[Peace-discuss] How to Sell 'Ethical Warfare'

[David Green]

How to Sell 'Ethical Warfare'

By Neve Gordon
Guardian (UK)
January 16, 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/16/gaza-middleeast1

Claim moral superiority, intimidate enemies
and crush dissent - Israel's media management
is not just impressive, it's terrifying.

One of my students was arrested yesterday and spent the
night in a prison cell. R's offence was protesting the
Israeli assault on Gaza. He joins over 700 other
Israelis who have been detained since the beginning of
Israel's ruthless war on Gaza: an estimated 230 of whom
are still behind bars. Within the Israeli context, this
strategy of quelling protest and stifling resistance is
unprecedented, and it is quite disturbing that the
international media has failed to comment on it.

Simultaneously, the Israeli media has been towing the
government line to such a degree that no criticism of
the war has been voiced on any of the three local
television stations. Indeed, the situation has become
so absurd that reporters and anchors are currently less
critical of the war than the military spokespeople. In
the absence of any critical analysis, it is not so
surprising that 78% of Israelis, or about 98% of all
Jewish Israelis, support the war.

But eliding critical voices is not the only way that
public support has been secured. Support has also been
manufactured through ostensibly logical argumentation.
One of the ways the media, military and government have
been convincing Israelis to rally behind the assault is
by claiming that Israel is carrying out a moral
military campaign against Hamas. The logic, as Eyal
Weizman has cogently observed in his groundbreaking
book Hollow Land, is one of restraint.

The Israeli media continuously emphasises Israel's
restraint by underscoring the gap between what the
military forces could do to the Palestinians and what
they actually do. Here are a few examples of the
refrains Israelis hear daily while listening to the
news:

- Israel could bomb houses from the air without
warning, but it has military personnel contact - by
phone no less - the residents 10 minutes in advance of
an attack to alert them that their house is about to be
destroyed. The military, so the subtext goes, could
demolish houses without such forewarnings, but it does
not do so because it values human life.

- Israel deploys teaser bombs - ones that do not
actually ruin houses - a few minutes before it fires
lethal missiles; again, to show that it could kill more
Palestinians but chooses not to do so.

- Israel knows that Hamas leaders are hiding in al-
Shifa hospital. The intimation is that it does not raze
the medical centre to the ground even though it has the
capacity to do so.

- Due to the humanitarian crisis the Israeli military
stops its attacks for a few hours each day and allows
humanitarian convoys to enter the Gaza Strip. Again,
the unspoken claim is that it could have barred these
convoys from entering.

The message Israel conveys through these refrains has
two different meanings depending on the target
audience.

To the Palestinians, the message is one that carries a
clear threat: Israel's restraint could end and there is
always the possibility of further escalation.

Regardless of how lethal Israel's military attacks are
now, the idea is to intimidate the Palestinian
population by underscoring that the violence can always
become more deadly and brutal. This guarantees that
violence, both when it is and when it is not deployed,
remains an ever-looming threat.

The message to the Israelis is a moral one. The subtext
is that the Israeli military could indiscriminately
unleash its vast arsenal of violence, but chooses not
to, because its forces, unlike Hamas, respect human
life.

This latter claim appears to have considerable
resonance among Israelis, and, yet, it is based on a
moral fallacy. The fact that one could be more brutal
but chooses to use restraint does not in any way entail
that one is moral. The fact that the Israeli military
could have razed the entire Gaza Strip, but instead
destroyed only 15% of the buildings does not make its
actions moral. The fact that the Israeli military could
have killed thousands of Palestinian children during
this campaign, and, due to restraint, killed "only"
300, does not make Operation Cast Lead ethical.

Ultimately, the moral claims the Israeli government
uses to support its actions during this war are empty.
They actually reveal Israel's unwillingness to confront
the original source of the current violence, which is
not Hamas, but rather the occupation of the Gaza Strip,
West Bank and East Jerusalem. My student, R, and the
other Israeli protesters seem to have understood this
truism; in order to stop them from voicing it, Israel
has stomped on their civil liberties by arresting them.
____________

Neve Gordon teaches in the Department of Politics and
Government, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel,
and is the author of Israel's Occupation, University of
California Press, 2008. His website is
israeloccupation.com