Everything You Feed Will Grow

A couple of days ago Ezra Klein wrote something very wise about the Israeli strikes. I urge you to read all of it — it is short — but here is one bit:

Hamas lacks the technology to aim its rockets. They’re taking potshots. In response, the Israeli government launched air strikes that have now killed more than 280 Palestinians, injured hundreds beyond that, and further radicalized thousands in the Occupied Territories and millions in the region. The response will not come today, of course. It will come in months, or even in years, when an angry orphan detonates a belt filled with shrapnel, killing himself and 25 Israelis. At which point the Israelis will launch air strikes killing another 70 Palestinians, radicalizing thousands more, leading to more bombings, and so the cycle continues.

I think it’s time people got into their heads that movements, ethnic groups and causes cannot be bombed into submission. I’m not saying a great power should never use military force to strike back at terrorists or subversives. However, I do think that a military response is useful only under very limited circumstances.

Naturally, Ezra got slammed by people who think every criticism of the government of Israel is tantamount to condoning the Holocaust. His response is equally good.

Long ago I heard a saying, “Everything you feed will grow.” I think that applies here. Israel needs to ask itself, What are we feeding? Hamas should ask itself the same thing, of course, but as Ezra says Hamas lives “off Palestinian hatred of Israel. Their currency is the oppression of their people. It is oxygen to their cause.” Put another way, Hamas lives because Israel is feeding it. Until Israel figures that out, Hamas will thrive.

In other news, President Bush is on vacation.

24 thoughts on “Everything You Feed Will Grow

  1. Random thoughts. First, the Simian in Chief has around 20 days left in office, and he can’t be bothered to take a little time off from his vacation to address an international conflict? I guess regulation starts at the top; maybe this is why everyone was asleep at the switch on the economy, Katrina, 9/11, etc. After all, relaxation is so important, and the Crawford brush isn’t going to cut itself down. (Irony, rightie trolls.)

    Second, the Irish were displaced from the six counties some 300+ years ago, longer than we’ve been in the US. The IRA has taken the unrealistic position that they should “give it back”, but recently, after 300 years, they’re starting to look at how we can work within the status quo. This one historical benchmark suggests it can take A Long Time Indeed to resolve territorial coflicts.

    Apply that to the Palistinian people. They’ve been displaced for some 50 years, as I understand it. There are living Palistinians who can visit the property that’s no longer theirs. That’s a very fresh wound and it’s going to take a very, very long time to get over it, if Israel intends to keep the property (and I believe they do.) 300 years? Wouldn’t be surprised.

    So, finally, somebody has to be the adult down there for the long haul, learn how to stop or prevent an attack, or punish for the attack, in a way that does not escalate the violence, causing a mutual retribution cycle from starting. Wicked hard to do. But you can’t get into this escalation cycle; they’re really hard to stop, short of killing everybody on the other side. And that solution is generally considered to be bad.

  2. If Hamas is regarded as a terrorist organization and it is controlling territory and launching attacks from that territory, it may well be a matter of national self defense for Israel to respond by making actual war on that territory. Not only does Israel regard Hamas as such, but so does Barack Obama, but if Israel can finish the job of displacing Hamas control by January 20, so much the better from their perspective, and probably from his.

  3. One simply cannot assume that the Zionists running the show (and not just in Israel) are such brain dead knuckle draggers that they are NOT well aware that they are indeed feeding continuous cycles of mayhem and totally disproportionate responses. How else does one ‘feed’ the so-called, and clearly ginned up… Global War on Terror? How else to incrementally de-sensitize western masses to the use and acceptance of overwhelming force? How else to hasten the agenda of the ‘New Order’ various ‘leaders’ have spoken of?

  4. Israel is conducting the same genocidal policy against the Palestineans as the American “settlers” conducted on native Americans, but with more effecient weapons and smaller “reservations”.

    Israel will continue the policy of collective punishment until the last Palestinean is either a mindless zombie,dead or in a zoo. The Israelis continue to do this with American tax dollars and American supplied weapons.

