[T]he grotesque beheading of James Foley is stirring passions in Washington policy circles.  From the highest levels of the Obama administration to the media pundits, emotions are flaring over what the United States should/could do.  The act in itself has changed nothing insofar as IS’ threat to the United States and its significance for Middle East politics are concerned. It is the mood that has been transformed. Irresistible impulse is displacing cool deliberation.

The flood of commentary, as usual, reveals little in the way of rigorous logic but much in the way of disjointed thinking and unchecked emotion. Also as usual, tactics eclipse strategy. Secretary Hagel pronounces IS the gravest threat from Islamist militancy “beyond anything we have seen….an imminent threat to everything we have….a 9/11 level threat.”  General Dempsey asserts that IS poses an “immediate” threat and cannot be “defeated without addressing that part of the organization that resides in Syria and use all means at our disposal. General John Allen who commanded American forces in Afghanistan, calls on President Obama to wipe out ISIS – whatever it takes. That is to say, a feat neither he nor his nine fellow commanders never came close to achieving in Afghanistan.   Rick Perry, as headlined in the NYT, warns that the immediate danger is not on the Euphrates or Tigris but the Rio Grande where IS infiltrators already have entered the United States (presumably disguised as Honduran teenagers).  Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the self-appointed joint chiefs  of “bomber command,” vociferously demand that we hammer IS – although it is not clear where IS stands on the priority list of the many bad guys the hawkish duo insist we must bomb.

These bits of fragmentary diagnosis and prescription – even the sober ones – are not very helpful.

Let’s get down to basics: national interests, threat assessment; measures of a successful policy. We cannot interpret what it means to “defeat” IS until we specify exactly what it is we are worrying about. Is it terrorism launched against the United States (a la 9/11) from the territories they control? Is it toppling the Baghdad government? Toppling the Kurdish government? Invading Jordan or Saudi Arabia? Presenting a long-term terrorist threat in the region that will destabilize governments we want to be stable? These variations of the threat present very different kinds of challenges. They affect American interests in different ways in different magnitudes. They are susceptible to different types of action – by the U.S. or by others.

Airstrikes are only pertinent to threats 2, 3 and 4, with the likelihood and degree of their effectiveness still highly uncertain. “Boots on the ground?” Well, we had a very large force in Iraq for eight years and that did not prevent the emergence of IS from the wounded body of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. This enemy is even more formidable. Nor could a new invasion protect the United States from direct terrorist acts. Complete elimination of IS from the territories they occupy is a near impossibility; moreover, to eliminate it permanently as General Allen demands is even more improbable. That is the dilemma we’ve faced with the Taliban in Afghanistan and which for more than a decade we have refused to recognize much less try seriously to solve.  Moreover, territorial control for training bases, indoctrination centers, planning cells, etc. is greatly over-rated.  Al-Qaeda did not need very much to set in motion the 9/11 attacks. The operational planning and coordination was done in Hamburg and the tactical execution managed from New Jersey.

There is a more general lesson to be learned from this latest exercise inad hoc policy-making by press conference.  The insistence of senior officials to speak at length in public on these complex, sensitive matters when there is no set policy is inimical to serious planning and diplomacy.  If they feel compelled to react to events to satisfy the media and an agitated populace, they should just say a few well chosen words and then declare themselves on the way to an important meeting – preferably not in Martha’s Vineyard.

Silence, though, is taken to be tantamount to death in the egocentric media age where image is all – confusing random motion with focused action.  The ensuing storm of static in our public space is invasive.  It destroys the ability to reflect, to assess, to ponder, to imagine.  We have come to ‘think’ in sound bites as well as to talk in sound bites.  This is the ultimate endpoint of a political culture where we spend more time trying to sort ourselves out than actually doing anything.

To put it bluntly, there is a persuasive argument to be made that the country would be well served if our leaders observed a moratorium on public statements for several days – ignoring the vain media, the not very knowledgeable or insightful pundits, and the blow-hard politicians – and devoted themselves to some concentrated hard thinking.  Serious governments, especially that of a super power, do not conduct their foreign relations in a state of histrionics.

