Why Libertarians Might Not Take Israel’s Side in the Latest Gaza Skirmishes

As a
ceasefire is announced today
in Gaza, John Glaser at
Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog offers some reasons a
libertarian might take special care to
not take Israel’s side
in that (hopefully squashed for now)
conflict.

Excerpts:

As things stand, and as everyone knows, the US is not a neutral
player in the conflict. Israel receives over $3 billion in aid from
Washington every year, not including the mountains of military
hardware and expertise that the Israeli Defense Forces are now
unleashing on the Palestinians….

Israel’s violence and abuse of the Palestinians – supported with
unparalleled US backing – is immeasurably greater than Palestinian
violence towards Israel, and therefore rightly attracts far more
criticism. Secondly, Americans are supporting and giving sanction
to Israel’s violence towards Palestinians, and therefore a simple
moral calculus leads us properly to focus
on that violence, as opposed to any that we are
not directly responsible for…

Just what is America supporting? Well, for 45 years Israel has
militarily occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank and
Gaza, while using unqualified support from the United States to
block the wildly popular political settlement based on the borders
set in 1948…

 Not only has the occupation continued, but Israel has been
slowly seizing more and more territory. In the West Bank, Israel
has been demolishing Palestinian homes that have rested on that
land for generations and building up Israeli settlements in their
place, paid for by the Israeli state which also subsidizes Israeli
citizens willing to live there…

Gazans have some legitimate reasons to feel aggrieved by the
Israeli state:

Israel unilaterally withdrew its military forces and settlers
from Gaza in 2005. This has led many Israeli leaders to claim they
made a major concession to the Palestinians, without much in
return. In a free election, which was heavily monitored by
international organizations, Gazans elected Hamas to power in 2006.
Israel decided they voted the wrong way and proceeded to impose an
economic blockade on all of Gaza, for what they described as
security reasons. The blockade has been devastating. Israel uses
the coercive power of the state to block the flow of goods and
people in and out of Gaza and it has resulted in severe poverty and
suffering.

Israel claims the economic blockade on Gaza is in place for
security reasons, but it includes purely economic and humanitarian
resources as well as other non-military items including children’s
toys
….

In a January 2008 secret Israeli document released in
a recent court case
, Israel decided to allow Gazans to eat
2,279 calories worth of food each day, as if they were dogs in a
cage. They estimated therefore that they would allow 1,836
grams of food per person, per day. The policy was summed up by Dov
Weisglass, an adviser to former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, years
before the document was written. “The idea is to put the
Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of
hunger,” Weisglass said,
claiming the hunger pangs are supposed to coerce Palestinians to
force Hamas out of government.

These realities, and many more that I don’t have the space to
explain here, are what motivate libertarians like me to emphasize
Israel’s crimes over those of the few Palestinians in Gaza who
launch rockets into Israel…

Glaser is responding to the argument (made on the Bleeding
Heart Libertarian
blog
by Steve Horwitz
) that since the Israeli state is–its
military actions notwithstanding–a more liberal state than ones
its Arab neighbors seem ever likely to establish, libertarians
might want to give them some consideration on those grounds. Glaser
doesn’t see it that way:

Even if Israel were incomparably better for liberty than all of
its neighbors, that still wouldn’t excuse Israel of its crimes and
it still shouldn’t convince libertarians to favor Israel in its
conflict with the Palestinians.

This latest clash between Israel and Hamas has rightly prompted
many libertarians to object, loudly once again, to US-Israeli
policies. Israel’s latest bombardment of Gaza began when
a lull in cross border violence was broken on Nov. 8th – not with
rocket fire into Israel – but with Israeli tanks invading southern
Gaza and shooting and killing a 13-year old boy. Gaza militants
responded by shooting an anti-tank missile at an IDF vehicle,
wounding four soldiers. Then Israel significantly escalated
airstrikes…

Hamas has indeed launch over 1,000 rockets into Israel, most of
them blocked by Israel’s missile defense system. Five Israelis
died, tragically. On the other side, Israel has unleashed countless
airstrikes into Gaza, killing over 145 Palestinians and wounding
more than 900, most of them civilian men, women, and children.

Since the end of the last war (which Israel
also instigated
) in 2009, 16
times as many
 Palestinians have been killed by Israel than
Gaza militants have killed Israelis.

With proportions like these, and with the limited context I
provided above, I think libertarians, especially leaders of the
movement looked up to by so many, should not hesitate to roundly
condemn Israel’s actions…

I wrote back in July 2006 a
annoyingly still timely piece
on the proper allocation of blame
in a previous Israel-involved Middle Eastern military conflict,
this time against Hezbollah in Lebanon.