    The whole world watches as American leadership sits on its hands unwilling to offend the overlords who busily extend Israeli borders.
    The “Holy Land” will be “cleansed” so that “God’s chosen” will live in peace, regardless if they were born in the former Soviet Union or in New York City.
    Nancy Pelosi, when asked why we continue to support Israel unconditionally responded” That’s just the way it is.”
    The current flare up is a direct result of the brutal blockade of Gaza.
    The use of hellfire missiles and thousand pound lazer-guided bombs in civilian neighboorhoods is the work of psychopaths, and for the lack of a better term, “Klingonesque”.
    Israel is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity for which they will never be punished in the world’s courts.These are the facts. Like it or not.
    While we are sleeping, images of the Gaza slaughter are beamed throught out the Muslim world.
    Any critism of Israel is “antisemitic” any action against Israel is “terrorism”.
    “That’s just the way it is”
    “An eye makes the whole world blind” indeed.

  5. If Hamas is regarded as a terrorist organization and it is controlling territory and launching attacks from that territory, it may well be a matter of national self defense for Israel to respond by making actual war on that territory.

    No. People need to stop thinking in terms of conventional war as fought against conventional nation-states. Conventional war against a movement, party, ideology, ethnic group, etc. does not work for the reasons Ezra expressed and is counter-productive in the long run. This is not to say that some form of military response is never needed, but it has to be used very smartly, even surgically. Brute, overwhelming force ain’t it.

  6. I hear ya,erinyes. And Hillary will use nuclear weapons to defend Israel, and Obama has pledged his undying support for Israel regardless of right or wrong. Would be nice if we could ally ourselves with truth, justice and fairness even if it departed from our Israel can do no wrong policies.

  7. I agree with Amir, Israel knows what it is doing; I believe it wants a response. Elections are coming and this insures the electorate will react instead of giving measured thought to what party gets power. I think the cycle is disgusting and I do not blame the Palestinians, all the blame is on the Israeli government. You cannot govern an aphartied state and not have an uprising; you cannot occupy stolen land for 3 generations and not have an uprising. You cannot deny citizenship to would-be immigrants based on ethnic and religious membership and not have an uprising.

    What if the UN decided that it was time to give long island back to the Algonquian Indians? And unless you where 25% Algonquian and believed in their god you would have to leave. Would the current residents resist or just go quietly? I think we all know the answer to that.

  8. Sadly, I don’t think much will change on this front after Jan. 20th. Although I hope at the end of 2009 I can list that as one of my “bad predictions.”

  9. I see little difference in the Israel – Hamas disproportion than the US – Iraq – Afghanistan attacks. The US is making enemies in both those nations for hundreds of years to come. I recall a news report of a huge celebration in Iraq where they were marking the anniversary of a victory in a war from centuries ago! The Iraqis will not forget what we have done to them for a very long time.

    I believe that the Bush Admin knew exactly what they were doing when they sank the ship of state into the bog of Afghanistan and assaulted the long-term memory of the Iraqi people. They specifically antagonized these nations with the intention of making enemies for the US for generations to come.

    Enriching war profiteers, legitimizing mercenary armies, ‘losing’ pallet-loads of cash, creating enemies for centuries to come: all part of the Republican plan to destroy America. Each one a step on the path to making America a third-world dictatorship.

    Now we have the Pentagon threatening martial law over any little excuse. This time it’s the ‘war college’ saying that they’ll overthrow the civilian government if the GOP can engineer a bad enough economic crisis.

  10. Comrade Rutherford — although the effects of Bush Admin policies are precisely what you say they are, I think it’s debatable how much the major players consciously “know” and how much of it is coming from their ids.

    The Bushies are mostly an unconscious crew. They don’t know themselves, they don’t understand their own motivations. They react viscerally and think up “reasons” after. This is their pattern over and over and over.

