Proportionality - in war? An oxymoron

Hamas cleric:  "Our belief about fighting you [Jews] is that we will exterminate you, until the last one, and we will not leave of you even one. For you are the usurpers of the land, foreigners, mercenaries of the present and of all times. Look at history, brothers: Wherever there were Jews, they spread corruption... (Quran): "They spread corruption in the land, and Allah does not like corrupters." Their belief is destructive. Their belief fulfills the prophecy. Our belief is in obtaining our rights on our land, implementing Shari'ah (Islamic law) under Allah's sky."

[Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas), July 25, 2014][1]

THE IGNOMINIOUS ATTACKS on Israel, by the puffed-up and increasingly inconsequential United Nations, is hypocritical. They assailed Israel for the tragic deaths and injuries to Palestinian's sheltering in a UN school. The indignity expressed afterward by a UN spokesmen left one feeling whether his anger was directed at the deaths of women and children, or at Israel because UN property was attacked.

            

            The Israelis say that mortars were fired from within the vicinity of the school at their position and they responded. Israel does not target civilians; if they did the whole of Gaza would be a grave yard today; such is the military power at Israel's command.

           

            Spurious talk of genocide is just that, hollow and erroneous, charged with emotion rather than reason. All Israel wants is to live in peace; but Hamas will not let it do so. Hamas is a terrorist organisation (acknowledged as such, even by the wretched UN) dedicated, not to a two state solution but to the eradication of the Jews. Hamas's Charter openly proselytises Jewish extinction:

Hamas Charter Introduction:
"Our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave..."

Article 28:
"Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims..."

Article 7:

"Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah's promise whatever time it might take. The prophet (prayer and peace be upon him) said [in a Hadith]: 'The time (of Resurrection) will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: 0 Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!'"[2]

TO THIS END Hamas is prepared to use its people as human shields; to this end they casually store their rockets under schools, and in homes; to this end they dig the entrances to their tunnels in homes hoping that, if Israel bombs them, they will kill (Hamas prefers the term Martyr) the civilians inside. To this end the Hamas leadership hide themselves away under hospitals, but one in particular.

            According to a headline in the Washington Post, the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City  ‘Has Become a De Facto Headquarters for Hamas Leaders, Who Can Be Seen in Hallways and Offices’. The report goes on; 'Contrary to international rules of warfare, Hamas has commandeered a large hospital in Gaza City as its “de facto headquarters,”'.

             The Post's reporter William Booth wrote on the 15^th of this month: 'At the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, crowds gathered to throw shoes and eggs at the Palestinian Authority’s health minister, who represents the crumbling ‘unity government’ in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The minister was turned away before he reached the hospital, which has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.'

          But it is not only hospitals but also Mosques that provide rich pickings for Hamas. At the end of the article it was reported that during a lull in the fighting: '… a group of men at a mosque in northern Gaza said they had returned to clean up the green glass from windows shattered in the previous day’s bombardment. But they could be seen moving small rockets into the mosque.”

            Twenty Rockets were also discovered in a school in Gaza and photographed by officials from the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees which operated the school. These are by no means isolated examples but ones that have been discovered and reported

            Hamas excuses their cruel exploitation of their people by telling them and themselves that they face the grace of Martyrdom, a concept hard to understand by the will-sapping liberal West who cannot see beyond the images coming out of Gaza.

ISRAEL WILL SUCK IT UP. They know where Hamas's leaders are, and at a cabinet meeting in Israel yesterday, some members of Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet voted to assassinate the Hamas leadership. According to Harutz Sheva[3] : 'Finance Minister Yair Lapid suggested, in a session of the Diplomacy-Security Cabinet, that Israel eliminate the heads of Hamas, reported Yisrael Hayom.

According to the newspaper, Lapid said that the IDF should “take down the heads of Hamas,” including Hamas-Gaza chief Ismail Haniyeh and the head of the organization's political bureau, Khaled Meshaal.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman (Chairman of Yisrael Beytenu) and Economics Minister Naftali Bennett (Chairman of Jewish Home) supported the idea.

