Retaliate against Muslim civilians for Islamic terrorist attacks

Tit-for-tat is a proper response to any harm, Islamic terrorism included. A bus with Arabs blown in Ramallah is an answer to the bus with Israelis blown in Tel Aviv. Swift Israeli retaliation will make the cause-and-effect relation between terrorism and anti-terrorism evident and prevent escalation. Israel should announce towns targeted for reprisal beforehand, so that Arabs in fear would press the Islamic terrorists to abstain. Living the countdown will cause anxiety, unattainable if Arabs everywhere see themselves as improbable targets of Israeli war on terror. Media will aggravate fear with reportages from doomed Arab towns. Israel should target Palestinian cities with offices of terrorist organizations and where demonstrations in support of terrorists took place recently. This will make the Arab inhabitants cautious of tolerating Islamic terrorists. Many Israeli soldiers will shy from intentionally harming Arab civilians, even if militarily sound; few takers will always be found among Israelis. Or Israeli terrorists could answer the Arabs in kind, formally relieving the Israeli government of responsibility for terrorist acts questioned by world opinion. Israel could invite Indians or Russians who served in commando units to do the terrorist job.

Arabs are not inherently bad or antagonistic to Israelis. The Israeli Arabs are reasonably loyal, though hardly fervent citizens. The Arabs have not become a fifth column of terrorists in any war Israel has fought, not so much because Israel is good to them but rather because they value the high quality of life they have in Israel compared to Arabs in other Middle East countries. Only Islamic radical propaganda and troublemaking prevent a similar rapprochement in the territories occupied by the Palestinian Authority. Local Palestinian administrators cannot crack down on the Islamic militants for fear of endangering their financial and political support from Arab countries. The only way to stop Palestinian terrorism is to turn Palestinians against the Islamic radicals. Israeli and American financial aid will not accomplish that end and is largely stolen or diverted by Palestinian administration anyway. External power cannot make people rich and happy. Only fear of Israel will make Palestinians root out the Islamic terrorists. The ways for Israel to instill fear in Arabs are many, from summary executions to large-firepower strikes by Israel Defense Forces to razing neighborhoods of Palestinian suicide bombers to pervasive police work and spying. The latter options are less cruel, and a reasonable Israeli military administration should use them. Ariel Sharon used them to keep Gaza quiet under Israeli control, but the West Bank is too large for Israel to police, but Israel can hit the Arabs often enough and hard enough to make them clean up their act and deal with Islamic terrorism. The statehood the Palestinians aspire to imposes obligations. A householder who rented to someone who stocked TNT to blow up the neighbors would be sued. Similarly, as would-be citizens, the Palestinians must deal with the Islamic terrorists among them, unless they think terrorism an acceptable means to fight Israel, in which case they are the home front of anti-Israeli forces. When Colombia could not whip the drug dealers, it enlisted American help and things improved—though scores of civilians died in the process. Islamic terrorists are more dangerous than drugs. If no country should tolerate drug traffickers, far less should any harbor Islamic terrorists. Countries must deal with their criminals, not let themselves be used as a base for international terrorism. The Palestinian Authority should deal with the Islamic terrorists by all possible means instead of refusing Israeli military help. If the Palestinian Authority cannot or does not want to do away with the Islamic terrorists, then it cannot be a state, and Israel is justified in taking it over it, just as the United States annexed bits of Mexico to stop the criminal anarchy on its border. Germans who disagreed with Nazi war policies still suffered in the war. The principle of collective responsibility means a state must be coherent in its relations with others. When people give up their individuality to form a state, they can no longer expect to be treated as individuals with varying opinions. When a government signs a peace treaty, it must assure the other party has dealt with the home opposition, if there be any. When a country undertakes to phase out the production of CFCs, the other affected parties cannot worry if the producing factories suffer. When a country goes to war, it conscripts citizens regardless of the way they vote. A state exists as long as almost all its citizens agree to act as a single body, whether they agree with particular decisions or not; when the Chechens or the Bosnians stopped seeing themselves as a part of larger entity, they opted for independence. Many Americans protested the Vietnam War, making retaliation against the mainland unjustified and counterproductive. Not a single demonstration in Palestine has protested the Authority’s tolerance and support of Islamic terrorists; no protests in other Muslim countries; no votes against the rulers and terrorist organizations who attack Israel; no conscientious objectors to Arab-Israeli wars among Muslims; no one refusing to pay taxes to finance the war with Israel. Though a duty to fight evil may be disputed, not supporting it is obligatory. The Arabs consort with and encourage Islamic terrorists and the families of suicide bombers instead of turning them in. Justice is statistical: collateral damage is inevitable in fighting criminals, from sentencing innocent people to killing hostages during rescue operations. The more heinous the crime, the higher the tolerance of collateral damage. Fighting the Muslim terrorism, the most damaging crime, causes the highest collateral damage.

