Deal Hudson Fails to Subscribe to the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the State of Israel and its Preservation from all sin both Original and Actual

This more or less summarizes my puzzlement about the radical disconnect between our political elites and the people they represent:

Is there any other significant issue in American political life, besides Israel, where (a) citizens split almost evenly in their views, yet (b) the leaders of both parties adopt identical lockstep positions which leave half of the citizenry with no real voice? More notably still, is there any other position, besides Israel, where (a) a party’s voters overwhelmingly embrace one position (Israel should not have attacked Gaza) but (b) that party’s leadership unanimously embraces the exact opposite position (Israel was absolutely right to attack Gaza and the U.S. must support Israel unequivocally)? Does that happen with any other issue?

Meanwhile, as the Church observes the World Day of Peace, here in the US, guys like Victor Davis Hanson urge us to embrace their pagan approach to war and ignore the Just War criterion of proportionality as a “phoney doctrine” since, well, it would call into grave question the approach Israel is taking.

Daniel Larison pretty much has the number of people like Hanson and the Salvation Through Leviathan by Any Means Necessary Crowd:

Faced with the possibility that there are Israeli actions in Gaza that actually are excessive and disproportionate, this element of just war theory is simply scrapped or dismissed as inappropriate to asymmetric warfare by defenders of those actions. As I remarked in 2006, “Quickly vanishing is the trope of Israel’s tremendous restraint. The new idea is the virtue of her disproportionate violence.”

As to the “What conceivable alternative do we have to simply giving full-throated approval to everything Israel does or might do?” Larison also has a reasonable reply:

Rod asks what I and other critics of the strikes would like to see Israel do instead. Speaking for myself, I would have liked to see Israel not foolishly strengthen the hands of its enemies by escalating a minor security threat into a major military operation. What else could the Israeli government have done? It could have lifted or ameliorated the siege, or better yet never imposed it. If we grant that cutting off Gaza was actually a blunder, remedying that blunder would be a first step. It is not certain that ending Gaza’s isolation would weaken Hamas, but its isolation has done nothing but strengthen Hamas’ position. Short of an extremely difficult and risky urban war aimed at destroying the organization entirely, which would cause massive dislocation and suffering, that seems the best means of weakening Hamas politically by forcing it to (mis)govern Gaza under relatively normal conditions. There will undoubtedly be a core of support for the group that will remain, but surely the political goal that Israel wants to reach is to have a majority of people in Gaza grow disillusioned with Hamas and to drive wedges between the group and most of the population. I don’t assume Hamas would sit idly by and let its support dwindle without attempting to gin up another crisis, and I expect that it would try to intimidate or kill dissenters to retain its hold on power, but there does not seem to be any other way to break its hold without taking military action that will create, if it is possible, an even more radical movement to replace Hamas should it be destroyed.

Of course, this may not be politically palatable in Israel, and it would invite accusations of “showing weakness,” because any policy that has been thought out for more than ten seconds is always labeled as “weakness” or “appeasement,” but that is at least the beginning of my proposal of an alternative.

I’m aware of the fact that Hamas is a brutal thugocracy. Nonetheless, there are a huge number of innocent men, women and children in the middle of this horrific mass reprisal, not to mention our brothers and sisters in Christ. Those who find it mysterious that a people who have been treated as crappily as they have only stick together more ferociously against the Israelis the more the Israelis treat them like crap seem to me to have no memory even of our own very recent historical experience.

After 9/11, you had people like Rosie Freakin’ O’Donnell thanking God for the Presidency of George W. Bush, a man she detests. How could an ideological enemy of such vehemence suddenly warm to a government she loathed? Because that’s what people do when they feel mortally threatened. Moral: You can’t bomb a population into loving you and hating their country. It didn’t work with the South in the Civil War, it didn’t work with the Brits in the Blitz, the Germans at Dresden, the Soviets when the Nazis drove to Moscow, or the Viet Cong. It won’t work here. It’s just going to create a new generation of Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim, who can’t wait for the Israelis to abort themselves out of existence (which they are, by the by, busily doing as they continue to try to have the cake of a western hedonist materialist state and eat it too).

It will be interesting to see if any Faithful Conservative Catholics[TM] take Hanson to task for simply spitting on the proportionality criterion for Just War doctrine.