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The Tragedies of Qana

As the Israel Air Force continues to investigate the air strike, questions have been raised over military accounts of the incident. It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time. The Israel Defense Forces had said after […]

As the Israel Air Force continues to investigate the air strike, questions have been raised over military accounts of the incident.

It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.

The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version on Monday.

The site was included in an IAF plan to strike at several buildings in proximity to a previous launching site. Similar strikes were carried out in the past. However, there were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike. ~Haaretz

Mistakes happen in war.  Realists understand this.  But there are some mistakes that have no good excuse, no ready justification.  Based on this latest information, it seems to me that the bombing at Qana is one of these inexcusable mistakes, because it was not the result of an accident or a ‘miss’.  With dozens of children and other civilians dead, supporters of the campaign were forced at least to acknowledge that this bombing was tragic.  Now they must acknowledge that the bombing was misguided and wrong. 

 The first tragedy of Qana was the killing of those innocents; the second has been the willingness of Westerners to conjure up every conceivable reason why the bombing of Qana was not the fault of the people who bombed it. 

I remember the same depressing zeal to justify the continuation of the NATO campaign against Kosovo in 1999 after some 70-odd Albanian refugees were killed by a bomb in the early days of the attack (I also remember the late, admirable Balint Vaszonyi’s sad assessment of this terrible event); or again after a civilian train was destroyed; or again when NATO targeted the journalists at a Belgrade TV station; or again when NATO began attacking the completely uninvolved civilians of the Vojvodina, and so on.  When it came to the Serbs, no abuse was too great that it could not be explained away as something that was “necessary.”     

In a sense, the defenders of Israel’s campaign are creating more critics and opponents of the campaign than the campaign itself with their snappy, ready-made talking points aimed at preventing Israel from having to take any public responsibility for what the Israeli armed forces actually do.  Normally, I would not take such a prolonged, extensive interest in a foreign conflict that should, by all rights, have next to nothing to do with us, but Washington has made it our business and implicated all of us by openly and fully supporting the campaign.  The chorus of American supporters further implicates America in the unfolding disaster of the attack on Lebanon, which makes it all the more imperative that voices of restraint prevail here.  

It does no credit to Israel to give the impression that it does not have to bow before certain fundamental moral obligations in wartime.  It is strange to me that professed friends of Israel would continue to indulge and defend Israel almost no matter what the government there does because they believe this is what support for Israel entails.  I suspect that this is a product of the same frequent confusion of nation and state that afflicted so many hawks on Iraq when our government’s policies were being criticised so harshly–the hawks took this to be hostility to America herself.  There seems to be a common assumption among such types that what some governments, the kinds of governments that they approve of, do is in always in the best interests of their countries, and to oppose a given government policy is to be hostile to that country.  In some cases, the government, either knowingly or not, begins to work against the best interests of the country it governs.  In these cases, someone who considers himself a friend of the people of that country should speak up against the government.  We have no problem doing this when the government in question is an archetypical despotism or tyranny, but we seem strangely reluctant to draw this distinction with more or less democratic allies.   

Regardless of that, if you see a friend or ally going down a treacherous path, you should warn him against it if necessary, not simply cheer him on as he successfully negotiates the dangers along the way.  If he has jumped into a snake pit, it might be better to help him out of the snake pit rather than enthusiastically approve of his fight against the snakes, especially if that fight somehow causes the death of innocents.  This is what America’s allies attempted to do as our government rushed into invading Iraq, and we all know the contempt that they received for their trouble.  But I would rather have a friendly or allied nation speak plainly to us about American errors, because they expect more of us in respect and admiration, than have cant-ridden lackeys who will smile and praise us regardless of what we do.  In turn, we should be frank with our allies if we believe them to be going down the wrong path or believe they are using the wrong methods.  Israel is sorely lacking in true friends–it does not need a panegyrist to always tell it how good it is.  The third tragedy of Qana is that those who claim to be most fervently supportive of Israel have shown that they have lost the ability to tell the difference between genuine goodwill for an ally and blind support of every aspect of the reckless policy of that ally’s government.    

Update: The newest buzz from the Qana apologists is that it was “staged,” by which they mean that the IAF definitely bombed the building, but the building didn’t collapse until later.  So that’s sort of like a mulligan, right?  It may be that Hizbullah exploited the bombing to maximal advantage, which would, of course, be despicable (and not much different from the truly KLA-staged massacre at Racak in 1999 in Kosovo, which helped prompt and ‘justify’ NATO intervention).  What remains to be seen is how the apologists will defend the original bombing.  How about this: “We tried to destroy the building, but we didn’t entirely succeed, so our hands are clean.”

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