Israel at War: The bleeding Heart and Somber Reality Well it seems from my glance at yesterday’s headlines in the Jerusalem post that the Israelis are indeed invading Lebanon. Interesting that the headlines read something like, “Israel to stage three-pronged invasion,” as if the generals would just hold a press conference and announce their battle plans. Being someone totally ignorant of military strategy or press relations, who knows, maybe they do this kind of thing. The reasoning might be like this. If a neighbor keeps throwing stones at your house and breaking your windows, your first response might be to break some of his windows in return. It doesn’t sound so civilized. So put a letter in his mailbox saying, I am coming over there. I will bring my brass knuckles and you should prepare to have the Akhbar beaten out of you.” Not so much more civilized, but perhaps more effective, if you have the ability to put your money where your mouth is. The most elegant solution would be some sort of computer generated revenge, like hacking into his credit files or bank account. But it’s so hard to do these days with all the fancy encryption. Heck, I can’t even use this darn mouse.
Anyhow, I have been thinking a lot about the morality or immorality of war, the web, anti-war activists who carry the badge of, “all war is inherently evil,” the fine line between leftist doctrine and Jew hating, and am waiting for you, my four or five readers, to choose one. But until then, I will turn my attention to all of the above.
One thing must be clear। These days you can disagree with Israel. You can claim that all war is inherently evil, and the Jews are just as guilty of war crimes as Muslim militants. But there could be different reasons for your views. It may be because you have a philosophy which states that everyone is judged equally. Just as the Muslim has his right to his religion and his land, the Jew also has the right to his religion and his land. This is a very American attitude. But it could also be that your view of Israel as the aggressor and the war criminal are just the fruits of good old fashioned Anti-Semitic Jew hating. “The Jews are the cause of all the wars in the world.” Jean-Paul Sartre in his classic, “Anti Semite and Jew,” has clearly shown us that Anti-Semitism is irrational. There is no rational basis for Jew hatred, it just seems to be a dark existential characteristic of unenlightened. A Jew ripped me off, a Jew killed my brother. The action of an individual does not speak for a whole nation. Anyone who hates a man for the sole reason that he is a co-religionist of another man who wronged him is either a chauvinist who had been driven mad by hemorrhoids, extremely allegiant to his clan but of a rather low IQ, but no matter how you slice it, categorically unreasonable.
What about when a foreign army enters your country, killing people, blowing up houses, and destroying infrastructure? Are you allowed to hate that army? It sounds reasonable to hate the actions of such an army. Yet demonizing the citizens of the country that sent that army, and possible even the soldiers themselves, is not a solution. Demonizing the civilians who have that army brought upon them as a result of their own militants aggression and, let’s face it, fanaticism, is also not viable. To the contrary, demonizing only perpetuates hatred. People are not usually born demons; they learn how to be like this. It is not only in the realm of fantasy that the same people could have learned to love instead of hate, tolerance and instead of terror. Man is after all the ultimate learning animal. If a man from his childhood is treated like a dog, he will act like a dog. But if you treat a man like a prince, he will eventually start acting like a prince.
The Jews are not just a people, they are also a religion, and an ethnicity. They are a people unlike any other deeply and spiritually connected to a land unlike any other. The Bible tells us that the Jews were taken out of Egypt by God’s strong arm and after a forty year womblike period of gestation, give the land of Canaan as an eternal inheritance. Though its "political correctness" comes into question, they were Divinely ordained to conquer and kill the inabitants of Canaan. (From Joshua to the last Kings of Judea, the Bible makes it clear that the Tribes of Israel were not able to completely fulfill this commandment.) With the conquest, the nations told us, “you are thieves! marauders! You stole the land from the Canaanites and the other six nations that were already there.” The Israelites responded to the world and said, “the earth belongs to God. It is not ours. He gives it to whoever He wants to, and He decided to give it to us.” (Rashi, Commentary to the Torah, Genesis, 1:1)
We had many nations conquer us, exile us, but we keep coming back. After seventy years of Babylonian exile, we came back. Then the Romans conquered the land and burned our temple. After two thousand years of "Roman" exile, we came back. You cannot change the laws of nature. And it seems to be that just as the law of gravity dictates that when you drop a ball it will fall to the ground, the biblical law of return dictates that the Jews will always come back to their own land against all odds.
Bear in mind, I have mostly been studying and translating sacred texts in Jerusalem for the past ten years. Finally, I decided to take a look at the world wide web's political markets, partucularly views opposed to my own. It was a little disconcerting.
