As in Operation Cast Lead, the last big conflict between Israel and
Hamas, and as during the operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon, much
of the world screams in outrage while America yawns. If anything, many
of Israel’s military operations are more popular and less
controversial in the United States than they are in Israel itself.
This time around, President Barack Obama and his administration have
issued one statement after another in support of Israel’s right to
self defense, and both houses of Congress have passed resolutions in
support of Jerusalem’s response.

Commentators around the world grasp at straws in seeking to explain
what’s going on. Islamophobia and racism, say some. Americans just
don’t care about Arab deaths and they are so blinded by their fear of
Islam that they can’t see the simple realities of the conflict on the
ground. Others allege that a sinister Jewish lobby controls the media
and the political system through vast power of Jewish money; the poor
ignorant Americans are the helpless pawns of clever Jews. Still others
suggest that it is fanatical fundamentalists with their carry on
flight bags packed for the Rapture who are behind American blindness
to Israel’s crimes.

America is a big country with a lot of things going on, but the real
force driving American support for Israeli actions in Gaza isn’t
Islamophobia, Jewish conspiracies or foam-flecked religious nuts. It’s
something much simpler: many though not all Americans look at war
through a distinctive cultural lens. Readers of Special Providence
know that I’ve written about four schools of American thinking about
world affairs; from the perspective of the most widespread of them,
the Jacksonians, what Israel is doing in Gaza makes perfect sense. Not
only are many Jacksonians completely untroubled by Israel’s response
to the rocket attacks in Gaza, many genuinely don’t understand why the
rest of the world is so steamed about Israel—and so angry with the
United States.

Americans as a people have never much believed in fighting by “the
rules.” The Minutemen who fought the British regulars at Lexington and
Concord in 1776 thought that there was nothing stupider in the world
than to stand in even ranks and brightly colored uniforms waiting to
shoot and be shot like gentlemen. They hid behind stone walls and
trees, wearing clothes that blended in with their surroundings, and
took potshots at the British wherever they could. George Washington
saved the Revolution by a surprise attack on British forces the night
before Christmas; far from being ashamed of an attack no European
general of the day would have countenanced, Americans turned a
painting of the attack (“Washington Crossing the Delaware”) into a
patriotic icon. In America, war is not a sport.

Theoreticians of “just war” say that in order for war to be
justifiable, two tests must be met. You have to have a legitimate
cause for war (self defense, for example, rather than grabbing land
from a weaker neighbor) and you must fight the war in the right way.
You must fight fair (that is, fight a just war), and you must fight
nice.

One of the criteria for jus in bello (fighting nice as opposed to jus
ad bellum which is about whether it is just ) is proportionality. If
the other guy comes at you with a stick, you can’t pull a knife. If
he’s got a knife, you can’t pull a gun. If he burned your barn, you
can’t nuke his capital. Your use of force must be proportionate to the
cause and to the danger.

Israel’s fiercer critics attack it for fighting unjust wars against
the Palestinians. For some, Zionism itself is an illegitimate idea and
a state that has no right to exist has no right to defend itself.
Anything it does to defend itself is a crime. This is how Hamas and
many others think and it is why people in this camp are able to work
themselves up into such a froth of indignation and rage when Israel
responds to their fire.

For others, Israel may have a right to exist, but its occupation of
the West Bank and other crimes against the Palestinians have deprived
it of a just grounds for war when Palestinians attack it. People in
this camp attack any use of force by Israel as lacking jus ad bellum,
basically because they think Israel has forfeited its jus by its
occupation and settlement policy. This is where a lot of the non-
Muslim European left comes out and it is why they are so quick to
attack Israel for a war which, after all, was triggered by rockets
from Gaza landing in Israel.

But more moderate critics of Israel (including many Israelis) focus on
jus in bello, and in particular they look at the question of
proportionality. When the Palestinians flick a handful of fairly crude
rockets at random across Israel, these critics say, Israel has a right
to a kind of pinprick response: tit for tat. But it isn’t entitled to
bring the full power of its industrial grade air force and its mighty
ground forces into an operation designed to crush Hamas at the cost of
hundreds of civilian casualties. You can’t fight slingshots with
tanks.

