The US is so committed to Israel because we see a big piece of ourselves in them. Both of us have sizable 'war' parties because we both on occasion get dragged into fundamentally unlawful situations.
The US is global cop. Arguing we shouldn't do the things we do is saying either the world doesn't need one or someone else could do a better job. Sometimes the law doesn't cover reality because the players we're dealing with aren't law abiding.
Israel in this case had to deal with a serial mass murderer. Yahya Ayyash already had the blood of at least 90 civilians on his hands and he was trying to perfect the "hundreds dead at once" routine. The Pals weren't going to arrest him, sending in the army would have been even more bloody, ergo assassination, even if it did kill a dozen other civilians, was the LEAST bloody way to deal with the situation.
The suggested alternative by the overly "lawful" would be living with terror attacks, which we're honest enough to admit we'd never do. So Israel did EXACTLY what the US would do in the same situation. That's why we're in their corner, it's because we understand them.
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The Right Way to Prosecute
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Israel, however, has a robust and much admired legal system that is fully capable of judging whether what Dichter did was in fact illegal. (And that's by no means clear. Collateral damages have long been accepted in wartime, and regularly occur when U.S. Predator drones take out Qaeda suspects in Afghanistan and Pakistan—with no objection from the U.S. public or the legal community.) The Israeli government regularly convenes commissions of inquiry to consider the propriety of its own military actions, and these have a reputation for probity and have proven unsparing in the past. Israel's prosecutors, moreover, are also not shy about going after top political leaders. In other words, Israel is fully capable of dealing with a case like this on its own. Which raises the question why U.S. courts should be involved. And it's hard to think of a good answer.
So the Second Circuit should throw the case out when it hears the matter on Jan. 16. If it doesn't, it risks undermining America's ability to try more legitimate cases, like Emmanuel's—an ability already strained by the Bush administration's profound hypocrisy on torture and the country's hostility toward bodies like the ICC.
© 2009
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