July '10

The Goldstone Report was released last September.

The Goldstone Commission members were appointed on April 3. They first convened on May 4. They spent about 10 days in Gaza listening to testimony from people whose testimony was guaranteed not to offend Hamas, and another two days in Geneva listening to other people.

By the beginning of August, they were done with their investigation and started writing the report.

In those mere three months, they say they investigated some 36 incidents from thousands that occurred during a complex military action. These incidents were specifically chosen to make Israel look as bad as possible - in other words, they chose incidents for which they felt that there was overwhelming evidence that Israel was wholly in the wrong, based on the already biased evidence and testimonies.

As Goldstone said,

The Report contains an analysis of 36 specific incidents in Gaza as well as a number on the West Bank and in Israel.

In Chapter XI of the Report, for example we detail a number of specific incidents in which Israeli forces launched direct attacks against civilians with lethal consequences. These were, with only one exception, where the facts establish that there was no military objective or advantage that could justify the attacks

...These attacks amounted to reprisals and collective punishment and constitute war crimes.

The bolded statement is the linchpin of the Goldstone Report. Based on the Goldstone Commission's supposed military expertise, faced with incomplete evidence and biased testimonies, they determined that Israel engaged in numerous operations in Gaza that had no military advantage and therefore, in the view of the commission, must have been purely for reasons of punishing ordinary Gazan civilians.

Generalizing from these cherry-picked incidents, Goldstone then implies that the entire war was at least in part for that same purpose - a war to target Gaza civilians.



Generalizing from these cherry-picked incidents, Goldstone then implies that the entire war was at least in part for that same purpose - a war to target Gaza civilians. As the report said:

While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right to self defence, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.

Since then, the Israeli government has released three reports about the Gaza war. These reports reflected painstaking investigations of the Goldstone 36 incidents as well as those alleged by various NGOs and others. Even a cursory look at the Israeli reports on the specific incidents shows that the number of man-hours spent in interviews and reviewing evidence far outweigh what Goldstone did, and that the seriousness with which they took these investigations likewise far outstripped Goldstone's.

(Read full article)

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Defining “Victory” and “Peace”: How the U.S. and Israel Reject General Sherman’s Solution and Get Blamed Any Way

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
07 Februray '10

“War,” said General William Tecumseh Sherman, “is Hell.” He knew what he was talking about. Sherman’s march through Georgia and into South Carolina at the end of the Civil War helped end the Civil War while destroying a lot of civilian homes, farms, and towns..

His strategy was to inflict such terrible punishment on the South that it would surrender faster, thus saving lives. His men did things shocking to Americans even after such a bloody conflict, burning plantations and destroying everything in their wake. Ironically, though, even Sherman's deeds have been exaggerated.

But Sherman was no mere brute. He was so depressed by the prospect of the Civil War—being among the few who understood how long and bloody it would be—that he had a nervous breakdown at its onset and tried to escape the responsibility of service that he ultimately knew would be impossible for him to avoid. Like other Western generals of his time, and almost up to the present day--but no longer--he simply believed, in his words, "I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early [that is, complete and quick] success."

After the war, Sherman became commander of the U.S. army and about 1870, regarding the Franco-Prussian War but it applies generally:

How are wars won? The preferred way is for one side to see that its own victory is impossible and that it will face much heavier costs by continuing than by surrendering or making peace. By making a deal sooner, the side that’s losing often reasons that it can get better terms.

What do you do, though, if the other side isn’t going to give up? Here’s what Sherman said about the French-German conflict but which also applies to America’s Civil War and many other conflicts as well:

(Read full article)
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Cast Lead And Contemporary Warfare

Eamonn McDonagh
Z Word Blog
29 January '10

Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff have a piece here in which they assess Operation Cast Lead a year after its conclusion. They acknowledge that,

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) penetrated to the heart of the strip — the center of Gaza City, where most of Hamas’s major compounds are located. The organization’s defensive infrastructure, which had been painstakingly built over three years and included hundreds of booby-trapped houses, tunnels, landmines, and smuggled anti-tank rockets, was destroyed.

