Home Destruction Doesn’t Work
One area where people primarily concerned with Israeli human rights abuses in the Territories and those skeptical Zionists like me can hopefully unite is in condemning certain Israeli military policies that are arguably violations of human rights, and more importantly for the Zionist crowd, don’t actually reduce anti-Israeli terrorism. A great example of this is the now-abandoned policy of home destruction. For a while, it was Israeli policy to destroy the homes of suicide bombers. It did not matter if the families themselves encouraged or supported their child mudering Israelis, it was thought that collective punishment would encourage Palestinians to do some self-policing. There are, of course, moral and human rights qualms with collective punishment. The most obvious question is whether or not it’s right to punish people for an action they did commit. The other problem with collective punishment in the context of Israel-Palestine is that it is often, as Haim Weitzman writes about his experiences serving in the IDF during the first intifada, not really a policy designed to reduce terrorism, but more to “to get back at the Palestinians for daring to oppose us, and to give the high army command something to report to the political leadership.”
But the army stopped demolishing the homes of suicide bombers in 2005. Why? Because it simply did nothing to actually reduce terrorism against Israel. If human rights groups could make their critique of Israeli actions in the Territories more along those lines, they would probably get wider support because many Zionists and Israelis instinctively come to Israel’s defense because of the horrible violence against civilians that Israelis have to deal with, and they often shudder at any attempt of “equivocation.” But with house demolitions, we see a policy that is clearly objectionable on both human rights and military grounds, and it would be nice if we could have a gotten a kumbayah moment where everyone except extremist settlers and arab haters could have renounced this immoral, ineffective policy.
