April 8, 2002
POSTER BOY FOR GENOCIDAL MANIA :
The Trouble with "Transfer" : Why Ethnic Cleansing Won't End Israel's Problems (Derek Copold, April 7, 2002, The Texas Mercury)Due to the recent pace of developments in the Levant, several of Israel's would-be friends are suggesting that the Jewish State take drastic measures in her quest for security. The more milder of these proposals simply call for "transferring" the Arab populations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip into neighboring Arab countries, whereas some of the more ruthless commentators are suggesting, as Texas Mercury contributor Orrin Judd did, that Israel "need[s] to act extremely ruthlessly and very quickly to, in effect, depopulate Palestine. The more young Palestinian men they kill the more secure their own future will be." Such rapture. So easy it seems. Kill or ship them off, and Israel's problems will be solved, or at least abated.In this essay I am not going to examine the morality of these proposals. I'll simply note that I find them disgusting, particularly as the people making them are those who have the luxury of speculating about such practices without having to live with the consequences. My main concern here is not questions of morality but, rather, of practicality. If carried out, would such a genocide or ethnic cleansing secure Israel's future? No, it would not. Even the minimum measure, "transfer", would ultimately prove a failure on three grounds: military, international and psychological.
Oh, the indignity, in just a few short months to go from a valued contributor to The Texas Mercury to its poster boy for genocidal mania; how the mighty have fallen...
Let me just defend myself briefly. First, if you'll note, Mr. Copold raises the genocide solution only to abhor it, he fails to explain why it wouldn't work. I actually agree with him on transfer. Relocating the Palestinians would be a disaster. If you find a rattlesnake in your living room, you don't move it to the garden; you kill it.
Harsh words, eh? An inhuman comparison? I know. As I said in the comments that Mr. Copold cites (A MACHIAVELLIAN MOMENT [BroJuddBlog, Sunday, March 31, 2002]), I too find the genocide solution disgusting and I'm awfully glad that the decision belongs to, and the killing will be done by, others. Yet I'm cognizant of the fact that the ancestors of the Brothers Judd committed a not dissimilar genocide when they came into contact with a native population whose "civilization" was so different from theirs that the two cultures found it impossible to live in peace. And I'm not one to beat my breast in shame at what they did, while enjoying the benefits. I honor their memory--including that of our own relative, John Locke, of modern day Hampton, NH who killed, and was eventually killed by, Indians.
I find it hard to believe that America would be as a great a nation as it is today if we had been forced to spend two hundred years carefully threading our way through the demands of respective Indian tribes. How many nations might there be within our borders if every tribe had demanded their own, as the Palestinians now do? What might our economy look like if there was a free-floating right-of-return, that allowed Indians to reclaim lands that had been taken from them? No, I can't find it in myself to condemn what they did, even though I'm glad I didn't have to do it. And despite the "Free Leonard Peletier" stickers you see sometimes and the periodic self-flagellation of the American Left, I doubt that any of you have ever lost a moments sleep over what was done to the Indians. In fact, I'll but a fair number of you resent the political correctness that forced your alma mater to get rid of its Indian mascot.
This was actually my point about the options facing Israel now. They can continue to seek peace or they can try to transfer some of the population, but these solutions will require their continual involvement in the repression of the Palestinians and this kind of continuous hands-on overlordship does eat away at a nation's moral fiber. Witness the eventual freeing and later desegregating of American blacks and the handover of power from whites to blacks in South Africa. A democracy simply can not long endure such despicable tyranny, even if necessary to its own survival, as was the case of Afrikaner South Africa. The moral price to be paid just becomes intolerable.
