Aletho News

Kill an Arab, any Arab, is longstanding and unquestioned policy

By David Samel on August 2, 2010

A barely-noticed incident gives occasion for reflection into the grossly skewed nature of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

A rocket launched from Gaza reached the city of Ashkelon, causing some property damage but no injuries. Israel responded by launching airstrikes at various targets in Gaza, killing one Hamas official named Issa al-Batran. Hamas was not suspected of launching the Ashkelon rocket, but the IDF explained its retaliation against Batran: “The IDF holds the Hamas terror organization solely responsible for the occurrences in the Strip and for maintaining calm there.”

So Israel’s rule of engagement is that any incident of violence directed at Israel from an Arab community may be answered by a lethal attack on an official of that community, regardless of whether there is any suspicion of the official’s personal responsibility for the act against Israel. The idea is that the leadership of a community is not only “responsible . . . for maintaining calm” among the entire populace, but that any random official could pay with his life for a breach of calm that he neither planned, carried out, or was aware of.

Let us imagine Palestinians employing the same rule.

If an IDF soldier, or a settler, committed a single aggressive act against a Palestinian, even if there were no resulting injuries, Hamas would be entitled to assassinate any IDF officer (and perhaps any Israeli official – the Minister of Transportation, or Education?) for failure to prevent the attack. Practically, of course, such retaliation is unthinkable, due to the overwhelming imbalance of power. Palestinians simply do not have the capability of killing any Israeli target. But the question here is one of law and morality, and random assassination of an Israeli official or even IDF officer for a settler’s attack would be indefensible.

It gets worse. The Israeli assassination of Batran is not an isolated or anomalous example of transferred responsibility. To the contrary, it represents the mildest and least objectionable form of Israel’s longstanding practice. At least the victim here actually was a Hamas official, and indeed was apparently a bomb-maker, though not responsible for the rocket projected toward Ashkelon. Israel, however, has been consistently using the same rationale for collective punishment attacks against civilian populations for decades: in Qibya in 1953; in southern Syria and Lebanon following the Munich Olympics incident of 1972; in Lebanon in 1982, 1993, 1996, and 2006; in Gaza 2008-2009.

And this is just a very small sample. A truly exhaustive catalog of Israel’s deliberate lethal attacks against civilians would fill many volumes. David Hirst’s book, The Gun and the Olive Branch, is a good place to start. Israel’s policy of treating any aggressive act by any Arab as a justification for revenge attacks on other Arabs is so deeply ingrained in international discourse that this latest incident barely hits the radar screen. “Only” one person, an actual Hamas official, was killed, although a dozen others were injured.

No one questions the morally repulsive nature of the policy of treating Arabs as fungible objects who need not be distinguished from each other in matters of life and death and criminal responsibility. What happens when grievances against Israeli policy give rise to lethal attacks against random Israelis? It is called by its proper name: terrorism.

August 2, 2010 - Posted by aletho | Militarism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism