Israel, Gaza and Proportionality

This is the first of a series of posts I said I would write on the recent violence in Gaza, and more widely on the Israel-Palestine conflict and on religious and nationalist extremism in general.

In this series:

1. Israel, Gaza and Proportionality (this post)

2. Israel-Gaza: why is it happening now?

(And see also: UK phone company severs ties will Israel, If Hamas didn’t fight)

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There’s an Internet meme among supporters of Israel to say that it’s OK for Israel to kill lots of Palestininans in response to Palestinians killing few or no Israelis.

For example, here’s David Bernstein:

Boy, am I already getting tired of hearing this. The basic claim is that since the thousands of rockets that Hamas has lobbed into southern Israel have caused relatively few death and injuries–just some deaths and injuries, along with massive panic, children living in bomb shelters, thousands of shock victims, etc.–Israel has no right to respond with overwhelming force.

What the Israeli government should do is offer anyone who thinks that having 1/4 million people living under constant fear of deadly rocket fire is acceptable, and should be accepted implicitly by the Israeli government, a plane ticket to Israel and free lodging in Sderot, the border town hardest hit by rockets from Gaza. Hell, I’ll personally pay for Glenn Greewald’s Sderot vacation.

Here’s Norman Geras:

The Israeli assault on Gaza has prompted the charge that Israel’s use of force is disproportionate. Some of those levelling this charge do recognize Hamas’s share of responsibility for the current situation, since Hamas presides over – whether by organizing or by authorizing – never-ending rocket attacks on Israeli towns. Others levelling the charge do not recognize this; they don’t have the interests of the people of Israel at heart. But, in any case, what is meant by ‘proportionate’?

If the insistence on proportionality is supposed to entail that Israel’s military response to rocket attacks from Gaza should be on the same scale as the attacks themselves, then this would amount to forbidding effective retaliation – a response, that is, which could put an end to those attacks. Proportionality would mean Israel was debarred from defending its citizens from external violence, a form of moral self-restraint which no sovereign state can accept. For it is clear that nothing short of a severe military blow to Hamas has a chance of getting it to desist. Proportionality in the sense of a reply to Hamas aggression that will be effective has, therefore, to mean Israel using greater force than merely reciprocates Hamas-type rocket attacks.

And here’s Iain Dale:

Hamas are a bunch of murderous thugs. Over the past few years they have fired 5,000 rockets on Israel from residential parts of the Gaza strip, killing and injuring dozens of innocent Israelis. Israel has done its best not to react, but in the end their patience has snapped – and understandably so. They have acted using the only kind of force Hamas can understand.

According to Conservative Friends of Israel, over the past week more than 300 rockets, missiles and mortar rounds have been fired from Gaza by Hamas and other militants at Israeli villages and towns. More than 560 have been fired since Hamas escalated rocket firing on 4 November. This is on top of the 5,000 which have been fired from Gaza this year. The media seem to think these rockets are fairly harmless. They are not. They are weapons of terror.

BBC reports suggest that in recent days none of these rockets has resulted in any Israeli deaths or injuries. Not true. CFI report today that: “An Israeli man was killed and four others were seriously wounded when a missile hit a house in Netivot.

But do these people really believe what they say, or is it just a post hoc argument they’ve made up to rationalise their support of Israel despite its brutality?

To answer this question, let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine Hamas got hold of a nuke, and detonated it in an Israeli city killing 90,000 people. This would be exactly as as proportionate, in the same 1:300 ratio, as Israel’s actions. Now, do we imagine that the gentlemen above would refer to this action using the same arguments? Would they, in other words, say things like:

“Boy, am I already getting tired of hearing this. The basic claim is that since the thousands of bombs that Israel has lobbed into Gaza have caused relatively few death and injuries — just some deaths and injuries, along with massive panic, children living in bomb shelters, thousands of shock victims, etc. — Hamas has no right to respond with overwhelming force.”

“The Palestinian nuclear attack on Israel has prompted the charge that Hamas’s use of force is disproportionate. Some of those levelling this charge do recognize Israel’s share of responsibility for the current situation, since Israel presides over  never-ending rocket attacks on Gaza. Others levelling the charge do not recognize this; they don’t have the interests of the Palestinians at heart. “

“For it is clear that nothing short of a severe military blow to Israel has a chance of getting it to desist. Proportionality in the sense of a reply to Zionist aggression that will be effective has, therefore, to mean Hamas using greater force than merely reciprocates Israel-type aerial attacks.”

“Zionists are a bunch of murderous thugs. Over the past few decades they have fired thousands of bombs on Palestine, killing and injuring thousands of innocent Palestinians, and stealing their land. Hamas has done its best not to react, but in the end their patience has snapped – and understandably so. They have acted using the only kind of force Zionists can understand.”

“According to Conservative Friends of Palestine, over the past week more than 300 rockets, missiles and mortar rounds have been fired from Israel by the IDF and other militants at Gazan towns and refugee camps. More than 560 have been fired since Isreal escalated bombing  on 4 November. This is on top of the thousands which have been fired on Gaza this year. The media seem to think these bombs are fairly harmless. They are not. They are weapons of terror.”

Of course they wouldn’t.

All big companies are software companies

These days, all big companies — and most medium-sized companies — are software companies. By this I mean that the company’s software (particularly custom softwware they’ve made) and associated data is integral to the success of their busines. As an example consider Tesco:

Some background: I worked on some Tesco online projects, I have friends who have worked on their data mining. I’m British but I now live in California. Tesco’s data mining is easily the biggest operation I’ve ever seen. Everything I did at Tesco had a large clubcard component. The clubcard was one of Tesco’s major innovations in Britain. It’s not dissimilar to a Safeway card. Tesco issue these things in keyfobs as well as card so you always have them.

I’ve seen people use their clubcard when they buy a newspaper. They don’t save money, they don’t even get points, it’s just habitual.

You can tell Tesco have really nailed data when you see their customer demographic. I saw something in the Guardian (British newspaper) a couple of years back which showed the Tesco customer wealth demographics matching the population norm almost exactly.

When a retail group can organise their stores and retail inventory such that every walk of life uses them they are on the road to success. Most people I know in Britain that don’t shop at a Tesco as their primary store have a competing store much closer to where they live.

Tesco sell a vast number of different product lines, in thousands of stores. Their software operation keeps track of what they sell in which stores. It allows them to restock accurately. More importantly it tells them which lines will be the most effective in which stores, based on the different demographic types of customer that different stores get.

The fact that every company is a software company has implications. The most important is that software is something companies have to understand. A company can’t hope to just outsource its computing operations and that way the managers not have to deal with or understand it. This is particularly relevant to companies run by bosses in thir 50s or 60s who don’t have a technical background anyway and are secretly a bit frightened by computers — the best things these sorts of bosses could do for their companies is resign.

If you want to see what failure to understand computers and the Internet looks like you only have to look at the music industry and the decline of the Big 4 (Warner, Sony, Universal, and EMI) over the last decade or so as they’ve failed to come to grips with how the Internet is transforming their industry.

The rise of Wikileaks

Glyn Moody notes how Wikileaks has risen to prominence in 2008:

There is a long journalistic tradition of looking back at the end of the year over the major events of the preceding 12 months – one that I have no intention of following. But I would like to point out an important development in the world of openness that has occurred over that time-span: the rise and rise of Wikileaks.

The site was actually founded two years ago, but most people (including myself) didn’t really become aware of it until this year. Now Wikileaks is frequently to be found in the eye of the storm. Indeed, it seems consciously to be raising its sights ever higher: recently, it has published documents that are acutely embarrassing to the German and British governments.

This is all good stuff, but I do worry that at some point the goading will get too much, and the needling too successful, until repressive governments like the one currently running the UK will fight back hard – citing the tired old tropes about “terrorism” or “child pornography” or maybe just “leaves on the track” – by ordering ISPs to block Wikileaks and any mirrors that pop up.

Unfortunately, the previously despised idea of censorship is gaining respectability all around the so-called “civilised” world. As well as the recent blocking of Wikipedia in the UK – something that handily revealed the scale of censorship *already* occurring in the UK – we have had a completely dotty suggestion from UK Culture Secretary Andy Burnham that some kind of “Film-style age ratings could be applied to websites to protect children from harmful and offensive material”.

I think that Wikileaks will continue to gain prominence in 2009. It’s possible that the UK or some other government may try to block Wikileaks — one could easily imagine Burnham attempting this — but if they do, the Streisand effect will ensure that it backfires on them and the offending material gains more prominence.

