Israel, Long Wars, and “Israel’s right to defend itself”

With Israel’s Gaza war well into its seventh month with no end in sight, I’m reminded again about how different it is for Israel to fight a long war than a shorter one in terms of its image abroad. Particularly in the United States which has been and is critical to Israel’s management of its security. The current war already counts as easily the longest one in Israel’s history.

One problem for them is that Americans and Europeans in this war get reports day after day after day of the very ugly war Israel is waging on Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Another is that the standard slogans used by Israeli officials and partisans to justify Israel’s apartheid system of rule and to frame the history of the conflict for a foreign audience don’t work nearly as well when so many people here them - and the arguments over them - for month after month after month.

This is an interview with “the Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass, the only Israeli Jewish journalist to have spent 30 years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank.”¹

Now, there is obviously a limited audience for a 41-minute interview on a dense and confusing topic like the Israel-Palestine conflict. But the long war means that there are lots more of these kinds of critical reports and analysis available than what Americans and Europeans normally hear between Israel’s short wars of previous decades.

For one thing, it’s unusual for large American and European audiences to get repeated examples of how critical Israeli journalists, political analysts and scholarly experts can be of their own government’s policies. But in this longer war, there is more available to those audiences available than only short, superficial discussions between “I totally support whatever Israel is doing” and, “Well, I support Israel, too, but maybe they should sometimes be a little more careful, even though I totally support what their government is doing.”

The Israeli reporter Amira Hass has been at this for a while. In 2012, for instance, she analyzed the phrase that is seemingly ubiquitous in presentations and arguments by Israel’s partisans, “Israel has the right to defend itself.” Israeli spokespeople use this to discredit any criticism of what it is actually doing at a given time. It’s really a truism repurposed as a defensive polemic for all occasions. It’s actually a fundamental part of international law that states have a right to defend themselves and basically no one contests that.

In the real world, of course, there are nations that do not have formal diplomatic relations with Israel. And there are partisans of Palestinian sovereignty who reject Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in is current form. Yet Palestinians militants know better than anyone that Israel counterattacks against the slightest provocation.

But when states step down from the right-to-self-defense abstraction and engage in actual wars, the right of self-defense is not a blank check for governments to do anything they choose in the actual war. Nor should it be. The right of a state to defend itself is not at all the same as the right of a state to do whatever it wants outside of its territory, or to commit any atrocity it chooses, or to throw the laws of war out the window.

Here are a few examples from the English-language edition of Haaretz:

Netanyahu: I Regret Gaza Flotilla Deaths, but Israeli Troops Had Right to Self-defense (05/31/2010)

Obama Welcomes Ease of Gaza Blockade, Reaffirms Israel's Right to Self-defense (06/20/2010)

Netanyahu Welcomes Obama's Statements on Israel's Right to Self-defense (03/04/2012)

Alan Dershowitz/Israel’s Right to Self-defense (11/18/2012)

U.S. Condemns Hamas, Says ‘Supports Israel’s Right to Self-defense’ (08/09/2018)

Blinken Reaffirms Israeli Right to Self-defense, Stresses Gaza Reconstruction (05/28/2021). This one seems grimly ironic today.

ICJ Debates Legality of Israeli Occupation; Netanyahu: Hearing Harms Right to Self-defense (AP) (02/19/2024)

Here’s a recent example:

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly said that Canada's Trudeau government will halt future arms exports to Israel. Confirming the decision, Joly stated, "It is a real thing," speaking to the Toronto Star.

Israel's Foreign Minister Israel Katz commented on the report, saying, "It's regrettable that the Canadian government is taking a step that undermines Israel's right to self-defense against Hamas terrorists.² [my emphasis]

Get that? Another country, Canada, deciding not to send more weapons to Israel, is undermining Israel’s “right to self-defense.” The US isn’t sending weapons to Russia, either. Does that count as undermining Russia’s right to self-defense?

