Posted by Peter Beinart, author of The Icarus Syndrome: "A History of American Hubris", and the recent article "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment", on the Gaza flotilla:
Don't blame the commandos for the flotilla disaster. Blame Israel's leaders, who enforce the cruel and corrupt Gaza embargo, and their supporters in America.
"If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin but he who causes the darkness."
In the late 1960s, when America's cities burned, Martin Luther King often quoted that line, which he borrowed from Victor Hugo. But it applies equally well to the catastrophe that occurred yesterday in international waters off the Gaza Strip.
It is not the Israeli naval commandos who should be judged guilty. Upon dismounting their helicopter onto the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara, they found themselves, unexpectedly, in the belly of an armed mob. Anyone who thinks American troops would have acted with greater restraint should cast their mind back to October 1993, when U.S. Special Forces rappelled down from their Black Hawk helicopters into a sea of Somali militiamen, and killed or wounded perhaps a thousand of them as they shot their way to safety.
In the name of solidarity, we have practiced denial. In the name of anti-terrorism, we have justified the brutalization of innocents.
No, the guilt lies with the Israeli leaders who oversee the Gaza embargo, and with Israel's American supporters, who have averted their eyes. Yesterday's events are the most dramatic example yet of why the epidemic of not watching must end.
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations greeted news of the flotilla disaster by repeating a common "pro-Israel" talking point: that Israel only blockades Gaza to prevent Hamas from building rockets that might kill Israeli citizens. If only that were true. In reality, the embargo has a broader and more sinister purpose: to impoverish the people of Gaza, and thus turn them against Hamas. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported, the Israeli officials in charge of the embargo adhere to what they call a policy of "no prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis." In other words, the embargo must be tight enough to keep the people of Gaza miserable, but not so tight that they starve.
This explains why Israel prevents Gazans from importing, among other things, cilantro, sage, jam, chocolate, French fries, dried fruit, fabrics, notebooks, empty flowerpots and toys, none of which are particularly useful in building Kassam rockets. It's why Israel bans virtually all exports from Gaza, a policy that has helped to destroy the Strip's agriculture, contributed to the closing of some 95 percent of its factories, and left more 80 percent of its population dependent on food aid. It's why Gaza's fishermen are not allowed to travel more than three miles from the coast, which dramatically reduces their catch. And it's why Israel prevents Gazan students from studying in the West Bank, a policy recently denounced by 10 winners of the prestigious Israel Prize. There's a name for all this: collective punishment.
Israel does not deserve all the blame for Gaza's impoverishment.
Gaza's other neighbor, Egypt, imposes an embargo of its own, though less effectively. And Hamas has been known to confiscate goods meant for Gaza's poor. But none of that excuses Israel's role in keeping Gaza destitute. Far from a well-crafted policy, the Gaza embargo has become something you might find in a University of Chicago seminar about the perversions inherent in interfering with free trade. As Haaretz detailed in a remarkable investigative report last summer, the embargo is not merely arbitrary (Gazans can import cinnamon, but not chocolate), it is corrupt. When Israeli farmers have surplus supply, they seek loopholes for the goods they wish to sell.
Israeli officials allow Gazans to import Israeli products, but not the materials necessary to make those products themselves, since that would threaten Israel's hold on the Gazan market. As the Israeli human-rights group Gisha has noted, Gazans can buy Israeli-made tomato paste, but cannot buy the empty cans necessary to preserve and market their own, which would compete with Israeli suppliers.
If all this were actually turning the people of Gaza against Hamas, perhaps--perhaps--it might have a cold-blooded justification. But if there is anything that the U.S. has learned from its half-century long embargo of Cuba, it is that policies of collective punishment don't turn people against their regimes. To the contrary, they usually offer those regimes an excuse for their inability to govern.
So it has been with Hamas. The embargo was designed to weaken the
organization, and bolster Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. But, in fact, Abbas himself is reportedly considering a visit to Gaza in an effort to bring Hamas into a national unity government.
Besides the ordinary men, women, and children of Gaza, in fact, the entity that the embargo has most weakened is Israel. It threatens to rupture the Jewish State's vital alliance with Turkey, whose government was furious about the embargo even before yesterday's attack killed several of its nationals. It has wrecked Israel's relations with Qatar, which offered to re-establish trade ties if Israel allowed the Gulf State to send supplies to Gaza. And now it has produced a public-relations disaster that will further destroy Israel's reputation around the world.
The Gaza embargo--as currently constituted--is indefensible, which is why Israel's American supporters have not so much defended it as pretended it was something other than what it really is. In the name of solidarity, we have practiced denial. In the name of anti-terrorism, we have justified the brutalization of innocents. Now all of us who enabled Israel's callous, reckless policy are reaping what we sowed. Don't blame the Israeli commandos for what happened yesterday on the high seas; blame us.
Peter Beinart is author of The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
Tweet
Email a friend
feed
twitter
facebook
Israel and Its Liberal 'Friends'
Why don't they apply the same tough love to the Palestinians?
• By BRET STEPHENS
•Questions for liberals: What does it mean to be a friend of Israel? What does it mean to be a friend of the Palestinians? And should the same standards of friendship apply to Israelis and Palestinians alike, or is there a double standard here as well?
It has become the predictable refrain among Israel's liberal critics that their criticism is, in fact, the deepest form of friendship. Who but a real friend, after all, is willing to tell Israel the hard truths it will not tell itself? Who will remind Israel that it is now the strong party, and that it cannot continue to play the victim and evade the duties of moral judgment and prudential restraint? Above all, who will remind Israel that it cannot go on denying Palestinians their rights, their dignity, and a country they can call their own?
