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Double Standard

Was Israel's war disproportionate?
Here's a history lesson.

INS.org

T

Students light memorial candles at the Israel rally.

U-M Hillel holds events that support
Israel during conflict.

Ann Arbor

A

trio of events on the University
of Michigan campus allowed
students diverse ways to sup-
port Israel — especially timely as Israel
was engaged in conflict with Hamas from
Gaza.
On Nov. 14, U-M Hillel Israel cohort
groups Hasbara Fellows, i-LEAD and
American Movement for Israel co-pre-
sented Middle East analyst and terrorism
expert Elliot Chodoff, who spoke on the
security situation with Gaza and more

broadly in the region. Close to 100 stu-
dents attended the lecture in Hillel's Green
Auditorium.
On Nov. 15, students participated
hands-on in a painting experience with an
Israeli artist on the Diag.
And on Nov. 16, the student leaders of
i-LEAD mobilized the pro-Israel commu-
nity on campus in a rally in solidarity with
and in support of Israel. Students proudly
displayed Israeli and American flags, sang
the Israeli national anthem, read a prayer
for the safety of Israeli soldiers, sang songs
and supported one another as a commu-
nity.

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At the rally, students sang "Hatikvah" together.

Middle East analyst and terrorism expert Elliot Chodoff with some U-M Hillel
students who attended his talk.

34

November 29 • 2012

he fact that the casualty
toll from the first days of
the Gaza fighting was three
Israelis and 30 Arabs "underscores
what critics of Israeli policy called
Israel's disproportionate
use of military force the
New York Times reported
on Nov. 17.
If the body count
determines whether an
army's actions are justi-
fied, then the historical
record contains more
than a few surprises.
• In early 1916,
Pancho Villa's revolu-
tionaries murdered 16
Americans in northern
Mexico, and then 18
more in a cross-border raid into
New Mexico. President Woodrow
Wilson responded by sending
American troops, led by Maj. Gen.
John Pershing, after Villa. In a series
of battles between March and June,
the Americans lost 15 men, while
Villa's forces suffered about 200
dead.
• The Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, left 2,330
Americans dead. The U.S. responded
not with a raid of similar size, but a
full-scale war against the Japanese
throughout the Pacific, culminating
in the dropping of atomic bombs on
the Japanese mainland. Japan had
lost an estimated 1 million soldiers
and 2 million civilians, including the
approximately 200,000 civilians killed
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Was
America's response disproportionate?
President Harry Truman didn't
think so. Regarding use of atom
bombs, he said, "We have used it
against those who attacked us with-
out warning at Pearl Harbor, against
those who have starved and beaten
and executed American prisoners of
war, against those who have aban-
doned all pretense of obeying inter-
national laws of warfare. We have
used it in order to shorten the agony
of war, in order to save the lives of
thousands and thousands of young
Americans:'
• The German blitzkrieg rained
terror on London and other British
cities every night for eight straight
months from September 1940 to
May 1941. About 40,000 British
civilians were killed in those
German bombings.

But in just three nights, the
Allied bombing of the German city
of Dresden claimed an estimated
20,000 lives. Other Allied bombings
of Germany brought the civilian
death toll there to far more than
what the British had suffered.
• In the Korean War, the
U.S. lost 36,576 soldiers;
the South Koreans, more
than 100,000 soldiers and
some 300,000 civilians.
By contrast, North Korean
military losses were prob-
ably around 400,000, and
Chinese fatalities were
probably in the vicinity of
500,000. Does that indi-
cate the Americans used
disproportionate force?
• In 1990, Iraq invaded
Kuwait. The U.S. and its
allies came to Kuwait's defense.
About 25,000 Iraqi soldiers, and
more than 3,000 Iraqi civilians, were
killed. The U.S. suffered 294 losses;
the other members of its coalition
lost a combined total of 188. Did the
Americans overdo it?
• Consider Afghanistan. About
3,000 Americans were killed in the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The U.S. and its allies responded by
attacking Al Qaeda and its Taliban
supporters in Afghanistan. As
of this writing, more than 2,000
American soldiers, and more than
1,000 other allied soldiers, have
died in Afghanistan, as well as some
10,000 Afghan soldiers. Estimates
for Al Qaeda and Taliban casualty
totals vary, but they certainly num-
ber in the tens of thousands — far
more than the Americans and their
allies. Should we conclude that the
Bush and Obama administrations
have used disproportionate force in
Afghanistan?
Israel does not claim its army
is perfect. It knows that when
fighting a war in which terror-
ists station themselves in civilian
neighborhoods, some civilians will
be harmed. And the Israelis regret
that. They simply want to be judged
by the same standard that the inter-
national community has used in
judging other conflicts in which the
aggressors end up suffering more
casualties than their intended vic-
tims.

❑

Dr. Rafael Medoff is director of the
David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust
Studies.

