The Goldstone reconsideration has done what no one else could do, and gotten the Gaza atrocity into the news, bigtime, once again, and the report is never going away. American-Israeli Bernard Avishai makes the point that Jerry Slater makes in his essay in our Goldstone volume, that Israel had an alternative to military action in Gaza, and that was to foster Palestinian self-determination:
Once young Israeli soldiers were put in harm’s way–with this mission, in that context–asking them to behave differently from the way they did was unfair and hypocritical. The idea that we need a judge to determine if the targeting civilians was intentional suggests that it is important to distinguish between trying to cause, and merely being cavalier about, Palestinian suffering.
ISRAEL SHOULD NEVER have come close to undertaking an operation of this kind, where loss of innocent life was bound to be so grim, since it had not come close to exhausting every possible diplomatic avenue for achieving an overall settlement. Yes, there were missiles. Yes, this was a crime against Israeli civilians that had to be stopped. No, (most) Israelis are not cruel. But when the historian Barbara Tuchman coined the phrase “march of folly,” it was to this kind of situation she referred.
By the time December 2009 came around, prior decisions, and failures of nerve, had limited everyone’s options. Political leaders were inevitably drawn into a military action whose goal, other than to “make a statement,” was uncertain but whose consequences were predictable. Some 400 children were eventually killed, and many more were injured or traumatized. That is just the worst of it.
Historians will not wonder why Hamas launched missiles. The organization thrives on confrontation and missiles were their sucker punch. Historians may well wonder why Olmert’s government had not long before taken all steps to discredit Hamas; stopped all settlement activity, or fought publicly for principles Olmert secretly agreed to in talks with Abbas, or renounced targeted assassination and invited Hamas to renew the cease-fire, or invited it to reiterate its prior commitment to respect any deal Abbas concluded and submitted it to a referendum, or agreed to an international monitoring force, which Hamas had asked for.
If you are serious about peace, you see, there was an alternative track all along to military tit-for-tat. The point to debate after the operation should not have been whether Israeli soldiers committed war crimes but whether the continued occupation, and a continuing policy of vendetta, were only prolonging contravention of international law and getting Israel deeper into a international ditch.