Muslims suffer, not because Israel wants to kill innocent civilians but because Islamic terrorists hide behind them. Muslim population is a live shield held hostage by Islamic terrorists. If the Muslims turned on the Islamic terrorists, the terrorists could not hide, and there would be no need for Israeli reprisals.

Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular are responsible for the Islamic terrorist war against Israel. A Muslim individual’s contribution to the Arab-Israeli war effort might be slight, but his chances of getting hurt in an Israeli reprisal attack are minor as well: reciprocal accountability is statistically equitable. Soldiers in conscripted armies are a representative sampling of civilians; as many soldiers oppose the war as civilians. Punishment based on responsibility should be logically extended to the Israel enemy’s soldiers, killing only those who credibly tried to kill Israelis; judging by Israeli losses, those are a small minority. Singling out Muslim soldiers or civilians directly responsible for Israeli deaths is impractical.

Instead of resisting the Arab-Israeli war or changing the Islamic governments or even asking the United States or the United Nations to help round up anti-Israeli terrorist organizations, Muslim civilians provide safe haven and financial and moral support for Islamic terrorists and conscripts for Arab armies whose primary target is Israel. Muslims encourage Islamic terrorists to murder Israeli civilians. Whether the Arab means or ends are just is irrelevant. They are unacceptable to Israel. The notion that Arabs are ruled by tyrants who sneer at popular opinion is wrong—and impossible in the world of mass media and interconnectedness. Autocrats today rely on popular support. Stalin, Hitler, Nasser, Khomeini, Saddam, Assad enjoyed majority support and repressed only a few dissidents. The reasons Arabs support rulers are irrelevant; but in undeveloped Islamic countries where differences of opinion are slight, the support is often overwhelming.

There is no reason Israel should not attack Arab civilians. Humane behavior is good with one’s neighbors. For the Israeli government, that means Israeli Jews. Humane concern for Israelis means retaliation for Israeli enemies, by far the most effective way to eradicate Arab popular support for Islamic vigilantes. Although physical destruction or mutilation of Islamic terrorist supporters are valid war tactics for Israel, milder reactions—like destroying Arab villages and exiling the Palestinians—may avoid stirring up the Israeli moral conscience. Israel could send the Palestinians to Lebanon or the poor countries of Asia, Africa, or Eastern Europe in return for Israeli economic assistance.

The Israeli distaste for warring on civilians comes from fear of retaliation and the Christian notion that it is better to let the guilty go unpunished than to punish the innocent. That is wrong, since the guilty always turn on the innocent so in the end more innocent people suffer than would if the judicial system punished the innocent now and then. The media cry out at the occasional unjust sentence but say nothing about the criminals who escape punishment because some juror had reasonable doubt. Right and wrong judgments balance each other, and attempts to reduce the number of wrong ones upsets that balance and reduces right judgments as well. In a just society any tightening of the requirements to prove criminal guilt would more likely hamper right judgments than prevent mistakes. In most societies, people are rarely brought to trial for nothing, and the ratio of unjust judgments is small. The absolute number is very important; even a single innocent person wronged by the jury is a liability to society. The system of justice, however, is not guilty for convicting a statistically minor percentage of innocent people, since absolute righteousness is unattainable, and the cost of attempting it is enormous. The law of marginal utility fully applies to justice. Formalizing the rules of evidence away from a common-sense approach makes society less just and frees criminals more than it protects the innocent. The same is true of Arab civilian casualties in israeli anti-terrorist strikes. If societies allow the equivalent of ten percent collateral damage judging common criminals, we should tolerate more when punishing terrorists, since each unpunished Islamic terrorist will inflict much more damage than any unpunished common criminal. Quite often, more Muslim civilians than Islamic terrorists die, and it is better to kill one or five civilians for every terrorist than to leave them free to kill countless civilians. The higher the death toll they are likely to incur, the higher the collateral damage justified. Dozens of innocent people might have to die for Israel to take out the leaders of Islamic terrorist organizations responsible for hundreds Israeli civilian dead in Islamic terrorist acts.