I am specifically addressing the case of Juan Cole, (http://www.juancole.com/) professor of Middle Eastern Studies at U Michigan, who is heart is bleeding for all the innocent civilian killings. [1] In his articles, I do not see his heart bleeding for Israeli blood (perhaps it is not as thick as Arab blood and not worth the tears? He is a professional academic, a clever man, well read, and has created a first rate website to share his knowledge and promote his views. As mentioned, he is very sensitive to the plight of the Arabs, and fairly ignorant of the plight of the Jews. For him, the Israelis seem to be misguided, bloodthirsty hordes stealing the ancestral home of the Arabs. They are, in his words, “killing little children every day.” He claims that the Israelis are systematically destroying many villages in southern Lebanon. “They are blowing us every home in Kfar Kana.” Did he witness this? Is his source telling the truth? The 21 out of the "37 " dead children at Kfar Kana seem to have dissapeared. Maybe only half of the houses were bombed? Still, I get the feeling that the Israeli army is opening the gates of hell, but let’s face it, they have been opened for a while now. In the past I have personally have heard the explosions of numerous homicide bombings in busses and restaurants. I even knew some of the victims and and have been to too many of their funerals. (In credit to the Israelis, they warned the villagers to get out of southern Lebanon on July 25th, a week before the bombing. Did the homicide bombers every phone in where and when they would be blowing up? Oh, I’m sorry, they told us years ago to get the hell out of “Palestine.”) Of the Israeli campaign, Cole writes, “This tactic is both collective punishment and ethnic cleansing all at once.”
Waving the flag of pacifism, he makes it sounds like the Israelis are Nazis. If only he would write so vociferously against Hamas and Hezbollah. Since the Israeli unilateral pullout from Lebanon in 2000 (?) it is hard to argue that the Israelis have been the aggressors in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah , on the other hand, has made sporadic rocket attacks in the past few years, and now lobed over a thousand Katusha Rockets in their own efforts at ethnic “cleansing” by sending 500,000 people either into bomb shelters or headed south to stay with friends, family, and helped by what would be erroneously viewed as the kindness of strangers. But among Jews, we now see that there are no strangers, only family.
For the Israelite, if one Jew is harmed, it is like harming the entire nation। If one or two Jewish soldiers are taken hostage, it is enough of an emergency to wage a fierce war on the captors and everyone who supports them. Former PM Barak didn’t seem to get that principle when he had his hostage crisis, but maybe he had information that they were killed in the capturing. Regardless, the current dedication not only to the hostages but to a courageous and what we hope will be a death blow to the Hizbollah is impressive. So much of the Israeli public has united on this issue and managed to get together in a way that makes me truly proud to be a Jew and an Israeli. The Israelis are truly pulling together in the face of Hezbollah's war crimes.
For such a clever guy, Cole doesn’t seem to be capable of understanding that the Katushas flying south, which as of August 12 reached a range of 70 kilometers, are not just a response to the Israeli campaign to create a buffer zone up to the Litani river. That is the short-sighted view. In their grand scheme, Hezbollah supports the eradication of Israel, and would gladly bomb all of Israel given the means and the opportunity, like right now. Hezbollah's bombs have displaced families, destroyed homes, squelched the economy, and sent those who cannot or will not move into bomb shelters. It is the express ideology of the Hezbollah, clearly announced to the whole world by their Iranian patrons, to throw the Israelis into the sea. For them the land of Israel is a land that the Israelis stole from the Arabs. Hezbollah claims that the Israelis have not right to live in the land they call, “Palestine,” and they must be forced out. I think that it is rather obvious that the Hezbollah , which is supported by over a million Lebanese, is a political, ethnic, and religious movement which actively pursues an ideology that includes ethnic cleansing and collective punishments. Hezbollah and Hamas (whatever you want to call it, they sound to me about as different as Episcopalians and Methodists, or the Steelers and the Raiders) have sent numerous suicide bombers to board busses, go into restaurants, stand in crowded downtown areas, and kill and maim as many men, women and children as possible. They do not just support collective punishments and ethnic “cleansing,” what used to be called Genocide. They are pursuing a Genocidal campaign.