As Hass wrote in 2012:

One of Israel's tremendous propaganda victories is that it has been accepted as a victim of the Palestinians, both in the view of the Israeli public and that of Western leaders who hasten to speak of Israel's right to defend itself. The propaganda is so effective that only the Palestinian rockets at the south of Israel, and now at Tel Aviv, are counted in the round of hostilities. The rockets, or damage to the holiest of holies - a military jeep - are always seen as a starting point, and together with the terrifying siren, as if taken from a World War II movie, build the meta-narrative of the victim entitled to defend itself.

Every day, indeed every moment, this meta-narrative allows Israel to add another link to the chain of dispossession of a nation as old as the state itself, while at the same time managing to hide the fact that one continuous thread runs from the 1948 refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, the early 1950s expulsion of Bedouin from the Negev desert, the current expulsion of Bedouin from the Jordan Valley, ranches for Jews in the Negev, discrimination in budgets in Israel, and shooting at Gazan fishermen to keep them from earning a respectable living. Millions of such continuous threads link 1948 to the present. They are the fabric of life for the Palestinian nation, as divided as it may be in isolated pockets. They are the fabric of life of Palestinian citizens of Israel and of those who live in their lands of exile.³ [my emphasis]

This Israel-as-victim meta-narrative is a key feature of Israel’s picture of itself that it presents to the rest of the world:

The foreign and international development ministries in the West and in the United States knowingly collaborate with the mendacious representation of Israel as victim, if only because every week they receive reports from their representatives in the West Bank and Gaza Strip about yet another link of dispossession and oppression that Israel has added to the chain, or because their own taxpayers' money make up for some of the humanitarian disasters, large and small, inflicted by Israel. [my emphasis]

And she warned her fellow Israelis that they were closing their eyes to important realities of their countries real situation:

We haven't heard masses of Tel Aviv and southern residents warning the stewards of the state about the ramifications of this destruction on the civilian population. The Israelis cheerfully wallow in their ignorance. This information and other similar facts are available and accessible to anyone who's really interested. But Israelis choose not to know. This willed ignorance is a foundation stone in the building of Israel's sense of victimization. But ignorance is ignorance: The fact that Israelis don't want to know what they are doing as an occupying power doesn't negate their deeds or Palestinian resistance. [my emphasis]

You’ve probably heard the stock claim, even from Bill and Hillary Clinton, that Israel offered the Palestinians their own independent state after the Oslo Accords were signed and those stubborn Palestinians turned it down and broke off negotiations over a further agreement. But Hass wrote in 2012:

In 1993, the Palestinians gave Israel a gift, a golden opportunity to cut the threads tying 1948 to the present, to abandon the country's characteristics of colonial dispossession, and together plan a different future for the two peoples in the region.

Did she say, “colonial dispossession”? I believe she did.

The Palestinian generation that accepted the Oslo Accords (full of traps laid by smart Israeli lawyers) is the generation that got to know a multifaceted, even normal, Israeli society because the 1967 occupation allowed it (for the purpose of supplying cheap labor) almost full freedom of movement. The Palestinians agreed to a settlement based on their minimum demands. One of the pillars of these minimum demands was treating the Gaza Strip and West Bank as a single territorial entity.

But once the implementation of Oslo started, Israel systematically did everything it could to make the Gaza Strip into a separate, disconnected entity, as part of Israel's insistence on maintaining the threads of 1948 and extending them. Since the rise of Hamas, it has done everything to back up the impression Hamas prefers - that the Gaza Strip is a separate political entity where there is no occupation. If that is so, why not look at things as follows: As a separate political entity, any incursion into Gazan territory is an infringement of its sovereignty, and Israel does this all the time. Does the government of the state of Gaza not have the right to respond, to deter, or at least the masculine right - a twin of the IDF's masculine right - to scare the Israelis just as Israel scares the Palestinians? [my emphasis]

And, of course, it’s now very much an issue in contemporary Israeli politics that Bibi Netanyahu encouraged and boosted Hamas exactly for the purpose of splitting the governance of the West Bank from that of Gaza and thereby to weaken the Palestinian negotiating position.

Finally, she notes at the end of that 2012 column, “In the West Bank, Palestinian activists try to develop a type of resistance different from the masculine, armed resistance. But the IDF puts down all popular resistance with zeal and resolve.”