Islamic terrorists target Israeli civilians not as collateral damage but as a primary targets, war objectives to advance a political goal of settling with Israel. Islamic terrorists do not shrink from killing even friendly civilians, as in the U.S. embassy bombings which inflicted far heavier losses on bystanders than on the targeted personnel. Radical Muslim clerics try to justify using weapons of mass destruction against Israeli civilians with references to the Koran and sharia. Common Muslims support the Islamic terrorists by a large margin. Muslim support for the 9/11 attacks was nearly universal in various Islamic countries. Germans who supported the Nazi Wehrmacht could not dissociate themselves from its actions, nor can Muslims object to Israeli attacks on Muslim civilians while they favor attacking Israelis.

To accustom public opinion to reprisals against Arab civilians, Israel should target active Islamic terrorist supporters like demonstrators. Every donor to Hezbollah and the like, from Egyptian janitors to Saudi princes, must fear Israel. Once they are known to Israel, they should be dead men walking. It is one thing to support Islamic terror from the safety of your house and quite another when every malicious donation puts your life in danger from monstrous Israel. Muslim donors finance Islamic terror and kill Israelis. No need for Israel to go after all of them: a few dozen publicized cases would dissuade most Muslims from supporting Islamic anti-Israeli terror actively.

Islamic terrorist warfare is not cheap—weapons, hideouts, training camps, payments to families of Palestinian suicide bombers, all add up—and terrorist leaders do not work for free. Cutting the money supply is an important counter-terror measure available to Israel. Eliminating a handful of Saudi financiers and Iranian mullahs would allow Israel choke off important resources of Islamic terrorism.

Some Israelis say finding Islamic terrorists is almost impossible, since there are so few. That is wrong for at least two reasons. Even if they are few, they still have to talk: ground, cellular, and satellite phones, e-mail. Tracing calls is no problem, and call lists reveal the network to most security services in the world now, though Israel’s limited access to Muslim telephone networks and satellite communications is a shame. More information comes to Israelis with physical pressure or drugging imprisoned Islamic terrorists. The issue is not collecting data by Israeli organizations but rather the Israeli government' political will to use it. Small Muslim cells are usually unprofessional and easily detected. The experience of Al Qaeda shows the impossibility of building an army from scratch. Short training courses did not make Al Qaeda professional, nor was it professional until it built training camps in Afghanistan. The properly trained Hezbollah is the only Islamic terrorist group remotely resembling an army unit—therefore it cannot hide underground and is sufficiently visible for Israel to attack it repeatedly.

Since the Arabs who support Islamic terror are accessories to terrorist crime against Israel, there is no reason for Israel to handle them with kid gloves. Both captured Islamic terrorists and the Muslim civilians who support them in any way whatsoever are liable to imprisonment and restitution of damaged Israeli property by confiscation or hard labor. Israelis wonder if Islamic terrorists and their Muslim supporters are criminals or soldiers, but the upshot is the same: Israel should hold them responsible, their punishment should be sufficiently harsh to discourage others, and Israel need not prove guilt beyond participation in illegal activity or war against Israel.

Israel's acceptance of the inevitability of some Muslim civilian casualties would allow involving the Israeli Defense Force in anti-terror operations. Currently Israel Defense Forces performs police work, searching houses and arresting individual Islamic terrorists with court warrants and letting everyone else go free. That is not the Israeli army’s job. Israeli soldiers are trained to kill efficiently. On the battlefield, Israelis don’t just shoot Muslims who shoot at them and let everybody else—tank drivers, for example—go. Warfare is no time for deliberation but rather for killing. Israeli anti-terror operations are beyond the scope of normal non-violent police work. The best idea is to let Israel Defense Forces follow the rules of combat and go after Islamic terrorists hiding among Muslim civilians, and that requires Israel accepting Muslims civilian casualties, such as regularly occur when police destroy houses in which criminals hide. The world bothered itself little about the hundreds of civilians killed in NATO operations in Yugoslavia, the thousands during the second American invasion of Iraq, or the millions of Muslims killed by Muslims in various conflicts in the last half-century. Yet public opinion does not tolerate collateral damage inflicted by Israelis.[6]

Limiting attacks upon Arab civilians to predictable levels puts the Israel Defense Forces at a disadvantage. The Soviet instructors in Vietnam noted a puzzling American habit: American troops warned villages before they attacked, and most raids destroyed only empty huts. The population survived to fight on. Attacking civilians has been effective in many wars, notably in World War II but also in civil wars against dictators. The long Iran-Iraq war ended only when the United States downed Iranian civilian aircraft—and that by mistake. Arabs support remote wars in Israel but are less enthusiastic when they are the front and at risk.

[6] Attempts to equate the occasional killing of Arab civilians by the Israel Defense Forces with the Nazi extermination of Jews do not warrant extensive rebuttal. Killing Arabs is not an Israeli goalbut regrettable collateral damage, like the civilians who die when factories are bombed.