Addressing Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s outlandish charge that Israel’s efforts to defend itself against Hamas rockets and tunnels “surpassed even Hitler,” an op-ed by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen today concluded that much criticism of Israel in effect “blame[s] the victim.”
After pointing out the extraordinary efforts Israel makes to avoid civilian casualties, noting that Israel “has warned civilians with telephone calls and text messages and even dummy bombs hitting the roof,” which “is far more than President Obama has done when U.S. drones kill terrorists in Pakistan,” Cohen gets to the core of his argument.
Erdogan’s remarks are merely the reductio ad absurdum of the anti-Israel argument. Some accuse Israel of a hideous lack of proportionality without pausing to say what the proper proportion of death and destruction should be. Would Hamas have ceased firing rockets into Israel if Israel had bombed less? Somehow, I think not. Would Hamas have blown up its own tunnels if Israel had ceased its attack after, say, a week? Again, no. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, did the United States go into Afghanistan to kill exactly 2,977 al-Qaeda and Taliban, an eye for every eye extinguished on that infamous day? Israel is a small nation of only about 8 million people, more than a fifth of them Arabs. Proportionality is a luxury beyond its reach.
It is clear that much of the world has grown weary of Israel. … Yet there is an edge to the outrage that is elsewhere lacking. When did thousands gather in Europe to protest the Syrian slaughter — not just the government’s abhorrent bombing, use of gas and repression but the torture and murder of about 10,000 activists and dissidents? It was a mass murder that the Syrian government studiously archived — photos and such — which surely deserves the Nazi analogy that comes so easily to the tongue of Erdogan and others. No matter. Silence.
In the end, Cohen writes that the effort to blame Israel “make the victim worse than the victimizer” and “does more than blame the victim. It tends to exonerate the criminal.”
[Photo: Daniel X. O’Neil / WikiCommons ]