We should be able to do better job of policy analysis than what we have seen to date re IS – and what we have seen during the entire GWOT era. The failure to meet a reasonable standard of sound deliberation and skillful execution has produced a national tragedy. That is an embarrassing commentary on the state of the American government.

Michael Brenner is a Professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.

[A]re the pessimists, followers of Optim’s antonymous sibling, right?  In these waning years of the Age of Obama, it sure looks that way.

Obama and his minions, abetted by a “bipartisan” consensus in Congress, are hard at work ending the world: pace T.S. Eliot with both a bang and a whimper — and then too, as global warming continues and waters rise, with a devastating whoosh.

The three are related.

First, the bang.

Unless Obama et. al. are stopped in their tracks, it will be big — not big like THE Big Bang, big enough for a whole universe to form out of it — but big enough that a whole lot of misery, death and destruction will.

Viewed one way, Obama’s contribution is just another episode, the latest, in a long story.  But stories play out and this episode, coming when it does, is more determinative than most – and potentially more devastating.

The story, or rather the relevant phase of it, began nearly a hundred years ago in the aftermath of The First World War.

Amid the devastation, revolutionaries brought down the Russian empire and reconstituted it on different bases, ostensibly for the benefit of Russian workers and peasants, and for the working masses everywhere.

Not long afterwards, diplomats representing the Allied powers superintended the demise of the Ottoman empire, picking up its pieces for the benefit of their respective ruling classes.

At the time, there were reasonable people – workers and intellectuals especially – who believed that the socialist order Bolshevik revolutionaries established would take root and flourish.

They looked forward to the construction of a new epoch in human history, built upon the ashes of the old, which would radically transform human life for the better.  They saw the Russian Revolution as the first stage of a European revolution that would, before long, sweep the entire world.

But the pillars of world capitalism were not about to let this happen, and neither were the forces of reaction.

Revolutions in Germany and throughout central Europe were crushed, as the newly constituted Soviet Union faced the concerted and overt hostility of the Western powers.

There was also, from Day One, the prospect of a civil war in Russia itself.   It soon materialized, causing incalculable harm.

The assault never stopped.  Communism’s enemies did all they could to make the Soviet experiment go wrong.  Unwittingly, the Communists helped them; they were their own worst enemy.

They did what they had to do.  But they also did more than that – a lot more and a lot worse.

Even before the revolutionary moment faded, its leaders governed despotically, establishing a bureaucratic tyranny that degenerated, in the Stalin era, into a dystopian police state.

This ended by the mid-fifties, but the regime never really liberalized.  Additionally, in contrast to the capitalist West, Communist governments never quite succeeded in delivering the consumer goods their peoples increasingly craved.

Nevertheless, the Soviet Union survived, as did faith in what the Russian Revolution began.  It was not until 1989 that Communism finally succumbed.  Then in 1991, the Soviet Union itself splintered apart.

The Ottoman Empire ended long before this — in the immediate aftermath of the First World War.  Its cultural and administrative center, reborn as Turkey, became a European-style nation state.  Its far-flung provinces were sorted out into British and French spheres of influence, and turned into nation states as well.

The triumphant imperial powers redrew the map of the Middle East with scant regard for historical or geographical realities.  Their machinations were motivated mainly by economic considerations. They had the power, and they took advantage.

In the process, the principle of self-determination for the world’s peoples, famously (though disingenuously) proclaimed by Woodrow Wilson, was ballyhooed, but scarcely honored.

Only some of the peoples that had been incorporated into the Ottoman empire got anything of the sort out of the peace conference at Versailles.   Peoples living under British and French rule got nothing at all.

The world has been dealing with the consequences ever since.

Even before Versailles, Britain had given the Zionist movement a green light to colonize Palestine.  The hope was that European Jews would settle in that Ottoman backwater.

Religious Jews, across the theological spectrum, were largely opposed; and Jewish nationalism – as much a nineteenth century concoction as other nationalist movements  — was slow to take on an expressly political, much less a statist, dimension.

At the time, therefore, and for several decades thereafter, few Jews took an active interest.  Those who did were mainly interested in building a haven for victims of European anti-Semitism.

As it happened, some of the British diplomats involved with Palestine’s destiny were drawn to those strains of Anglo-Protestant theology that fuel Christian Zionism today.

