Hamas rockets no licence for Israeli overkill

With the full extent of the damage in Gaza now becoming clear - including more than 1000 deaths of men, women and children - Israel needs to ask itself some serious moral questions about the demonstrable overkill in its campaign responding to the rockets Hamas has fired into its territory.

Today The Age published my letter commenting on another letter ('One man's terrorist is another man's...' by Charles Meo, 22/1) and responding to an opinion piece by Mark Leibler, national chairman of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council in Wednesday's edition of the paper.

Meo took a relativistic view of the definition of terrorism, which I point out is not necessary to disagree with Leibler's defence of Israel's disproportionate and deadly response to Hamas rockets, which have killed a very small fraction of the number killed by Israel's military action.

Here's the letter as published, and then as submitted. My version is probably a bit long for the paper, but I include it here for completeness and interest. First, The Age:

Moral relativism

ONE can disagree with Mark Leibler's defence of Israel (Comment & Debate, 21/1) without descending to Charles Meo's moral relativism in defining terrorism (Letters, 22/1). Terrorists can never be right simply because they win. Al-Qaeda will never be right, even if it ultimately succeeds; the German officers who plotted to kill Hitler were right, despite their failure.

Instead, we can judge actions to be terrorism based on moral reasoning. The firing of rockets into Israel by Hamas is terrorism. Yet that does not give Israel the licence Leibler appears to think it has in launching indiscriminate attacks on Gaza.

Leibler argues that Israel's military action need only be proportional to the objective to be achieved. Yet such action should be proportional to the threat to be averted, and should be directed at combatants. That those combatants are entwined with an innocent Gazan population does not give Israel the right to kill innocents.

Leibler's reasoning that "terrorists cause terrorism, not policies that terrorists dislike" is also flawed. It could well be argued that Israel's oppression of Gazans contributes to terrorism, without ever justifying it.

Now, as submitted:

One can disagree with Mark Leibler's defence of Israel (Opinion, 21/1) without descending to Charles Meo's moral relativism in defining terrorism (Letters, 22/1). Terrorists can never be right simply because they win. Al Qaeda will never be right, even if it ultimately succeeds; the German officers who plotted to kill Hitler were right, despite their failure.

Instead, we can judge actions to be terrorism based on moral reasoning. The firing of rockets into Israel by Hamas is terrorism. Yet that does not give Israel the licence Leibler appears to think it has in launching indiscriminate attacks on Gaza that, by media reports, have killed more than a thousand men, women and children - many of them, and every dead child, innocent.

Leibler argues that Israel's military action need only be proportional to the objective to be achieved. Yet such action should be proportional to the threat to be averted, and should be directed at combatants. That those combatants are entwined with an innocent Gazan population does not give Israel the right to kill innocents - especially when the death toll from Hamas rockets fired at Israel is such a small number relative to those Israel has killed in its current campaign.

Leibler's reasoning that 'Terrorists cause terrorism, not policies that terrorists dislike' is also flawed. It could well be argued that Israel's oppression of Gazans contributes to terrorism, without ever justifying it.

Following the Holocaust, Israel had a widely acknowledged moral authority in its highly targeted pursuit of Nazi war criminals. Its present actions in Gaza are squandering that authority. Had Israel destroyed entire residential buildings housing innocent bystanders to get the monster Eichmann, its pursuit of him would have met with a far different international reception. How can Israel engage in such indiscriminate atrocities to eliminate terrorists living among the civilian population in Gaza?

The analogy with the pursuit of Eichmann is not perfect - elements within the country in which he was hiding (Argentina) were not firing rockets at Israel, yet the point about proportionality and non-combatant immunity should be clear.

I'd been submitting a few letters on this topic, when I came across this interesting post on Margaret Simons' Crikey blog, The Content Makers. The post and comments set a useful context for the Leibler opinion piece, in that they illustrate the lobbying efforts of Jewish community leaders with the editor of The Age, Paul Ramadge.

My two comments on the post set out my views on that. I have nothing against lobbying as such, except to say that potential influences on editorial content ought to be transparent to the paper's broader readership. I also believe that the key issue on which the lobbying occurred - publication by The Age of a poor critical piece about Israel - was a distraction from what should be the primary focus - the atrocities perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.