Hanson:
The West has developed a dangerous concern for “proportionality.”
In the
current epidemic of Palestinian violence, scores of Arab youths are attacking,
supposedly spontaneously, Israeli citizens with knives. Apparently, edged
weapons have more Koranic authority, and, in the sense of media spectacle, they
provide greater splashes of blood. Thus the attacker is regularly described as
“unarmed” and a victim when he is “disproportionately” stopped by bullets.
The
Obama State Department has condemned the use of “excessive” Israeli force in
response to Palestinian terrorism. John Kirby, the hapless State Department
spokesman, blamed “both” sides for terrorism, and the president himself called
on attackers and their victims to “tamp down the violence.”
In
short, the present U.S. government — which is subsidizing the Palestinians to
the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year — is incapable of
distinguishing those who employ terrorist violence from the victims against
whom the terrorism is directed. But why is the Obama administration — which can
apparently distinguish those who send out drones from those who are blown up by
them on the suspicion of employing terrorist violence — morally incapable of
calling out Palestinian violence? After all, in the American case, we blow away
suspects whom we think are likely terrorists; in the Israeli instance, they
shoot or arrest those who have clearly just committed a terrorist act.
Two
reasons stand out.
One,
Obama’s Middle East policies are in shambles. Phony red lines, faux deadlines,
reset with Putin, surrendering all the original bargaining chips in the Iranian
deal, snubbing Israel, cozying up to the Muslim Brotherhood, dismissing the
threat of ISIS, allowing Iraq to collapse by abruptly pulling out all American
troops, giving way to serial indecision in Afghanistan, ostracizing the
moderate Sunni regimes, wrecking Libya, and setting the stage for Benghazi —
all of these were the result of administration choices, not fated events. One
of the results of this collapse of American power and presence in the Middle
East is an emboldened Palestinian movement that has recently renounced the Oslo
Accords and encouraged the offensive of edged weapons.
Mahmoud
Abbas, the subsidized president of the self-proclaimed Palestinian State, and
his subordinates have sanctioned the violence. Any time Palestinians sense
distance between the U.S. and Israel, they seek to widen the breach. When the
Obama team deliberately and often gratuitously signals its displeasure with
Israel, then the Palestinians seek to harden that abstract pique into concrete
estrangement.
Amid
such a collapse of American power, Abbas has scanned the Middle East, surveyed
the Obama pronouncements — from his initial Al Arabiya interview and Cairo
speech to his current contextualizations and not-so private slapdowns of
Netanyahu — and has wagered that Obama likes Israel even less than his public
statements might suggest. Accordingly, Abbas assumes that there might be few
consequences from America if he incites another “cycle of violence.”
The
more chaos there is, the more CNN videos of Palestinian terrorists being killed
by Israeli civilians or security forces, the more NBC clips of knife-wielding
terrorists who are described as unarmed, and the more MSNBC faux maps of
Israeli absorption of Palestine, so all the more the Abbas regime and Hamas
expect the “international community” to force further Israeli concessions. The
Palestinians hope that they are entering yet another stage in their endless war
against Israel. But this time, given the American recessional, they have new
hopes that the emerging Iran–Russia–Syria–Iraq–Hezbollah axis could offer ample
power in support of the violence and could help to turn the current
asymmetrical war more advantageously conventional. The Palestinians believe,
whether accurately or not, that their renewed violence might be a more brutal
method of aiding the administration’s own efforts to pressure the Israelis to
become more socially just, without which there supposedly cannot be peace in
the Middle East.
But
there is a second, more general explanation for the moral equivalence and
anemic response from the White House. The Obama “we are the ones we’ve been
waiting for” administration is the first postmodern government in American
history, and it has adopted almost all the general culture’s flawed relativist assumptions
about human nature.