On the other hand, behave with utter ruthlessness, solve the problem in one generation, hopefully in one swift action, and no matter the amount of blood you shed, no matter the lives you take, no matter the blight on your own soul, the world will not long recall your action nor the succeeding generations of your own countrymen condemn you. We may think the Afrikaners were brutes for imposing apartheid, but no one ever mentions the extermination of the Bushmen. We may have turned the Holocaust into a fetish, but we welcomed Germany into NATO. We may decry the Rape of Nanking, but we rebuilt Japan and made it a bulwark of our own foreign policy. And while we justly castigate ourselves for the way we treated African Americans, no one seriously mourns what we did to the Indians. These are the cold hard facts of realpolitik.
Similarly, should it come to that awful eventuality and Israel be forced to savagely depopulate Palestine--by which, make no mistake, I mean kill Palestinian men, women, and children in the tens or even hundreds of thousands--there will be a brief international outcry, but that will end the matter. America will not abandon Israel no matter what action they take, so long as it ends quickly. The Arab states can not hope to win a war, so their leaders won't fight one. If their populations demand such a war, they will lose, badly. The international community might try to embargo Israel or put on sanctions, but without our cooperation this would be meaningless. And who is going to be willing to sacrifice American consumers and markets just to express their solidarity with the Palestinians? If you think France will actually put its money where its mouth is, you don't know the French. If you think Saudi Arabia's princes care enough about the Palestinians to give up their oil revenues, you really haven't been paying enough attention to the Middle East. And if you think that there still exists a significant body of opinion in Israel that is so guilt-plagued over their treatment of the Palestinians that they would rather see Israel destroyed than the Palestinians killed, I suspect you've not understood how radicalized popular opinion there has become as a result of the recent wave of bombings.
The tragedy in all this is not that it may happen, but that it will be the fault of the Palestinians when it does. If they stopped the violence today and accepted the last Israeli peace offer, they could immediately have a nation of their own and begin building a healthy society. Aid money would poor in, not least from America, Israel, and world Jewry. In fact, I bet they'd get more assistance from those three sources than from their Arab "brothers" and all of Europe combined. But they do not choose peace. They choose war. It is a war they will lose. All that remains to be determined is how many Palestinians will die in the process. Like Mr. Copold, I find the prospect of thousands of dead Palestinians disgusting, but I place the blame where it belongs : on the Palestinians.
MR. COPOLD RESPONDS :
I'll deal with your response in seven points, Orrin. You can post this on your blog if you wish.First, you argue that a genocide would be different than a transfer, thus I did not address your point. Actually, the effect of an attempted genocide would be the same, indeed it would be worse. No matter how well the Israelis planned a prospective snuffing of the Palestinians, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, would escape Israel's grasp. Killing three million people is not an easy task, and it would be made more difficult by the inevitable war it would provoke with both Jordan and Egypt. Admittedly, these two countries would lose the conflict, but they would provide enough interference to gum up any genocide, and thus render it a transfer in effect. This is why I termed transfer alone the lesser action. Your action would be even worse because it would put some real fire in the Palestinians' bellies. Admittedly, I should've made this point clearer.
Second, about America's dealing with her own natives: In point of fact, your and my (maternal) ancestors did not immediately begin killing off Indians. In fact, for centuries, right up until the present, they negotiated and bargained with numerous tribes. They also intermixed, which is why you and I would most likely find a few non-European ancestors in our family trees given enough searching. The process was a rather long, drawn-out process of contention, some times friendly, more often not. And, even now, we still suffer (stupidly) cultural guilt spasms from the conflict.
Third, you claim history forgives genocides. This was certainly true in the time before modern communications, but now we have live satellite link-ups, which makes this an entirely different situation. Look at what the camera did to the Germans. Do we of today think of the Germans in the same manner as those who lived before Hitler did? No, we think of those dark grainy films with skeletal figures walking around. Yes, Germany was allowed into NATO, but at what cost? Fire-bombings, occupation and, even then, only the severe necessity of fending off the Soviets allowed them admission. The same with Japan. We have no severe threat to a strategic asset that Israel can help us with, unless it has to do with AIPAC's political funding.