They saw the  “return” of the Jews to the Holy Land as a prelude to the Second Coming – and also, not incidentally, to the conversion or eternal damnation of Jews.  Naturally, they made common cause with the Zionist minority in European and North American Jewish communities.

For the most part, though, the British promoted the colonization of Palestine in order to secure British economic and geopolitical interests.  They regarded a Jewish homeland there as a Western beachhead in the heart of the Middle East that could prove useful in countless ways.

Their efforts were enormously consequential.

Even before the rise of Nazism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Zionism transformed the politics of the region.

For the Palestinians, it has been a catastrophe (a nakba).

Throughout the Middle East, its effects have been tumultuous – not just around the time that the state of Israel was established, but even more saliently after 1967, when, in the course of the Six Day War, Israel took hold of the remaining 22% of Mandate Palestine.

Nevertheless, the state system that European powers established in the region remained robust.  The borders were draw with little regard for the peoples affected, but, to date, they have held up tolerably well.

It took the machinations of America’s two post-9/11 presidents to destabilize that historical settlement – probably fatally.

Syria, Iraq and Lebanon are still nominally intact, though, with the Islamic State (IS) now in control of large swathes of their territory, it is unclear how much longer this can last.  Before long, it may also become necessary to add Jordan to the list.

The mini-states on the edges of the Arabian Peninsula could also slip out of the control of their ruling elites and therefore of the United States and other Western powers.  So could Saudi Arabia, the linchpin of the world’s energy system and the main buttress of reaction throughout the region.

At present, oil revenues and the American military presence are keeping the status quo intact.  But this cannot go on forever.  There are already signs of fatal unrest.  Instability nearby could be just the thing to undue stability back home.

1989 and 1991 marked the end of the era that began with the radical transformation of the Russian empire.  Now the other great transformation imposed on the world in the aftermath of World War I, the political structure established for the Middle East, is also becoming undone.

The world is in a perilous state on both accounts; and, to put it mildly, American diplomacy is not helping.

The United States, with the EU in tow, is now aggressively moving against Russia’s efforts to reestablish its influence and dignity.  It is treating Russia today the way that Cold War anti-Communists would have treated the Soviet Union, if they thought they could have gotten away with it.

This is extraordinarily reckless.

The world managed somehow to avoid catastrophe during the first Cold War, though it came perilously close several times.  This time, with the West supporting hostile states right up to Russia’s borders, the world may not be so lucky.

But what Obama and the others are doing in Ukraine – and less conspicuously in other former Soviet republics and in Russia itself – is almost reasonable in comparison to their determination to press on in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world with the failed policies of recent years.

How could they not have learned, by now, that bombs and drones and special ops hit squads harden victims’ determination to resist; and that the so-called war on terror, or whatever the Obama administration chooses to call it, makes more “terrorists” than it kills?

How could they not have realized, after all these years, that siding absolutely with Israeli governments, no matter what they do, has horrific consequences not just for Palestinians, but also for Israeli society and for America’s standing in the world and therefore ultimately for American interests?

For that matter, how could they not see that whenever they do intervene, no matter what the reason, they make the situation they intervene into worse?  The problem is not just that they lack the capacity – and the wisdom – to make things better; the problem is that, very often, they are the problem.

It was the Bush and then the Obama administration’s management of the occupation of Iraq, and their bumbling responses to the complexities of the situation that led to the on-going Syrian civil war, that brought on the sudden, very frightening, emergence of the IS, a group second to none in brutality, religious zealotry, and military proficiency.

Who knows what dire consequences will come from Obama’s efforts now to destroy the IS?

The one sure thing is that nothing good will.  A ruinous big bang is more likely.

We can’t vote the problem away either – because what passes for normal politics these days has turned our never very democratic electoral system into a spectacle fit only for reality TV.

When Eliot wrote that the world would end “not with a bang, but a whimper,” he couldn’t have had the 2014 and 2016 American elections in mind.  But he might as well have.

No matter what comes out of the several clueless Bush-Obama efforts to control the course of events in lands that were once parts of the old Russian and Ottoman empires, the body politic at home is passing into oblivion.  Our politics is doing us in.

