Evelyn Gordon
Analysis from Israel

How to Tell that Pro-Palestinian Activists Don’t Care About Palestinians

Published March 25, 2011

Do pro-Palestinian activists actually care a whit about ordinary Palestinians? An implicit acknowledgement that the answer is “no” came from a surprising source this week: Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, herself a leading pro-Palestinian crusader.

Hass’s anti-Israel rhetoric is up there with the best of them (she describes Gaza, for instance, as “the world’s largest prison camp” and Israel as “crazy”). But unlike many of her fellow activists, she has actually lived among the Palestinians for years: first in Gaza, and currently in Ramallah. So she sees the results of Palestinian, Israeli and international policy firsthand, and has drawn an unusual conclusion: Even though Palestinians have every right to “defend themselves … by force of arms,” launching Qassam rockets at Israel from Gaza does nothing to further Palestinian independence; it merely supplies Israel with “pretexts” for counterstrikes in which innocent Palestinians are maimed and killed.

After all, the rockets are usually fired from the heart of Palestinian population centers (something Hass neglected to mention, preferring to imply that Israel targets civilians deliberately). That makes civilian casualties from Israeli counterstrikes almost inevitable. Just this week for instance, an errant Israeli shell killed four Palestinian civilians; the target was a group of terrorists launching mortars at Israel “from a grove just beyond our house,” as the brother of one of those killed told the New York Times.

Since the cost of the rocket fire far outweighs its benefits, Hass argued, anyone who cares about real live Palestinians should be denouncing it in an effort to pressure Hamas and other terrorist organizations to stop it. Instead, she charged, pro-Palestinian activists have given it tacit consent:

In the binary thinking of those who oppose the Israeli occupation (Palestinians, Israelis and foreigners), public criticism of the tactics used in the struggle of an occupied and dispossessed people is taboo. It is as if criticism would create symmetry between the attacker and the attacked. To a large extent, this taboo has been broken with regard to the Palestinian Authority: Many opponents of the occupation have no qualms about portraying the PA as a collaborator, or at least as the captive of its senior officials’ private interests. But when it comes to Hamas’ use of arms, silence falls.

She therefore ended her column with a challenge:

So for all those who demonstrated in support of the Gazans when they were trapped under Israeli fire, all those planners of past and future flotillas, this is your moment to raise your voices and say clearly: The Qassams merely feed Israel’s madness. It is not the Qassams that will ensure the Palestinians, both in and out of Gaza, a life of dignity. It is not the Qassams that will topple the Israeli walls around the world’s largest prison camp.

But will other pro-Palestinian activists take her up? I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Originally Published in: Commentary
Original Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/03/25/how-to-tell-that-pro-palestinian-activists-don%e2%80%99t-care-about-palestinians/
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Why Israel Needs a Better Political Class

Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Haviv Rettig Gur, which can be found here

Israel’s current political crisis exemplifies the maxim that hard cases make bad law. This case is desperate. Six months after the coronavirus erupted and nine months after the fiscal year began, Israel still lacks both a functioning contact-tracing system and an approved 2020 budget, mainly because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more worried about politics than the domestic problems that Israel now confronts. The government’s failure to perform these basic tasks obviously invites the conclusion that civil servants’ far-reaching powers must not only be preserved, but perhaps even increased.

This would be the wrong conclusion. Bureaucrats, especially when they have great power, are vulnerable to the same ills as elected politicians. But unlike politicians, they are completely unaccountable to the public.

That doesn’t mean Haviv Rettig Gur is wrong to deem them indispensable. They provide institutional memory, flesh out elected officials’ policies, and supply information the politicians may not know and options they may not have considered. Yet the current crisis shows in several ways why they neither can nor should substitute for elected politicians.

First, bureaucrats are no less prone to poor judgment than politicians. As evidence, consider Siegal Sadetzki, part of the Netanyahu-led triumvirate that ran Israel’s initial response to the coronavirus. It’s unsurprising that Gur never mentioned Sadetzki even as he lauded the triumvirate’s third member, former Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov; she and her fellow Health Ministry staffers are a major reason why Israel still lacks a functional test-and-trace system.

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