{"id":8737,"date":"2015-10-20T07:29:27","date_gmt":"2015-10-20T14:29:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8737"},"modified":"2015-10-20T07:29:46","modified_gmt":"2015-10-20T14:29:46","slug":"moral-equivalence-in-the-middle-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/moral-equivalence-in-the-middle-east\/","title":{"rendered":"Moral Equivalence in the Middle East"},"content":{"rendered":"

The West has developed a dangerous concern for \u2018proportionality.\u2019<\/span><\/em><\/h3>\n
by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online<\/a><\/div>\n
\n
\"Palestinian
Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli soldiers in Hebron, October 10, 2015. (Hazem Bader\/AFP\/Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I<\/span>n the current epidemic of Palestinian violence, scores of Arab youths are attacking, supposedly spontaneously, Israeli citizens with knives. Apparently, edged weapons have moreKoranic authority, and, in the sense of media spectacle, they provide greater splashes of blood. Thus the attacker is regularly described as \u201cunarmed\u201d and a victim when he is \u201cdisproportionately\u201d stopped by bullets.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Obama State Department has condemned the use of \u201cexcessive\u201d Israeli force in response to Palestinian terrorism. John Kirby, the hapless State Department spokesman, blamed \u201cboth\u201d sides for terrorism, and the president himself called on attackers and their victims to \u201ctamp down the violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short, the present U.S. government \u2014 which is subsidizing the Palestinians to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year \u2014 is incapable of distinguishing those who employ terrorist violence from the\u00a0victims\u00a0against whom the terrorism is directed. But why is the Obama administration \u2014 which can apparently distinguish those who send out drones from those who are blown up by them on the suspicion of employing terrorist violence \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Two reasons stand out.<\/p>\n

One, Obama\u2019s 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Amid such a collapse of American power, Abbas has scanned the Middle East, surveyed the Obama pronouncements \u2014 from his initial Al Arabiya interview and Cairo speech to his current contextualizations and not-so private slapdowns of Netanyahu \u2014 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 \u201ccycle of violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cinternational community\u201d 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\u2013Russia\u2013Syria\u2013Iraq\u2013Hezbollah 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\u2019s own efforts to pressure the Israelis to become more socially just, without which there supposedly cannot be peace in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

B<\/span>ut there is a second, more general explanation for the moral equivalence and anemic response from the White House. The Obama \u201cwe are the ones we\u2019ve been waiting for\u201d administration is the first postmodern government in American history, and it has adopted almost all the general culture\u2019s flawed relativist assumptions about human nature.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Our children today play tee-ball, where there are no winners and losers \u2014 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 \u201czero tolerance,\u201d 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, \u201cconflict resolution and peace studies\u201d programs proliferate, in which empathy and dialogue are supposed to contextualize the aggressor and thus persuade him to desist and seek help \u2014 as if aggression, greed, and the desire for intimidation were treatable syndromes rather than ancient evils that have remained dangerous throughout history.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 which alone prevented wars \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cThey have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind\u201d was the standard philosophy by which aggressive powers were taught never again to start hostilities. Defeat and humiliation led to peace and reconciliation.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 which, of course, was disadvantageous and shaped by the constant threat of unexpected attack by its enemies.<\/p>\n

Applying this to the Middle East, the Palestinians believe that the new American indifference to the region and Washington\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 and is currently engaged in clear-cut aggression.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The West has developed a dangerous concern for \u2018proportionality.\u2019 by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online In the current epidemic of Palestinian violence, scores of Arab youths are attacking, supposedly spontaneously, Israeli citizens with knives. Apparently, edged weapons have moreKoranic authority, and, in the sense of media spectacle, they provide greater splashes of blood. Thus […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2gV","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3734,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/israel-did-it\/","url_meta":{"origin":8737,"position":0},"title":"Israel Did it!","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 15, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"When in doubt, shout about Israel. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online These are strange times. Perennially beleaguered Israel, for instance, was hit all summer long with rockets from Lebanon and Gaza, as the world watched and kept score in an absurd new game of proportionality: Israel was to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2006"","block_context":{"text":"December 2006","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2006\/december-2006\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13404,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/how-to-ensure-a-middle-east-war-in-five-easy-steps\/","url_meta":{"origin":8737,"position":1},"title":"How To Ensure a Middle East War in Five Easy Steps","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 17, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness More than 2,500 rockets have landed in Israel over the past week. Some Arab Israeli citizens are terrorizing Jewish Israelis. 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The Trump Administration has changed course in various ways from its predecessor when it comes to relations with Israel. Among other things, the current American government has moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8737"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8737"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8741,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8737\/revisions\/8741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}