Gaza and After: An Interview with Paul Berman
I think that, around the world, a lot of people look at Hamas in that light. They see in Hamas the ugliness that clings to the powerless, and, out of compassion, they excuse the ugliness. Or they choose to overlook it, in the way that, out of courtesy, you might choose not even to notice a dreadful deformity on someone's face or body.
Now, if Hamas were, in fact, extremely weak and doomed to remain so - if Hamas were capable of nothing more than lobbing primitive rockets at Israel, which might kill a few people but not more than a few - well, the question of proportionality in Israel's military response would look a little different. Israel, in that case, would have acted just now in a grotesquely criminal way, like some deranged police force that, in its efforts to put down a street gang, has ended up leveling an entire city.
A lot of people...see in Hamas the ugliness that clings to the powerless, and, out of compassion, they excuse the ugliness
But which of these is the correct analysis - that Hamas poses a genocidal threat in the making? Or that Hamas expresses mostly the ugliness of the powerless, and poses a relatively small danger? Everything hangs on the answer to that question. People tend to assume that the proportionality of a military action should be measured against what has already taken place - that somebody who has been attacked has the right to counter-attack on roughly the same level. "The law of even-Steven," in Walzer's dismissive phrase. But it is the future that has to be taken into account.
Unfortunately, we cannot predict the future. We stand in the dark, and we make guesses. Those of us who look on the Gaza war from thousands of miles of away enjoy the luxury of speculating this way or that way. But if you were in the Israeli government, it wouldn't be so easy to gamble on the answer. So Israel is in a bind. No matter what the Israelis choose to do, they have to recognize that they might be tragically wrong - either in their failure to defend themselves, or in the suffering they inflict on other people.
One aspect of the proportionality debate has been pretty much ignored, and this has to do with the rest of the world, and not Israel - the rest of us. People ought to have noticed by now that any number of humanitarian catastrophes lie just over the horizon and are perfectly predictable - the catastrophes that will follow ineluctably from any future wars in Gaza or Lebanon, or from an attack that Israel, out of fear of the Iranian nuclear program, could conceivably launch on Iran.
No matter what the Israelis choose to do, they might be tragically wrong - either in their failure to defend themselves, or in the suffering they inflict on other people
Now, if the rest of the world really wants to worry and be upset over humanitarian disasters, there would be every reason to start worrying right now over the prospect of those future wars. A humanitarian logic ought to lead us to ask, how can those wars be stopped, pre-emptively, so to speak - instead of merely deploring them, after the fact. I know that a lot of people would say that, well, Israel ought to dismantle its West Bank settlements and do a thousand other things to allow their enemies to calm down. Me, I've never had any patience for West Bank settlements, and I can picture a lot of ways that Israel could improve.
Still, it would be disingenuous not to notice another obvious reality. An Iran without a nuclear program would be in no danger of Israeli attack. Here is an impending war that rests on a single variable. Why not alter the variable? Equally obvious: Israel is not going to launch a war against any of the groups on its own borders that remain at peace. Why not do everything possible to disarm those groups? Protests, moral pressures, diplomatic pressures, not to mention grand international alliances, not to mention human rights reports!. There are a lot of things that could be done. But it may be that, around the world, some of the people who weep over the sufferings caused by war would rather see still further wars than undertake even the simplest and most obvious steps to avoid the wars.
