Etgar Keret
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08.04.2006
Q.E.D.: Israel, Lebanon, And The Metrics Of War (24 comments )
READ MORE: Indictments, Israel, Lebanon
A friend of my brother's told me a story a few years ago. He was taking part in a demonstration against the security fence when a group of settlers showed up. The loudest among them were several American Jews, who hurled insults and physical threats at the Left wing demonstrators. The demonstrators, for their part, tried to exercise restraint, but not all of them succeeded.
Some of them--notably, a contingent of American Jews for peace--found it difficult to control themselves and hurled violent curses back at the settlers. Very quickly, the war of words had deteriorated from broken Hebrew to juicy New York slang, and a few minutes later, to fists.
For a moment, my brother's friend told me, both the peace activists and the settlers froze, staring at the impassioned group of Zionist and anti-Zionist Americans raining blows on each other. "I don't understand why they had to come all the way here," one of the Palestinians said to my brother's friend. "They could have beat each other up in Brooklyn and saved the price of a plane ticket."
Recently I was reminded of this story when I came across two articles written by Americans about the Israel-Hezbollah war. One is "Arithmetic of Pain," by Alan Dershowitz, in the Jewish World Review; the other, "And Then They Paid Dearly," from the blog written for the Huffington Post by Tom McCarthy in Beirut. Although these articles approach the conflict from opposite ends of the spectrum, it seems to me, they approach it with a similarly passionate self-assurance.
Dershowitz is well known. So, perhaps, are his views on the conflict. Dershowitz likes to compare Hezbollah to a bank robber, the Lebanese to hostages and the IDF to cops--good guys who stay good guys even if they'll shoot five hundred hostages dead.
If the argument is familiar, so are the objections . They may be too obvious to rehash here. But I was surprised to find equally blind fervor on the on the other side of the debate. McCarthy cites the numbers of casualties as if they contained--in a self-explanatory way--their own indictment of the Israeli air strikes. According to McCarthy, the ratio of Lebanese civilian casualties to Israeli civilian casualties on a given day (fifty to two). says something fundamental and inarguable about the morality of the war.
But what exactly does it say?
That on that day, Israel was twenty-five times more evil than the Hezbollah? If Israel had settled on killing two civilians that day--two babies for example, deliberately destroyed by an Apache at close range--would the Israeli government be blameless because it maintained the principle of proportionality?
Should we weigh it in the balance that Hezbollah operates consistently out of densely-populated neighborhoods? Does this change the calculus of blame? Should we consider the possibility that the large number of attacks and Lebanese casualties on that day may in fact have disrupted Hezbollah's own attacks, thus reducing the number of Israeli casualties? If Hezbollah had managed to kill more Israelis that day, would it have somehow made the killing of fifty Lebanese civilians more justified? Finally, is the fact that the Hezbollah killed so many fewer Israelis that day an indication of moral scruples, or does it simply mean that they tried to kill hundreds and failed?
I don't raise all these questions in order to absolve Israel from the responsibility of needlessly killing Lebanese civilians (the Dershowitz view). Nor am I writing here in order to deny speakers like Dershowitz and McCarthy the right to fight it out ideologically in Brooklyn, Beirut or on the Happy Hunting Grounds of the Internet. And I'm not saying we don't have boundless cruelty here, or that we don't sacrifice innocent lives on the altar of national honor and other, equally hazy ideals on a daily basis. I simply wish they would try to understand that the tragedy of the Middle East cannot be ended with a calculator and a highly developed moral sense.
â Translated from the original Hebrew
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/etgar-keret/qed-israel-lebanon-_b_26497.html