Moshe Elad
Chirac. 'Hypocritical leaders'
Photo: AP
On proportionality
Cynical world leaders have long accused Israel of acting 'out of proportion'. But it's only a matter of time until they change rules of game
Over and over, the world complains that Israel's
responses are "out of proportion."
French President Jacques Chirac, for example, would have preferred Israel kidnap two Hizbullah soldiers in response to the kidnapping of two Israeli ones. An eye for an eye, you know.
Today, more than ever, it is clear that the source of these claims is to be found in hypocritical leaders and corrupt media outlets. This war is a good opportunity for Israel's PR machine to finally tell the world: yes, we are responding out of proportion, because the threat Israel faces has no proportions.
A word for the cynical
We would also do well to remind those self-righteous people that our "non-proportional" attention to national security did not begin with the current war. Since Israel was established, there have been several landmarks that the world wanted to remove, but eventually made peace with – and even saluted. For example:
Air Security. Israel was the first country to enact "non-proportional" security measures on El Al flights. Several hijackings by PLO terrorists in the 1970s forced the airline to place security guards on board, to take great care checking out passengers and baggage and to profile passengers.
One time we even made a surprise visit to Entebbe to free hostages being held at an entirely non-proportional distance. Travelers used to outrageously lenient security procedures on foreign airlines complained about Israel's lack of "proportion," and some even boycotted El Al – until September 11, 2001, that is.
Teaching security
As someone who has used American airports a fair bit, mainly in Boston before the World Trade Center attack, I was shocked more than once that airports employed security rules more appropriate for buses or taxis. Only after the attack did I understand that this stemmed from an American desire to be "proportional."
Israel experts summoned to the United States taught their hosts that in the era of modern terrorism, the price for proportional action could well be human lives. And as a result, security at Boston's Logan Airport today is a virtual copy of the security arrangement at Ben Gurion Airport.
Targeted assassination. When Israel assassinated heads of the PLO's "Black September" faction back in the 1970s, we were criticized by Europe and the United States, both of whom called for a halt to those actions. They demanded we arrest the guilty and bring them to trial, as if they were car thieves or rapists.
Even though Israel never publicly took responsibility for the assassinations of the killers of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, for example, the hypocritical world demanded we stop, because we had entered a new standing in the fight against terror, completely "out of proportion."
But again, it was only a question of time until the West began experiencing terrorist attacks at home and quickly changed its self-righteous moral stance. Al-Qaeda and Hizbullah attacks created new ideas about "targeting," as well as "decks of cards" including Bin Laden, Zarqawi, Zawahiri, showing once again that proportion is really just a matter of time.
Iraq's nuclear reactor. After Israel destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981, only a few voices around the world backed Israel up during those hard days. World leaders, including the US administration, fumed that Israel was "hysterical" for acting so far out of proportion. They felt there was no "clear and immediate danger" to Israel.
10 years later, during the Gulf War, the world, and especially America, understood that Israel's removal of Iraq's nuclear threat a decade prevented a totally non-proportional disaster, one that would not have been aimed only at Israel.
The lesson the world must learn today is that the more nuclear Iran benefits from understanding under the same banner of "proportional policy," the damage it will cause in future will be further and further out of proportion.
What can you do, Israel is the sacrifice of non-proportionality. The only democracy in the Middle East is surrounded by 10 Arab dictatorships, two of whom –nuclear Iran and terror-sponsoring Syria – make no attempt to hide their desire to destroy us.
Their agents, Hizbullah in the north and Hamas in the south and center of the country – are two fundamentalist terror organizations that remind Israel every day that it must fight for its survival.
Others, such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, support the terror groups politically, morally and financially. Even supposed "friends" – Egypt, Jordan, Morocco – put diplomatic pressure on the United States, the European Union and the UN to reign in Israel.
Israeli PR must teach the world the following principle about proportionality: If the Arabs lay down their weapons, there will be peace. If Israel lays down its weapons, there will be no Israel.
Brig. Gen. (res.) Moshe Elad served in several senior positions in Lebanon and the Territories. Today he is a researcher at the Shmuel Neeman Institute at the Technion
