Rael Jean Isaac

French President Jacques Chirac is only the most prominent of the multitude who raised their voices against Israel for supposedly engaging in, to use Chirac’s phrase, “totally disproportionate” actions against Hezbollah in Lebanon. (Meanwhile the French foreign minister revealed his sense of “proportion” by calling Iran, Hezbollah’s controller, “a great country…which plays a stabilizing role in the region.”)

Although not in the sense meant by hostile critics, Israel is indeed guilty of gross disproportion in its response to the challenges facing the state. One could argue that such “disproportionate response,” repeated over and over again, regardless of which party is in power, is at the core of Israel’s present desperate existential danger.

Let us begin with the most obvious area in which Israel has been guilty of disproportion – prisoner exchanges. The first of these ludicrously imbalanced “exchanges” occurred in May 1985 on the watch of the joint Likud-Labor government presided over (in agreed sequence) by Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres. In exchange for three Israeli soldiers Israel released 1150 Palestinian Arab prisoners. The pattern has continued with, for example, Israel releasing 436 terrorists in January 2004 in exchange for the remains of 3 Israeli soldiers and the release of a civilian, Elhanan Tennenbaum. No one should be surprised if eventually Israel releases hundreds of prisoners in exchange for the two soldiers Hezbollah captured.

Many in Israel seem to take a perverse pride in these lopsided exchanges, viewing them as evidence of moral superiority, proof that Israel will go to any length to secure the life of a single individual, the state serving as an extended family. But a country is not and must not behave like a family. Most parents would sacrifice everything they have to ransom a kidnapped child. In doing so, they may make it more likely that the kidnappers, or other would-be kidnappers, will seize someone else’s child, but they cannot be faulted for thinking only of saving the life important to them, without the broader implications even crossing their minds.

But a government must think of the implications of its actions. As would subsequently be widely acknowledged, that initial 1985 “exchange” provided the basis for the first Intifada (which in turn paved the way for the disastrous Oslo agreement), as those released became its organizers and leaders. Nadav Shragai recently pointed out in Haaretz that fourteen of the mass terror attacks in the last several years were carried out by freed terrorists and dozens of attacks in which hundreds of Israelis were killed or wounded were also organized by terrorists released by Israel. In choosing to secure the life (or sometimes dead bodies) of a very few at the price of setting free hundreds of terrorists to attack her citizens again, it can be argued that the Israeli government is as responsible for the clearly foreseeable deaths as if cabinet members had strapped on the suicide belts.

The widely publicized large scale prisoner releases (often made simply as a “gesture” of good will to her enemies) are not even the whole story. In foolish response to the pressures of Israel’s “human rights” organizations (as phony in Israel as most of the groups going under that rubric are in the United States) Israel has been steadily releasing teenagers and women engaged in terrorism simply on the ground of their sex and age.

Nor has Israel’s government learned anything. On August 1, with the war in both Lebanon and Gaza still in full swing, Israel announced it was releasing 100 Hamas and Islamic Jihad prisoners, obviously as an exchange for the single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, whom Hamas had captured. Nabil Shaath, former PA foreign minister, dismissed this as a wholly inadequate gesture, telling the newspaper Al Quds that negotiations were in the last stages to free 700 prisoners for Shalit.

These wildly disproportionate “exchanges” have other far-reaching consequences. The terror organizations (including the so-called government of the PA, whether Fatah or Hamas-led) have become accustomed to allowing the numbers of their members in Israeli prisons to grow into the thousands (there are 9,700 now), comfortable in the assurance that at any point they can capture one or two Israelis and secure the release of most of them. The present war may have been the inadvertent consequence of such “business as usual” with Hezbollah kidnapping two Jewish soldiers on the assumption that in its wonted fashion Israel would obligingly embark upon an “exchange.” As The New York Times (Aug. 4) notes, Hezbollah was particularly anxious to secure the release of Samir Kuntar, who had raided the apartment of the Haran family in Nahariya, killed the father, then killed his four year old daughter by smashing her head with a rifle butt. The mother survived, hiding in the attic with her two year old daughter whom she inadvertently suffocated as she tried to prevent
her from crying. Hezbollah spokesmen have openly expressed their surprise and outrage that Israel did not react in the way experience had led them to expect.

While Israel’s sensitivity to casualties is understandable, again, a country is not a family and cannot focus only on the immediate casualties, ignoring longer-range benefits. In another wildly disproportionate response, Israel fled headlong from southern Lebanon in 2000 in response to a protest group of “four mothers” who had lost their sons in the fighting there. The lives of soldiers should not be carelessly squandered (as was done in the terrible trench battles of World War I) but what is an army for if not to put lives on the line for vital goals?

