McCarthy on how to help Israel

In an informative article at National Review, Andrew McCarthy lays out the two main things that the U.S. can do to help Israel against its enemies: (1) dispense with the fantasy that the Palestinians are ready for a state (a fantasy that the Bush administration itself has forcefully endorsed and turned into an orthodoxy); and (2) refute the false belief that Israel’s actions in Gaza violate international law. The whole piece, which is 2,400 words long, is clearly argued and worth reading. For those short of time, below I have copied key passages adding up to one third the length of the original:

On the political front, it is high time to acknowledge the failure of the fantasy that the Palestinians are legitimate actors worthy of statehood and its privileges. Contrary to the prevailing elite view, legitimacy is not conferred by such facile exercises as the holding of popular elections—though such exercises are not without consequences, which we will come to momentarily. There are certain minimal requirements for statehood, not least of which is accepting the right of one’s sovereign neighbor to exist….

In short, we can help Israel enormously in the here and now—while simultaneously setting the Palestinians on their only realistic path toward long-term prosperity—by making clear that statehood is absolutely off the table until the Palestinians convincingly abandon terrorism, acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, rescind or amend all covenants to the contrary, and demonstrably overhaul their institutions (especially their media and education systems) in a manner that conveys their commitment to this new state of affairs….

This will call for taking a strong stand on a crucial matter of international law: namely, there is no consensus international law of armed conflict.

For far too long, we have abided—even encouraged—the fiction that there is a community of nations all playing by the same rules. There is not. For present purposes, the most significant demonstration of this is that many nations, including our European allies, have joined the 1977 Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. The United States has not. Israel has not. Since this is about national life and death, we can no longer afford to keep papering over that difference.

As has happened to us repeatedly since our military response to 9/11, Israel is being accused of war crimes based on standards to which it has never consented. For people who care about their international obligations—and the Israelis deeply do, just as we do—such allegations have a devastating effect on the national cohesion needed to see through a difficult war. They are also slanderous.

These Protocol I standards were designed for the benefit of terrorist organizations, national-liberation movements, and third-world tyrannies. We don’t accept them, nor do the Israelis, and nor would the Europeans had they not abdicated responsibility for their own security. As construed by human-rights activists, Protocol I makes the conduct of warfare illegal—certainly if the combatant nation has any notion of achieving its objectives, which is the point of going to war in the first place….

The ethos we are dealing with here is best demonstrated by the ludicrous contention that Israel’s operations are “disproportionate” because so many more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed or wounded at this point in the fighting. The concept of “proportionality,” which has long been a guideline in the conduct of war, has nothing to do with comparative casualties. It refers to a weighing of the military advantage to be derived from an operation versus the risk of inordinate collateral damage (i.e., excessive harm to civilian lives and infrastructure).

Of Protocol I’s many failings, among the worst is its attempt to impose legal exactitude on proportionality and its companion concept, the “distinction” between military and civilian targets….

For very sound reasons, this is not our law. Nor is it Israel’s. Governments with real security responsibilities cannot protect lives this way. If they try to do so, they are effectively elevating the lives of their enemies above their own populations. That would be inappropriate in any event, but it is especially inane when the enemy is the Palestinians. They have willingly chosen to be led by a terrorist group whose sworn mission is to obliterate a neighboring country. Of all the civilians on earth, they are the least deserving of such indulgence.

With each day’s perusal of news accounts comes new accusations of Israeli international law violations and war crimes. In response, we shouldn’t cower behind the usual diplomatic niceties. We should be clear: there are no international law obligations in warfare absent consent. We can’t stop transnational progressives from designing suicidal compacts, and we can’t stop Europeans from adopting them. But we are not obliged to engage the fiction that these arrangements constitute law in our own country, in Israel, or in any nation sober enough to reject them.
[end of McCarthy excerpts]

My only comment is: given that Israel is constantly being torn apart by the left and the mainstream opinion makers for “violating international law” by not using “proportional” force, why haven’t the Israelis themselves energetically argued the points that McCarthy makes? Sadly, I think I know the answer. The Israelis have become the archetypal liberals—people who are incapable of taking their own side in a debate.

The upshot is that the more liberal the Israelis actually are, the more their enemies call them Nazis.

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January 7

Carol Iannone writes:

The Israelis themselves are spouting the line about how the Palestinians are just like them and want what they want and it’s only Hamas and the terrorists that are the problem. They dismiss the fact that, as Andy points out, Hamas was elected, and therefore that it represents the Palestinians. Andy does not mention that Israeli leaders were balking at the idea of Hamas being included in the elections, but Bush insisted because of his almost religious belief in the power of freedom and democracy. But then, as soon as Hamas was elected, the U.S. refused to to acknowledge its legitimacy, and now everyone in the liberal West seems to have graduated to actively excusing the Palestinians from any responsibility whatsoever for the leadership they put in place. We’re in trouble if the democracy game is going to be played only one way.

The Palestinians also want peace, the Israelis say. Well, that’s so, but their idea of peace is the elimination of Israel.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 06, 2009 09:41 PM | Send