“Radicalization”
One of the things Piers Morgan likes to harp on when he slams Israel for its response in Gaza is the idea, which he may actually believe, that Israel killing Gazan Arabs will radicalize the survivors. That it will make them more likely to become future terrorists.
This is part and parcel of the mindset that says Palestinians think the same way that westerners like Piers Morgan think. And at this point, I honestly doubt Morgan’s ability to comprehend the fact that they don’t. That they come from an utterly foreign values framework. That the obvious (to you and me and Piers Morgan) fact that mothers love their children, and want them to grow up healthy and happy, is not the case among the Palestinians.
Arab society is an honor based society. In their society, if a member dishonors the family, killing that family member is not something to be ashamed of. It is something that restores honor to the family. It sees ideas like compromise as foreign, weak, and even unjust. In late summer, 1947, a few months before the vote on the UN Partition Plan, Israel’s Abba Eban spoke with Azzam Pasha, the first Secretary General of the Arab League. His argument to Azzam was simple: “If there is a war, there will have to be a negotiation after it. Why not negotiate before and instead of the war?” This is a rational argument to a westerner. Here is Azzam’s response:
“If you win the war, you will get your state. If you do not win the war, then you will not get it. We Arabs once ruled Iran and once ruled Spain. We no longer have Iran or Spain. If you establish your state the Arabs might one day have to accept it, although even that is not certain. But do you really think that we have the option of not trying to prevent you from achieving something that violates our emotion and our interest? It is a question of historic pride. There is no shame in being compelled by force to accept an unjust and unwanted situation. What would be shameful would be to accept this without attempting to prevent it. No, there will have to be a decision, and the decision will have to be by force.”
(emphasis added)
This is something that westerners simply don’t understand. Arab society will fight at times that westerners would never fight, and they will submit at times that westerners would never submit. “There is no shame in being compelled by force to accept an unjust and unwanted situation.” If Israel defeats the Palestinians soundly, unambiguously, harshly, and finally, they will accept their defeat. It will not “radicalize” them. What radicalizes them is one thing, and one thing only: Hope.
Unlike westerners, who view peace as a condition of compromise, where opposing sides compromise, where each side gets less than they want, but more than the other side wanted to give them, Arabs view peace as a condition where the weaker side has submitted to the stronger side. The very name of the majority Arab religion, Islam, means submission. But it comes from the root salaam, or peace. Because that is how peace is attained in Arab culture. That is why there is no shame in being compelled to accept bitter defeat. And that’s why providing them hope of an eventual victory is precisely the thing that causes violence. The thing that, to use Morgan’s term, “radicalizes” them.
When Israel signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians in 1993, the immediate result was a vast wave of murder and butchery of Jews. This was not extremist Arabs getting their last licks in before peace took hold. This was Arabs seeing Israel granting them a quasi-state (the Palestinian Authority). To the Arabs, this act was one which demonstrated that Israel lacked the courage of its convictions. It assured the Arabs that Israel was weak, and didn’t think it could survive without surrendering. And so they reacted in a way that was fully rational — by their understanding.
In 2000, when PM Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians virtually all of the West Bank, plus land inside the Green Line to match the parts of the West Bank we would keep, plus a capital in Jerusalem, westerners would have seen this as an incredibly generous offer. Arafat, true to his culture, saw it as an incredibly weak offer. As an offer of a dying nation (Israel) that was simply trying to die slowly, rather than quickly. His immediate reaction was to start a massive wave of terror attacks against Israeli civilians. Again, to the western mind, this seemed like an utterly irrational response. But to the Arab mind, it was Israel’s offer that was irrational. You don’t give a gift to the enemy if you don’t intend to be defeated.
Every single time, without fail, that concessions have been made to the Palestinians, the result has been increased violence. Radically increased violence.
If Israel has been guilty of anything with regards to the Palestinians, it has been in Israel’s pathological refusal to win. To defeat them. To bring them low and deprive them of any hope of ever being able to do anything about it. That sounds horrible to the western ear. It feels horrible to write it, because it is so foreign to me. But it is Israel’s mercy, Israel’s pulled punches, Israel’s magnanimity in victory, that has done just as much to perpetuate the conflict as UNRWA’s abusive brainwashing of one Palestinian generation after another to believe that they will destroy Israel in the end.
So Morgan’s repeated refrain that taking the Palestinians down is likely to radicalize them is not only an abject failure to look at the world from the Arab point of view, it is ignoring the historical record of what has happened every time Israel has pulled its punches.
(Israel making the same mistake doesn’t make Morgan’s any more justifiable.)
“Proportionality”
Morgan likes to talk about proportionality. He claims he supports Israel’s right to go after Hamas after what happened on October 7, but complains that too many people have died.
First, just to clear up a common misconception, the term “proportionate” in international laws of warfare has nothing to do with relative numbers of dead. It has only to do with whether the degree of casualties anticipated is “proportionate” to the importance of the target. For example, if a single Hamas fighter is holed up in a school that has children in it, bombing that school and killing all the children in order to get the terrorist would not be proportionate. If, on the other hand, Hamas had a nuclear bomb, and the launch controls were located in a control room in that school and the only way to prevent them from launching the nuke was to bomb that school and all the children in it into oblivion, it would be, in fact, a proportionate act.
But that’s not Morgan’s issue. In a recent interview with former PM Naftali Bennett, he drew a comparison between the number of people killed in Ukraine and the number of people killed in Gaza. But what did he ignore? The number of active Hamas fighters and leaders in Gaza makes up at least 2.5% of the population there. That is an enormous proportion. It means that 1 in every 40 human beings in Gaza is an active terrorist, and that’s ignoring the vast numbers of “civilians” who act as spotters, calling in to Hamas phone centers to let them know when IDF soldiers have been sighted.. It means that if Israel maintains its uniquely low rate of civilian casualties in urban warfare of 2:1, that 3 in every 40 human beings in Gaza is liable to die by the time this war is over. Not because Israel wants it that way, but because the Gazans — not just Hamas, but the Gazans as a whole — have chosen for it to be that way. Because let’s be honest, even 2.5% of the population could not have constructed 500 kilometers of multi-level tunnels under residential neighborhoods and schools and hospitals without the 97.5% knowing about it and choosing to allow it.
Morgan also repeats, ad nauseum, the factoid (a factoid is a fake piece of data presented as a fact) that over half of the population of Gaza is children. It’s maddening to hear him trot this out over and over when it’s patently untrue. If he chooses to view teenagers under arms as “children”, he is welcome to do so, but if one of those children were to come after him, he’d wind up just as dead as he would if the terrorist was in his 40s. In a society that sees nothing wrong with a 40 year old man marrying a 10 year old girl, the whole concept of “child” is something utterly unlike the one that Morgan is using.
Essentially, Piers Morgan wants Israel to stop causing deaths in Gaza, because they make him feel bad. The consequences of Israel doing so don’t matter to him at all. And if they result in another October 7, or in numerous October 7s, Morgan can deplore each one of them, never having to confront the fact that he was proudly demanding that Israel allow it to happen.
(מדרש תנחומא, פרשת מצורע)
אמר רבי אלעזר: כל שנעשה רחמן על האכזרי, לסוף נעשה אכזר על הרחמנים