Bully Pulpit Article on Israel-Palestine

Strolling around White Hall today before my government section (incidentally, on Middle Eastern politics), I picked up a copy of the Bully Pulpit and began reading the lead article. Now, I know that the Bully Pulpit is a self proclaimed leaflet for “anarchists and socialists, activists and theorists, and community organizers and academics,” whose goal is to give a “voice to the political left,” but I did not expect to find this in their lead article on the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “… Israel’s attacks are deliberately aimed at the civilian population.” The article ended up being a long polemic against the actions of the Israeli government and its terrorization of the innocent Palestinian population.

I will be the first to say that the current conflict—as well as the historical Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has roots in the 1917 British Balfour Declaration — is complicated. It would be easy to oversimplify and support Israel on the grounds that it is the only robust democracy in the Middle East or deride Hamas as supporters of anti-American Islamofascism, but neither of these positions would address the complexity of the issue. That being said, I am consistently baffled by liberals’ (I use this label because the Bully Pulpit uses this term in self-reference) support of Palestine as a small state fighting for independence against the tyrannical behemoth of oppression that is the Israeli state.

Apart from mentioning once that the Qassam rockets fired into Israel by Hamas are “condemnable,” this article assigns absolutely no moral responsibility to Hamas. This is, after all, the organization that the U.S. and E.U. label as a terrorist organization, whose official charter calls for the dismantling of Israel in favor of a Palestinian state. The same organization places its weapons in densely populated civilian areas and airs children’s television shows that encourage martyrdom and Israeli hatred. The Pulpit says that the Qassam rockets are “more symbolic than effective” and have killed fewer than 20 Israelis. There doesn’t seem to be any mention of the thousands of Israeli civilians and soldiers that have been killed in the numerous Palestinian Intifadahs against Israel.

As a prospective student of behavioral economics I don’t have a religious commitment to rationality, but I still can’t conceive of any rational reason why Israel would want to intentionally inflict casualties on Palestinian civilians, as the article suggests. I don’t entirely dismiss that there have been isolated abuses by the Israeli military, (although the article cites information from what is clearly a website for Palestinian propaganda), but I can’t imagine how this could be part of a general Israeli policy. Krauthammer offers a more likely explanation. On one side, the Israelis try to inflict as little collateral damage as possible by sending out text messages to actively inform Palestinians when certain areas will be bombed. Another side, Hamas, intentionally hides it arsenal of weapons in the homes of its own people so that Israel will inflict as much collateral damage as possible and the world will blame Israel. So far, it appears as though Hamas has been successful.

Like I said, this issue has its complexities, but I can’t help but point out that Israel is surrounded by states and independent Islamist organizations that preach the necessity of its outright destruction. Perhaps Golda Meir was right when she said, “There will be peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate Israel. Until then, there will be no peace.”