The Thrasybulus Syndrome: Israel’s War on Gaza
Francesco Guicciardini, the Florentine historian and diplomat, was the
contemporary and friend of Niccolò Machiavelli. The latter now enjoys an
everlasting fame (or infamy, as you please), having gotten an adjective named
after him, but his friend Francesco, now forgotten, often had the better of
Niccolò in argument. After Machiavelli’s death, Guicciardini read his Discourses
on Livy’s Roman history in manuscript and wrote
a lengthy analysis of it. Discussing Machiavelli’s observation that
“a new prince in a city or province taken by him, must make everything new,” Guicciardini
insisted on the weaknesses invariably incurred by force: “Violent
remedies, though they make one safe from one aspect, yet from another . . .
involve all kinds of weaknesses. Hence the prince must take courage to use
these extraordinary means when necessary, and should yet take care not to miss
any chance which offers of establishing his cause with humanity, kindness, and
rewards, not taking as an absolute rule what [Machiavelli] says, who was always
extremely partial to extraordinary and violent methods.”
The difference of opinion between Machiavelli and Guicciardini over the
utility of force echoes down the ages. Every age presents some
variation of it. But the old argument is displayed with a ferocious
intensity in the ongoing controversy over Israel’s approach to Hamas and to the
Palestinians. In dealing with its neighbors, there is no contemporary state more
partial to extraordinary and violent methods than Israel. Israel has
fought four major wars in the last eight years, including the Lebanon War of
2006 against Hezbollah and three devastating wars against Hamas in Gaza from
late 2008 to the present (not counting several
smaller operations from 2006 to 2008). It has assassinated Iranian
nuclear scientists and bombed sites in Syria, Lebanon, and Sudan over the same
time period, just as it has continually agitated for U.S. military strikes
against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. In Israel, hawks have found a welcome
abode; doves are an endangered species.
The regularity of Israel’s perceived need to use force is
illustrated by the notorious expression, “mowing the lawn,” that one of its
military officers used to describe strategy toward Gaza. It is reminiscent of
the advice that Thrasybulus gave Periander of Corinth, recounted in Herodotus.
Walking through a field, Thrasybulus broke off the tallest ears of grain by way
of showing Periander’s envoy the best way to rule violently. The envoy couldn’t
figure out his meaning, but Periander, the prototype of the ancient tyrant,
understood immediately on hearing the envoy’s report. The analogy showed that
violence could not be a one-time affair. New stalks would grow up. It would
remain necessary to keep lopping off the top ones—i.e. mowing the lawn.
Machiavelli offers a view different from Thrasybulus. It is unfortunately
all too true that Machiavelli did have a penchant for extraordinary and violent
methods, as Guicciardini alleged, but his thought also reflected an
appreciation of “the
economy of violence.” “The indiscriminate exercise of force and the
constant revival of fear,” as Sheldon Wolin observed of Machiavelli’s teaching,
“could provoke the greatest of all dangers for any government, the kind of
widespread apprehension and hatred which drove men to desperation.” This sense
of the limits of force, even among one of its greatest partisans, was given
expression in another of Machiavelli’s famous sayings, in which he advised,
“One must be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves. Those
that wish to be only lions do not understand this.” Israel’s strategy toward
Hamas—seeking peace by periodically pummeling the Palestinians, shedding the
blood of numerous innocents—violates Machiavelli’s injunction. It generates
hatred as well as fear. It produces desperate men.
The counterproductive and useless character of Israel’s uses of force has
always seemed to me the best argument against them, the one most likely to gain
some kind of purchase in officialdom. But the sad state of affairs is that the
Israelis think they are succeeding. They also believe they are using force in a
limited and proportionate way, and no exhibition of “telegenically dead
Palestinians” will convince them otherwise.
Even more important, by way of criticism of Israeli strategy, is the point
made by Guicciardini. The idea that Israelis might improve their relationship
with the Palestinians by treating them with humanity, kindness and rewards
seems alien and even risible to Israeli opinion. The Palestinians, the Israelis
think, hate them and will hate them for eternity. It is worse than useless to
take an interest in their well-being, because doing so has the fatal liability
of demonstrating weakness. Much as this viewpoint must be regarded as a
profound mistake, it is written all over the conduct of Israel toward Gaza
since the withdrawal of soldiers and settlers in 2005. Ensconced in the world’s
largest open-air prison, encircled by a stringent blockade, the inmates too
often behaved like those locked up in solitary confinement, a dementia
attributable in large part to their loss of dignity. Israel’s belief that it
can solve the Palestinian problem by ever-larger doses of the old medicine
appears delusional—but there it is.