What the Israelis are doing is not Genocide. It is a brave action of defense against a guerilla army that preaches and practices Genocide. The Israelis would prefer to live and let live, but they are being fired upon by barrage after barrage of missiles. So let the storm of war rage over all their miserable little villages. If they can dish it out, they’d better be prepared to take it. You may call it ethnic cleansing, I call it, like most other Israelis these days, “milchemet eyn brirra,” a war that we are forced into. It’s a military tactic which includes the forced transfer of a largely hostile population. As I have never met a southern Lebanese villager, I cannot begin to take the pulse of the people, even if I was such a doctor. But Cole teaches me that over a million Lebanese, largely comprised of Shi’ite Muslims, support the Hezbollah. When Professor Cole throws terms around like, “ethnic cleansing,” which when read between the lines sounds an awful lot like, “the Israelis are Nazis,” he fails to compute the fact Israel, after making a unilateral withdrawal from south Lebanon, was willing to let the Arab Lebanese live there in peace. Yes, Professor, I conceed that the Israelis are guilty of "ethnic cleansing." It happened time last summer when they made Gaza Judenrein. But this summer in suprising moment of clarity, the Israeli government has realized that they cannot live with a population overrun with Islamic militants armed to the teeth and lobbing missiles across the border into northern Israel. The real clarity is, a thousand Hizbollah katushas have woken up Israel to use the appropriate force against their sworn enemies.
Cole's article "who is Hizbollah," tries to identify the ethnicity of the Lebanese villagers। Before we get to Palestinian Arab geneology, lets identify their land. Lebanon is in the northern sector of the ancestral homeland of the Jews, according to the Bible, which professor Cole, at least in his blog, doesn’t seem to evoke as he does his beloved Koran. He writes, “The Israelis have an Orientalist myth that the Arabs are Bedouin and not attached to their ancestral villages. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon still group their neighborhoods around their camps in accordance with the geography of their former villages.” How sweet. History is a little more complex, professor. In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman empire ruled the lands of Israel and Lebanon. With nationalism on the rise and imperialism under attack, the Ottoman government was interested in fending off such a nationalist uprising among its “Dhimmi.” They were worried about a Jewish state emerging in Israel or Christian-Arab state in Lebanon. Though there have always been Jews in Israel in vacillating populations, sometimes at severe lows like after the Roman Conquest, the real “growth spurt” came in the end of the Nineteenth and throughout the Twentieth century, under the British and the Israelis. The Ottomans, seeing the beginnings of significant Jewish immigration back to their homeland, decided to bolster the Muslim population as part of a wider policy of strengthening their rule. “From the nineteenth century into the twentieth, a continuous stream of more than two million Muslim colonists from the Crimea and the Balkans were settled in Anatolia, Armenia, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine by the Ottoman government, hoping thereby to counter the dhimmis’ indigenous national aspirations by a massive Islamic colonization.” [2] I want to know just how many Muslims in Lebanon as well as Israel still group their neighborhoods around their camps according to their ancestral villages in Serbia. True, the Arabs of southern Lebanon may not all be nomadic Beduins, yet according to the last time I read my Torah, they are living on Israeli soil. This being so, it would have been prudent for them not to break the law. I want it to be clear. I try to assess people as individuals, based on their actions and words, so I don’t “hate” the Arabs. As a Rabbi, I look to the Bible, which tells us, “lovers of God, hate evil…” But what is evil? Killing children and killing civilians are two things that come to mind. But in the radical militant Islamic mindset, killing children is not evil. it is war. After all, it is our land, the evil satanic bloodthirsty Jews have stolen it from us, right? They must be brought to their knees and submit to the will of Allah, or at least to us, His right hand masked men, right? And how is this done? Raise your children to be suicide bombing martyrs. Wait a second! Sending civilian children (they are usually between the ages of 20 and 30 by know) to go blow themselves up in crowds of innocent Israelis? That, according to a sane definition, is evil and morally reprehensible. But no, answers my Hamas or Hezbollah interlocutor. You don’t seem to get it. There are no innocent Israelis. In the words of the popular Gazan cleric Sheik Mudaires, which he shouted at the Sheik Ijlin mosque in Gaza on May 13 2005, “Allah has tormented us with the people most hostile to the believers, - the Jews. … With the establishment of the state of Israel the entire Islamic nation was lost, because Israel is a cancer spreading through the body of the entire Islamic nation, and because Jews are a virus resembling AIDS, from which the entire world suffers … you will find that the Jews are behind all the civil strife in the world. The Jews are behind the suffering of the nations. … Listen to the prophet Muhammad who tells you about the evil end that awaits the Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew. …”
This is a repeat of Nazi propaganda। True, the Israelis are clobbering Lebanon. Truly. an effect of the tactics of the Israeli army – crippling Lebanon is a part of crippling the Hezbollah’s military capability - can be described as a collective punishment. But in a perfect world the civilians would be here and the terrorists there. Israel’s army is not targeting children, Israel is trying to cripple the Lebanon that contains over a million Hezbollah supporters and is sick or foolish enough to wreak havoc and destruction on sovereign Israeli soil. In the world of prisoner exchanges, the Arabs often equate one Jewish captive soldier to hundreds Arabs in Israeli detention. So by that logic, you shoot one rocket, we shoot hundreds. You kill one of us, we destroy a hundred of you. One may be inclined to call this a collective punishment. It can equally be called the use of overwhelming force and is just response to a militia of militant “majnun” who are demanding a war. You want a war, Israel will give you a war.
