Alan Dershowitz wrote an article on March 13, 2008 in FrontPage Magazine under the title Hamas's Declaration of War Against Israel. It is clear that his purpose for writing this article was to conclude by asking a question which takes him the following paragraph to pose:
"The time has come for Israel’s critics to tell Israel what it should do in the face of these escalating rocket attacks on its civilian population centers. If economic sanctions, border controls, targeting terrorists and ground incursions should not be done, what are the alternatives?"
Before he gets to the question, Mr. Dershowitz lays out his view of the facts and the law pertaining to the situation as he understands it. The trouble is that the critics of Israel as he calls some of us have a different understanding of the situation and have therefore reached a different conclusion.
Many reasons have contributed to the gap that separates the two understandings, and each reason could take several articles to discuss in full but there is one overarching reason that can lead to a deeper grasp of those differences and therefore to a clearer view of the whole picture. One short passage in the Dershowitz article will help us in this regard. It is this:
"In January of 2006, Hamas was elected to govern … After Israel removed all of its settlers, Hamas threw the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza and assumed control over the entire Strip. Its leaders then instructed its military wing to direct rockets at civilian targets in southern Israel."
This is short but it says a mouthful about the state of mind of Mr. Dershowitz and those who think along the same line. It basically says that the Israelis are a good people by nature because they have good intentions, and that the Palestinians are a bad people by nature because they have bad intentions.
So what? Everybody says we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. Why get upset about it now? True, everybody says that but nobody uses this kind of assertion at the start of every negotiation then follow up with a demand that the other party throw away the cards it holds before sitting down to negotiate the terms of surrender.
Mr. Dershowitz and those who plead Israel's case say that regardless of what Israel did before removing the settlers from Gaza, her hands are now clean simply because she removed the settlers after 40 years of occupation. And why are Israel's hands clean? Because Jews can experiment with the lives of millions of people all they want for as long as they want and if the experiment does not pay off for them, they just quit the experiment and everything goes back to normal. Well, not exactly back to normal in this case because Israel still had some unfinished business in Gaza which it tried to do with helicopter gunships, and never mind the fact that this forced Hamas to respond.
By contrast, says Dershowitz, look what the Hamas people did. They threw the PA out of Gaza and instructed their military wing to bomb civilian targets in Israel. And what does this mean? It means that Israel's designated unfinished business to bomb targets in Gaza by helicopter gunship was the correct decision to take. The Palestinians should have recognized that they are an evil people and should have accepted the punishment not responded by sending those homemade firecrackers they call Kassam to scare people in Southern Israel.
There is nothing wrong with someone proclaiming that they have good intentions whether the facts say so or say otherwise. What is wrong is to impugn bad motives to the other side and then proceed on the basis of this assertion. And why is this wrong? Because you can go into any direction you want after that and bore your interlocutor to death at the very moment that you have psyched yourself into believing that God Himself could not be as correct as you are in making the assertion that you just made. The following two passages do not come back to back in the Dershowitz article but read them here back to back and then judge for yourself:
"Close to a thousand rockets have been aimed at southern Israel in recent years. Each one of them had the capacity to kill dozens, if not hundreds of civilians. The fact that no Hamas rocket has yet hit a school bus, a kindergarten, an ambulance, a synagogue, or a school yard is simply happenstance. It is only a matter of time until this happens."
"Israel has tried economic sanctions, border controls, targeted attacks on terrorists and ground incursions. Each of these generally acceptable war measures carry with it the risk of some civilian casualties. The reason for this is that the distinction between combatants and civilians has deliberately been blurred by Hamas. Rockets are fired from densely populated areas, precisely in order to force Israel into choosing between allowing its own civilians to continue to be killed by its inaction, or taking actions that risk hurting killing some Palestinian civilians."
You see, once you have made the assertion that you are the good guys and they are the bad guys, you will go into every possible false direction and nothing will make you stop for a moment and examine a few simple facts such as the fact that the homemade firecrackers used by Hamas are not guided missiles, the reason why they killed almost no one while the ammunition used by the Israeli helicopter gunships are precision guided "smart" bombs, the reason why they slaughtered Palestinian children by the hundreds. Yet, it is not how many Israel has killed that is upsetting Dershowitz but the potential that the Palestinian rockets may someday hit a sensitive target and kill somebody.
Perhaps Mr. Dershowitz will now understand why his complaints fall on deaf ears when he keeps repeating refrains like: "Israel has tried several options, each of which has been condemned by vocal members of the international community, human rights groups and religious organizations…"
But the worrisome part is not just that this attitude is boring humanity to death. It is that it will inevitably lead to serious consequences as it has done in the past over and over again. The reason is that when you keep impugning bad motives to others, the others will eventually start impugning bad motives to you.
It happened to the Christians who responded to the Jews by looking in the Old Testament and in the Talmud where they found zillions of stories about the Jews taking pleasure in punishing their enemies by killing their children. So the Christians came up with metaphors about the Jews soaking bread in the blood of Christian children and eating it.
This did not happen in the Muslim World because unlike the Christians who gave the rope to the Jews to hang themselves, the Muslims never allowed the Jews to get out of line. But the Muslims are not in a position to draw a line in the sand right now, and the Jews are taking advantage of the situation to get away with murder. Eventually, the Muslims will come up with metaphors that will explain why so many of their children were slaughtered by the Jews and why the Jews built their Kibbutzes on the frontlines, filled them with their own children and hid behind those children.
Alan Dershowitz and company must understand that the negotiating tactic of trying to disarm your opponent before you start to negotiate compels you to badmouth the opponent so badly that he will be forced to do the same to you. In the end you will lose as you have lost throughout the ages because you will have psyched yourself into believing you are so correct in what you are doing, you can sit back and fantasize about a deliverance that will miraculously come out of nowhere and hand you the ultimate victory you have been waiting for.
Trust me, Mr. Dershowitz, there are no miracles to be had. You asked a question and here is my answer. The alternative to fantasizing about false miracles is to accept the fact that you are no better than anyone else. You then sit down and negotiate without preconditions and in good faith.
Otherwise you must accept the fact that history will repeat itself except that this time, humanity will be so bored with your shenanigans, it will chant: "Let them burn, they have been begging for it for ages so let us have a final solution and move on with the serious business of the human race because enormous challenges lay ahead pertaining to our survival as a species."
But it will not be the Arabs or the Muslims who will do that; it will be those who did it before as they still have the propensity to get bored too quickly, lacking the patience that the Arabs and the Muslims have which prevents these people from blowing a fuse too soon.