The New War Against Israel

Is there a lesson that American Jews should derive from the bloody May 31st encounter between Israeli naval commandos and Turkish Islamists? The world seems to have learned the wrong lesson: Everyone from the Obama administration to UN officials criticized the blockade of Gaza and demanded that Israel be investigated over its interception of the flotilla.

Lost in the obsessive media attention and manufactured international “outrage” that followed the incident is the way in which this latest mini-crisis captured the essence of the new war that is being waged against Israel. Israel’s enemies have accepted the fact that their military and economic weaknesses mean that they will have to convince more powerful forces to do their fighting for them. Now they are working to turn western democratic political opinion against the Jewish state so that it will be isolated, condemned, delegitimized and eventually destroyed. This strategy, unlike previous ones, is working.

During the first few decades of Israel’s existence, those seeking to destroy the Jewish homeland pursued an unimaginative strategy of conventional war: for the most part, Arab states fielded soldiers against the Israeli military. But the wars in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 were disastrous for the Arabs. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Arab regimes still denounced Israel but privately accepted their inability to defeat the IDF on the battlefield.

And so they switched methods. Terrorism rose as the go-to tactic for sustaining the fight against Israel. Sponsoring terrorism was largely cost-free for the Arab regimes because the IDF would invariably defer regional war in favor of the far less costly option of increased domestic security and limited engagements with the PLO and Hezbollah. But the terrorism strategy also failed. The culminating point was the second intifada (2000-2004), in which Israel prevailed over the suicide bombing war by killing terror leaders, building a security barrier and fighting a few limited battles in Palestinian towns that had been transformed into suicide-bomber factories. The current war represents the third large shift in strategy, and it combines crude military tactics with sophisticated PR: Hamas and Hezbollah, sponsored by Iran and Syria, build up a rocket infrastructure embedded in civilian populations. When fired at Israel, these weapons force a terrible dilemma on the Jewish state, which seeks to preserve both its moral standards and its international reputation: either take the punishment and be humiliated and weakened or fight back—and inevitably, no matter how careful the response, kill civilians.

Most everything modern western militaries do is grounded in the desire to separate soldiers from civilians. It is why our personnel wear uniforms; it is why only states are permitted to field armies; it is why we create elaborate and judicially enforced rules of engagement; it is one of the main reasons why we develop precision weapons. These innate cultural expectations about war are why we have such a hard time grasping the idea that the Iranian-Hezbollah-Hamas military strategy is to bring the war into villages and cities and literally force Israel to kill Arab civilians.

The flotilla was a microcosm of this strategy. The civilian casualties gave the delegitimization campaign against Israel the raw material it needs to advance. “War crimes” lawsuits are filed in European courts against Israeli officials. “Human rights” groups churn out context-free and often factually erroneous reports against the IDF, which are amplified and legitimized by a credulous international press. Groups such as the New Israel Fund pour millions of dollars into politicized “civil society” NGOs that propagandize about Israel being an “apartheid” state. Over time, the goal is to build credibility for a narrative that Israel is a cruel oppressor, a serial human rights violator and a state beyond the pale, deserving of pariah status.

In the flotilla incident, as in previous episodes of this new phase in the war against Israel, we witnessed an alliance of radical leftists and Islamists who adopted the rhetoric of human rights and international law to advance a violent and illiberal cause; we saw the cynical use of the Palestinians as pawns in the larger struggle to destroy Israel; the irresponsible media, which is always quick to pass judgment against Israel before the facts are known and always loath to correct the record after the truth comes out; and, perhaps most troublingly, the curious lack of outrage in liberal quarters when the cause of humanitarianism is warped and perverted to serve inhumane ends.

The lesson that American Jews must learn is that this new war has the potential to be far more dangerous and successful than previous ones, precisely because it seeks to convince westerners that the struggle against Israel should also be their struggle. It is thus unfortunate that the reaction to the flotilla from some liberal Jewish groups has not just been indifference to the new delegitimization war but active support of it. Americans for Peace Now released a statement calling the violent and anti-Semitic Turkish Islamists aboard the Mavi Marmara—two of whom had signed martyrdom statements before setting out on the flotilla—“dissidents.” J Street called the knife- and club-wielding thugs “civilians” and claimed they merely wished to bring “humanitarian supplies and construction materials to the Gaza Strip.” In their eagerness to distort the truth, cover for Israel’s enemies and reflexively assume Israel’s guilt, these statements are offensive and should have been contested by the liberals in whose name they were made.

But they weren’t. The flotilla incident showed once again that many liberal American Jews suffer a deficit of moral clarity and an inability or unwillingness to face the truth about the new war being waged against Israel.

Noah Pollak is a graduate student at Yale University and a contributor to Commentary’s blog, Contentions.