The mechanics of martyrdom

I too am saddened by the whole thing at Rafah. Israel knew there would be lots of casualties but pressed on with their plans. I have no way of evaluating the military objective (closing off tunnels through which arms are smuggled), so all I know is that lots of people are getting killed over dumbness, and that many members of the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] are assholes.

But you knew all of that from the New York Times, which gleefully prints daily photos of Arabs with head wounds. Instead, I'm going to take the hopelessly unpopular position of questioning the protest. This is not a defense of the morality (if any) of Israeli actions, just a discussion of the logic behind it all. So, for those of you still reading, here are some basically undisputed, trying-to-be-morally-neutral, facts and my conclusions therefrom.

Arab militants are impossible to distinguish from Arab civilians. Arabs choose not to wear a big uniform that says `I'm a belligerent' when killing people. There are recent examples of Arabs of all ages and both genders who have been walking down the street and suddenly started killing people. The other side of that coin is: if there is no way to distinguish civilians from belligerents, all civilians are suspect. This makes for supremely skittish 19-year-old Israeli boys and girls with rifles, who are surrounded by people who are wholly indistinguishable from people who have tried to kill Israelis in the past. It makes you pine for the days where one side wore grey and the other wore blue.

Similarly with locations: Arab militants use family residences as the center for military operations, making their house a valid military target in the traditional sense of the word, and making the IDF wonder about every single house occupied by an Arab family.

I'm not gonna tell Arabs how to run their war, but the simple fact is that if a belligerent chooses to use guerilla tactics, he or she puts peaceful civilian neigbors under suspicion and therefore at risk.

Most protests in and around Israel go bad Either Arabs start throwing rocks (which will kill you despite their low-techness) or Jews get skittish expecting Arabs to throw rocks and start firing. I don't really know how many protests turn out peaceful, since those protests don't bleed, and therefore never lead at the NYT, but from what I do know the track record is pretty bad.

Finally, we have the above IDF operation/invasion/whatever into Rafah. After much gun- and missile-fire on both sides, they secured a position, with lots of tanks and artillery and such. Again, I'm not saying anything about whether the action was hunky-dory on any sort of moral level, just that it certainly happened a few days ago.

That sets the stage for the protest. Arab leaders got together and said, `Hey guys, let's protest the IDF by getting as close to their fortifications as we can! Bring your kids!'

From the IDF perspective, there was a too-large-for-comfort chance that this crowd of people would turn violent. Because the area was a true-and-honest war zone a day or two before, there was an inherent and obvious ambiguity in the protest. There was no way to distinguish the peaceful protesters from the people who had been firing machine-gun rounds at the IDF in the days before---a few were probably indeed the same people. There is debate as to whether any number of protesters were armed, but the debate is irrelevant: the probability that somebody in the crowd of a thousand was armed and willing approched certainty, and enough past Arab protests billed as peaceful have turned into rock- or molotov-throwing events that any promises that this time it'll be peaceful are suspect. Simply put, you do not protest a heavily armed military position---about a day after heavy fighting to secure that position---by having a thousand or so people peacefully walk as close to it as they can.

Given the setup---a newly-secured military position and a thousand people approaching it---the outcome was mechanical: there was no way that the IDF would not have fired warning shots, and in a highly populated area those warning shots were likely to hit somebody. We can debate the morality or severity or level of caution all day long, and the IDF probably wouldn't look very rosy if we did, but their actions were basically inevitable. I would never say `the Arabs had it coming' or such callousness, but the organizers and the protesters certainly saw it coming, and planned for it. There is just no way that the organizers of the protest couldn't have expected that the crowd would probably be fired upon.

Part of the planning is journalist coverage, and for this, I feel the NYT is implicated in the violence. The protest was obviously not aimed at Israelis---what, the IDF didn't know they were unpopular in Rafah? Is there some Jewish soldier going `Gee, I didn't know they hated us until that protest there!' No, the protest was aimed at you, the New York Times reader. In a mechanical fashion that complements the IDF's mechanical response, most readers look at the picture, read the headline about Israelis killing Arabs, mumble something about those fucking Israelis, and move on to the Circuits section. Like dominos, an organizer saying `Let's protest the IDF' is a few steps in an inevitable chain of logic from `let's get some pictures of our soon-to-be dying children on the cover of the Times'.

So this is how martyrdom works. The IDF response to the protest was inevitable, and journalists were on hand to record the event and put the photos on the cover of the NYT. The citizens of Rafah weighed these facts and showed up in force, with their kids.