Israel, Hamas, and the Laws of War
It's . . . complicated.
There has been a lot of discussion of war crimes by both myself and commentators since the latest round of the Israel-Palestinian conflict turned violent a week ago. A comment Friday by @Andy, highlighted yesterday by Dave Schuler at his place, gets to the crux of the matter:
The asymmetry between the standard for Israli conduct and Hamas’ conduct is very revealing – Israel is held to an impossible standard where any killed civilians are immediately counted as war crimes and condemned. Hamas is held to no standard at all despite it being one long string of continuous and intentional war crimes and having an explicit goal is to murder Jews. Somehow that is spun as “resistance” when Hamas is largely indistinguishable from Nazi’s in terms of answering “The Jewish Question.”
A related point has been made multiple times by Michael Reynolds:
Not that long ago it was US policy to respond to a nuclear attack by condemning the entire human race to extermination. The USSR tried to move missiles into Cuba and we responded by threatening to annihilate the USSR and if a billion or so people died, well, better dead than red, amiright? We’re very good at telling others to turn the other cheek. The country that perpetrated the Trail of Tears is upset that Gazans have to walk south to avoid being caught in the crossfire.
At first blush, these aren’t hard questions. We hold Israel to a higher standard than Hamas because one is a modern nation-state and signatory to the treaties that make up international humanitarian law and the latter is a terrorist group. We hold 2020s Israel to a higher standard than 1830s America because humanity has evolved substantially over that period of time, both in terms of the ability to kill one another and in terms of our legal structures.
But making practical decisions in the face of the realities the Israeli government is facing is not easy in the slightest. The fact that their enemies don’t feel even the slightest compunction about violating the rules doesn’t alter their obligation to follow them but it nonetheless makes doing so much harder.
Two articles I’ve found this weekend are useful in helping sort out the details. Even excepting the highlights, though, makes for long reads.
The Economist, “Is Israel acting within the laws of war in Gaza?“
Israel’s initial actions have prompted a wave of criticism. B’tselem, an Israeli human-rights group, has accused Israel of “a criminal policy of revenge”, arguing that the scale of its air strikes and blockade constitute “war crimes openly ordered by top Israeli officials”. Médecins Sans Frontières, a humanitarian organisation, has accused Israel of unlawful “collective punishment” of Gaza “in the form of total siege, indiscriminate bombing, and the pending threat of a ground battle.”
In practice, though, international law and the specific rules that govern warfare—the law of armed conflict (loac), also known as international humanitarian law (ihl)—give Israel considerable latitude to attack Hamas, according to legal experts. Article 51 of the United Nations charter gives states the right of self-defence against armed attack, provided that, according to customary international law, the force they use is necessary and proportionate. Proportionality does not mean symmetry in the type of weapons used or the number of casualties caused. It means that the defending state can use as much force as is needed to address the threat—and no more.
Drawing that line is a subjective and contentious process. But Israel’s campaign so far would meet those criteria, argues Aurel Sari, a law professor at the University of Exeter who lectures to nato armed forces. The scale of Hamas’s attack, its demonstrated intent and proven capability means that invading Gaza or even occupying it temporarily to destroy the group “will be relatively easy to justify” legally, he says.
Nonetheless, some measures are particularly contentious. Israel, helped by Egypt, which controls a southern crossing, has maintained a ground, air and naval blockade of Gaza for years, with only some goods and people permitted to cross. Sieges and blockades are not in themselves illegal. But on October 9th Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, said that would turn into a “complete siege”, with “no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed”. Three days later Israel Katz, the energy minister, warned that no “electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter” until Hamas freed hostages.
Israeli officials justify this move on the basis that Hamas diverts civilian goods for military use. “Clearly” says Amichai Cohen, a law professor at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem, “there is some level of supply that Israel should allow. The question is whether Israel should provide electricity to areas which are clearly controlled by Hamas, and where Hamas will use the electricity in order to attack Israel.” Others, such as Tom Dannenbaum, a law professor at Tufts University in Boston, argue that Mr Gallant’s order plainly violates a prohibition on starving civilians—even if the goal is to squeeze Hamas. That may be one reason why, despite Mr Gallant’s combative rhetoric, Israeli officials are privately working with Egypt to ensure that some supplies can come in from the south.
A second source of legal dispute is the idf’s decision, late in the evening of October 12th, to tell 1.1m civilians living in the northern part of Gaza to move south. (Hamas called on civilians to ignore the call.) The grave humanitarian consequences of this decision are not in doubt. Gaza’s infrastructure is in ruins and there are few places for so many people to go. But the legal aspects are more complicated.
