Proportionate Action

Israel has a policy of assassinating enemy leaders and their families. They do this because they can. Cenk Uygur, writing on The Huffington Post, doesn't approve:

Imagine what American reaction would have been if Hamas had just killed one of the top Israeli leaders -- like Tzipi Livni -- and her family. No one can honestly say that we would have the same reaction of indifference...

Hmmm. Yes, I can sort of see Charles Krauthammer lying on the floor, frothing at the mouth.

Uygur's larger point is that the Palestinians have adopted a strategy and tactics that can't possibly succeed. The Israelis were pioneers in modern terrorism, and it worked for them, but the case of the Palestinians is different. In the British, the Israeli Irgun was dealing with a foreign country that really wanted to get the hell out, while the Palestinians are dealing with colonists who have taken root and really really intend to stay.

Uygur thinks that the Palestinians would be far better off adopting the tactics of Gandhi, Mandela, and Martin Luther King. I am inclined to agree, but far from confident that it could work - for one thing there is too much history in the way already.

The Hamas strategy, such as it is, is to provoke Israeli retaliation by any means possible. That retaliation inevitably kills noncombatants, and that provokes the outrage of the Arab masses. The weakness in the strategy is that the Arab masses are impotent, and that everybody else can see that Hamas provoked the retaliation deliberately.

There is much talk of proportionate action, but that is rarely appropriate in war. In war, it is necessary to destroy the enemy's power to resist as quickly as possible. Now that Israel has invaded, the question is what its strategic objectives are, and whether they are coherent and achievable. One concrete action they could take is to sieze control of a broader area of the border with Egypt, thereby limiting the smuggling of weapons into Gaza.

Whatever they do, though, Palestinians are unlikely to submit as long as Israel keeps them miserable and starving in a gigantic unsupervised jail.

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