“There were young knights among them who had never been present at a stricken field. Some could not look upon it and some could not speak and they held themselves apart from the others who were cutting down the prisoners at My Lord’s orders, for the prisoners were a body too numerous to be guarded by those of us who were left. Then Jean de Rye, an aged knight of Burgundy who had been sore wounded in the battle, rode up to the group of young knights and said: ‘Are ye maidens with your downcast eyes? Look well upon it. See all of it. Close your eyes to nothing. For a battle is fought to be won. And it is this that happens if you lose.”
– Froissart’s Chronicles, 14th century
I have deliberately waited to comment on the Itamar Massacre until I had gained enough control over myself to do so with a certain degree of objective detachment.
I may be alone in this, and it’s not likely to win me any popularity contests. But as I’ve said, you know you’re being objective when everybody likes you – or everybody hates you.
The facts as they have emerged so far are these: in the West Bank Israeli village of Itamar last week, two men broke into the house of the Fogel family and murdered Udi Fogel, 36, his wife Ruth, 35, their sons Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and their four-month-old baby girl Hadas.
The victims were stabbed in the heart and had their throats cut. It subsequently emerged the baby had been beheaded.
Two boys, Roi, 8, and Yishai, 2, were somehow overlooked. The couple’s daughter Tamar, 12, returned home from spending Shabbat with friends, found something suspicious outside the house and roused a neighbor. The neighbor got his gun and accompanied her into the house to find Yishai shaking the bodies of his parents, begging them to get up.
Reportedly, bloody footprints were found leading to the nearby Palestinian village of Rafah.
Palestinian response has been contradictory. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas officially condemned the murders as, “immoral and inhuman” according to the BBC news. We also know Palestinian leaders have a history of issuing statements for the Western media contradicted by statements issued for home consumption in the Arabic-language press.
Other Palestinian sources claimed it was an Israeli set-up. This seems a frail reed in light of reports of people celebrating and handing out sweets in Rafah.
(Photo credit Free Republic.)
Reaction in the West has ranged from outraged among supporters of Israel, to muted among supporters of the Palestinians.
Supporters of Israel found fault in much of the media coverage. Examples include treatment of the story in the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC.
After looking over the offending sites, in my judgement their coverage does seem to lean a certain way, but you can also find things that don’t seem to get mentioned in conservative Israeli-supporting media.
The BBC reported, “On Sunday some settlers set fire to Palestinian cars and attacked Palestinian homes in revenge. There are fears there could be more violence.”
The violence feared does not include beheading four-month-old babies though.
President Obama released a statement, “There is no possible justification for the killing of parents and children in their home,” which seems eerily detached.
It is also not true.
Plenty of parents and children have been killed in their homes over the past century, by bombs dropped from aircraft, artillery fire, or Predator drone attacks. Some of them on President Obama’s orders, some of them by Israeli firepower.
(However, the president has generally been getting a pass in the media Israel doesn’t get.)
The allied bomber pilots and crews who smashed the Third Reich and imperial Japan are rightly regarded as heroes. We don’t spend a lot of time contemplating the women and children who died when they rained hell on them from the air. We can’t, or we’d be paralyzed by conscience.
What is horrifying to us in the west, is the up-close and personal nature of the murders, and the deliberate targeting of helpless civilians. Not as “collateral damage,” in that detestable military euphemism, but calculatedly, deliberately, and gleefully.
But there is something perhaps even more horrifying. From time to time we see news stories in the west about crimes committed by murderous psychopaths with similar results. We don’t see masses of people dancing in the streets, celebrating the murders with gifts and sweets, and naming public facilities, events, and streets in honor of the murderers.
There’s been a lot of back-and-forth on the issue, almost all of which misses the point.
Some point out that Palestinian casualties have always been higher than Israeli casualties. They’re quite right.
The best comment I ever saw on this was from an Israeli girl a few years ago. She pointed out in her village they get fire through their living room windows from a nearby Palestinian village. They sometimes respond with fire from helicopter gunships.
“Excuse me for our superior firepower,” was how she put it.