In The Jerusalem Post (August 10) Evelyn Gordon points out that from 1982 until 2000 Israel’s fatalities in Lebanon averaged 20-25 soldiers a year. Southern Lebanon was a crucial buffer zone protecting northern Israel from Hezbollah terrorists; it was controlled by a Christian militia (the South Lebanese army) trained, supported and helped on the ground by Israel. There would be a huge price for winning a six year reprieve from the drip of Israeli casualties. The price of the disproportionate response in 2000 is not only paid six years later in far more lives lost, in one million displaced persons within Israel, in economic devastation, but most important, in the destruction of Israel’s deterrence, her only protection against future warfare that will leave her losses even in the costly War of Independence seem trivial.

Again, in Israel there is no learning curve. The original four mothers have given extensive interviews in which they declare their support for today’s war against Hezbollah while reaffirming the “rightness” of their earlier insistence that Israel leave. They simply will not connect the dots.

Israel also demonstrates a wholly disproportionate sensitivity to and respect for “world opinion.” In what Victor Davis Hanson rightly calls a West “on the brink of moral insanity,” a corrupt world “awash with a vicious hatred [for Jews] that we have not seen in our generation,” it is folly for Israel to think it can shape world opinion by its actions. Yet American Jewish leaders who went to Israel while the air campaign against Hezbollah was going on (Olmert prevented the army until the last moment from engaging in a meaningful ground campaign) found that Israeli politicians wanted only to talk of their effort to prevent civilian casualties in Lebanon – apparently this, not crushing Hezbollah, was their chief concern.

Israeli leaders typically embark on preemptive apologies at the first squeak of Western or even Arab outrage – and investigate afterwards, often to find the charges ludicrous. But by their apology they have given credence to the accusations, encouraging their enemies and making what friends they have abroad despair. For example, there was the embarrassing spectacle of Olmert apologizing to Mubarak for the killing of two Egyptian terrorists. The episode at the Lebanese village of Qana, where the number of deaths were doubled (as even the bitterly anti-Israel Human Rights Watch has acknowledged) and there remain questions whether the entire “event” was staged by Hezbollah not only made the government go into apologetic overdrive but led Israel to announce suspension of all air operations for two days.

The desultory way in which Israel conducted the war against Hezbollah was the product of the two ingrained disproportionate responses we have already noted – the fear of Israeli casualties and the fear of world opinion. Of course in the end, the feeble campaign maximized both. The war lost the element of surprise (what could have been a swift hard-driving ground invasion became a slow, slogging affair) and there was a torrent of world abuse.

It is a series of disproportionate responses which has led Israel into the terrible existential dangers she faces today. Israel responded to the first Intifada, a minor nuisance of stone-throwing, chiefly by teenagers -- with Oslo, installing a terror state on her doorstep. Israel would eventually respond to the second Intifada, launched by Arafat in 2000, with so-called “disengagement” (although it is possible the “disproportion” here was even more sordid – with disengagement being Sharon’s response to the threat of a probe into his election finances.)

The ultimate disproportion is between Israel’s government and her people. Maintaining the state requires strength, courage and sacrifice. Yes, Israel’s intelligentsia contains a sizable number of scoundrels and outright traitors. But far more ordinary Israelis are imbued with the necessary strength and spirit of sacrifice. In the last issue we published Naomi Ragen’s “The Taxi Driver” about the security officer who told Sharon he could not participate in the eviction of Jews from Gaza and thus lost his career. Ragen concluded: “Once again, the reality of living in a country with wonderful people and terrible leadership struck me full force.”

For Israel’s leaders have gone from disproportionate response to outright disconnect from reality. Israel experiences government by the Marx Brothers. Look at perennial Israeli leader (now vice premier) Shimon Peres. After Oslo he babbles of a delusory New Middle East. With the victory of Hamas, he announces that Israel is closer to peace than ever before. Now with this war he declaims on CNN (August 10): “Since we didn’t initiate the war, we don’t have to win it. We just have to stop it.” The second member of the trio, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, proudly announces that the war has laid “the groundwork for negotiations with Syria” (to return the Golan Heights) and says he is eager “to resume negotiations with the Palestinians” (i.e. presumably to turn over more territory for the rocket launchers).

Nor is Prime Minister Ehud Olmert any improvement. At the start of the war he told Associated Press reporters “I’ll surprise you. I genuinely believe that the outcome of the present conflict” will provide “new momentum” (for his “convergence” plan, i.e. more retreats in Judea and Samaria). His government actually chose this moment to send out eviction notices to families at Givat Ronen in Samaria. As northern Israel became uninhabitable, Olmert spun empty boasts not heard since “Baghdad Bob” announced Saddam’s great victories over U.S. forces even as they rolled into Baghdad. Olmert declared that Israel has won because Hezbollah “can never [again] threaten this nation that it will fire missiles at it.”

No wonder that Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades leader Abu Maamun declared that Olmert’s statements were proof Arab attacks were working. Said Maamun: This is a great period and I believe a new era.”

The responses of Israel’s rulers to the challenges facing the country are no longer simply disproportionate: they are insane.