* * *
In the early days of Israel’s existence, it was the policy of the Jewish
state to make friendships outside the circle of immediate enmity with the
Arabs. Thus with the Turks, the Persians and non-Islamic Africans, there was
some hope for good relationships that would put a countervailing pressure on
the Arabs. Israel continues that policy in Africa, but has lost its once
important relations with Iran and Turkey. The first loss came thirty-five years
ago, in 1979, with the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The Iran-Iraq War that
followed from 1980 to 1988 actually served that countervailing purpose quite
well; Israel was happy to see those states, both potential enemies, weaken
themselves in war. Enjoying an equality of ignominy in Israel’s eyes, Iraq and
Iran were seen as potent threats for many years, but for the last decade at
least Iran has counted as by far the greater enemy for Tel Aviv.
The collapse of Israel’s relationship with Turkey is more recent but also,
one should think, a very serious liability to Israel’s policy in Gaza. The
recent fulminations
of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, even more vitriolic than those
of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, attest to the extreme deterioration of a once
important and long-lasting modus vivendi between Israel and
Turkey. On any sensible accounting, this is an important cost of the Gaza
campaigns, but it seems like the Israelis could care less.
Of course, Israelis do care about their larger standing in the world and
rightly fear isolation, but they figure they are safe so long as they have
American public opinion in their corner. Indeed, the key prize in their
geopolitical strategy of leaping over their opponents to find allies on the
other side has been to secure a vital redoubt in American public opinion and in
the organs of American state power. Here they have shown extraordinary
success, the most potent symbol of which (not counting the annual
bill of over $3 billion in military aid) is the twenty-nine
standing ovations given to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
when he addressed Congress in May 2011. (Who sat down first? One wonders.)
Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies; those whom they denominate as
terrorists, we denominate as terrorists: Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Sudan.
This support does not simply reflect the adeptness of AIPAC and other
pro-Israel groups in granting and withholding favors from members of Congress,
but exists throughout the corporate commentariat and is well rooted in broad
swathes of U.S. domestic opinion. The latest
polls show that 57 percent of Americans believe Israel’s actions in
Gaza are justified, with 40 percent opposed. An earlier Pew poll from 2013
showed that 51 percent of Americans sympathize with Israel; only 14 percent
sympathize with the Palestinians. The findings are remarkably stable over time.
According to a CNN
poll, the same 57 percent thought Israel’s actions were justified
against Hamas in 2012. In 2009, the approval rate was 63 percent. (The margins
are closer in Gallup
polling, with a July 22-23 poll showing a 42-39 split on whether Israel’s
actions are justified and—disturbing for Israel—a 25-51 split among people aged
18-29.)
Israel has also made very considerable progress with European governments,
if not so much with public opinion. While European opinion shows majorities in
Germany and France looking skeptically on Israel’s claims, governments in
Europe, east and west, show strong verbal support for Israel’s right to defend
itself and offer only weak criticisms, if at all, of the methods by which it
has done so. Even Vladimir Putin (no doubt with diabolical motives) weighed
in on Israel’s behalf. The great verbal support that Arab heads of
state once lavished on the Palestinians is no more; they have been mostly silent
spectators to Israel’s war. Yes, the Israelis are vociferously
condemned on the Arab street and the broader Islamic street (one of whose
addresses is Europe), but Israelis never enjoyed any support in that venue and
it would seem absurd to them that they might ever get any. The Kurds, whose
independence Israel champions (in a throwback to its old policy of cultivating
peoples who have bad problems with Arabs) want this relationship kept
hush-hush.
* * *
There are three expert timelines of the Israeli assault on Gaza published
by John
Judis, Larry
Derfner, and Scott
McConnell. They make clear that the first rockets fired by Hamas,
after having observed a cease-fire since November 2012, came after a wide range
of Israeli provocations. Israel had to deal with intermittent
rocket fire from Gaza splinter groups, especially Islamic Jihad,
throughout the previous eighteen months, but Hamas kept its fire. In March
2014, Netanyahu acknowledged
that the number of rocket attacks from Gaza in the previous year was the
“lowest in a decade.” The shock of the three Jewish teenagers kidnapped on June
12 led to widespread official calls for collective punishment, 1500 building
searches, and some 500 arrests in the West Bank in the following two weeks,
even though the government had every reason to
believe that the teenagers were dead and that a group antagonistic
to Hamas was behind the kidnappings. The clear purpose was to disrupt
the accession of Hamas to the Palestinian “national consensus” government in
early June. Israel not only arrested fifty-one Hamas members released in the
exchange for Gilad Shalit, but also conducted thirty-four airstrikes on Gaza on
July 1 and killed six Hamas men in a bombing raid on a tunnel in Gaza on July
6. After these Israeli actions, came a big volley of Hamas rockets, then
Operation Protective Edge.