Iraq Condemns Israel

I’m going to post a longer post (or possibly a series of them) later on the Israel-Gaza violence, but meanwhile this caught my eye:

Of the various premises on which the U.S. invasion of Iraq was sold to the American people, one of the most bizarre was that a post-Saddam Iraqi government would be friendly to Israel. As with claims about WMD and Al Qaeda connections, this one has proved to be a work of imagination.

Just as they did during Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah, Iraq’s leaders are now showing where their true sympathies lie. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Da’wa Party “issued a statement condemning the attacks and calling on Islamic countries to cut relations with Israel and end all ’secret and public talks’ with it.”

Khalid Hussain of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) told Gulf News “We have obligations towards Palestine and all Iraqi people are in solidarity with the people in Palestine, and we will support the people in Gaza.”

Indeed it was rather stupid and naive for US policymakers to have believed that a democratic Iraq would automatically be pro-Israel; this sort of stupidity can best be explained that the policymakers gained high office because of their ideological purity rather than because of any intelligence or detachment on their part.

But it is a bit ironically amusing that AIPAC supported the invasion of Iraq because they thought it would help Israel. Here’s a scenario: assume Iraq gets back on its feet, politically and economically, while retaining the trappings of democracy. The democratic Iraq decides (maybe through a referendum) to gain nuclear weapons while other states in the region (naming no names, of course) have them. What’s the betting that in that scenario AIPAC and the American right-wing idiots will suddenly lose all support for democracy in Iraq (no doubt asserting that all along they had never believed it was properly democratic) and call for Maliki to be deposed in favour of a dictator?

(via Matthew Yglesias)

Britblog Roundup #202

Britblog Roundup #202 is up at A Very British Dude.

My profile on Normblog

I’ve just been profiled on Normblog.

Merry Christmas everybody!

I’d like to wish all readers of Amused Cynicism a merry Christmas, and a happy new year. I hope you’ve all enjoyed reading my blog as much as I have writing it.

2009 will bring new directions to Amused Cynicism. I’ll be moving it over to my includipedia.com website, which will allow me to add nested comments and improve the text layout. I’m also planning to do something for the general election, which may happen in 2009 — I liveblogged the last election and wrote some electoral forecasting software, and I’ll be doing something similar this time.

UK government sells Aldermaston nuclear weapons factory

The British government has sold the Aldermaston nuclear weapons factory:

The government has sold its last remaining shares in the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment in Berkshire to an American company.

The move means Britain no longer has any stake in the production of its Trident nuclear warheads. Opposition MPs have criticised the sale, but the Ministry of Defence said Britain’s “sovereign interests” had been protected. The fee paid by California-based Jacobs Engineering has not been disclosed.

This is a bloody stupid decision. Given that manufacture of atom bombs is quite obviously a strategic sovereign interest, and that the factory’s only customer is the UK government, there is absolutely no merit in selling Aldermaston.

I do sometimes wonder if the government isn’t just taking the piss, making more and more absurd decisions as a joke to see what they can get away with. This and their recent decision to allow bailiffs to smash people’s doors down and beat up the occupants are obvious examples of the above.

(via FP passport)

Britblog Roundup #201

Welcome to Britblog Roundup #201, your weekly dose of all that’s best in British blogging.

We’ll start off with The Yorkshire Ranter, who thinks the fuss about leaked counter-IED technology is overblown:

like so much government secrecy, this is much more to do with security from embarrassment (we spent $billions on technology that would have been cutting edge in 1940!) than security from anything else.

David Copperfield writes about the difference between British and Canadian policing:

I’ve been out here for just over a year now and a few people have asked me what the main differences between policing in the UK and in Canada. [...] What I now have that I didn’t before, is discretion: I’m able to give each incident the attention it merits and I’m not bound by the need to meet government targets. If you add to that decent mobile IT systems, an arrest/charge procedure with 90% less bureacracy, and proper opportunites to do some proactive patrolling, you can begin to get an idea of what the job’s like.

Another place where the government’s “targets culture” doesn’t work is higher education, says John Naughton. Is there anywhere where it does work?

The Heresiarch writes about Lillian Ladele, the Islington registrar who refused to conduct civil partnership ceremonies on account of her Evangelical Christian beliefs.