Hamas fighters had no answer for the IDF’s technological and military edge. Their attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers failed and, though Hamas fired hundreds of rockets into Israeli territory, only a few civilians were killed. More than a year after the fighting, the strip is still under siege by both Israel and Egypt. Most Gazans are forbidden from traveling abroad, while their supply of goods depends primarily on smuggling through tunnels from Egypt.

They go on to describe how, in spite of this, a year later Hamas is celebrating what it feels was a great victory and explain this by saying,

(Read full article)
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The Goldstone Illusion

What the U.N. report gets wrong about Gaza--and war.

Moshe Halbertal
The New Republic
06 November 09

(This is a long but thorough explanation of the topic, a worthwhile read.)

I.

In 2000, I was asked by the Israel Defense Forces to join a group of philosophers, lawyers, and generals for the purpose of drafting the army’s ethics code. Since then, I have been deeply involved in the analysis of the moral issues that Israel faces in its war on terrorism. I have spent many hours in discussions with soldiers and officers in order to better grasp the dilemmas that they tackle in the field, and in an attempt to help facilitate the internalization of the code of ethics in war. It was no wonder that, when the Goldstone Report on the Gaza war was published, I was keen to read it, with some hope of getting a perspective on Israeli successes or failures in this effort to comprehend war, and to fight it, morally. Unlike many who responded to the report, in praise or in blame, I gave this immensely long document a careful reading.

Let us begin with a sense of the moral stakes. Since the early 1990s, the nature of the military conflict facing Israel has been dramatically shifting. What was mainly a clash between states and armies has turned into a clash between a state and paramilitary terror organizations, Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north. This new form of struggle is now called “asymmetrical war.” It is defined by an attempt on the part of those groups to erase two basic features of war: the front and the uniform. Hamas militants fight without military uniforms, in ordinary and undistinguishing civilian garb, taking shelter among their own civilian population; and they attack Israeli civilians wherever they are, intentionally and indiscriminately. During the Gaza operation, for example, some Hamas militants embedded in the civilian population did not carry weapons while moving from one position to another. Arms and ammunition had been pre-positioned for them and stored in different houses.

In addressing this vexing issue, the Goldstone Report uses a rather strange formulation: “While reports reviewed by the Mission credibly indicate that members of the Palestinian armed groups were not always dressed in a way that distinguished them from the civilians, the Mission found no evidence that Palestinian combatants mingled with the civilian population with the intention of shielding themselves from the attack.” The reader of such a sentence might well wonder what its author means. Did Hamas militants not wear their uniforms because they were inconveniently at the laundry? What other reasons for wearing civilian clothes could they have had, if not for deliberately sheltering themselves among the civilians?

As for the new “front” in asymmetrical warfare, we read in another passage, which is typical of the report’s overall biased tone, that, “On the basis of the information it gathered, the Mission finds that there are indications that Palestinian armed groups launched rockets from urban areas. The Mission has not been able to obtain any direct evidence that this was done with the specific intent of shielding the rocket launchers from counterstrikes by the Israeli armed forces.” What reason could there possibly be for launching rockets from urban centers, if not shielding those rockets from counterattack? And what is the moral distinction that is purportedly being established here?

By disguising themselves as civilians and by attacking civilians with no uniforms and with no front, these paramilitary terrorist organizations attempt nothing less than to erase the distinction between combatants and noncombatants on both sides of the struggle. Suicide bombers exploded themselves on buses and in restaurants in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Dimona, Eilat, and many other places. Qassam rockets and Katyushas were fired randomly at various Israeli civilian centers, as far as their range allowed. So the war had no defined place and was waged by unidentified murderers. It justifiably felt like a change in the very nature of warfare. The goal of this momentous transformation was to create a war of all against all and everywhere. It aimed at shifting the Israeli population from a healthy sense of cautious fear attached to a particular place-a border, a security zone--to a generalized panic that has no location. Everywhere and everyone is now regarded as dangerous. This is not paranoia. It has a basis in a new reality, and is the outcome of a new strategic paradigm.

(Full article)
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