Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
Indeedies. I'll even go a little further.
And I'll take one step to the side but continue on that vector, using the same example:
There's no such thing as terrorism. What we have are:
1. International unconventional warfare, and
2. Low grade civil war, and
3. Insurgency.
Now, let's attempt to analyze the Israel/Gaza conflict in these terms, one by one.
1. International unconventional warfare
Hardly very unconventional, these tactics have been employed by several nations, with Israel and the USA as two of the most prolific actors on this arena. Gaza could be seen in these terms, but only if we admit the existence of a Palestinian state. And from the Israeli side of the equation, that's a nonstarter, while from the other side of the other side of the equation, Israel has had several campaigns, while Palestine has had a rash of border incidents, not unlike the brief spat between Turkey and Syria just a short while ago, where a few stray hits in Turkey were answered with a few warning shots for Syria, demonstrating a measure of porportionality. When one party abandons porportionality, that is called escalation and leads to a war of some duration, i.e. a campaign, in which the escalating party is, by convention, considered the belligerent.
So, yes, if we recognize Palestine as a nation, we can deem Hamas a legitimate military and see this as Palestine using "unconventional" warfare in response to a long standing war that Israel started and occasionally renews with military campaigns against Palestine. This, in most cases, can be resolved by obliterating the nation in question. Israel has successfully levelled the governing body in the past and it's made no difference, calling into question the concept of a Palestinian state after the presumed assassination of Arafat, who at least had a certain measure of control. But if we still cling to this analysis, it's possible to progress to genocide as a resolution. Israel has been a bit hesitant to do this, but is presently out of options according to this view.
In this analysis, our current predicament started on Nov 8th of this year, when Israeli forces killed a 13 year old boy, a civilian, during a raid in Gaza. In response to that, Palestine ran a low intensity campaign against Israel, in which there may have been one Israeli casualty in total, so direct porportionality. In response to that, Israel started a de facto war on Palestine, without adherence to ROE, and the casualty figures are so far about a hundred to none.
The simplest solution if this were a correct analysis would be for Israel to stop being the aggressor.
2. Low grade civil war
Domestic disputes do happen, usually over seperatism (ETA, IRA, etc.), ideology (RAF, etc.), poverty (Mexico, Afghanistan, etc.), group struggles (Indian castes, Norwegian Saami, Native Americans, etc.) or history, the latter being the result in all cases in which there has been a long standing dispute of some sort. Once you call in the military, you've departed from treating this as being a domestic issue entirely (hence not listing the US independence as a domestic issue in the UK), and the IDF is a military the last time I checked. To underline that this is an incorrect analysis, despite most of these grounds for conflict existing in Gaza, we need only look to the clear separation between the parties, the homogeniety of the parties and the fact that there is no real due process for people living in the geographic area of Gaza.
This conflict is not domestic; these are not tensions in a single state.
3. Insurgency:
Quite frequently, a colonial power (UK in India and America), an occupying force (Nazi Germany in Norway) or an invader (USA in Afghanistan) will be faced with a certain level of resistance to what the Pashtun so nicely put as "bearing arms on another man's land when unwelcome", and the oppression that tends to go along with maintaining such an unwelcome presence. I suppose it's the nation state equivalent of rape, this use of force to maintain an unwelcome presence where one was not invited, and is not wanted, for one's own reasons.
Insurgency has only one resolution: leave.
The alternative is, as has successfully been employed throughout history, to continue to thoroughly oppress the population and to live with the occasional bouts of violence that inevitably follow an ongoing unwelcome presence. In short, as applied to the Gaza situation, for Israel to live with the attirition and expend the necessary resources to keep the Palestinian population oppressed, without driving them into that "rock and a hard place, back to the wall" spot where people eventually find the spine to cast off their shackles and either have nothing to lose or are willing to lose it; since it takes quite a fair bit of prodding to get someone to that point, this is easy to avoid.
History tells us nothing is as easy as oppressing human beings, particularly women, children and the elderly, three groups that together make up the vast majority of the Palestinian population. Yet the Israeli seem to, if we accept this analysis, have crossed the magic line where continued occupation is a dead proposition. Lo and behold, they are realizing this. They can eke out a few more years by upping the level of oppression dramatically and "mowing the lawn" more frequently and more brutally, but when you've beated the hold you've got out of a population, you're done. That situation can only be resolved by leaving or clearing the land of life and colonizing it. The Israeli government seems to be pondering which of those two options to go for, and whether there's an exit strategy that won't cost them the election.
I'm kind of inclined to go with this view, of the "evil empire" and the "rebel insurgents".
Why, one might ask, and the answer, for me, is simple enough:
This is the view Israel is acting according to.
Actually, I omitted one other option, that Israel has bungled in the past, which is the classic Roman solution that Gaius Marius instated: to take the territory by force of arms on the ground, settle the conquered lands with a heavy military presence that makes the officers quite invested as a sort of warlord in their own right, seize a significant portion of their women, and start normalizing things so that they'll one day be proper Roman citizens, without bitching about any frustrations they might take out on you. Presumably, while subjected to that treatment, the Jewish population never observed very closely, or simply failed to pass on the tip to their descendants. Or maybe they don't have the stomach for it. I doubt that, with 90% of this subpopulation being in favor of genocide (ironic for a group that's been through one). Rather, they don't really want Palestine. They want to kill Palestinians, or step on them, either will do, or else have them off their hands, being disinterested in having anything else to do with them. With USD 900 per capita annual GDP and 46% of the population below the poverty line, you'd think the Israeli could find a cheap way to exploit these people, and we'd all be better off for it, including the Palestinians.
Conclusion:
Terrorism is nothing but a buzzword to refuse to deal with reality, instead going for an absurd DC Comics simplification of the world into black and white with everything causally disconnected and nothing to be done about anything but to wait for some hero to come render enough violence unto the bad guys (them) to save the good guys (us). Well, that's pretty much how simple it must seem to people in Gaza, too, given their level of education and their age. But people in Israel don't have that excuse, and unlike comics, reality has this nasty property that a violent resolution isn't Superman hauling your ass off to jail, but rather women and children screaming in terror, the real deal, not the buzzword.
A student blogger in Tel Aviv neatly put it, yesterday, that when a traffic jam might be a bomb, you know you're in Israel.
A journalist similarly put it, that when you wake up under your desk just in time for the second blast to fill the room with glass and knock the wind out of you, when the next three blasts are within seconds and people run across the broken glass to dive for cover under your desk, when people have nowhere to run or hide and just resume their fearful lives once the bombs are gone because they've been that close many times before, well...
... then you know you're not in Israel anymore.
Then you know you're in Gaza.
They get terror.
Really.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Rethinking the rules of war - 
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