This has nothing to do with what people, informed by Marxism and bedazzled by the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, would have predicted  – that in a classless society, the state loses its reason for being and therefore withers away.

It is happening instead because governing structures in our class-ridden society inspire justifiable indifference because they are no longer capable of reflecting popular aspirations or effecting urgently needed changes.

Our elections were never very consequential, except at the margins; they are rapidly becoming irrelevant.

Conventional wisdom has it that, come November, Republicans will retain control of the House and, more likely than not, gain control of the Senate.

Will this make our politics worse than it already is?   Not likely, inasmuch as the most that can be said for nearly all Democrats these days – the only good thing, in most cases — is that they are not Republicans.

Nothing worth doing gets done now; nothing that stands a chance of happening in this November’s election will change this one iota.

The sad part is that it is probably a good thing that nothing does get done because the status quo, awful as it is, is better than anything Democrats, not to mention Republicans, would do if they could.

Sadder still, in all likelihood, the already useless Democratic Party, ostensibly the party of the lesser evil, will soon be getting even worse.  The deterioration will begin the second Hillary Clinton decides to run for president.

That dreadful panjandrum, good only at attracting inflated speaker’s fees and luxury accommodations for appearances at “events” that any sane person would pay to avoid, is now positioning herself to the right of Obama on bombs, drones and hit squads, while missing no opportunity to pay obeisance to the criminal conspiracy that the Israeli government and its American agents have become.

If the Clintons decide to call in their chits, as they likely will, the nomination will be hers.  And unless the Republicans somehow manage to field a candidate that reasonably lucid voters can abide, the White House will be hers too.

Imagine looking forward to and then living under that!  It will make even Obama look good.

Imagine, the hopeless resignation.  It is enough to cause fears of a big bang to fade, and to think that maybe Eliot was right, after all, about the world ending with a whimper.

Meanwhile, global warming is proceeding, and no one in government is doing much of anything about it.

The problem is not that we are afflicted with a political class that favors environmental devastation.  It is that the paymasters of our political class are getting rich off activities that promote it.  They are paying the piper and calling the tune.

In a political culture as corrupt as ours, why wouldn’t they?   Obama and the others see no percentage in going out on a limb by doing the right thing – not when they can still, as the saying goes, kick the can down the road.

In this too, Obama is only the latest in a long line.   But, again, his contribution comes at a time when the consequences of past inaction are beginning to be felt.  The same old same old is, by now, tantamount to criminal negligence.

Of all Obama’s sins of omission, doing nothing to halt global warming is perhaps the most egregious.

The followers of Pessim seem to have hit upon the perfect trifecta:  the way things are going, the world will end with a bang and a whimper and, as the waters rush in, with a colossal whoosh as well.

It doesn’t have to be this way; an aroused citizenry can still turn these impending disasters around.   But only diehard followers of Optim are foolish enough to think that in the Age of Obama anything like that will happen in time.

ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

[O]peration Protective Edge was not merely a military assault on a primarily civilian population. As in its previous “operations” (Cast Lead in 2008-9 and Pillar of Defense in 2012), it was also part of an ongoing assault on international humanitarian law (IHL) by a highly coordinated team of Israeli lawyers, military officers, PR people and politicians, led by (no less) a philosopher of ethics. It is an effort not only to get Israel off the hook for massive violations of human rights and international law, but to help other governments overcome similar constraints when they embark as well on “asymmetrical warfare,” “counterinsurgency” and “counter-terrorism” against peoples resisting domination. It is a campaign that Israel calls “lawfare” and had better be taken seriously by us all.

The urgency of this campaign has been underscored by a series of notable legal setbacks and challenges Israel has incurred over the past decade or so, beginning with the indictment of Ariel Sharon in 2001 by a Belgian court over his involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacres, for which he escaped trial. In the wake of Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, when Sharon’s government oversaw the demolition of hundreds of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, the utter destruction of virtually all the infrastructure of Palestinian cities, the death of 497 Palestinians and the arrest of 7000 people, Israel was accused of war crimes, but succeeded in foiling a UN investigation.

