Excerpted from Jonathan Freedland
They, like everyone else, condemned the brutal June kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers on the West Bank, an act immediately blamed on the Hamas leadership (falsely so, it later turned out: the kidnapping was, in fact, the work of a local “lone cell,” acting without authorization). But some felt queasy during the subsequent two-week Israeli operation to root out Hamas militants there, referred to as “mowing the lawn,” not least because several Palestinian civilians were killed in the process.
Few of these campaigners knew that the Israeli authorities had, in fact, established from the start that the boys were dead and apparently withheld that information from the public.
Liberal Zionists condemned the Hamas response to the West Bank lawn mowing—the resumption of rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel—but they hoped Benjamin Netanyahu’s government would react with restraint. And of course the eventual discovery of the teenagers’ corpses had liberal Zionists standing in solidarity with Israel during its hour of national grief. But when that led to the revenge kidnapping and murder by Jewish extremists of a Palestinian teenager from East Jerusalem, forced by his abductors to drink gasoline and then set alight, they were appalled at what furies had been unleashed.
But liberal Zionists felt conflicted. A death rate that saw civilians account for four out of every five Palestinians killed—and that by July 25, according to the UN, included nearly 200 children—was hard to defend. Earlier this week, David Landau, wrote that it was no longer good enough to rely on the traditional hasbara sound bite that, while Hamas deliberately targets civilians, Israel only ever kills civilians by accident. Citing halacha, Landau argued that when it’s certain that civilians will die as a result of one’s actions, the distinction between intended and unintended becomes meaningless and is “nullified.” (Landau added that a ground operation was more morally defensible, because it allowed for greater precision.)
Reports that Israelis were sitting on garden chairs on a hilltop by the Gaza border, munching popcorn as they watched the shelling of Gaza, as if witnessing a fireworks display, wrongfooted many usually reliable defenders of Israel. I have heard one rabbi, an avowed Zionist, describe these developments as nothing less than “a failure of Judaism.”
Privately, people admit to growing tired of defending Israeli military action when it comes at such a heavy cost in civilian life, its futility confirmed by the frequency with which it has to be repeated.
