Terror Tunnels The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas (18 page)

Consider the following hypothetical situation. A new group with a serious grievance hires an amoral consulting firm to advise them on the most effective tactic for achieving their goals. Such a consulting group might well recommend that they emulate Hamas, ISIS, al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, rather than the Tibetans or Kurds. This advice would of course be immoral but it would be truthful as a matter of simple cost-benefit analysis.

In the end, the only way to defeat terrorism is to reverse the cost-benefit calculus. This would require an international agreement whereby every country in the world would pledge to refuse to give in to terrorists, to pay ransom to terrorists, to legitimate terrorist organizations or to treat them as morally and politically equivalent to the democracies they are fighting. It would also require that no country release captured terrorists from custody and that they place them on trial or extradite them to a country that will.

We are doing exactly the opposite today. World leaders, such as Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu, demand that we treat Hamas, which is indistinguishable in its overall brutality from ISIS, as a legitimate political organization. The United Nations General Assembly grants statehood to a group that began as a terrorist organization and continues to honor terrorists who murdered children. The Nobel Peace Prize Committee honors Yasser Arafat, the godfather of terrorism, who persisted in this tactic until the day he died. European countries pay ransom to terrorists. And many European nations—Italy, Germany, Great Britain, and others—have freed terrorists, including mass murderers, who have returned to lives of terror. Even Israel has engaged in prisoner exchanges with terrorist groups.

It is one thing to negotiate—directly or indirectly—with terrorists who hold innocent people as hostages. Such negotiation may be a necessary evil. Democratic nations are sometimes forced to negotiate with the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, and other criminal gangs. But we should never honor or legitimate them, as we have done with Palestinian terrorists. Nor should the world condemn and place on trial democracies that fight against terrorist organizations that use their own civilians as human shields. The current misguided approach is a prescription for emulation and repetition of terrorism as the tactic of choice.

So let’s not be surprised when a group like ISIS learns the tragic lesson of history and emulates success and visibility rather than failure and invisibility. ISIS is doing exactly what the amoral consulting firm would advise it to do. So we shouldn’t be surprised. Instead we should reverse course and develop responses to terrorism that never allow this tactic to succeed. Terrorists must never be allowed to win, as they are, unfortunately, doing today.

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Ten Reasons Why BDS Is Immoral and Hinders Peace

February 12, 2014

The BDS movement, which will only increase following the 2014 war in Gaza, is highly immoral, threatens the peace process, and discourages the Palestinians from agreeing to any reasonable peace offer. Here are ten compelling reasons why the BDS movement is immoral and incompatible with current efforts to arrive at a compromise peace.

1. The BDS movement immorally imposes the entire blame for the continuing Israeli occupation and settlement policy on the Israelis.

It refuses to acknowledge the historical reality that on at least three occasions, Israel offered to end the occupation and on all three occasions, the Palestinian leadership, supported by its people, refused to accept these offers. In 1967, I played a small role in drafting UN Security Council Resolution 242 that set out the formula for ending the occupation in exchange for recognition of Israel’s right to exist in peace. Israel accepted that resolution, while the Palestinians, along with all the Arab nations, gathered in Khartoum and issued their three famous noes: no peace, no negotiation, no recognition. There were no efforts to boycott, sanction, or divest from these Arabs naysayers. In 2000 and 2001, Israel’s liberal prime minister Ehud Barak, along with American president Bill Clinton, offered the Palestinians statehood and the end of the occupation. Yasser Arafat rejected this offer—a rejection that many Arab leaders considered a crime against the Palestinian people. In 2007, Israel’s prime minister Ehud Olmert offered the Palestinians an even better deal, an offer to which they failed to respond. There were no BDS threats against those who rejected Israel’s peace offers. Hopefully, there will be ongoing peace negotiations in which both parties make offers. Under the circumstances, it is immoral to impose blame only on Israel and to direct a BDS movement only against the nation-state of the Jewish people, which has thrice offered to end the occupation in exchange for peace.

2. The current BDS movement, especially in Europe and on some American university campuses, emboldens the Palestinians to reject compromise solutions to the conflict.

Some within the Palestinian leadership have told me that the longer they hold out against making peace, the more powerful will be the BDS movement against Israel. Why not wait until BDS strengthens their bargaining position so that they won’t have to compromise by giving up the right of return, by agreeing to a demilitarized state, and by making other concessions that are necessary to peace but difficult for some Palestinians to accept? The BDS movement is making a peaceful resolution harder.

3. The BDS movement is immoral because its leaders will never be satisfied with the kind of two-state solution that is acceptable to Israel.

Many of its leaders do not believe in the concept of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. (The major leader of the BDS movement, Omar Barghouti, has repeatedly expressed his opposition to Israel’s right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people even within the 1967 borders.) At bottom, therefore, the leadership of the BDS movement is opposed not only to Israel’s occupation and settlement policy but to its very existence.

4. The BDS movement is immoral because it violates the core principle of human rights: namely, “the worst first.”

Israel is among the freest and most democratic nations in the world. It is certainly the freest and most democratic nation in the Middle East. Its Arab citizens enjoy more rights than Arabs anywhere else in the world. They serve in the Knesset, in the judiciary, in the foreign service, in the academy, and in business. They are free to criticize Israel and to support its enemies. Israeli universities are hotbeds of anti-Israel rhetoric, advocacy, and even teaching. Israel has a superb record on women’s rights, gay rights, environmental rights, and other rights that barely exist in most parts of the world. Moreover, Israel’s record of avoiding civilian casualties, while fighting enemies who hide their soldiers among civilians, is unparalleled in the world today. The situation on the West Bank is obviously different because of the occupation, but even the Arabs of Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Tulkarm have more human and political rights than the vast majority of Arabs in the world today. Moreover, anyone—Jew, Muslim, or Christian—dissatisfied with Israeli actions can express that dissatisfaction in the courts, and in the media, both at home and abroad. That freedom does not exist in any Arab country, or in many non-Arab countries. Yet Israel is the only country in the world today being threatened with BDS. When a sanction is directed only against a state with one of the best records of human rights, and that nation happens to be the state of the Jewish people, the suspicion of bigotry must be considered.