Fourth, you believe the world will not impose serious sanctions on Israel, and then say, in effect, "So what if they do, the US wont?" I would point back to South Africa. For a very long time the US resisted joining these sanctions, but eventually backed down. Even the much-maligned French were in on the action. Now, remember, South Africa has all sorts of goodies to offer-gold, diamonds, uranium, etc-and yet the sanctions regime held. What does Israel have? Computer games, Holy Land tours, and some weapons. There's hardly an economic incentive to keep doing business with them. In fact, there's a lot incentive to keep them out of some markets, like weapons, where they compete with us and the Europeans.
Fifth point: I especially enjoyed your assertions that I do not know the French or the Saudis. As it happens, I spent time in Saudi Arabia during our last futile war and lived for a year on the French border when I was stationed in Germany. Like all people, yes, the Saudis can be a greedy lot, but they also accept a very strict religious regimen. This is not a top-down imposed model, either. I wouldn't dismiss them as spineless. After all, they provided us with effective backbone troops in our proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan (much to our later regret!). Given enough motivation, the Saudis will act with discipline. Of course, they don't really need to if the Europeans join in the boycott because all they would have to do is sell to them. The Europeans would probably be happy to play along because it would give them a chance to undercut the US without a direct confrontation, during which time they would give us yet another tiresome lecture on morality.
Six, you think the Israelis are up to this task, and that they can live with themselves. I might accept this for any other people, but here we're dealing with a country centered around the Yad Vashem. Remembering holocausts is the national past time for their intellectuals. Committing the act you suggest would directly contradict the very founding ethic of the state of Israel. Sure, at the moment, they're all very gung-ho, but you give it a few years, and it'll eat at them. Especially given the sanctions, the films and the tramautic impact such a number of close-range murders will have on Israel's soldiery. All of this will feed a desolation that Israel can ill afford, especially as she's already losing citizens to emigration.
Finally, I come to your most confusing point, the one about how this slaughter would be entirely the fault of the Palestinians. It's an interesting moral concept. If Palestinian civilians, who have lived under an undemocratic occupation for nearly four decades, would be responsible for their own genocide, then what can we say of the Israelis? They, we are so often told, live in the Mid-East's only democracy. Yet, with their votes, they supported an occupation of a captive people for decades where land was seized and given to settlers, where water was requisitioned and shipped to Israel, where, even pre-intifada, an person could find himself, for no reason, detained by Israel's forces indefinitely. In fact, like the Palestinians, those very Israelis have elected known terrorists, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, as Prime Minister, not to mention the current leader, a known reprobate who's indirectly responsible for another massacre of civilians. You know, Orrin, using your very standard, we could really say that it's the Israelis themselves who are behind the suicide bombings. Of course, I guess they could just turn around and, like you and our dear Robert Kaplan, simply shrug, grin sheepishly and say "Gosh, sorry, I guess Machiavelli made me do it."
ORRIN RESPONDS :
(1) I actually did not mean that Israel would need to kill all the Palestinians. They needn't commit a true genocide. But they may well have to resort to the kind of firebombing or atomic bombing that we used in WWII, in which no regard was given to whether victims were combatants or non-combatants; it sufficed that they were German or Japanese. Similarly, Israel may have to stop trying to surgically wipe out terrorist and instead impose such a price in civilian lives that the Palestinians, like the equally fanatic Germans and Japanese will be forced to surrender.
It is of course foolish to speak of Israelis killing Palestinians as genocide anyway. They are both Semitic peoples, not distinct races, and genetic studies show them to be quite closely related. This is very much a war between brothers.
(2) Well, the Judds settled New England, so we started killing each other early on, particularly in King Joseph's War. Nor was there much intermarriage here in the East, where the settling was done by entire families coming from England. I realize the situation out there in the West was quite different.