Others point out the Palestinians are resisting colonizers of their land. I agree, and I’ll point out that I was saying this way back when it was still dangerous to do so, before the rise of anti-Semitism on the Left.
Claims by Zionists of a prior right to the land based on their descent from the original inhabitants a few thousand years ago are nonsense. By those lights all of us of Goidelic Celtic descent could demand the right to settle in Spain, the jumping off point for the colonization of Ireland and Scotland. Hell, we could make a case for the reconquista of most of Western Europe.
The counter-point is that Palestinians living in Israel are both freer and richer on average than any Arab population elsewhere in the region under governments of their own, and that most of the misery they suffer within the boundaries of Israel is self-inflicted.
This is also quite true.
We could go round and round with these points and not get anywhere. What is preventing a resolution here is I think, certain cultural illusions held by the west. Illusions seen and understood, but not shared by non-westerners.
We need not be ashamed of holding these illusions, all cultures have them and it takes an extraordinary effort of courage and clear thinking to see past them. And we must, because our survival as a civilization depends on it.
I expect a lot of disagreement on this, but firstly can we agree on one point?
This has been stated many times before: If the Palestinians, and all Arab countries hostile to Israel, laid down their arms, stopped attacking Israel, and renounced force as a means of getting what they want, there would be peace. If Israel disarmed and renounced force, there would be no Jews left there within a very short period of time.
At this point in time, I think it perverse to deny this elementary fact. The way opponents of Israel deal with it, is to ignore it. They can’t deny it with a straight face.
Would Israel’s enemies allow the Jews to evacuate the country (assuming they could find a place to go) without attacking them as they left?
Who knows? My guess is not, but it’s just that, a guess.
The primary illusion we are hampered by is about how peace is made, and it’s a relatively recent one. Few members of western civilization would have held it in the early-to-mid 19th century for example.
There are three ways peace can be made between contending parties: through reason, exhaustion, and victory.
Today we assume peace can always be made through reason. Warring parties will make peace if they are shown the costs of war outweigh any benefits of victory.
Peace arrived at by clear reasoning is historically rare, and the most likely to fail in the short run. Clear-eyed statesmen may prevent war by reasoning among themselves, but when the situation changes enough to make only one side believe it has a chance of getting what it wants through war, the peace can collapse overnight.
Recently we’ve seen an example of the peace of exhaustion, where one or both parties are just too sick of the conflict to go on.
Northern Ireland, Ulster, looks like it’s finally at peace. There were certain concessions made, and certain injustices redressed, but the goal of the Catholic faction, unification of Ulster with the Republic of Ireland, was not achieved. Mostly it seems, the “hard men” got old and didn’t want to kill each other anymore. For some reason, young men were no longer interested in continuing the war.
(And by the way, a nodding acquaintance with the long history of Ireland would show that if Ireland is ever unified, it won’t be “again” but for the first time ever.)
With Ireland at peace (knock wood) the last prolonged conflict in the world that did not involve Muslims ended.
The most common reliable and lasting peace is achieved by overwhelming victory.
Why is there no serious Confederate irredentist movement? In most other countries a civil war of that magnitude would be simmering for centuries afterwards.
Could it be because the South was so thoroughly beaten there was never the least doubt they lost because of overwhelming force? That there was no credible “stabbed in the back” consolation?
Furthermore, what would be the point of reopening the issue? Slavery is gone and not likely to return. (Or rather if it does, it will be an equal-opportunity non-racial slavery.)
Why are Germany and Japan, in spite of some friction and honest disagreements appropriate to free men, now our friends and allies?
Because both of them learned in the clearest possible way that it is a terrible thing to be our enemies. Because they learned it is dangerous to be our enemy, it is dangerous to be friends with our enemy, it is dangerous to be in the same neighborhood as our enemy.
Next: Reflections on Itamar, part 2: Things we don’t want to think about and are too polite to mention.
A collection of Steve Browne’s essays and newspaper columns, “The View from Flyover Country: A Rural Columnist Looks at Life in the 21st Century” is available on Amazon Kindle.
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