5. The BDS movement is immoral because it would hurt the wrong people.

It would hurt Palestinian workers who will lose their jobs if economic sanctions are directed against firms that employ them. It would hurt artists and academics, many of whom are the strongest voices for peace and an end to the occupation. It would hurt those suffering from illnesses all around the world who would be helped by Israeli medicine and the collaboration between Israeli scientists and other scientists. It would hurt the high-tech industry around the world because Israel contributes disproportionally to the development of such life-enhancing technology.

6. The BDS movement is immoral because it would encourage Iran
—the world’s leading facilitator of international terrorism—to unleash its surrogates, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, against Israel, in the expectation that if Israel were to respond to rocket attacks, the pressure for BDS against Israel would increase, as it did when Israel responded to thousands of rockets from Gaza in 2008 and 2009.

7. The BDS movement is immoral because it focuses the world’s attention away from far greater injustices, including genocide.

By focusing disproportionately on Israel, the human rights community pays disproportionately less attention to the other occupations, such as those by China, Russia, and Turkey, and to other humanitarian disasters such as that occurring in Syria.

8. The BDS movement is immoral because it promotes false views regarding the nation-state of the Jewish people, exaggerates its flaws and thereby promotes a new variation on the world’s oldest prejudice, namely anti-Semitism.

It is not surprising therefore that the BDS movement is featured on neo-Nazi, Holocaust denial, and other overtly anti-Semitic websites and is promoted by some of the world’s most notorious haters, such as David Duke.

9. The BDS movement is immoral because it reflects and encourages a double standard of judgment and response regarding human rights violations.

By demanding more of Israel, the nation-state of the Jewish people, it expects less of other states, people, cultures, and religions, thereby reifying a form of colonial racism and reverse bigotry that hurts the victims of human rights violations inflicted by others.

10. The BDS movement will never achieve its goals.

Neither the Israeli government nor the Israeli people will ever capitulate to the extortionate means implicit in BDS. They will not and should not make important decisions regarding national security and the safety of their citizens on the basis of immoral threats. Moreover, were Israel to compromise its security in the face of such threats, the result would be more wars, more death, and more suffering.

All decent people who seek peace in the Middle East should join together in opposing the immoral BDS movement. Use your moral voices to demand that both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority accept a compromise peace that assures the security of Israel and the fidelity of a peaceful and democratic Palestinian state. The way forward is not by immoral extortionate threats that do more harm than good, but rather by negotiations, compromise, and goodwill.

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Debate between Alan Dershowitz and John Dugard

August 14, 2014

On August 14, 2014, as the war was winding down, I debated Professor John Dugard by Skype, in front of a live audience at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa.
⁵⁵
Professor Dugard, the former dean of that law school, had served as chairman and rapporteur of the United Nations Commissions investigating human rights in Palestine and had written reports accusing Israel of war crimes. He had also served as a judge on the United Nations’ International Court of Justice. He is widely regarded as the world’s most distinguished accuser against Israel.

Professor Dershowitz:
Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to present my perspective. I was asked to begin by adding a historical context of the events in Gaza.

In 1937, the Peel Commission proposed the division of the British land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish agency accepted. The Arab states rejected. In 1947, the UN created its partition. Again, the Jewish agency accepted and a year later declared the State of Israel. The Arabs rejected and all surrounding Arab armies attacked Israel, killing 1 percent of its population, including many Holocaust survivors.

Following the 1967 war, which was caused by Egypt and Syria threatening a genocidal war against Israel, the Israelis offered to return the captured territory in exchange for recognition and peace. All the Arab nations went to Khartoum and issued their three famous noes: “No peace. No recognition. No negotiation.”

Then in 2000 to 2001, Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton offered the Palestinians a state on about 95 percent of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip, ending the military occupation and the civilian settlements. Yasser Arafat rejected that and began the Intifada in which four thousand people were killed.

In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered an even more generous proposal to the Palestinians, which was never responded to.

Now to Gaza. In 2005 Prime Minister Sharon ended the civilian settlements in Gaza, removed all the settlers, and all the soldiers.

At that time, there was no blockade and it was certainly possible for Gaza to develop itself freely and effectively. Israel maintained some security controls to prevent the import of weapons, but between 2005 and 2007, there was no blockade.

The response was massive numbers of rockets which played Russian roulette with the lives of Israeli children and other civilians. The blockade was—and this is very important—the
result
of the rockets. The rockets are not the result of the blockade.

In 2006, the tunnels were first used to kidnap an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, and kill two other Israeli soldiers and wound four others. That was Israel’s first indication that this tunnel warfare was about to commence.

Hamas, at about that time, instead of developing itself independently, developed a brilliant public relations strategy that would involve a double war crime. Their strategy was to fire rockets and build tunnels from the densely populated areas in the Gaza Strip.

If any of you have been to the Gaza Strip as I have, you know that there are many empty areas in Gaza between the major cities, but Hamas elected to put their tunnels and fire their rockets in the most densely populated areas, using civilians as human shields.