Randon Acts of Reality says the ambulance service is overstretched:

On Monday the London ambulance service went to REAP 4. The REAP system runs from REAP 1 (no problems with the service) to REAP 5 (the sort of problems you get after all the power stations blow up and there are plague rats running on the streets of London).

We have never been at REAP 4, and if you ask the road crews in London they would probably say that we should have been at REAP 4 a couple of months ago.

Janine at Stroppyblog thinks USDAW aren’t doing enough to save Woolworths workers’ jobs.

Jess McCabe notes a downside to microlending:

Is it socially responsible for microcredit institutions – which frequently present themselves as a sort of alternative to charity, whereby investors get their money back with interest – end up with women being shamed, scolded, made homeless and ending up in debtors prison?

Philip Booth notes that the USA is getting closer to banning mercury fillings.

Jim Jay is not impressed by Post Office privatisation or the Labour Party:

With all these attacks on welfare claimants, wars, and privatisations I often find myself thinking “what we need is a Labour government” and then have to pinch myself in horror as I realise that’s exactly what we’ve got.

Natalie Bennett reviews The Cordelia Dream by the RSC at Wilton’s Music Hall:

This was quite the worst time I’ve had at the theatre in a very long while. About the only virtue of this production is that it makes the previous effort in the RSC’s new play series, The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes, look good in comparison — at least that was an interesting failure.

Guido Fawkes thinks Derek Draper is angling for some money from the Labour Party to launch a pro-Labour blog.

Conor Cruise O’Brien is dead, but when he was alive he wrote a biography of Edmund Burke.

Charles Crawford discusses the nature of evil and wants to know whether he should spray water on his teenage son.

Bill Jones talks about the class divide between Strictly Come Dancing and XFactor:

The two programmes are poles apart regarding presentation and mirror the division of our country into different classes and cultures: Strictly’s ‘Wimbledon’ contrasting with XFactor’s ‘Championship Darts from Purfleet’. I discovered that in this dichotomy, I am well into the middle class part: I enjoy the dancing but abominate the presentational style of XFactor. The former focuses on the dancing, or at least it has since the withdrawal of John Sergeant. The presenter Bruce Forsyth tells execrable jokes and, despite his catchphrase denials really is doddery. But he is an old time pro who presides genially over a genteel middle class celebration of ballroom dancing: Guardian and the Times stuff. XFactor, however is The Sun, Star, News of the World and People rolled into one in its appeal.

Devil’s Kitchen and Mark Wadsworth have a barney about Land Value Tax.

Andrew Ian Dodge wonders when politicians will be brave enough to have a go at legalising assisted suicide:

No politician, barring a very few, seems to want to get near this issue for fear of offending their more religious constituents. This is despite the fact that Britain can be seen for the most part as a mostly secular country.

As a result, the growing trend has been for sufferers to bypass parliament and go directly to the High Court to force action on the issue. The documentary to be shown on television is merely a stepping up of the campaign to aim directly for the sympathy of the public on this most difficult of subjects.

The subject of “death with dignity” has reared its head again in the British consciousness. It looks doubtful any change will come about in the law — yet one wonders how long politicians will be able to turn a blind eye to the subject. Death is, after all, an issue that affects every single citizen of their country.

Francis Turner thinks the NHS “helped” his mother to die:

The ambulance crew showed up because at o’dark thirty on Thursday my mother tried to go to the toilet and fell somehow next to it instead of on it. Father was unable to extricate her and called 999. When they showed up (quite promptly I believe) they quickly got her up from where she had fallen and gave a little first aid. They (and their superiors via radio) advised against taking her to hospital because they said she’d be no better off. Father says they predicted she would be dumped on a trolley in a corner and ignored for 8 hours before being sent home if she was taken to hospital. Hence she was put back in her own bed despite being seriously weak, cold and without a fit caregiver on call.

Britblog Roundup is a weekly compilation of the best of British and Irish blogging. For more details and some of its history, have a look on Britblog Roundup central, or on the Includipedia article for Britblog Roundup.

Next week Jackart will be doing it — if you have any nominations for next week’s roundup, send them to britblog (at) gmail (dot) com.

Scottish Political Roundup

Scottish Political Roundup is up: Hallelujah! Christmas comes early for the blogosphere.

Nominiation for inclusion in next week’s roundup should go to scottishroundup [@] gmail [.] com.