Conor plunges into the Gaza debate again, and catches Mark Steyn making an unfounded claim:

Did you catch the logical leap there? As Freddie points out, of course we expect better from the Middle East’s most advanced democracy that we do from Hamas! Israel is indisputably a Western society bound by civilized norms, as I’m sure Mark Steyn would agree. French President Sarkozy, however, emphatically doesn’t think that “any old barbarism issuing forth from Gaza is to be excused on grounds of ‘desperation,’” unless I’ve missed the shocking statement in which he excused rocket attacks, suicide bombings, etc.

This is a crucial point. If we are speaking of Israel’s critics in the West, including members of Western governments, none has excused barbarism of any kind. Indeed, I assume virtually all of Israel’s critics in the West take for granted that Hamas has been and is a terrorist group that at the very least continues to permit (largely ineffective) terrorist attacks from the territory it controls. Outrageous, indefensible, wrong–these are just the most common words that I have seen used and have used to describe the rocket attacks. What the critics have insisted on is the application of civilized standards to both sides on the assumption that such standards are desirable and valid, and should therefore be observed by all parties. If more of the criticism has focused on Israeli actions, it is because Israel escalated the conflict, just as more criticism initially focused on Georgian escalation of conflict with the Ossetians. The flip side of generally greater identification with Israel is greater attention to its actions, which is made all the more acute in the U.S. because of Israel’s status as an allied and subsidized government. Because we are more closely tied to and implicated in what Israel does, we are more concerned that Israel not commit blunders or crimes.

What we do not assume is that all Palestinians in Gaza are complicit in such acts and therefore do not deserve to be treated as if they were. Further, we do not take for granted that a population living in rather dismal conditions that backed an “Islamic resistance movement” should therefore be treated as if they were barbarians. One of the dangers that comes from describing a people as barbarian or barbaric or complicit in barbarism is that it lowers the standards in both directions: “we” may expect less from “them,” but there is a tendency to allow worse treatment of “them” on the grounds that “they” are barbarians.

That is, we do not make the identitarian move of reducing an entire people to a uniform mass that is to be painted with the worst wrongdoing of its political leaders. This is a move that nationalists of various kinds often make (yes, including Palestinian nationalists), and more generally it is a move that a person of almost any persuasion can make when he opts for describing a group of people in essentialist terms. Essentialism is not simply generalization about trends or habits (generalizations can sometimes be true and useful), but a claim that such-and-such a group acts in a certain way as an expression of their nature, which is to imagine that a cultural habit, which may have only been fairly recently adopted and might not long endure, is a permanent feature or characteristic of the group. The most ridiculous and insulting stereotypes of other nations are often enough created at a particularly humiliating or ugly moment in the nation’s history, but have little or no merit as an observation on the character of a nation over decades and centuries. How else could so many Americans associate the French with a lack of martial prowess and Germans with militarism and efficiency, when for most of modern history something more like the reverse would have been closer to the truth?

To make one other quick point, comparison with Western reactions to the war in Georgia is useful. Most politicians and pundits deplored Russian “aggression” and disproportionate Russian actions following the initial Georgian escalation. Indeed, I also said that the Russian response was disproportionate, because it seemed to be so, but for most Western observers the importance of proportionality seems to come and go like the tide depending on the military action in question. Two years ago and again this year, Israeli military action has appeared to be proportionate to most of the same people who were deeply offended by Russian actions, or else they will insist that proportionality is irrelevant or impossible to define. If the consensus-supporting politicians and pundits are creative, they may argue both things at the same time. What never fails is their willingness to make excuses for one side while falsely claiming that their opponents in the debate are doing likewise. If there is one thing that most of the critics of U.S.-allied governments have in common, it is the desire to get Americans to stop making excuses for their allies when the allies are in error.

Filed under: foreign policy, politics