And if you really want peace, tens of thousands of displaced Israelis from Gaza is proof positive that Israel is crazy enough to cut of its right arm to make peace। Sadly the displacement of 20,000 Israeli Jews from Gaza, their homes destroyed, their synagogues reduced to rubble, and their businesses collapsed, has not brought peace. It has rather inspired the Gazan Arabs to continue to fire rockets at Israeli civilians. "Here, Muhammad, were going. Bashing your face in didn't seem to solve the problem. Have a state. Rule yourselves.' "No thank you, Moshe, I would prefer to continue trying to bash your own face in."
The Talmud teaches, “be the first one to say Shalom।” Be the first one to offer peace. The biblical law even requires Israel to first offer peace to a besieged city in its wars. But on a personal level, how many times can you say shalom to someone who has no interest in making peace with you? And what do you do when they attack, sit around and say it’s our fault anyway? Turn the other cheek? Jews don’t turn the other cheek. [3] “The Lord my God is a vengeful God.” And his people, at least now, know how to take vengeance and defend themselves. Eliminate the enemy at all costs.
Juan Cole thinks this is a no win situation। He says that both the Israelis and Hezbollah will have to learn the hard lesson that war is not the answer, but the only lasting solution is dialogue and agreement. I would, however, remind professor Cole that there is really no one in Hezbollah, Hamas, or Al Kaida, who is at all interested in chatting, let alone honoring deals. It's all about getting rid of Israel. A negotiation may lead to a temporary "hudna" (cease fire) but the war goes on until the Islamic flag flies over Jerusalem, God forbid. My old professor, Former ambassador Herman Eilts, often reminded us in class that history is heavy on the backs of the Middle Easterners, Jews and Arabs. Americans have this misconception that ecumenicalism, the attitude that says live and let live, can be imported to the Middle East. As an Israeli with a hand on the pulse of the people I see that all we really want to do is live and let live. We would prefer to turn Israel into Switzerland. But our little holy Switzerland went up in a puff of katusha smoke. Hezbollah just can't resist a fight. As the Israeli government is filled with foolish and soft hearted seekers of lovingkindness, the will undoubtedly offer them an untimely peace, sooner or later. But Hezbollah is only interested in offering us the Koran or the sword.
I agree that the one who kills more civilians is not considered the winner. Surely the bigger killer looses the moral high ground, at least in the leftist camp, no matter how justified they seem to be. Israel will have won the campaign when Hezbollah can not longer fire missiles at Israel, and is no longer willing to take hostages. May God help them to do this and do this swiftly. This battle is crucial. But remember, Israel is teaching them a lesson that they will not soon forget. Sadly, reverse psychology might have it that the more we clobber them, the stronger their resolve to clobber us back. So goes the war of attrition. And yet, the Talmud teaches, “if you know that someone is planning on waking up early to kill you, get up earlier and go kill him first.” This doctrine of pre-emptive self defense is logical, but more importantly, it is ethical. We will leave turning the other cheek for the Christians. With all the blood that has been spilled in the name of Jesus it seems hard to believe that he every recommended turning the other cheek.
Children, civilians? An ethic of war (something like the Geneva convention, a document that I have heard mentioned many times but never actually read) that all civilians are to be spared. But sadly, Hezbollah prides itself in the blood of martyrs. All Muslim extremists these days dream of being Shahidim, holy martyrs. Poor Muslim women kiss their children goodnight with prayers that they will someday blow themselves up on a crowded Israeli bus. So in this mindset, civilians are not human shields, they are potential holy martyrs. Rather than call them human shields, call them "holy" public relations weapons. Every dead Arab child is not just a martyr but a blowout in the press. Personally, I can’t justify the killing of children, but Hezbollah should be an expert at it by now.
[1] It is possible that having been raised in a "peripatetic military family" (that's wandering soldier dad, to you non-professors) has left him with a disdain for war, soldiers, and all things military, but you will have to ask him that. A lot of people never connected to the millitary also hate war. I'm sure the Israeli soldiers in lebanon hate it, but are mature enough to know when it is of vital interest. [2] Bat Ye’or, page 105. The Dhimmi, , Farleigh Dickenson, 1985, [3] Despite the verse in Proverbs, “if someone who hates you is hungry, feed him, if he is thirsty, give him water, for thus you put hot coals on his heart.”
{One of the great and holy Rebbes.}
{One of the great and holy Rebbes.}
