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Rabbi Elliot M. Strom
This morning I read in all the papers of the condemnation of Israel by the United Nations and the European Union. Israel is being condemned for using what is termed “excessive force” for its most recent incursion into Gaza, an incursion in which scores of Hamas extremists were killed along with some unintended victims, including women and children.
As a Jew, as a human being, I cry for the innocent civilians who become such so-called “collateral damage.” They are human beings, non-combatants. They do not deserve to be harmed as a by-product of war. No wonder Ban Ki Moon and the rest of the world are uncomfortable with this terrible human loss. They wish for a war in which only uniformed military men and women were placed in harm’s way, a war in which civilian populations would not be used as protective cover, a war in which the universally-recognized military conventions would protect non-combatants from being sucked into the jaws of death.
But when it comes to terrorist war – and the wanton, brutal assault against the innocent Israeli residents of Sderot, Netivot and now Ashkelon can qualify as nothing else – I wonder what it is that Ban Ki Moon and the rest would do themselves if they were faced with such a constant barrage against their own citizens within the borders of their own nations. What is it that Ban Ki Moon would do to see that innocent parents, teachers, workers, children were not forced to stay off the streets for hours at a time, to live in specially reinforced structures within their homes designed to withstand a missile shell, to flee from their hometown because it is not safe, and for those who remain to wonder whether at any moment a missile may whoosh in from overhead and end their world. What is it that Ban Ki Moon thinks is legitimate? What would he say constitutes reasonable and proportional force? And what would any American President – Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative – do if suddenly there was shelling of towns in South Texas, Southern California or Montana by a hostile, terrorist force on the other side of the border?
What I can’t understand, after all these years, is why Israel is the one nation in all the world not allowed to do the minimum necessary to secure its own citizens within their own homes? Why is it that only Israel’s existence is begrudged her, is open for debate? Why is it that every other country’s existence and survival is understood to be an unassailable, unquestionable fact – but not that of Israel?
I believe – as I think should any decent human being, as should any knowledgeable, caring Jew – that one of the primary concerns of warfare has to be the protection of non-combatant civilians. But in the terrorist world of Hamas and Hezbollah, their strategy is based on a cynical disregard for their own people, using them as protective cover for their aggressions, storing ammunition in private homes in crowded residential neighborhoods, cynically forcing their enemy to attack them in ways and places where their own people will be harmed, knowing that such suffering will be attributed to Israel and not to the real perpetrators, the terrorists themselves.
It is a sick system but it is a system that will continue as along as the world continues to be drawn into defending it, which they do every time that criticize Israel for “excessive force” in simply trying to remove the terrorist batteries before they can wreak death and destruction on the homes, schools, hospitals and streets of
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