The moral asymmetry between Israel and its enemies has been
strikingly on display in the latest flare-up between Gaza terror
groups and Israeli forces.
By Monday afternoon the Israeli air force had
reportedly killed 19 terrorists in pinpoint strikes on
Gaza targets — mostly rocket-launching crews — and two
Palestinian civilians as collateral damage, a 15-year-old boy and a
12-year-old boy. According to UN data
cited by Richard Kemp, former commander of British
forces in Afghanistan, the typical ratio when armies fight terror
groups is 3:1 — three civilians killed per every terrorist killed
by the military forces.
By contrast, the over 200 rockets fired from Gaza at
Israel since Friday have been aimed solely at civilian
targets. Most have been lobbed at cities — Ashkelon,
Ashdod, and (my own) Beersheva — in the hope of killing and
maiming as many men, women, and children as possible.
The far larger of the two groups doing the firing, Islamic
Jihad, is, as
noted by the Israeli army spokesman, “an arm of the
Iranians. It is completely funded and supported by Tehran when it
comes to weapons and resources.” A senior
officer said Iran
was directly encouraging Islamic Jihad to keep up the
shelling.
If the casualties sown by this barrage have so far been
relatively few — two seriously wounded and several lightly
wounded, with a larger number of shock victims — it’s because
Israel has invested greatly to try and keep it that way. Its
state-of-the-art, $200-million Iron Dome missile defense system has
so far downed about 90 percent of the rockets that were headed for
populated places.
Again by contrast, the Gaza terror groups have essentially
recklessly endangered the Gaza population by initiating the
conflict. Yes, technically Israel fired the first shot — by
assassinating terror leader Zuhair al-Kaisi on Friday. Al-Kaisi was
behind a
terror attack on southern Israel last August that
killed eight, and was actively planning another, imminent
attack.
For the Gaza terror groups, that preemption of a mass
murder is an act requiring “revenge” — or the firing of hundreds
of rockets. Which, inevitably, means Israel has to strike back. And
the sole thing that has protected the Gaza population from
greater losses is Israel’s supreme effort so far to restrict its
strikes to military targets. (Update: on
Monday night it was reported that
the terrorists were using Gaza civilians as human
shields.)
Given that this is a conflict between a democratic country
and terror groups, these moral asymmetries might not seem so
notable. But, as mentioned, Israel’s main antagonist in the
conflict, Islamic Jihad, is actually a proxy of a country — Iran.
Last week in Washington, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu
was trying to press home the idea that Iran’s is a fundamentally
terrorist regime whose attainment of nuclear weapons would be a
catastrophe.
And seemingly President Obama acknowledged at least the
latter point when he told
AIPAC: “Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a
policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from
obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
The problem is that, two days after saying that — as
Charles Krauthammer
put it — “the Obama administration acquiesced to
yet another round of talks with the mullahs [that] don’t just gain
time for a nuclear program about whose military intent the IAEA is
issuing alarming warnings [but] make it extremely difficult for
Israel to do anything about it (while it still can)….”
For those who care to look, the current round of fighting
in southern Israel-Gaza is a microcosm not only of Iran’s war on
Israel but also on the West in general and the most fundamental
norms of respecting human life. For Israelis, though, it’s hard to
believe that — even when lip service is paid to them — such
points are getting through to the right places. And that creates
even more unease than the incoming rockets.
