My last name is Weinberg and yes, I’ve been on Birthright. With that logic I should be posting Facebook messages like this one quoting the man, the myth, the legend Bibi Netanyahu: “If Palestine put down their weapons there would be no war, if Israel put down their weapons there would be no Israel.”
One of the biggest weaknesses of not only our generation but our modern reality is the good versus evil dichotomy that has forced everyone to view the world in such a myopic prism. It is, in fact, possible to support Israel without supporting or at least questioning its policies and actions. That is how we support America when our party is out of office: Republicans spent the past four years calling President Obama anti-American and Democrats spent the eight years prior calling George W. Bush a war criminal. This is all while we spent the last decade questioning our own wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If you want the best for any nation or idea, it is always best to question it, to keep it honest in the face of power. This means I will not vow to boycott The New York Times because their headline read “Ferocious Israeli Assault on Gaza Kills a Leader of Hamas,” because that is in fact what happened. Israel took out Hamas military commander Ahmed Jaabari and then proudly posted the video to YouTube, because everyone knows the best way to push for peace is to flaunt a leader’s death to his supporters.
If you want to complain of a New York Times media bias, look at their cover story the next day, which listed the deaths of Israelis in the first sentence, but waited until the sixth paragraph to report the deaths of Palestinians.
All lives are worth the same, and at the time of writing, around 103 lives have been ended due to the conflict; where three too many Israeli civilians have died, at least 100 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including 24 children and 10 women, while 850 people have been wounded, 260 of which are children.
Nations have a right to defend themselves, but the manner in which they do so often determines their need to fight in the future. Forget for a second the cyclical violence fueled by an assassination and then flaunting of this magnitude — if the goal of it all was to stop rockets flying in from Gaza, how did this help?
Not only was Jaabari able to quell the rockets coming out of Gaza prior to last week’s short-lived ceasefire — that by many accounts broke when the IDF shot a 12-year-old boy playing football — but he was a relative moderate compared to the people waiting to take his reins. One of the groups now looking to take power is the Salafist jihadi group the Mujahideen Shura Council of Jerusalem, a rival to Hamas that is responsible for many of the rockets launched into Israel recently.
This is compounded by the fact that Gershon Baskin, founder of the Israeli think tank IPCRI, said that the day Jaabari was executed, the Hamas commander was reviewing a long-term ceasefire that Baskin had given to him, which history has shown to be the only means of reaching peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As put last month by Yosef Kuperwasser, director of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, “If worst comes to worst, we can [launch] a much wider operation in Gaza. But that is not going to really solve the problem. There is a wide and deep problem of hate indoctrination that produces more and more terrorists all the time.”
Kuperwasser goes on to say that Hamas has recently been deterred from sending rockets into Israel due to the violence returned upon Palestinian civilians, but these other Islamist groups are far less bothered by the loss of civilian life. “Most of the activity is coming now not from Hamas,” said Kuperwasser, adding that Islamic Jihad was receiving a relatively bigger share of the weapons that had “been pouring into Gaza.”
Yossi Verter of Israeli newspaper Haaretz makes an interesting point, tying the strike to a common theme in Israel of military escalations two months prior to an election, adding, “A sweeping military operation at a sensitive political timing inevitably raises the question, why now? Couldn’t the extrajudicial killings have been carried out earlier? After all, we experienced quite a few hostile outbursts over the past year and Israel’s policy was always marked with restraint. Or, wouldn’t it have been better to wait until after the election? Presumably, Jaabari would still cruise Gaza’s streets in his car after January 22.”
We live in a world where actions have consequences, including the loss of human life. Whether it be election year politicking or true military action, wars should be questioned, especially by those who care most for the nation and people involved.