In 2004, at the request of the General Assembly, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that Israel’s construction of the wall inside Palestinian territory is “contrary to international law” and must be dismantled. The ruling was upheld almost unanimously by the UN General Assembly, with only Israel, the US, Australia and a few Pacific atolls dissenting – though, again, it lacked any means of enforcement. In the second Lebanon War in 2006, after destroying the Dahiya neighborhood in Beirut, the Hizbollah “stronghold,” Israel announced its “Dahiya Doctrine.” Declared Gadi Eisenkott, head of the IDF’s Northern Command,

What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006, “will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on…. We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”

And it was applied again. The Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead concluded that

The tactics used by Israeli military armed forces in the Gaza offensive [of 2008-2009] are consistent with previous practices, most recently during the Lebanon war in 2006. A concept known as the Dahiya doctrine emerged then, involving the application of disproportionate force and the causing of great damage and destruction to civilian property and infrastructure, and suffering to civilian populations.

The Dahiya Doctrine violates two cardinal principles of IHL: The Principle of Distinction and the Principle of Disproportionality. The Principle of Distinction, embodied in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their two Additional Protocols of 1977, lays down a hard-and-fast rule: civilians cannot be targeted by armies. On the contrary, they must be protected; violence to life and person is strictly prohibited, as are “outrages upon personal dignity.” The Principle of Proportionality, also embodied in the 1977 Protocols to the Fourth Geneva Conventions considers it a war crime to intentionally attack a military objective in the knowledge that the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage. “The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians,” says Protocol I, Article 50 (3), “does not deprive the population of its civilian character.”

Not only were these principles violated yet again in the current round of fighting – and the Israeli government, aware of this, has carefully prepared its defense before the UN Human Rights Council’s international committee of inquiry as well as before the International Criminal Court, should the Palestinian Authority turn to it – but an additional doctrine of intentional disproportionality has also been declared and perpetrated: the Hannibal Doctrine. This states that when an Israeli soldier is captured, rescuing him becomes the main mission, no matter how many civilians are killed or injured, how much damage is caused, or even if the captured soldier himself is killed or wounded by “friendly” fire. When, then, it was believed (falsely, it turned out) that an IDF soldier had been captured by Hamas in the Rafah area, the entire urban area came under massive Israeli artillery fire and air strikes, in which hundreds of buildings were destroyed and at least 130 people killed.

Violations of the Principles of Distinction and Disproportionality constitute grave breaches of international law – and we can only imagine what states would do if they were eliminated from the legal code or significantly watered down. But this is precisely what Israel aims to do. Using the Palestinians as their guinea pigs in a bold and aggressive strategy of “fixing” international law, it wants to create new categories of combatants – “non-legitimate actors” such as “terrorists,” “insurgents” and “non-state actors,” together with the civilian population that supports them – so that anyone resisting state oppression can no longer claim protection. This is especially relevant when, as British General Rupert Smith tells us, modern warfare is rapidly moving away from the traditional inter-state model to what he calls a “new paradigm” – “war amongst the people” – in which “We fight amongst the people, not on the battlefield.” A more popular term used by military people, “asymmetrical warfare,” is perhaps more honest and revealing, since it highlights the vast power differential that exists between states and their militaries and the relative weakness of the non-state forces confronting them.

But “the people,” those pesky “non-state actors,” also have rights. Back in 1960, the UN General Assembly’s Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples endorsed the right of peoples to self-determination and, by extension, their right to resist, even by armed force, “alien subjugation, domination and exploitation.” The push-back by governments over the years, and certainly since 9/11, led by the US and Israel, has been to delegitimize the right of non-state actors to resist oppression. Thus, when Obama or the EU uphold Israel’s right to defend itself, they do not include as part of that right that of an occupied people to defend itself. Indeed, non-state actors are cast as “terrorists” (the category into which Israel dumps all insurgents, revolutionaries and, by extension, any protesters threatening the powers-that-be), thus deprived of any legitimacy as “a side” to a conflict with whom negotiations are possible. When they seek the protection of international law, as did the people of Gaza, and take steps to hold state actors accountable for their illegal actions, they are engaging in what Israel defines as “lawfare”: when “terrorists” employ international law as a weapon against democracies. Israel’s campaign against lawfare attempts to cast non-state actors as the villains, of course, but “lawfare’ best describes Israel’s own efforts to bend IHL to its needs – a kind of asymmetrical lawfare to remove all constraints on states in their attempts to pursue wars against peoples.