The prime minister opposed it.

It was decided instead to bomb the homes of the Hamas leaders even though it is known that they are not residing in them.'

            Israel knows where they are and can act at a moment's notice; but Netanyahu overruled those within his cabinet who supported such an act.

            It is better to degrade Hamas until the people become fed up with Israeli bombardments, almost bi-annually, against Gaza. It is hard to believe today that fifteen years ago there were trade links between Gaza and Israel to each of their mutual advantage. All sorts of commodities were traded and Gaza's Palestinians even crossed into Israel to work. Those who support Hamas on the Left cannot, or refuse to, remember theses pre-Hamas times. Hamas however, rose like a satanic emblem, and destroyed any understanding between Gaza's Palestinians and the Israeli's.

            Hamas were freely elected and have been ever since, to the detriment of their people, to whom, one has to ask the question – why do you continue to support Hamas?

             Israel has always reacted to what the Arab world has thrown at them including the Palestinians. Israel has no wish to do to the Palestinians that which Hamas wishes to do to them.

            Israel has only ever countered an attack which wishes to seek their demise. They have never taken the offensive, without provocation. In the Six Day War, Egypt built up its forces along the Sinai, flagging to Israel an offensive. Syria and Iraq also were manoeuvring their forces for an attack from their borders with upon Israel. Israel, at the time, pleaded with Jordan not to join in, but were ignored. Which left Israel little recourse but to defend itself; and after the Six Day War found itself in the occupancy of the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and a part of Jordon west of the River Jordan - today known as the West Bank.

            Israel has since given back the Sinai to Egypt and has left Gaza; but has insisted on keeping the Golan Heights because of their strategic importance to Israel. Israel has no imperial ambition. If it still holds on to land it once conquered it is because the land was used by their previous owners to try and conquer the state of Israel (as far as the Golan Height are concerned) from a military and geographical advantage.

THE WORLD IS TURNED upside down; and the weak-willed leadership of the West have steered a course of appeasement when confronted by its enemies. The West has  overwhelming military power; which could have proved successful in Afghanistan but for that wretched and ridiculous concept known as proportionality - a political construct imposed on Generals by politicians, thus tying the hands of the young men the politicians send into battle; often to clear up some political mess or other of the politicians own making.

            Israel does not do proportionality; just as the UK would never have understood it as concept when fighting Nazism, or the Americans when fighting the Japanese. Churchill, Eisenhower, and the Generals and officers under their command would have also been bemused by such a concept.

            Churchill, like Netanyahu, believed that if your nation is attacked you do what you have to do to defeat your enemy and protect your people, or face your enemy's victory over you. You do what you have to do to save your country and defend its people (thus Iron Dome). Proportionality in war, at the very least would prolong it; and at its worst would lead to hundreds if not thousands of unnecessary deaths among your own young men and women fighting in the field.

            Instead of condemning the Israel's, Western leaders should have the courage to support them. If the Israeli government are war criminals and are to be considered as such in the age of proportionality – then so must Churchill, Eisenhower; and Truman (the latter who, you will remember, ordered the atomic bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a conservative estimate of  225,000 killed or wounded) also be posthumously given war criminal status by whatever fatuous UN human rights committee looks into it.

            Israel is in the right – the 'right' being its own survival; and no concept of proportionality has any part to play when the very existence of the state of Israel is at stake. I only wish our Western leaders shared Netanyahu's and Churchill's belief in total war as the only means of shortening it. We have had several incursions into Gaza by Israel, and each time pressure has been put on the Israeli state to end it prematurely; thus storing up further interventions later, with even more civilian deaths.

            Israel is any exemplary example of how a nation should protect its people, and keep the nation safe. Churchill would have understood Netanyahu and what he was trying to do; and would have had nothing but contempt for the hapless contemporary Western leadership who are without the courage and incapable of facing up to and living with their liberal guilt.

            Shalom! 

           

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[1] Palestinian Watch Media (PWM)

[2] Thanks to the PWM

[3] Israel National News.com