The previous experience with the cease-fire should have shown that it was
possible to maintain a relationship of deterrence with Hamas, and
not really possible to eliminate, save at a horrific cost, its capacity to lob
inaccurate rockets into Israel—rockets that, in the aggregate, could kill no
more people than a few traffic accidents. Though Hamas was in all
likelihood not responsible for the kidnappings, its leader did
publicly laud them, an incendiary and reprehensible comment. Israel was looking
for an excuse; Hamas provided it. But Israel was wrong to attempt the
disruption of the unity government, the terms of which required Hamas to
subordinate itself to the far more conciliatory platform of the Palestinian
Authority. It was deeply cynical for Netanyahu to use the kidnapping and death
of the three teenagers as a cover for that purpose. In no way can the formation
of the unity government be seen as a threat that would justify the war that
Israel has fought.
The capacity of one symbolic incident to set the Israelis on a big war has
many precedents. In 1982, the assassination of Shlomo Argov, the Israeli
ambassador in London, provoked Israel to invade Lebanon, to pummel Beirut in
that dreadful summer, to force the PLO’s removal to Tunisia, and to occupy the
south of Lebanon for another eighteen years, creating Hezbollah. In 2006,
Israel made the kidnapping of two
Israeli soldiers and the death of three others along the Lebanese
border the occasion for a major war during which the southern suburbs of
Beirut, where Hezbollah has its headquarters, were flattened.
Hezbollah’s rockets flew into Israel after Israel began its air attack, not
before. The preliminaries to the three campaigns in Gaza since 2008-09
show the same tendency. In the Israeli psyche, these incidents stand as a
mortal threat to their existence. The wars that follow invariably cause more
Israeli casualties than the initial incidents themselves. The only compensation
for that is the devastation inflicted on the enemy, for which the incidents
provide a convenient excuse. Then the Israelis go back to the previous policy
of deterrence, until they feel compelled to mow the lawn again.
When war is one of choice and not necessity, the criticism of inhumane
methods has even greater force. The Israelis, to be sure, claim fidelity to the
laws of humanitarian warfare—Rob Dermer,
Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, recently nominated
the Israel Defense Forces for a Nobel Peace Prize for their contributions on
this score. The standards for receiving this august award have admittedly
declined a bit lately;
even so, it seems unlikely that the IDF will get the medal. And they definitely
don’t deserve it, because their war methods inevitably cause large civilian
casualties. Eminent authorities such as Michael Walzer (writing about U.S.
methods in Vietnam) might be cited on the point, but we will have to make do
with the recent headline
in The
Onion: “Israel: Palestinians Given Ample Time to Evacuate to Nearby
Bombing Sites.” The policy of targeted assassination of the enemy’s
leadership—together with their homes, children and immediate environs—is
especially obnoxious: among all the older authorities on the law of warfare one
would search in vain for a justification of such a practice.
That America should be deeply associated with these Israeli attacks on
Arabs and Muslims cannot be beneficial to American security. Osama bin Laden
once revealed that he got the idea for blowing up skyscrapers from witnessing
the Israeli shelling of Beirut in 1982; and the plan took shape after he
observed the devastation wrought upon Iraq by Desert Storm in 1991. Everyone
says that it was the stationing of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia that most
offended bin Laden, but it was what the United States did
with those forces—the war and the ensuing large civilian death toll in
Iraq—that was the greater offense in his book. Violence motivates people, often
to kill; that is a universal trait of our divided and depraved humanity.
No prudent foreign policy should ignore the motive for retaliation we give
by recklessly using force in the Islamic world ourselves or by identifying the
United States so
closely with Israel. Adverting to this phenomenon two centuries ago,
then-diplomat John Quincy Adams wrote that to take an eye for an eye allowed
the allied powers ranged against France to “glut their vengeance for the
wrongs” they had received from France, but Adams
believed that they were “laying up stores of wrath for the day of
wrath in revenge for those which they are inflicting.” Mahmoud Abbas, the
president of the Palestinian Authority who has sincerely tried to bring peace
for the last decade, spoke
on July 22 in a
similar vein:
The time has come for everyone to raise their voices and
tell the truth, clearly and powerfully, in the face of the Israeli killing and
destruction machine. The oppressing occupation forces have crossed every line
and [have broken] all the laws. They have deviated from all standards of human
and international morality in their ferocity and barbarism. . . . We will go
anywhere in order to stop the aggression and the confiscation of our legitimate
rights, and we will hunt down those who commit crimes against our people, no
matter how long it takes. These crimes will not go unprosecuted and unpunished.
To the people in Gaza, he said: “Words cannot describe our emotions and
what our heart feels for you. Your wound is our wound and is the great anger
that is within us. We will never forgive and never forget.”