Israel’s lawfare campaign is led by two Israeli figures. One is Asa Kasher, a professor of philosophy and “practical ethics” at Tel Aviv University, the author of the Israeli army’s Code of Conduct. Indeed, attaching a professional ethicist to the IDF provides the basis for Israel’s oft-stated claim to have the “most moral army in the world.” The second figure is Major General Amos Yadlin, former head of the IDF’s National Defense College, under whose auspices Kasher and his “team” formulated the Code of Conduct, and today the head of Military Intelligence.

It is completely appropriate and understandable that Israel should be leading the campaign to remove the protections enjoyed by non-combatant civilians, Kasher vigorously asserts. “The decisive question,” he says,

is how enlightened countries conduct themselves. We in Israel are in a key position in the development of law in this field because we are on the front lines in the fight against terrorism. This is gradually being recognized both in the Israeli legal system and abroad…. What we are doing is becoming the law. These are concepts that are not purely legal, but also contain strong ethical elements.

The Geneva Conventions are based on hundreds of years of tradition of the fair rules of combat. They were appropriate for classic warfare, where one army fought another. But in our time the whole business of rules of fair combat has been pushed aside. There are international efforts underway to revise the rules to accommodate the war against terrorism. According to the new provisions, there is still a distinction between who can and cannot be hit, but not in the blatant approach which existed in the past. The concept of proportionality has also changed….

I am not optimistic enough to assume that the world will soon acknowledge Israel’s lead in developing customary international law. My hope is that our doctrine, give or take some amendments, will in this fashion be incorporated into customary international law in order to regulate warfare and limit its calamities.

In order to provide a philosophical basis for undermining the Principles of Distinction and Proportionality, Kasher and Yadlin put forward a “new doctrine of military ethics” based on their version of a “Just War Doctrine of Fighting Terror.” Basically they privilege states in their conflicts with non-state actors by giving them the authority to deem an adversary “terrorist,” a term lacking any agreed-upon definition in IHL, thereby depriving it of any legal protection. They define an “act of terror,”

as an act, carried out by individuals or organizations, not on behalf of any state, for the purpose of killing or otherwise injuring persons, insofar as they are members of a particular population, in order to instill fear among the members of that population (‘terrorize’ them), so as to cause them to change the nature of the related regime or of the related government or of policies implemented by related institutions, whether for political or ideological (including religious) reasons.

If we remove the words “not on behalf of any state,” this definition of a terrorist act conforms precisely to Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine. According to Major General Giora Eiland, attacks against Israel will be deterred by harming “the civilian population to such an extent that it will bring pressure to bear on the enemy combatants.” Reducing a popular struggle to a series of discrete acts, moreover, makes it possible to label an entire resistance movement “terrorist” purely on the basis of one or more particular acts, with no regard to its situation or the justness of its cause. Once this is done, it is easy to criminalize non-state resistance, since terrorism is, in Kasher’s words, “utterly immoral.”

Israel’s attempts to have the Iranian Revolutionary Guards declared a “terror organization,” even though it is an agent of a state, shows the tendentiousness of Kasher’s and Yadlin’s philosophical definitions, since it does not fit into their very own “state/non-state” dichotomy. What, then, would prevent the international community from naming the IDF and various covert Israeli agencies such as the Mossad or the Shin Bet (the General Security Services) as “terror organizations”? The Goldstone Report itself concluded that Israel’s offensive against Gaza during Operation Cast Lead was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.”

Having de-legitimized state-defined “acts of terrorism,” Kasher and Yadlin then go on to further legitimize state actions such as those taken by Israel against Hizbollah, Hamas or, indeed, all Palestinian resistance, by invoking “self-defense” – again, a claim which, according to Just War Theory and Article 51 of the UN Charter, only a state can make. In order to do so, they begin the narrative of events leading up to the attacks on Gaza with the discreet acts that the “terrorist” organization had done by launching rockets on Israel without any regard whatsoever for 47 years of occupation, 25 years of closure, seven years of a self-described regime of semi-starvation and the attacks on Hamas that preceded the rocket fire – or, for that matter, the right of Palestinians to resist “alien subjugation, domination and exploitation.”

