What Israel should have done

Jan 15, 2025
Flags of Israel and Palestine, conflict concept.

Israel chose the wrong way to deal with its enemies. For a better way, it could have borrowed a leaf from China.

Israel’s — and the Jewish people’s — plight needs to be understood and sympathised with. Jews were hounded and discriminated against, and much worse, for decades and more, long before the Nazis slaughtered six million Jews in the Holocaust. Survivors of the Holocaust were then rejected as immigrants by multiple Western countries, including the United States. The Western states’ preferred solution was to create a Jewish state in 1948 within Great Britain’s colonial mandate of Palestine.

Moving Jews there necessitated displacing many native Palestinians, some of them violently. They have never forgiven Israel, or the Jews. The result was that the new state of Israel was surrounded by hostile powers intent on making war on Israel to drive the Jews out. Schools run by Palestinians still teach children that there is no such thing as Israel. Sometimes they even celebrate the killing of Jews. Jews in Israel, a tiny country surrounded by sworn enemies, have been frightened since establishing their state. They have, however, gained in strength, enough to no longer be the pitiful weak and oppressed peoples that they were, but to prevail – to prevail even so far as to become, themselves, the oppressors of their enemies.

Israel’s recent means of prevailing in the face of a horrid terrorist attack, a heinous act that killed more than 1000 Israelis on 7 October 2023, by Hamas, the governing authority of Gaza, has been a disaster. The terrorism could be seen as a desperate act by a people who suffered oppression and simply couldn’t take it any more. But Israel’s response to this single horrific act has been the destruction of Gaza, killing tens of thousands of men, women, and children.

One would think Jews would know better than to turn the tables and become the oppressors and the murderers, even if they see it as the only way they can defend themselves.

There could have been a better way. It would have been difficult to implement, because it would have violated basic Western principles. And yet – would it have violated those principles any worse than what Israel is doing now?

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Israel’s cure for Gazan terrorism has been to drop not a pound, but 80,000 tonnes of bombs on Gaza, more than the combined total of bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London during World War II. This has been called “consistent with the characteristics of a genocide” by a Special Committee of the United Nations.

An ounce of prevention would have been better. But it would have offended many in the Western world. That better way is the way in which China dealt with its own threat from terrorist organisations like the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

On 18 December, an interesting article by Bertrand Arnaud appeared in Pearls & Irritations. Arnaud notes that Uyghur separatists, members of the ETIM, were a part of the Syrian opposition that recently brought down Syria dictator Bashar al-Assad after years of brutal civil war.

He contrasts that Syrian tragedy with China’s approach to its own experience of terrorism in Xinjiang, terrorism that was fuelled by extreme Islamic ideology. Arnaud admits that:

“China did indeed operate a ‘crackdown’ that involved identifying all the people in Xinjiang who empathised with this ideology and sending them to what it called ‘vocational education and training centres’ (and what the West calls ‘re-education centres’), where they were basically given a choice: either re-integrate into society by learning a useful skill (hence the vocational education and training aspect) or you’ll be headed to prison next. They ran this program during approximately two years until December 2019.”

What Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank is indefensible. It is an appalling overreaction, even to the monstrous act of terrorism that Hamas perpetrated on 7 October 2023. Suppose that instead, it had administered a comparative ounce of prevention, as China did. Suppose that Israel had identified the most dangerous Palestinian adherents of extreme anti-Israel ideology, rounded them up, and detained them in re-education camps. There, they could be gently taught different views, and retrained to useful employment – perhaps even, in the case of the most enterprising and intelligent of them, taken into Israeli businesses or subsidised to start their own. In order to treat the detainees humanely in the process, Israel could deploy “the most moral soldiers in the world”.

This would, of course, be in radical opposition to “free world” values. Preventive detention is anathema in Western systems, because it means depriving individuals of their freedoms without due process through the court system. Injustice it may be, but it would at least inflict it on suspected terrorists instead of raining death and destruction on tens of thousands of innocent women and children.

Drastic circumstances occasion drastic measures. Instead of joining in the exaggerated Western criticisms of China’s treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang — criticisms that go so far in their hyperbole as to call that treatment “genocide” — perhaps Israel could have sent delegations to China to study how well this re-education process worked.

The 7 October massacre should have been avoided in the first place, by a better defence and response on the part of Israel. The blame for the failure to do so rests with Benjamin Netahyahu. But given the realities, Israel’s plight may require thinking about the unthinkable. Which is worse, violating the free world’s proscription against preventive detention, or ethnic cleansing?

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