And how did Israel respond in 2018 when Gazans tried Ghandian nonviolent protest in the “Great March of Return”?

Tens of thousands of Palestinians protested at the Gaza-Israel border fence on Friday, marking the beginning of the “Great Return March,” a 45-day-long series of protests and events planned to culminate on May 15 — Nakba Day. The organizers of the Gaza return march had said explicitly that the protest was meant to be nonviolent yet Israeli forces fired live bullets and tear gas at the demonstrators.

Israeli troops killed at least 15 Palestinians during Friday’s protests, which took place at several points along the besieged coastal strip’s border. The Palestinian Ministry of Health reported that an additional 1,400 people were wounded, roughly half of them from Israeli army sniper fire. The Israeli army reported zero injuries among its troops.⁴

A detailed two-part report by a UN Commission of Inquiry describes the events.⁵ (5) The Summary of the detailed findings portion states:

The Commission found reasonable grounds to believe that during these weekly demonstrations, the Israeli Security Forces (ISF) killed and gravely injured civilians who were neither participating directly in hostilities nor posing an imminent threat to life. Among those shot were children, paramedics, journalists, and persons with disabilities. 183 people were shot dead and another 6,106 were wounded with live ammunition. …

While the demonstrations were civilian in nature, bringing them under a law enforcement legal paradigm, they were at times violent, including throwing stones, cutting through the separation fence, and launching incendiary kites and balloons. The Commission found, however, that the use of lethal force in response was rarely necessary or proportionate. For lethal force to be permissible, the victim must pose an imminent threat to life or limb. The ISF violated international human rights law in most instances the Commission investigated.

ISF conduct also violated international humanitarian law, which permits civilians to be targeted only when they ‘directly participate in hostilities.’ This purposefully high threshold was not met by demonstrators’ conduct, in the view of the Commission, with one possible exception on 14 May.

But Netanyahu explained just the other day to CNBC in a softball interview that it is the Palestinians who are “savages.”⁶ Just don’t call that a “colonial” attitude. Because that would be denying Israel’s right to defend itself!

And the Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan last week just declared the UN itself to be a “terrorist entity.”⁷ And, of course, if you don’t accept that characterization, you are denying Israel’s right to defend itself! Although cheap propaganda claims like that don’t do nearly as much actual damage as the bombings and drone strikes Israel is carrying out in Gaza.

1. “Resist the Normalization of Evil”: Israeli Reporter Amira Hass on Palestine and Journalism. Democracy Now! YouTube channel 05/17/2024. (Accessed: 18-05-2024).

2. Israeli FM Slams Canadian Counterpart's Decision to Stop Sending Arms to Israel. Haaretz 03/19/2024. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-03-19/ty-article/report-canada-will-stop-sending-arms-to-israel-foreign-minister-says/0000018e-58a9-d88e-a39e-7dbb83210000> (Accessed: 2024-19-05).

3. Hass, Amira (2012): Israel's 'Right to Self-defense' - a Tremendous Propaganda Victory. Haaretz 11/19/2012. <https://www.haaretz.com/2012-11-19/ty-article/.premium/amira-hass-israelis-as-victims/0000017f-e71c-d97e-a37f-f77db6910000> (Accessed: 2024-19-05).

4. Photos: Tens of thousands march on Gaza border, Israeli troops open fire. +972 Magazine 03/30/2018. <https://www.972mag.com/photos-tens-of-thousands-march-on-gaza-border-israeli-troops-open-fire/> (Accessed: 2024-19-05).

5. Report of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the 2018 protests in the OPT. UN Human Rights Council – two parts, 02/28/2019 and 03/18/2019. <https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/co-iopt/report2018-opt> (Accessed: 2024-19-05).   

6. Watch CNBC's full interview with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu on Rafah, US relations and more. CNBC Television YouTube channel 05/15/2024. (Accessed: 2024-19-05).

7. The UN has become a ‘terrorist entity,’ asserts Israel’s UN envoy. Times of Israel 05/15/2024. <https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/the-un-has-become-a-terrorist-entity-asserts-israels-un-envoy/>> (Accessed: 2024-19-05).