  11. The media coverage of this really raises my paranoid (the media is controlled by one person) antenna. All the coverage of this is using the same talking points: Israel is only attacking military targets (since when is a university a military target). The attacks are in response to rocket attacks by Hama’s (I have only seen video of on rocket landing site it was a small 1foot diameter hole in a vacant field). If Hamas has been firing so many rockets why no casualties? Until yesterday they only had one death, then 3 yesterday (1 month of rocket attacks 1 death, 1 day of rockets 3 deaths?). Yesterday all the cables started showing Obama speech to APAIC, as if to corner him into the same unquestioning policies and to neutralize any opposition from his supporters. The media cannot be trusted to report on this issue, they are completely compromised by Israeli interests. “That’s just the way it is”.

  12. maha – 10:15 am – an interpretation of your second paragraph:

    Once government, especially one influenced by ideologies, adopts a policy and implements it, all subsequent activity becomes an effort to justify it. In such an environment reason becomes a heresy and must be silenced.

  13. Barbara,

    No. People need to stop thinking in terms of conventional war as fought against conventional nation-states. Conventional war against a movement, party, ideology, ethnic group, etc. does not work for the reasons Ezra expressed and is counter-productive in the long run. This is not to say that some form of military response is never needed, but it has to be used very smartly, even surgically. Brute, overwhelming force ain’t it.

    It seems to me that you are arguing tactics if you simply think the military operation is not smart or surgical enough. If a military operation is necessary (as sometimes you feel it may be) then the best hope would be for them to limit civilian casualties. I think that Hamas cannot be wiped out militarily, as you say, but the territory they control can be taken out of their control. So much for George Bush’s theory that democracies never go to war against one another, anyhow. Hamas will still exist, and Israel will still have enemies which it cannot defeat on the field of battle, and this operation may not make any improvement on that score. Nonetheless, the rocket attacks from Gaza can be stopped, and must be stopped.

    Conventional war makes sense when you are fighting over territory, not when you are fighting over ideology. This is a territorial action, however, as I see it.

    • I think that using military force to route Hamas out of the territory it occupies will make it stronger in the long run. Short-term, maybe it makes sense, but long-term it’s a big mistake.

  14. I think we should have learned some of this from our Vietnam experience, but it seems we have to keep relearning it. It’s hard to remove an enemy from their territory when they melt into the indiginous population when not actually fighting. Any attempt to do so (a) fails, and (b) creates an angry populace, which (c) leads to more enemies.

    Conventional warfare works against conventional armies, who might all surrender when they’ve had enough. Terrorism, no matter where it is, is not a nail; a hammer isn’t going to solve this problem.

  15. Barbara, you may be correct that this action will strengthen Hamas in the long run, but then again it depends on a lot of other factors, such as Fatah, which controls the West Bank and which seemingly supports Israel’s right to defend itself. The fact is that Israel has a right to exist as strong as any other nation, all of which were founded upon occupation of territory for a sufficiently long period of time as to become accepted as unquestioned. Hamas does not respect Israel’s right to exist, therefore Israel need not respect Hamas’s right to exist.

  16. Michael,Fatah “seemingly” supports Israel’s right to exsist because it was cobbled together by the U.S. and Israel, like so many other corrupt governments in the Muslim world.

    I agree Israel has a “right to exsist”, but the policy of collective punishment and land stealing are crimes against humanity, which has NO right to exsist.
    If I remember correctly, Hamas is the result of free elections in Palestine.

    If Israel is not reeled in, we can expect more trouble in Lebanon, which could see Jihadis streaming in to fight Israel on Israeli soil where their nukes are unusable.Remember, Hisbulah kicked Israeli ass in the ’06 war, much to the shock of Bush and Olmert.

    Like so much behavior we have seen in the past several years, the situation between Israel and Palestine is unsustainable and needs repair ASAP.

  17. Erinyes, I’m not defending the settlements or anything like that, and Israel does need to make major concessions if it wants peace. You’re absolutely right that the situation is unsustainable and needs repair, hopefully the incoming administration will be more helpful on that account.

    As for Lebanon invading Israel, I think it would be a very different matter than the invasion of Lebanon by Israel. Do not expect Israel to yield an inch of territory to Lebanon, and it would be a mistake for Hezbollah to overestimate themselves to that degree. The ’06 war was a stupid move and I said so at the time.

Comments are closed.