The answer, say people like Peter Beinart, formerly of the New Republic, is people like . . . Peter Beinart. And now that Israel has found itself in another public relations hole thanks to last week's raid on the Gaza flotilla, Israelis will surely be hearing a lot more from him.
Now consider what it means for liberals to be friends of the Palestinians.
View Full Image
Associated Press
Protesters denounce Israel during a rally in New York. June 1.
Here, the criticism becomes oddly muted. So Egypt, a country that also once occupied Gaza, enforces precisely the same blockade on the Strip as Israel: Do liberal friends of Palestine urge the Obama administration to get tough on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as they urge him to do with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? So a bunch of "peace" activists teams up with a Turkish group of virulently anti-Semitic bent and with links both to Hamas and al Qaeda: Does this prompt liberal soul-searching about the moral drift of the pro-Palestinian movement? So Hamas trashes a U.N.-run school, as it did the other week, because it educates girls: Do liberals wag stern fingers at Palestinians for giving up on the dream of a secular, progressive state?
Well, no. And no. And no. Instead, liberal support for Palestinians is now mainly of the no-hard-questions-asked variety. But that is precisely the kind of support that liberals decry as toxic when it comes to Western support for Israel.
I leave it to others to decide whether this is simple hypocrisy or otherwise evidence of how disingenuous claims by certain liberals to friendship with Israel have become. Still, these liberals insist that their remonstrances are necessary because, without them, Israelis won't get the tough love they need.
More
• Gaza Blockade Hampers Private Sector
• Israel Kills Diving 'Squad' Off Gaza
• Turkey's Handling of Gaza Affair Sparks Rift
• Complete Coverage: WSJ.com/Mideast
Really? Consider a sample of recent clippings from the Israeli press. An editorial in Haaretz: "Like a robot lacking judgment . . . that's how the [Israeli] government is behaving in its handling of the aid flotillas to the Gaza Strip." A columnist in the Jerusalem Post: "As evil as these jihadists [aboard the flotilla] are, they were acting in a cause the whole decent, democratic world knows is right: Freedom for Gaza. Freedom for the Palestinians. And end to the occupation. An end to the blockade." A member of Israel's cabinet: "We need to ease the population's conditions and find security-sensitive, worthy alternatives to the embargo."
None of this indicates a society lacking in a capacity for self-criticism. Yet that capacity hardly has any parallel in the closed circle of Palestinian media or politics, a point that ought to bother Western liberals.
It doesn't. One wonders why.
Part of the reason surely has to be intellectual confusion, an inability to grasp the difference between national "liberation" and genuine freedom. Ho Chi Minh was not a "freedom fighter," and neither was Yasser Arafat. How many times does the world have to go through this drill for liberals to get the point?
There's also a psychology at work. Harvard's Ruth Wisse calls it "moral solipsism"—obsessive regard for your own moral performance; complete indifference to the performance of those who wish you ill.
Finally there's the fact that liberalism has become a politics of easy targets. Liberals have no trouble taking stands against abstinence educators, Prop 8 supporters or members of the tea party. But when it comes to genuine bigots and religious fanatics—and Hamas has few equals in those categories—liberals have a way of discovering their capacity for cultural nuance and political pragmatism.
Today, by contrast, the task of defending Israel is hard. It's hard because defenders must eschew cliches about "the powerful" and "the powerless." It is hard because it goes against prevailing ideological fashions. And it's hard because it requires an appreciation that the choice of evils that endlessly confronts Israeli policy makers is not something they can simply wash their hands of by "ending the occupation." They tried that before—in Gaza.
Is there a liberalism that is capable of recognizing this? Or are we again at the stage where it has been consumed by its instinct for fellow-traveling? In 1968, Eric Hoffer wrote: "I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us." By "us," he meant liberals, too, and maybe most of all.
What you say is very thoughtful, but at the end of the day it's still the same excuses over, and over again. Poor Israel, liberals ask to much of Israel, what would you do if the rockets were coming down in your country. Ask yourself, why are they shooting rockets? Why, because they like too? Or maybe it's because for the last 60yrs they have had no country of there own. Or maybe it's because they live in an open air prison, with prison guards that treat them worse than some people treat there pet's. Really, is that your argument? Israel is supposed to be the enlighten country, that's why your held to a higher standard than the Palestinians, because there are a bunch of different groups with different agendas, working for different goals, and Israel is a country that supposedly shares the same values as the us, but Israel has left people living in the dark ages. Tell me on good reason that there are not enough incubators in the gaza, why can't they have oxygen mask. Why can't dark skinned Jew's goto school with the "white" jew's? Why? I'm mean Israel has really pulled the wool of the eyes of the US, some of Israel s behavior is just really sick...it reminds me of some of the things that happened in South Africa, and by the way how much military hardware did Israel sell South Africa in the 80's? ALOT, so you tell me what are the Palestinians supposed todo, in the face of a powerful military? Other than shot bs rockets, throw rocks, I mean Israel has twisted the media so much that when people try to boycott Israeli goods, it's incitement...i mean boycotting is incitement. I think israel needs to take a big step, show the world that they are really a civilized nation, stop settlement building, and trade soldiers with Hamas, open the crossings. That would be a start, and then from there you could start peace talks, but from what I have seen, Israel doesn't want peace, they want to humiliate the Palestinians!