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The Perils of Collective Punishment

The Israeli security cabinet's latest decision to reclassify Hamas as an "enemy entity" is a nice recognition of the obvious, but does nothing to explain its more dangerous proposal of withholding electricity and fuel to the Gaza Strip, which is now also re-designated "enemy territory." (Thanks for clearing that up.)

As someone who's been a vocal opponent of Islamism in both its cave-dwelling and people-powered manifestations, I'm left queasy at the prospect of blacking out an entire region that, at least under its current political leadership, is already living in the Dark Ages. Under international law, the Occupied Territories are still within the demesne of Israel, meaning that Israel is in effect giving the signal to take one of its own neighborhoods off the grid.

This is a scandal for even a nasty neocon like myself because one of the acknowledged early snafus of securing a post-Baathist Iraq was the Army Corps of Engineers' failure to get basic utilities like water and power up and running on time. As the last few years have demonstrated, these were utilities that would have gone, per force, to plenty of sectarian thugs and Al Qaeda riffraff skulking in the midst of — and in some cases, governing — the innocent and suffering. If the U.S. now admits that it should have run the risk of unintentionally giving this kind of aid to the enemy in Iraq, then why is Israel more reluctant to do so with respect to Palestine? As I've said before, the surge is really a militarily-implemented rescue operation of Iraqi infrastructure, and it is being conducted under much more violent conditions than what now exist in Gaza. Gen. Petraeus rightly understands that an occupier's inability to deliver basic resources for daily living is a fine way of doing the enemy's recruiting for it. (Hamas is already losing steam because of its own rancid ideology. Why allow even the hint of a chance for it to regain momentum by pointing to the evil Zionist pigs as the source of all its constituents' heating and lighting woes?)

Collective punishment is morally and pragmatically wrong.

Israel should learn from its past mistakes. As recently as last month, Tel Aviv decided to stop the shipment of paper into Gaza, thus threatening the on-time publication of schoolbooks for Palestinian students. The proffered rationale for this blockade — that those textbooks would instruct young minds in the ways of jihad — didn't quite wash because the schools in question were run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and thus had an international charter. Moreover, even if Haniyah-worshiping lesson plans did manage to find their way into the curriculum, this would have only proved the point of Israeli hawks: another feckless attempt at "peace-keeping" by the dire and irrelevant U.N.

Largely thanks to the efforts of Gershon Baskin and Hanna Siniora of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, enough textbooks and paper were eventually approved by the Israeli Foreign Ministry in late August so that Gazan UNRWA students were prepared for the first term.*

Pro-Israel Jews should fax Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni (her number is: +972-2-5303506) and Defense Minister Ehud Barak (his is: +972-3-697-6218) and let them know fighting Jew-hating militants and rocket launchers is a worthwhile and necessary cause, but denying an entire population energy and fuel is not.

* In my original post I mistakenly said there should be enough textbooks for the second term. The IPCRI has only requested this of the Defense Ministry. Sorry for the error.

View Comments (3)
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