Reply #97: You Have Set Me a Pretty Task, Ma'am [View All]

[The Magistrate]

For as you observe, we do agree on a great deal, and are more on the same side of the larger dispute than not, yet there are indeed some signifigant areas where we do not seem to see anything near to eye to eye.

Allow me to commence by stating my agreement that the concentration of the United Nations on this dispute, and within that dispute on Israeli wrong-doing, is wrong, and wrong to the point of working to undermine the very concept of international law and laws of war. Should someone have available, a thousand years hence, only a record of U.N. Security Council resolutions as their basis for compiling a history of world crisis in the last half of the distant old twentieth century, they could not possibly produce anything even a moderately attentive person who lived through the period could recognize. The cold fact is that, important as it is for those directly affected, the conflict between Israel and Arab Palestine constitutes little more than a rounding error in the sum of human suffering and displacement attendant on armed conflict criminally conducted in the twentieth century. A policeman who makes a few misdemeanor arrests while a multitude of felonies occurs on his beat calls the enforcement of law deeply into question, and invites the neighborhood to disregard it and deal irregularly with the felons at best, and entices them into commitment of felonies themselves, secure in the expectation these will pass un-punished as well, at the worst.

A key to some of our disagreement, and perhaps resolving it to a greater degree, may lie in your use of the word "terrorist". You may have noticed the absence of that word from my comments, and it is deliberate. The reason for that absence is that the term is essentially meaningless: people use it to indicate violence towards a political end they disapprove of, in the hopes of getting the audience to share their disapproval without much thought, since it is generally agreed that, whatever it might mean, it is a bad thing, and to be universally deplored. When a term indicates through its usage more about the person employing it than it does about the thing that person purports to describe by its usage, there is something strange and very different from what is normally understood as communication going on. Again, the standard of criminal or not criminal with reference to applicable law is much superior, for it conveys information about the thing described, and can be checked for accuracy. To argue that something is falsely called terrorism in all cases boils down to stating "but I approve of this violence, because I agree with the end it seeks, and even if it is very bad and cruel, the end it seeks redeems it by its goodness." But it is quite possible to recognize that a side in a conflict one sympathizes with more than the other has done a criminal act under law, and even to recognize that an act of the side one opposes is not a crime even if you would far rather it not have been done. Neither recognition requires a change in allegiance, though it may require a forthright acknowledgement that the side one aligns with is, on balance of the totals, a greater violator of the law than the side one opposes. Persons who are not concerned with appearing angels in combat with demons can manage that without undue difficulty, appealing to other grounds for the allegiances they are moved to.

The usage of "disputed territories" is another that troubles me a little, but for another reason, namely that in fact there is no dispute at all regarding those territories. No portion of them belongs to Israel, and no portion of them can be Israel's save by mutual agreement between Israel and representatives of the people of Arab Palestine empowered to cede that portion of them to Israel. That is simply what the law on the question dictates. There is no doubt whatever the intent of the United Nations in 1947 was for two states within the area of the Palestine Mandate, one Jewish and one Arab, and at that time it can hardly be sensibly argued the organization was showing any bias against Israel. The criminal behaviors down the years you point to, which have certainly occured, are the actions of individuals, who ought to be punished as individuals, but they cannot be visited upon the whole of the people as a punishment consisting of the forfeiture of rights all peoples are considered to enjoy, and that the United Nations in its partition of the Mandatory Territory clearly granted, and intended that people to enjoy. It is impossible to emerge from study of the history of this conflict, going back to its commencement early in the last century, with the view that the people of Arab Palestine have, until very recently, enjoyed even a whiff of real self-determination in their political life, which commenced with dominance by aristocratic families and passed on to men with guns whose popularity, even when genuine to some degree, cannot be seperated from the capacity for coercion they enjoyed in a lawless condition. People cannot be held responsible for decisions they did not make, and actions they did not perform themselves.

It might, Ma'am, be worth indulging in the thought experiment of what benefits Israel itself might derive from a situation in which Arab Palestine was a state, even if ruled by leaders hostile to Israel. A great deal of mud might be removed. For instance, if a Hamas government ruled a state of Arab Palestine, who could question that its gun-men constituted the armed force of that state? They would be as assailable as any Israeli soldier. An infiltration into Israel in civilian clothes for assault on Israeli civilians would be beyond sensible argument an act of perfidy, and subject any with command authority, up to the head of the government, with liablity for trial and confinement on conviction.