For many people around the world, this seems patently obvious: Israel
has a right to respond to attacks from Hamas but it doesn’t have an
unlimited right to respond to limited attacks with unlimited force.
Israeli blindness to this obvious moral principle strikes many
observers as evidence of hardheartedness and national moral decline,
and colors their perceptions of many other Israeli policies.

The whole jus in bello argument sails right over the heads of most
Americans.  The proportionality concept never went over that big here.
Many Americans are instinctive Clausewitzians; Clausewitz argued that
efforts to make war less cruel end up making it worse, and a lot of
Americans agree.

From this perspective, the kind of tit-for-tat limited warfare that
the doctrine of proportionality would require is a recipe for unending
war: for decades of random air strikes, bombs and other raids. An
endless war of limited intensity is worse, many Americans
instinctively feel, than a time-limited war of unlimited ferocity. A
crushing blow that brings an end to the war—like General Sherman’s
march of destruction through the Confederacy in 1864-65—is ultimately
kinder even to the vanquished than an endless state of desultory war.

The European just war tradition springs in part from the reality that
historically in Europe war was an affair of kings and rulers that hurt
the little people without doing anything for them. Peasants really
didn’t care whether the Duke of Burgundy or the Count of Anjou was
recognized as the rightful overlord of their village, and moralists
and theologians worked to limit the violence that the dukes and the
counts and their henchmen wreaked on the poor peasants caught up in a
quarrel that wasn’t theirs.

With no feudal past in this country, Americans have tended to see wars
as wars of peoples rather than wars of elites and in a war of peoples
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets tends to
collapse. The German civilian (male or female) making weapons for
Hitler’s Wehrmacht was as much a part of the enemy’s warmaking
potential as the soldier at the front. Furthermore, in a war of
peoples in which civilians are implicated in the conflict, the health
and morale of the civilian population is a legitimate target of war.
This justified the blockades against the Confederacy and against
Germany and German occupied Europe during the world wars, and it also
justified the mass terror bombing raids of World War Two in which the
destruction of enemy morale was one of the stated aims.

This is the same logic by which someone like Osama bin Laden could
justify his attacks on civilians at the World Trade Center, and it is
the fundamental logic behind Hamas’ indiscriminate attacks on Israeli
civilian targets. Americans don’t like it when their enemies use this
kind of logic, but it is a type of warfare they understand and they
have fought and won enough of these wars in the past to be ready if
necessary to do it again.

From this perspective, in which war is an elemental struggle between
peoples rather than a kind of knightly duel between courtly elites,
the concept of proportionality seems much less compelling. Certainly
if some kind of terrorist organization were to set up missile
factories across the frontier in Canada and Mexico and start attacking
targets in the United States, the American people would demand that
their President use all necessary force without stint or limit until
the resistance had been completely, utterly and pitilessly crushed.
Those Americans who share this view of war might feel sorrow at the
loss of innocent life, of the children and non-combatants killed when
overwhelming American power was used to take the terrorists out, but
they would feel no moral guilt. The guilt would be on the shoulders of
those who started the whole thing by launching the missiles.

Thus when television cameras show the bodies of children killed in an
Israeli air raid, Jacksonian Americans are sorry about the loss of
life, but it inspires them to hate and loathe Hamas more, rather than
to be mad at Israel. They blame the irresponsible dolts who started
the war for all the consequences of the war and they admire Israel’s
strength and its resolve for dealing with the appalling blood lust of
the unhinged loons who start a war they can’t win, and then cower
behind the corpses of the children their foolishness has killed. The
whole situation strengthens the widespread American ...

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You are in the minority with your opinion shithead. Your problem.

 Americas support for Israel is at an all time high,
and growing.
---
wrong again. As America become more secular the zionists will lose
political power.

You are in the minority with your opinion shithead.
---
go fuck yourself and that whore you call your mother, bitch!

 Your problem.
---
having zionists in America who will sacrifice US interests for
israel's.
know the enemy.