Re “War Report Said to Fault Both Russia and Georgia” (news article, Sept. 29):
Two recent international commission reports on conflicts — in Georgia and in Gaza — have blamed both sides irrespective of who fired first. That is a worrisome trend that does not promote stability. Both conflicts involve long-running grievances, yet it is clear who started the latest rounds of violence: the Georgians with their shelling of Tskhinvali, and the Palestinians with their rocketing of Sderot, Israel.
In both cases there are allegations of a disproportionate response. Yet without the initial attack, there would have been no response at all. No one would have died.
If we want hard-won periods of calm to take root, we must unambiguously censure those who break them.
Ilya Shlyakhter
Cambridge, Mass.,
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Good Letter
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3 comments:
This would appear to still apply:
"Sometimes the desire to form a balanced judgement of the conflict, and not to attribute responsibility for the conflict largely to one side, a generally positive aspiration, may prove a pitfall and distort the picture...Symmetries in objectives, modes of action, and interrelationships of two sides in the conflict must be examined carefully. It is sometimes the very desire to adopt the stance of a neutral judge that leads the observer to close his eyes to inconvenient patterns of behaviour on the part of one side or the other in the conflict or at least to regard them benignly. Adopting a neutral stand is liable to intoxicate the observer with a euphoria of self-righteousness; he will derive great satisfaction from his rectitude and from his capacity to transcend issues and view them from lofty heights. His awareness of affinity with one side of the conflict may inculcate in him a tendency towards ostentatious neutrality, leading him to tip the scales and do violence to the facts." (Y. Harkabi: Nuclear War and Nuclear Peace, Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1966, p. 270).
Talking about "balanced judgment", lucky for you this is from 1966. After that Fatti went down hill.
So I hear. I've only read a few of his early works but probably should read Israel's Fateful Hour one of these days, dated as it is.
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