Republican lawmakers respond to a Washington Post article which claims the dome delays a peaceful resolution.
Amidst Hamas’s continued rocket attacks on Israel and the Jewish State’s ongoing response, the Washington Post has published what some lawmakers and foreign-policy experts claim is a misguided “analysis” of the consequences of Iron Dome missile-defense system.
Iron Dome, which was declared operational in 2011, has a simple charge: to protect Israeli citizens from barrages aimed mostly at population centers from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. With a success rate hovering somewhere around 90 percent, it can only be considered an unqualified success by that metric.
However, the Post piece — authored by Israeli professor Yagil Levy — submits that it also has the unintended effect of perpetuating tension and violence in the region.
Levy argues that “by intercepting almost all incoming rockets, Iron Dome released the Israeli leadership from political pressure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
While he acknowledges that Iron Dome benefits Gazan civilians as well as the Israelis by sparing them the “potentially devastating outcomes of an Israeli ground offensive,” he also believes that the “reduced pressure to resolve the conflict with Gaza also means Iron Dome gives Israelis a false sense of security, based on technological success — which isn’t guaranteed forever — rather than political solutions.”
Levy is not the first to express doubts about Iron Dome in spite of the lives it saves on both sides. In 2012, the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg passed along an anonymous critic’s concern that it would convince Israeli leaders that “the solution to Gaza will not be to simply build bigger and better walls — both on the ground and in the sky” and incentivize them “to put off hard political decisions.”
While Levy doesn’t call on Israel to dismantle its Iron Dome, his critique suggests that innocent Israeli lives lost in Hamas rocket attacks today might bring the conflict to a swifter close at some undetermined future point; it’s a dubious proposition and one that is unsupported by the long history of the conflict, according to Israel’s allies within the American foreign-policy establishment.
Senator Tom Cotton was incredulous at the implication that Iron Dome perpetuates the conflict, telling National Review that “saving innocent Israelis isn’t prolonging this conflict — Hamas’s terrorist attacks are.”
“It’s ridiculous to blame Israel for defending itself against indiscriminate rocket fire” he added.
Representative Mike Gallagher suggested that “Palestinians have a defensive shield even more effective than Israel’s Iron Dome. It’s simply to stop firing thousands of missiles at Israeli civilians” and decried “Hamas’s cynical use of Palestinian civilians as human shields.”
Clifford Smith, Washington project director at the Middle East Forum, was also aghast at Levy’s argument, deeming it “untrue and morally obtuse” predicated on the idea that peace can be achieved “with Hamas, through further Israeli concessions.”
“The heart of the conflict is that Israel wants the right to exist as a Jewish state, and Hamas, and sadly many other Palestinian leaders, don’t want it to exist. Bringing true resolution to the conflict requires the Palestinians to admit defeat, concede Israel’s right to exist, and then to move on with the rest of their lives” Smith explained.
It would seem that the history of the conflict bears out Smith’s hypothesis. Israel has made generous offers that would have given birth to a relatively large Palestinian state in 2000 and 2008. In both cases, they were rewarded with violence. The first was followed by an intifada led by Yasser Arafat and the second saw rocket attacks from Hamas, the very kind that made plain the need for a system like Iron Dome.
Smith also likened the case against Iron Dome to that of the Soviets against President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), chafing at the idea that “the ability to fend off attacks from an aggressor is destabilizing to anything but the aggressor’s aims at conquest.”
“This sort of logic was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.”