In a recent interview [PDF] with the Middle East Monitor, Colonel (ret.) Desmond Travers of the Irish Army — best known as one of the members of the U.N. commission that produced the Goldstone report — attracted attention for his statement that “the number of rockets that had been fired into Israel in the month preceding their operations was something like two.” Critics of the Goldstone report like Commentary‘s David Hazony and Evelyn Gordon have seized on the comment as proof that Travers and the rest of the Goldstone commission are irredeemably biased against Israel; Gordon cites figures [PDF] from the Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center showing that over 300 rockets were fired into Israel from Gaza during the month of December 2008. (Operation Cast Lead began on Dec. 27.)
As Jerry Haber notes, however, these criticisms are based on a simple misunderstanding. In fact, the “operations” that Travers refers do not commence with the start of Operation Cast Lead on Dec. 27, but rather with Operation Double Challenge on Nov. 4. Double Challenge was an IDF incursion into Gaza that left six Palestinians dead, ending months of calm; because the operation came the day of the U.S. presidential elections, it vanished without a trace in the U.S. media. Paul Woodward explains that the ceasefire was, in fact, functioning quite well until the Israelis broke it on Nov. 4; only after the IDF raid did the number of rocket attacks increase.
Therefore, when Travers speaks of “the month preceding their operations,” he is referring not to December but to October 2008. And how many rockets were fired into Israel in October? According to the very figures [PDF, p. 6] that Gordon cites against Travers, only one. (According to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there were two rockets fired in October, and twelve in the four-month stretch from July through October.)
The fact that the ceasefire was actually working quite well in preventing rocket fire into southern Israel is one reason that we should be skeptical of the claim that Israel had no choice but to use military force to prevent the rocket attacks. (This is not, of course, to deny that the rocket attacks constituted war crimes in their own right.) If Israel’s primary goal were simply to end the rocket attacks, it could have worked to maintain the ceasefire (or better still, lifted the siege of Gaza). Why, then, did Israel choose to violate it instead? I suspect that the Israeli government, wary of the incoming Obama administration, believed that the blank check it enjoyed during the Bush years was coming to an end, and was determined to make one last sustained effort to root out the Hamas government before it did.
Yes, those tunnels can really move at breakneck speeds. It’s certainly providential that the Israelis have F22s without mach speeds those tunnels could have stretched to North Korea by now.
Jon, your arguments here are very weak. I suppose you would turn to pulp the chicken for fluttering about after his neck is broken. The spasms of desperation that represents the Palestinian resistance are no threat to Israel. Nor were niggers at lunch counters or on white designated zones a threat to this country, though we killed thousands of black men, women and children and anyone who dare show them any empathy.
Your Bullshit rationale Jon, ignores our own history here. I’ve seen Jim Crow. I’ve seen the saccharine hospitality, hidden bitterness, smallness and viciousness. You ignore this and yes, it can seem easy to put an uppity negro in his place. I know why the caged bird beats his wing. Jon, I suppose the caged birds should cease their chirping, fluttering and thrashing. Why can’t these birds accept their fate?
Scott, it’s not that my arguments are weak, it’s that you fail to appreciate the subtleties of my thought!
“If someone’s shooting at my children, I retaliate. I agree that the Israeli retaliation was disproportionate. But believe me, if someone starts shooting at my family, I will make every attempt to kill him.”
This logic here is totally circular. By this rubric and facts that we’d both agree to, the Palestinians have every right to fire at the Israelis ever since the Nakba. You’ve made the eye for an eye argument.
One can’t argue for even handedness in a master/slave relationship. Only by humanizing the slave and dethroning the master can this relationship be reconciled. But again, the humanity of the Palestinians or the Israeli unwillingness to grant equal status to Palestinians as Jews is the core of the problem.
My father is a condemnation atty. I a real estate appraiser by training. Have the Palestinians gotten the fair compensation of “eminent domain” that they would enjoy and expect under Common Law? The “right of return” should be compared to conventional “eminent domain” tort standards.
If Palestinians are willing to sell their land to Jews, Pigs, or Chinamen I don’t care. If Israel were formed democratically, I wouldn’t oppose it. But, “Oppressing, Dominating, Starving and Dominating and entire people” is flatly wrong. Quoting the Refusniks, is there any new news regarding that movement?
I actually agree with you. I’m simply putting myself in another man’s shoes. If I had stolen my land from the New Yorkers down the road, I’d be in the wrong. But if I’m going to stay here anyway, and the New Yorkers start shooting at me, I’m gonne shoot back. My argument was an abstract one rather than a commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. You read this blog, and my comments upon it. You know I consider Israel to be an illegitimate, colonial entity. But if I were an Israeli, and guilt didn’t drive me to leave, I’d attack those attacking me, rather than sit around waiting to be killed. Doesn’t mean that I’d be “in the right.” That wasn’t the point I was discussing.
I don’t believe in an eye for eye. I believe in killing the other guy first.
I wish all wars were fought as we fight here, in earnest, in fun, and in words.