The “Final Solution” in Palestine

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  Here in America we hear rumors of on-going massacres in Gaza.  The latest one, which was not reported either in Israel or America, concerns Israel’s most intensive invasion of Gaza in months or years.  Israeli tanks had cornered some militants in a mosque in Bait Hanun and then proceeded to destroy the mosque with the men inside.  Hamas radio urged all the women in this part of Palestine to converge on the mosque to block the tanks. 

  Thousands of black-cloaked women immediately raced to the mosque, some reportedly wearing two sets of clothes so that the men could escape in disguise as women.  The tank machine gunners simply trained their weapons on the converging women.  The full count of the dead and injured has not yet been determined, but initial reports from what is left of the local hospital indicates that at least one of the badly injured was pregnant.  One woman, lying dead in the make-shift morgue, was unrecognizable because her face had been blown away.

  The Israeli rationale was simply the claim that “the militant wing of Hamas” was firing rockets across the border.  Assuming that Hamas was behind the rocket firing, which is certainly questionable, my first question is, why is the “militant wing of Hamas” firing rockets into Israel?

  Frustration is one obvious reason but this is no excuse.  Desperation is another reason, but lack of hope is un-Islamic when there are better alternatives to secure justice.

  This is not the first time that women have acted more boldly than men in perceived self defense.  A quarter century ago, in 1982, fifty thousand women shouting “Allahu akbar” in south Beirut, in response to a sustained two-day artillery barrage into the Shi’ite slums of south Beirut, caused the instantaneous collapse of the Lebanese army, the immediate withdrawal of American forces, and the beginning of the end of Israeli occupation.  As a ghost-writer for some former American ambassadors at the time, I was privy to the fact that the bombing of the marine barracks was only an excuse, not a cause for American surrender.  The totally unplanned strategy of using woman power worked spectacularly well in Lebanon, which is why it has been carefully hidden from the public, but I doubt that it will work in Palestine.

  The strategy to launch unarmed women against Israeli tanks will not succeed and, as the current example shows, probably will not even be reported in the American and Israeli press.  In response to rocket attacks, the Israelis will not hesitate to kill as many women as necessary to achieve their aims.  Armed escalation will merely play into the hands of the “settlers’ choice,” Lieberman and his associates, who are the new power brokers in Israel and are eagerly waiting for an excuse to launch “the final solution.”

  My second question concerns the “final solution.”  Is the transfer of all Arabs out of Israel proper, and perhaps even beyond, which is the stated policy of Lieberman, the only possible final solution to a conflict over sovereignty in the Holy Land? 

  As Amina Huntress has replied so cogently in answer to the first question, “People have the right to defend themselves. The U.S. attacks even without having to defend itself.” 

  In theory and on the surface she is absolutely right.  Article 51 of the United Nations Charter states that every occupied people has the right to use force in self-defense and perhaps even the duty to do so.  The principle is simple.  When I was in charge of interrogating Russian POWs during the Korean War, we were told that every prisoner of war, including Americans caught by the enemy, has a duty to resist and to escape in any way possible.  Failure to fight back even after capture is a violation of international law as defined by the United Nations Charter. 

  And, of course, I considered that I had the duty to put a bullet between the eyes of any prisoner who acted on this provision.  Initially, as a two-time escapee from Stalin’s prisons during the time when as a teenager I was studying the dynamics of maintaining resistance against the totalitarian state, I would have jumped at the time to kill every Russian.  In fact, this was the reason I volunteered to join Army special forces at the beginning of the Korean War.  My hatred of the Communist enemy was somewhat shaken when I learned from experience that American torture of prisoners through rendition across the hall of the Eighth Army interrogation compound to Koreans was routine.  Our only restriction was to avoid torturing the prisoners to death, because this might cause the loss of valuable intelligence. 

  My desire to kill as many Russians as possible was still powerful more than a decade later in 1965 when I was walking across a bridge over the Moskva River toward the Kremlin.  I stopped in the middle of the bridge and prayed that somehow a 20 megaton bomb would explode right over my head and incinerate the city of Moscow.  The misguided fervor of my prayer, however, and the shock of facing my own hatred finally woke me up to fact that merely killing the enemy is no way to fight for justice.

  The real issue is not the moral right to kill the occupier, since this is enshrined in international law and in the moral code of every religion.  The issue is one of strategy and tactics.  How can one best secure justice over the long run for all concerned, both the occupied and the occupiers, since the doctrine of just war applies to all sides in every conflict.

  There are three classical principles and four more modern ones in this doctrine.  The original three are that before one starts killing other human beings one must have persuasive evidence that there is no better way to defend oneself; one must use the minimum amount of force necessary to achieve one’s objective; and one must be confident that the post-war human rights of everyone concerned will be more secure after the killing than before.

  Before one even considers the application of the just war doctrine, however, one must choose from three prior policy options.  We have three choices in all conflict.  One is to manage conflict in order to win.  This is the doctrine that rules in Washington and always has.  The other is not conflict management but conflict resolution.  This can imply simply “peace now” by failing to address the issues or even failure to admit that there are some legitimate moral issues; or, it can require bold initiatives to change the entire framework of relations by addressing not only the intractable issues but the very identity of the parties. 

  The third choice would be conflict resolution as merely a clever means to manage conflict in order ultimately to destroy one’s opponent.  This third choice is a staple of American foreign policy, especially when we speak of promoting freedom and democracy in order to promote regime change in selected countries as a means to secure the status quo favorable to special interest groups in America. 

  One’s approach to conflict and the application of the just war doctrine, which applies to all conflict in human affairs, even in marriage between husband and wife, are the two major sets of criteria or guidelines that underlie the Islamic doctrine of hudna, as called for in a center-fold op-ed piece in the New York Times on November 1st, 2006, by the Palestinian Prime Minister, Isma’il Haniya, through his principal foreign policy adviser, Ahmed Yousef.  In essence, hudna is a truce designed to resolve conflict in recognition that the doctrine of just war forbids the continuation of mere conflict management even when restricted by the just war provisions.

  This differs from the concept of truce in Western thought, because a hudna is based on moral principle, not on merely pragmatic considerations, and therefore is morally binding.  In classical Western international law, as I learned to my great shock at Harvard Law School, there is no role for morality, because power is the sole determinant of legality.  This poses a problem for a hudna or normatively- based truce between religious people and non-religious or anti-religious people.

  The viability of a hudna therefore depends on the extent to which the enlightened religious leaders in society can actually lead public policy, so that the citizens are led by people who are led by God.  This poses a challenge to both orthodox Jews and orthodox or traditionalist Muslims, who are the only ones who can take hudna seriously in the Holy Land. 

  The real challenge of a “final solution” is not to destroy the enemy.  It is to change the ground rules so that each of the two peoples in the Holy Land can transcend its cherished identity as an artificial state acting as a substitute for God.  The ultimate object of hudna is to move from conflict, to peaceful coexistence, and ultimately to peaceful economic and political cooperation in building an Abrahamic federation of peoples who have re-educated themselves.  An important first step in hudna is the adoption of a common textbook for schools throughout the Holy Land in order to revive recognition that the norm of relations between Jews and Muslims throughout the centuries has been to regard the other as a reliable friend.

  This final solution, called for as a matter of principle in the Qur’an, is better than the only other “solution,” which is mutual and inevitable annihilation.