Steve Walt poses a thought experiment:
philosophy professor Joseph Levine at University of Massachusetts: what
if Hamas was hiding out among the civilian population of Tel Aviv, and
attacking Israel from within? Would the IDF be using massive force to
eradicate them? Unless you think that Palestinian and Israeli civilian
lives are not equal, what justifies the current policy?
This isn't just a thought experiment. A few years ago, James North informs me, an Israeli officer who had been asked to carry out a "targeted assassination" in Palestinian territory went to his commander and asked, If this guy was living among Jews, would you order this operation? The commanding officer said, Of course not, and the officer then refused. That's the heart of it. We all know that Israel would not be doing anything like this if there were Jews in the neighborhood. Bloody ethnocentrism. Particularism. Parochialism. Tribalism. Call it what you like, it's wrong, and especially horrifying in view of the power politics involved. This is why Jimmy Carter and David Bromwich speak of state-sponsored terrorism. Bromwich:
Thus the Israeli commander who ordered the attack on the university in Gaza was an agent of state terror.