The announced purpose of Israel’s war has been to destroy Hamas, but its
result will in all probability be to destroy Abbas. Perhaps that was after all
the real intention of Netanyahu and his war cabinet: the extremists invariably
seek to undermine the moderates.
* * *
The settlement of the Palestinian question through a two-state solution is
desirable from the standpoint of both American interests and values. We have a
strong interest in containing the violence, and it is our duty to respect both
the Palestinian right of self-determination and the Israeli right of
self-defense. (The Palestinians have the right of self-defense too, but Abbas
has accepted demilitarization in his peace proposals.) Despite the evident
attractions of a peaceful settlement, it seems virtually impossible to imagine
the circumstances in which the United States would make a serious attempt to
force Israel to change its course. It is and has been so much easier to look
the other way, especially for politicians. All the candidates of the major
parties are squarely in the pro-Israel camp. Rand Paul, otherwise reputed to be
an isolationist, is emphatically in favor of engagement on behalf of Israel
(and has introduced a bill in the Senate to cut off all aid to the Palestinian
Authority). Elizabeth Warren, the darling of the progressive left, is as
regressive as Hillary Clinton on this particular issue.
About the only thing that might seriously disrupt this solid consensus
would be a sea-change in the outlook of American Jewry. Despite
strong discontent among
many younger Jews, and stiff
protests
from some older ones, there are few real signs
of that. Even J Street and Americans for Peace Now champion those annual $3
billion charitable donations, which equip the forces used in the attacks to
which they object. To their credit, the liberals don’t accept the proposition
that the only thing the Palestinians understand is force, but they do believe
that the Israelis respond only to U.S. love—that is, that Israelis would never
make concessions unless they were persuaded that America absolutely had their
back.
I used to believe that too, or at least accepted
the argument that U.S. reassurance to Israel was vital in getting it to make
concessions to the Palestinians. The analogy was to the way the U.S. commitment
to Britain and France after 1947 made possible a more lenient treatment of
Germany—an adroit maneuver that must still be regarded as one of the finest
moments of twentieth-century American statecraft. But the argument today, as
applied to Israel, appears increasingly otherworldly; it is founded on the fact
that the Israelis don’t want to make peace with the Palestinians at any
reasonable price and have nothing close to a governing coalition willing to
make the concessions required. After all these years of negotiation, the
Israelis refuse to produce a map
for a peace accord they would find acceptable, as if vague generalities would
suffice for a serious proposal. One can only conclude that unlimited and
unconditional U.S. support has bolstered and will continue to bolster the
expansionists among them. Certainly it has done nothing to weaken or restrain
them. Fifteen years after the breakdown of Oslo, the settlement project
continues, with 650,000
Israelis living in the occupied territories as of May 2011. There
were 129,200 in 1995.
This is not the conduct of a government and people who wish to give these
territories up. It also dooms Israel to eternal domination of and conflict with
the Palestinians. Truly, the Israelis have got the wolf by the ear, and can
neither hold him, nor safely (so they believe) let him go.
Realists are among the sharpest critics of Israel but, realistically, there
seems nothing in prospect that would dislodge the force of Israel’s support in
America. It would be wishing for a different political system, a different
culture, a different intellectual milieu from those which we have come to
inhabit. I hope that change will come; I do not see it on an even intermediate
horizon. If the four great thrashings of the last eight years have not sufficed
to bring about a change in view, what would? Bad as the current war is, it is
as yet no worse than Operation Just Reward in Lebanon (2006) or Operation Cast
Lead in Gaza (2008-09).
The American people’s deep reluctance to venture on another Middle Eastern
war does operate as a strong barrier to the war Israel wants America to fight
with Iran, but that reluctance may not be sufficient to get a nuclear agreement
with Iran or, if one is gotten, to get it passed through Congress. At least,
however, there are now potent forces in American domestic opinion barring a
preventive war against Iran; nothing comparable to that exists with respect to
restraining Israel’s actions in its immediate neighborhood.
We are thus forced back, for want of anything better, to hoping for a
change in Israeli consciousness on two key points: one would have them be far
more discriminate in the use of force; the other would have them use more
humanitarian methods (e.g., lifting the siege of Gaza) as a way of encouraging
more pacific tendencies in the Palestinian population. More Machiavellian
economy in their approach to force, let us say, and more Guicciardinian
kindness in their administration of the occupied territories. These days,
however, either wish seems more like an impossible dream than a plausible
future course. Israel wants to follow the method of Thrasybulus, and its own
untroubled conscience is just about the only thing that stands in the way.
David C. Hendrickson is professor of political science at
Colorado College. He is the author of Union, Nation, or Empire: The American
Debate over International Relations, 1789-1941. (Kansas, 2009). His blogs
include What
They Think and IR and
All That.
posted by Gert @ 4:43 PM
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