(3) One can't help notice that Germany and Japan are among the wealthiest nations on earth. Obviously the cost wasn't too high. And if you don't like those examples, how about the Turks and their actions against both the Armenians and the Kurds? Yet they remain a good friend to the U. S. and Israel and a vital ally in the region.
(4) The U.S. only went along with sanctions on South Africa after they ceased to be a key strategic country for Cold War purposes. So long as the Soviet Union was a threat, we would never have allowed this naval chokepoint and important source of raw materials to fall into the hands of non-Western peoples. Also, participating in the sanctions regime was popular with a significant voting block--black Americans--while sanctions on Israel would alienate a key group and a wealthy and politically active one at that--American Jews. It ain't gonna happen.
(5) I'm sorry; I meant a general "you", as in the reader, not you, Mr. Copold, in particular. But the idea that the Saudi leadership follows the strict dictates of Islam seems to me untrue from everything I've read. And it seems unlikely that they would risk their luxurious lives for the Palestinians. As for the idea that the Europeans would participate in any kind of economic retaliation that included us as a target, I think we have to assume that even as anti-American and anti-Semitic as Europe's elites have become they would not actually risk open warfare with the U.S. and Israel, which would be a serious possibility in such a scenario. I'd think the regular citizens of Europe must still harbor some loyalty to America, which has saved them in the last three world wars, even if the intellectuals don't.
(6) I wonder if you don't miss the point of Yad Vashem by approaching this from the Palestinian side. The point of Holocaust remembrance is that never again will Jews stand by as enemies try wiping them from the Earth. This is precisely the goal that radical Islam seems to have set itself and that the Palestinians in particular are embarked upon. If the choice is between dead Palestinians and dead Jews, I just don't see what alternative the Israelis really have. And no one, no one, seems to have any idea how to get the Palestinians to stop killing Jews unless Israel signs its own death warrant by giving Yasar Arafat everything he's demanded. If you know of an end game scenario whereby Palestinians lay down their explosives and try to live in peace with Israel, I'd be happy to hear it.
(7) America willfully slaughtered Japanese civilians in WWII. We even effectively lured them in to Hiroshima and Nagasaki by sparing those cities in earlier conventional bombing plans, so that they would be pristine when we nuked them and we'd be able to see exactly how much damage we did. We did so because we believed it right and fitting to hold a people responsible for the actions of their government and because we thought that we could get Japan to surrender immediately, saving as many as a million American lives. Sure there are folks on the Left who consider this to have been something akin to a war crime, but poll the American people and see how many feel any guilt about it. More to the point, poll America in 1945 and see how few would have felt any. By what stretch of the imagination would we deny Israel the same right to defend its people, even if the cost in Palestinian lives is horrific? And, as I said, the Palestinians can avoid this fate quite easily. All they need to do is pursue peace instead of war. If their leaders won't do it, the people should get rid of them. If they don't they face potentially awful consequences, for which I think it fair to say they will ultimately be responsible themselves.
I'd think your point about Sharon actually proves my point. The accusations about his role in the Sabra and Shatilla (I may well have those names wrong) massacres did not prevent him from becoming Prime Minister, did they? You might even have to consider the possibility that they helped him to take power at this time, a time when Israelis may indeed want just such a man at the helm.
Finally, let's turn to Machiavelli again :
[A] dispute arises whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The response is that one would want to be both the one and
the other; but because it is difficult to put them together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one has to lack one of the two.
I do not believe that genocide, in the sense of murdering all the Palestinian people, is necessary, wise, or morally defensible. But I do think peace between Palestine and Israel will only come when the Palestinians truly fear the Israelis. This may require a brutality that will be called genocidal or be compared to ethnic cleansing, and so I accepted the rhetorical challenge. I actually have great faith in the Jewish people, that they will kill not one more person than is necessary to secure a just and lasting peace. But I have no doubt that they will kill however many as it requires to achieve this peace and to protect the nation of Israel and the Jewish people. In this I, and I suspect most Americans, support them 100%, no matter what we choose to call it.