Israel right to "retaliate"

Editorial

What does the Israeli leadership do after a terror attack? Retaliate. What do Palestinian leaders do after a suicide bombing? Call for a ceasefire. It has the structure of a joke, but it holds far more truth than jest.

Criticism against Israel for its attack on Islamic Jihad murder-training bases in Syria have been swift, self-righteous and hypocritical. Here in Canada, CBC reporter Neil Macdonald punctuated his Monday night report from Washington with the observation that U.S. President George W. Bush could hardly criticize Israel for attacking terrorism bases in Syria, since America is doing essentially the same thing in Afghanistan and Iraq.

True enough, though there are some very distinct differences between the American and the Israeli policies. America cannot prove that the former Iraqi regime had any part in the 9/11 terror attacks, hid weapons of mass destruction, had demonstrable, substantive ties to America's enemies or that Iraq provided any direct succor to murderers of American civilians.

On the other hand, with the exception of fanatical extremists of various stripes, nobody seriously argues that Syria is innocent of harboring killers. Along with neighboring Arab states and the Palestinian Authority, Syria provides a launching pad for murderers who kill Israeli civilians, provides a welcoming moral and cultural environment in which terrorists thrive and which glorifies them after they're dead. But this fact doesn't matter to a large proportion of Israel's critics, in Canada and around the world, whose sense of moral outrage and humanitarianism is wildly selective. To them, Islamist terror is always forgivable, Israeli self-defence is always excessive or wrong. Arguing logically with this sort of relativist fanaticism is like trying to debunk UFOs: It's difficult to dissuade people from a "truth" created by their own powerful imaginations.

Meanwhile, the American president's reticence to criticize Israel has not been shared by most international observers. This week, we have witnessed the usual critics accuse Israel of extraterritoriality, war crimes and the familiar mantra of invective.

This moral outrage diminishes, though, when they tally the Jewish dead: in this instance, the 19 people in Haifa who were blown apart on erev Yom Kippur and the incalculable human repercussions of those murders and associated maimings. These victims and others like them over the decades of anti-Israel terrorism are condemned mildly as unfortunate casualties in the cycle of violence brought on, indirectly, by the victims themselves.

Then, Israel is accused of "retaliation," which implies that one of the world's strongest and most sophisticated military organizations is arbitrarily lashing out without rhyme or reason against a stateless people in a violent tantrum of petty pique. What Canadian media refer to as "retaliation" is in fact – always – a deliberate, well-planned, strategic precision offensive attack on the individuals and locations from which terrorism against Israeli civilians emanates. The Israel Defence Forces never target civilians. Terrorists always do. Critics insist otherwise. For a variety of reasons, they lie.

Israel has a right to defend its citizens from murderers, whether that requires building a fence or bombing the terrorist training ground being sheltered and supported by a neighboring country. And Israeli deaths deserve to be mourned with the same sense of moral outrage and humanitarian revulsion reserved for Palestinian victims.

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