What Is He Saying?

Nicholas Kristof’s latest New York Times column takes as its point of departure three “myths”:

• The first myth is that in the conflict in the Middle East there is right on one side and wrong on the other (even if people disagree about which is which).
• The second myth is that Palestinians can be put off indefinitely, strung along by Israel, the United States and other countries.
• The third myth is found on both sides of the conflict and is approximately: It’s too bad we have to engage in this bloodshed, but the people on the other side understand only violence.

I’m afraid I disagree with his underlying premise:

Israelis deserve their country, forged by refugees in the shadow of the Holocaust, and they have built a high-tech economy that largely empowers women and respects gay people, while giving its Palestinian citizens more rights than most Arab nations give their citizens.

I don’t believe that such a right exists for the Israelis, the Palestinians, or anybody else. What has actually happened in the real world is that people have banded together and seized countries for themselves by force of arms and they keep them in the same way. Example: the United States. We’re not alone. It pertains to Germany, France, Italy, China, and every other country of which I’m aware. It’s harsh but it’s real.

I’m not claiming that might makes right. No. My point is that right has nothing to do with it. It’s a cold, cruel world.

Indeed, that’s what’s going on right now. Hamas is trying to seize control of a country, proclaiming it theirs by right. The Israelis disagree. The ire is an outcome of the cowardly way in which Hamas is prosecuting its claim.

Mr. Kristof does point out some interesting things:

A great majority of those killed have been women and children, according to Gaza’s Hamas-controlled Health Ministry, and one gauge of the ferocity and indiscriminate nature of some airstrikes is that more than 100 United Nations staffers have been killed, which the U.N. says is more than in any conflict since its founding.

Why does he conclude from the large number of UN staffers killed that Israel is bombing indiscriminately? I can think of at least two other explanations:

• there is substantial overlap between Hamas and UN staffers
• Hamas is exploiting UN staffers as “human shields”

of which I prefer the second to either Mr. Kristof’s or my first explanation. Why does he believe what he does? He does not explore that in the column. Indeed, I think pretty much the opposite. I think the preponderance of the evidence suggests the Israelis are showing substantial discrimination under very difficult circumstances.

Here’s another interesting observation he makes:

Israel has a right to feel anxious in any case, but I suspect that the best way to ensure its security may be not to defer Palestinian aspirations but to honor them with a two-state solution. This is not just a concession to Arabs but a pragmatic acknowledgment of Israel’s own interests — and the world’s.

I agree with that but I probably think the outcome would be different from that which Mr. Kristof apparently does. I think that Israel should grant the West Bank and Gaza statehood and, when Israel inevitably is attacked from the newly-formed country, they should seize a buffer and annex it. Lather, rinse, repeat. As long as enough Palestinians are willing to take Hamas’s route, a two state solution would doom the Palestinian cause rather than being their salvation.

Which brings us to Mr. Kristof’s third myth. Is he really arguing that because 100% of Germans did not support Hitler during World War II, we should not have waged war against Germany? Or that because 100% of Japanese were not militarists we should not have made war against Japan?

The sad reality is that Hamas has something between 40% and 60% support among Palestinians. The exact number does not matter. It’s a large percentage—more than were Nazis in Germany or Communists in the Soviet Union.

Under the circumstances, sad as it is to say, if Israel wants to preserve the country Mr. Kristof says it has a right to, they’re going to kill a lot of Palestinians. Mr. Kristof concludes with an appeal to emotion:

These are people like Mohammed Alshannat, a doctoral student in Gaza, who has been sending desperate messages to friends who shared them with me; he agreed to allow me to publish them as a glimpse into Gazan life.

“There was heavy bombing in our area,” he wrote in English in one message. “We run for our lives and I lost two of my children in the dark. Me and my wife stayed all night searching for them amidst hundreds of airstrikes. We miraculously survived an airstrike and found them fainted in the morning. Please pray for us. The situation is beyond description.”

“I see death a hundred times a day,” he wrote another time. “We defecate in the open and my children defecate on themselves and there is no water to clean them.”

If he survives the war, what will we Americans say to him and his children? How will we explain that we supplied bombs for this war, that we were complicit in his family’s terror and degradation?

My heart doesn’t just bleed for Israelis. It bleeds for Israelis and Palestinians and anyone else injured in war. I hate war and I believe we should only engage in war as a last resort.

It appears to be a last resort for the Israelis but it’s not for us and we should avoid making it into our war.