And lately we hear from our enemies that Israel is causing ‘collective punishment” and its military operation is not “proportional”.
And so, we must be careful not to submit to any terms that obfuscate rather than clarify. Many of these terms are meant to hide the plain meaning and instead now find their home on placards carried by protesting “useful idiots” in universities together with their Islamist allies.
We must be clear that
-since 2005 Israel: has not been in Gaza
and that
--South African-style apartheid does not exist in Israel,
- only the Arabs are genocidal and not the Jews,
-that the so-called peace process is just another Islamist trick to get more land on their way to wiping out the Jewish state,
-that there is no equivalent cycle of violence when one side is just defensive,
-that free Palestine means killing the Jews who live in Israel and
-that there is no comparison between hardline Israelis and hardline Islamists.
We now hear a lot of pundits or activists criticize Israel for its collective punishment of the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza. Many who make this allegation do not put it in the context of Hamas’ horrible crimes against civilians on October 7th, nor do they mention the genocidal aims, clearly outlined in the Hamas Charter – which I would suggest are well known to the people of Gaza.
How can allegations of collective punishment be made in the absence of any discussion of the actual crimes of Hamas, including their women and children, and the acquiescence of their educators and imams for mis-educating youth to grow up to be terrorists and suicide bombers, and for placing military instillations in schools, and for the doctors and hospital administrators to allow rocket storage and launching from their hospitals?
Seldom is the use of the term collective punishment accompanied by a discussion of how Hamas has turned all of Hamas into a military base with the full knowledge of their people including media, educators, and imams. Given the Hamas charter and the fact that almost all Gazans support Hamas, anti-Israel types do not want to discuss this. Furthermore, with the cancer of moral equivalency spreading through the West, the crimes of Hamas get washed away with every opportunity to either equate the IDF and all Israelis with Hamas or to blame Israel rather than just equate it.
Another interesting moral travesty about the October 7th massacre is now being discussed.
According to some witnesses, the massacre perpetraters included both Palestinian Arab women and children, the former mostly stealing clothes and the latter being given guns and instructions to shoot people.
Unfortunately, most of the world will be against Israel and that could hasten more difficulties for Israel. We are worried about an axis between Russia and Iran, especially because Russia feels itself quite threatened by western support for Ukraine and Iran has been quite candid on its plans for the Jewish state.
The most catastrophic possibility, G-d forbid, is the beginning of a second Shoah as our enemies allege that Israel is undertaking collective punishment against the Palestinian Arabs so they will support collective punishment against the Jews. Accordingly we must fight the use of the term collective punishment as it applies to Israel.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that Hamas “attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people”. However, this was soon after the hospital was hit by certain parts of a missile launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Guterres statement was no doubt influenced by a too hasty and unfair conclusion that Israel would do such a thing.
From the Chinese Foreign Minister to an Arab opinion writer in anti-Zionist Haaretz to government members in Australia and New Zealand to Doctors Without Borders, the allegations of collective punishment increase daily. What is collective punishment?
According to Oxford Public International Law, collective punishment is a form of sanction imposed on persons or a group of persons in response to a crime committed by one of them or a member of the group. As noted by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the concept of collective punishment does not refer to sanctions imposed pursuant to the application of penal law characterized by respect for due process, but rather to ‘penalties of any kind inflicted on persons or entire groups of persons, in defiance of the most elementary principles of humanity.
But what if most people in a nation have accepted genocidal aims? What if the Gazans are the new Nazis, totally obsessed with murdering every Jew and taking all of Israel? What if all Gazans support a party, Hamas, which has a charter pledging to kill all the Jews. It seems to me that collective punishment is not applicable to a society where all or substantially all accept the murder and genocide promoted in that society and in its Charter.
Alan Dershowitz, the famous law professor, has written about the international law of proportionality, which is somewhat related and very often misunderstood:
"In the weeks to come, Israeli strikes will accidentally kill civilians in Gaza, because Hamas deliberately uses Palestinian children, women, the elderly and disabled as human shields. Some are willing shields; others are pressured or forced to risk their lives to protect Hamas killers. The international law of "proportionality" allows Israel to destroy important military targets — such as Hamas leaders or rocket launchers — even though they know that a certain number of civilians may be killed or injured. The only requirement is that the military value of the target be proportional to the number of anticipated collateral deaths and injuries among civilians. The rule of "proportionality" does not mean that Israel is permitted to kill the same number of civilians as those killed by Hamas. The rule of proportionality also depends on how "civilian" these "civilians" actually are. Israel legally has more leeway in endangering the lives of civilians who volunteer to be shields, or who are in other ways complicit with Hamas, than they would be with regard to young children or others who are completely innocent."