Affluent
and leisured Western culture in the 21st century assumes that it has reached a
stage of psychological nirvana, in which the Westernized world is no longer
threatened in any existential fashion as it often was in the past. That allows
Westerners to believe that they no longer have limbic brains, and so are no
longer bound by Neanderthal ideas like deterrence, balance of power, military
alliances, and the use of force to settle disagreements. Their wealth and
technology assure them that they are free, then, to enter a brave new world of
zero culpability, zero competition, and zero hostility that will ensure
perpetual tranquility and thus perpetual enjoyment of our present material
bounty.
Our
children today play tee-ball, where there are no winners and losers — and thus
they are schooled that competition is not just detrimental but also can, by
such training, be eliminated entirely. Our adolescents are treated according to
the philosophy of “zero tolerance,” in which the hero who stops the punk from
bullying a weaker victim is likewise suspended from school. Under the pretense
of such smug moral superiority, our schools have abdicated the hard and ancient
task of distinguishing bad behavior from good and then proceeding with the
necessary rewards and punishments. Our universities have junked military
history, which schooled generations on how wars start, proceed, and end. Instead,
“conflict resolution and peace studies” programs proliferate, in which empathy
and dialogue are supposed to contextualize the aggressor and thus persuade him
to desist and seek help — as if aggression, greed, and the desire for
intimidation were treatable syndromes rather than ancient evils that have
remained dangerous throughout history.
Human
nature is not so easily transcended, just because a new therapeutic generation
has confused its iPhone apps and Priuses with commensurate moral and ethical advancement.
Under the canons of the last 2,500 years of Western warfare, disproportionality
was the method by which aggressors were either deterred or stopped. Deterrence
— which alone prevented wars — was predicated on the shared assumption that
starting a conflict would bring more violence down upon the aggressor than he
could ever inflict on his victim. Once lost, deterrence was restored usually by
disproportionate responses that led to victory over and humiliation of the
aggressive party.
The
wreckage of Berlin trumped anything inflicted by the Luftwaffe on London. The
Japanese killed fewer than 3,000 Americans at Pearl Harbor; the Americans
killed 30 times that number of Japanese in a single March 10, 1945, incendiary
raid on Tokyo. “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” was
the standard philosophy by which aggressive powers were taught never again to
start hostilities. Defeat and humiliation led to peace and reconciliation.
The
tragic but necessary resort to disproportionate force by the attacked not only
taught an aggressor that he could not win the fight he had started, but also
reminded him that his targeted enemy might not be completely sane, and thus
could be capable of any and all retaliation.
Unpredictability
and the fear sown by the unknown also help to restore deterrence, and with it
calm and peace. In contrast, predictable, proportionate responses can reassure
the aggressor that he is in control of the tempo of the war that he in fact
started. And worse still, the doctrine of proportionality suggests that the
victim does not seek victory and resolution, but will do almost anything to
return to the status quo antebellum — which, of course, was disadvantageous and
shaped by the constant threat of unexpected attack by its enemies.
Applying
this to the Middle East, the Palestinians believe that the new American
indifference to the region and Washington’s slapdowns of Netanyahu have
reshuffled relative power. They now hope that there is no deterrent to violence
and that, if it should break out, there will be only a proportionate and modest
response from predictable Westerners.
Under
the related doctrine of moral equivalence, Westerners are either unwilling or
unable to distinguish the more culpable from the more innocent. Instead,
because the world more often divides by 55 to 45 percent rather than 99 to 1
percent certainty, Westerners lack the confidence to make moral judgments —
afraid that too many critics might question their liberal sensitivities, a
charge that in the absence of dearth, hunger, and disease is considered the
worst catastrophe facing an affluent Western elite.
The
question is not only whether the Obama administration, in private, favors the
cause of the radical Palestinians over a Western ally like Israel, but also
whether it is even intellectually and morally capable of distinguishing a
democratic state that protects human rights from a non-democratic,
authoritarian, and terrorist regime that historically has hated the West, and
the United States in particular — and is currently engaged in clear-cut
aggression.