Kasher and Yadlin also imply that states cannot engage in terrorism – only because they are states which have a “legitimate monopoly” over the use of force. In fact, the non-state “terrorism from below” which so concerns them pales in scale when compared to “terrorism from above,” State Terrorism. In his book Death By Government, R.J. Rummel points out that over the course of the 20th century about 170,000 innocent civilians were killed by non-state actors, a significant figure to be sure. But, he adds,

during the first eighty-eight years of this [20th] century, almost 170 million men, women and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people.

And that, written in 1994, does not include Zaire, Bosnia, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, Saddam Hussein’s reign, the impact of UN sanctions on the Iraqi civilian population and other state-sponsored murders that occurred after Rummel compiled his figures. It also does not account for all the forms of State Terrorism that do not result in death: torture, imprisonment, repression, house demolitions, induced starvation, intimidation and all the rest.

“We do not deny,” Kasher concedes, “that a state can act for the purpose of killing persons in order to terrorize a population with the goal of achieving some political or ideological goal.” However, he adds,

when such acts are performed on behalf of a state, or by some of its overt or covert agencies or proxies, we apply to the ensuing conflict moral, ethical and legal principles that are commonly held to pertain to ordinary international conflicts between states or similar political entities. In such a context, a state that killed numerous citizens of another state in order to terrorize its citizenry would be guilty of what is commonly regarded as a war crime [italics added].

Kasher’s caveat – “a state that killed numerous citizens of another state in order to terrorize its citizenry” – does not relate at all to a state that terrorizes its own citizens, and lets Israel off the hook, since the terrorized population of Gaza are not citizens of another state.

Israel’s strategy of lawfare rests on repeating illegal acts while continuing to justify them with “new military ethics.” “If you do something for long enough,” says Colonel (res.) Daniel Reisner, former head of the IDF’s Legal Department, “the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries…. International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassinations thesis [that extra-judicial killings are permitted when it is necessary to stop a certain operation against the citizens of Israel and when the role played by the target is crucial to the operation] and we had to push it. Eight years later it is in the center of the bounds of legality.” “The more often Western states apply principles that originated in Israel to their own non-traditional conflicts in places like Afghanistan and Iraq,” says Kasher, “then the greater the chance these principles have of becoming a valuable part of international law.”

A few years ago (2005) the The Jerusalem Post published a revealing interview with an Israeli “expert in international law” who, choosing to remain anonymous, explained:

International law is the language of the world and it’s more or less the yardstick by which we measure ourselves today. It’s the lingua franca of international organizations. So you have to play the game if you want to be a member of the world community. And the game works like this. As long as you claim you are working within international law and you come up with a reasonable argument as to why what you are doing is within the context of international law, you’re fine. That’s how it goes. This is a very cynical view of how the world works. So, even if you’re being inventive, or even if you’re being a bit radical, as long as you can explain it in that context, most countries will not say you’re a war criminal.

This, again, is serious stuff. Just as Israel exports its occupation – its weaponry and tactics of suppression – to such willing customers as US and European militaries, security agencies and police forces, so, too, does it export its legal expertise in manipulating IHL and its effective PR/hasbara techniques. Gaza itself represents little more than a testing ground for these varied instruments of suppression of Gaza. It is the globalization of Gaza that is a key Israeli export. Exports, however, need local agents to package the product and create a market for it in the local economy. Thus, B’nai Brith in the US spawned “The Lawfare Project” under the slogan “Protecting Against the Politicization of Human Rights” <http://www.thelawfareproject.org>, whose main strategy is to enlist prominent legal experts to delegitimize attempts to hold Israel accountable for its crimes under IHL.

Globalizing Gaza in both military and legal terms raises the slogan “we are all Palestinians” from one of political solidarity to literal accuracy. Its collolary also highlights a key element of international politics of which we must be keenly aware: our governments are all Israel.

Jeff Halper is the head of The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). He can be reached at: jeff@icahd.org.