Israelis killing Palestinians, and vice versa

[Englander]

Is 'moral equivalency' really so wrong?

By Henry Siegman, HENRY SIEGMAN is a senior fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations and a visiting professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
June 18, 2006

THE DEATH OF an entire Palestinian family — a father and his six children — on a Gaza beach earlier this month, followed just a few days later by an Israeli missile strike that killed nine more Palestinian civilians, has reopened the controversy about whether there is really much difference between Palestinian terrorism and Israel's military retaliations.

Writing in Israel's Maariv, columnist Dan Margalit argues that "even if an Israeli shell killed them, there was no intention to kill peaceful civilians on a beach in Gaza. On the other hand, the Kassam fired at Sderot is an ongoing, systematic and conscious effort at the premeditated killing of (Israeli) civilians." He concludes that "only a world lacking integrity and full of conspiracies ignores the decisive difference in intentions between the two sides."

The last time this controversy flared was following the release of Steven Spielberg's movie "Munich." The movie was criticized for its "moral equivalence," allegedly equating Palestinian terrorism and Israeli retaliations. Much in the spirit of Margalit's angry comment, Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic argued at the time that the equation is false because "the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective."

The distinction might have had greater merit if Israeli strikes held out any prospect of ending, or even reducing, Palestinian terrorism. In fact, they have the opposite effect. Ofer Shelah writes in Yedioth Ahronoth that even those in the Israeli Defense Forces responsible for this policy now admit that in the early days of the Palestinian intifada, retaliatory strikes contributed to the continuation of the conflict and the great outbreak of terrorism starting in mid-2001. The IDF's notion that "what doesn't work by force will work with more force" has proved its bankruptcy.

The vast disproportion between Palestinian civilian casualties from Israeli "mistakes" and Israeli casualties from Palestinian terrorist assaults also brings into question the distinction between the two. It suggests that the killing of Palestinian civilians is, at the very least, more a matter of Israeli indifference than a mistake. Not a single Israeli has been killed by a Kassam rocket since Israel's disengagement from Gaza last year, although during this period Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli artillery and airstrikes virtually on a daily basis. (According to B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, Israeli forces have killed about 3,400 Palestinians since the intifada started, and Palestinians have killed about 1,000 Israelis).

More at;
LA Times

[cali]

1. What a good article,

thanks for posting it.

[pelsar]

2. and yet they keep on trying to kill us...

(According to B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, Israeli forces have killed about 3,400 Palestinians since the intifada started, and Palestinians have killed about 1,000 Israelis).

is there moral equivalancy?...so when i'm standing over palestenains waiting in line for a security check with my machine gun...morally i can "open up on them" and kill as many as possible since that is what a palestenains jihadnik would do given the chance.

that would be the morally equivilant to the suicide bomber of the jihadnkim...