Israel Defense Force Arguments and Vietnam Déjà Vu
▻http://www.laprogressive.com/israel-defense-force
During the Vietnam War, American officials argued that any civilian casualties resulting from US military action was the fault of the National Liberation Front (“Viet Cong”) because it operated amidst the population. The US used this line to rationalize “free-fire zones,” carpet-bombing, artillery barrages, and the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people.
One Israel Defense Force argument I keep hearing on TV lately is cut from the same cloth. It goes something like this: “We have to kill all those children and toddlers and babies and elderly women because our ‘targets’ (Hamas ‘militants’) circulate freely among the civilian population.”
This idea ignores not only the nature of guerrilla warfare and the fact that such wars cannot be “resolved” through military violence, but also masks the inherent asymmetry of the opposing forces.
It rests on the absurd premise that people fighting for their lives from their own front porches against an immeasurably more powerful military force should strip off their clothes, paint targets on their backs, and lay in a field somewhere out in the open where they can be more easily mowed down. If the Americans who fought against the British at the time of the battles of Lexington and Concord obeyed this dictum there probably wouldn’t be a nation called the United States of America.
Blowing away large numbers of civilians in pursuit of military “targets,” as the US learned in Vietnam, always generates a lot of refugees (as we are seeing currently in Gaza). These fleeing civilians who are then crammed into makeshift refugee camps disrupt the social fabric and drive up the popular support for those who are fighting back against the enemy that just ruined their lives.
Since what’s happening in Gaza is a political conflict that cannot be solved through military violence, by unleashing its firepower and enlarging the number of refugees the IDF can expect to strengthen Hamas’s political standing inside the Gaza Strip as well as the West Bank (as the demonstrations show).
The IDF actions have also created a really tough “optics” problem for the Netanyahu government. In the current context of social media the Israeli hasbara propaganda methods have grown old and worm-eaten no matter how aggressively they’re pursued on Twitter and Facebook.