Israel Only Acts When the World Fails To

For thirty years I have supported Israel’s actions to defend itself. So last week it was unexpected when I briefly thought that Israel might have gone too far. However, as I paid to attention to the international response, it became clear this was another case of Israel being forced to act because of inactivity by the international community.

Allegedly, Israel had stolen the identities of eleven foreigners to obtain false passports, which Israeli agents would use to enter Dubai in order to assassinate a known Hamas leader. It was the use of the names of real people on these passports that bothered me. Why endanger people who had apparently committed no other crime than visit Israel? If any harm would come to those individuals as a result of the Mossad having stolen their identities, then Israel had gone too far. Any injury to these people could not be dismissed as unfortunate but necessary “collateral damage”.

But the international community’s response allayed my concerns. Interpol placed the eleven alleged assassins, supposedly caught on television cameras, on their “most wanted” list. The Irish and the British foreign ministers called in the Israeli ambassadors in each of the countries to ask “tough” questions about the killings. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown launched an investigation into how passports issued to six British Israelis were not the people caught on camera in Dubai.  All of this, without any concrete evidence that Israel had carried out the assassination.

Moreover, Noah Pollak, a blogger for Commentary magazine, asked a question that made the passport issue look trivial:

For the people who are whining about “passport fraud” misdemeanors while ignoring the felony staring them in the face: what do you say about the fact that the terrorist in charge of illegally smuggling missiles from Iran to Hamas apparently had an open invite to hang out in Dubai? This isn’t a problem?

(It is possible that Dubai’s government is not pleased with having Hamas operatives in the country. Hamas recently asked for the release of two Palestinians arrested in Dubai. The government rejected the request.) Even if Dubai is not willingly collaborating with Hamas, Pollak has a valid point. It’s only when Israel takes military action to defend its citizens that the “international community” can muster any outrage, and direct it almost exclusively at Israel.

Consider the Gaza strip. For ten years, Gazans, with the support of their government, deliberately shelled Sderot and the other communities of Southern Israel. But the “international community” took absolutely no interest in the violence in Gaza until Israel attacked Gaza in order to defend its civilians.

Consider Lebanon. In 1970, after being thrown out of Jordan for trying to overthrow the ruling monarchy, the armed fighters of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization took over Southern Lebanon. Their purpose was to establish a base from which to launch terrorist and rocket attacks on the Jewish State. In the process they effectively established a “state within a state” in the south, and that led to the Lebanese government effectively losing control of the south and the breakout of a civil war between Lebanese Christians and Muslims. Thousands died. Syria used the chaos created by the war to send its own troops into Lebanon and to occupy the eastern part of the country.

The “international community” largely ignored the bloodshed in Lebanon until 1982 when Israel entered the fray. This incursion, unlike previous ones, was not limited. They marched to the outskirts of Beirut, where the PLO’s headquarters were. It was clear that the Israelis were prepared for a long stay. Although Israel would withdraw from most of the territory in Lebanon that it had captured, it would continue to hold a security zone along its border until May 2000. Thousands of the city’s residents had been slaughtered since the outbreak of the civil war more than a decade before the 1982 Israeli incursion, but the world’s diplomats and journalists professed little concern for the fate of the residents of Beirut and the rest of Lebanon, until Israel intervened.

Consider Iraq. In recent weeks the British were holding an inquiry into the decision-making that led to the British participation in the Iraqi War. It’s quite clear that the highly politicized inquiry will conclude, using legalese, that the British participation in the Iraq war was illegal.

Before this, it was those on the left — the same people who opposed the Iraq war — who used to say that the end of the Cold War made it possible to bring political leaders who were guilty of genocide and human rights violations to justice. On this basis, the arrests of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic were celebrated. Humanitarian concerns were the rationale for Western intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. This meant that the United States and other western democracies were castigated for not intervening in Rwanda and Darfur to prevent genocide.

By the time Iraq was invaded, Saddam Hussein had already committed genocide and numerous human rights abuses. Saddam had massacred Kurds and Shiites in his own country; attacked Israel with Scud Missiles during the 1991 Gulf War, and in the ‘80’s launched a senseless war against Iran, resulting in hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Victor David Hanson is one of the few political writers who remembers this:

The U.S. Senate and House voted for war in Iraq, not merely because they were deluded about the shared intelligence reports on WMD (though deluded they surely were), but also because of the 22 legitimate casus belli they added just in case. And despite the recent meae culpae, those charges remain as valid today as they were when they were approved.

Some critics of the war have correctly pointed out that Saddam was an ally of the United States during the 1980’s, and that President George W. Bush was never a proponent of humanitarian intervention before he invaded Iraq. There may be some truth that Bush did not have idealistic motives, but this does not let the critics of the invasion off the hook. Many of the fiercest opponents of invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein had previously been advocates of intervention in the Balkans. They argued that not bringing political criminals like Milosevic and Pinochet to justice would allow other would-be tyrants to follow in their footsteps. Would not leaving Saddam Hussein in power have the same consequences? Furthermore, America’s critics always accuse the U.S. of trying to impose its will on the rest of the world. Why should America’s support for Saddam Hussein have affected how other countries dealt with him? If Saddam acted criminally, didn’t the rest of the world have the right, even the responsibility, to make him answer for his crimes, even without American co-operation?

That’s the argument of a little-known book titled A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for the War in Iraq. Published in 2005, when the war was going badly for the United States, it consists of a series of essays by self-described “left-liberal intellectuals”. These are individuals who wouldn’t consider voting for a Republican and many of the writers are highly critical of how Bush made the argument for and conducted the war. Still the book’s editor Thomas Cushman asserted

There are situations in which ethical imperatives trump law, especially if those laws are unjust … [M]any, if not most, left-liberal critics of the war blindly accepted the authority of UN procedures, international law, and the questionable moral righteousness of the antiwar axis. In doing so, they were clearly tolerating the intolerable injustices of Saddam Hussein and betraying their liberal principles.

The situations in Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq are similar in the skewed manner that the “international community” blames the troubles in these three hotspots almost exclusively on Israel and the United States, overlooking, in each case, the perpetrators that had initiated violence. Ironically, Israeli interventions in Gaza and in Lebanon as well as the U.S. invasion in Iraq were ultimately caused by failures of the international community to maintain peace and order in each of these places.

Israel would never be imposing a blockade on Gaza, or assassinating Hamas leaders abroad if the international community had done something to stop the shelling of Southern Israel from there. Similarly, Israel would have never intervened in Lebanon if the international community had stopped the PLO from pushing the country into a bloody civil war. In the same vein, the United States would have never invaded Iraq if the international community lived up to the liberal principles to which it claims to adhere by removing Saddam Hussein from power long before 2003.

It’s the failures of the international community that necessitated the American and Israeli military interventions. Ironically, it’s the authors of these failures who condemn these interventions.