Lawyers distinguish between temporary evacuation of civilians in warzones, which can be lawful, and permanent displacement, where the intent is to prevent them from returning, which is not. However the International Committee of the Red Cross (icrc), a humanitarian group, says that the evacuation instructions, combined with the siege, “are not compatible with international humanitarian law”. It is also not always safe to move while the bombardment continues. Video footage verified by the Washington Post showed a number of people including several children who had been killed, apparently by an Israeli strike while they were fleeing to the south on Friday.
The question of evacuation is tangled up with the specific conditions of Gaza, where Hamas is deeply intermingled with the civilian population. ihl, which governs the conduct of armies once they are waging a war, demands that soldiers distinguish between combatants and military objects on the one hand, and civilians and civilian objects on the other. Targeting the latter on purpose is always illegal. But an attack that kills civilians—even lots of them—can be legal if it is necessary for some military purpose and proportional “in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”.
Israel’s targeting is “broadly within the mainstream of contemporary state practice” and in line with American doctrine, argued Michael Schmitt of the University of Reading and Lieutenant-Colonel John Merriam, a us Army Judge Advocate, in papers published after they visited the idf’s headquarters and studied its procedures shortly after Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s 50-day war on Hamas in 2014.
But the same legal principles, even interpreted in broadly the same way, can result in different and sometimes jarring outcomes because of local circumstances. Hamas’s large rocket force, capable of striking most of Israel, means that the anticipated “military advantage” of attacks is seen to be high, note Mr Schmitt and Lt-Col Merriam. That can justify, in the idf’s view, high levels of collateral damage that would appear excessive to an army whose civilian population did not face a comparable threat—though, conversely, the effectiveness of the country’s Iron Dome missile-defence system can have the opposite legal effect. Similarly, Israel’s conscript-heavy armed forces are casualty averse and sensitive to soldiers being taken prisoner. That can result in a greater reliance on firepower.
Hamas’s way of war also plays a role in Gaza. “It’s not a regular city,” argues Avichai Mandelblit, who served as Israel’s chief military advocate general (mag) from 2004 to 2011 and attorney-general from 2016 to 2022. “It’s a military city. There are thousands of legal military targets inside the neighbourhoods of Gaza. You cannot distinguish them.” Israel’s war aim is to destroy Hamas. “If you want to do it,” says Mr Mandelblit, “then you have to destroy Gaza, because everything in Gaza, almost every building there, is a stronghold of Hamas.” Evacuation of civilians is thus unavoidable, he says. “There is no other way—the other way is they’re going to be killed.”
The law nonetheless demands discrimination. Each target must be judged individually. But the scale of Israel’s bombardment—6,000 bombs dropped in six days, compared with 2,000 to 5,000 per month across Iraq and Syria during the American-led air campaign against Islamic State from 2014 to 2019—has given rise to concern that the definition of military targets is being stretched to breaking-point. “It is very hard to see a legal basis for many of these strikes,” argues Adil Haque of Rutgers Law School in New Jersey. “It’s hard to believe that all of these buildings were in active use by Hamas when they were levelled, or that their military value would outweigh the foreseeable harm to civilians in or near them.”
Mr Sari says that the idf, in his experience, is “world-class” in its legal expertise and professional ethics. “I have a lot of faith in the Israeli military, lawyers and their system. It is very robust.” Military lawyers are present at Israeli military headquarters from the brigade-level up to advise on targeting. “Every target is legally examined,” insists Mr Mandelblit. Legal policy is set by the mag and civilian attorney general together, with the latter getting the last word.
But this system is likely to face its greatest test in the weeks ahead. On October 10th an Israeli official told a television station: “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings.” Daniel Hagari, an idf spokesperson, boasted that “hundreds of tons of bombs” had been dropped on Gaza. Then, he added: “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” Neither statement can be squared with the law.
Via his Facebook page, Donald Sensing points me to a Spring 2010 essay by a retired Marine colonel and philosophy professor.
Keith Pavlischek, The New Atlantis, “Proportionality in Warfare“
The last two times Israel went to war, international commentators criticized the country’s use of force as “disproportionate.” During the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006, officials from the United Nations, the European Union, and several countries used that word to describe Israel’s military actions in Lebanon. Coverage in the press was similar — one newspaper columnist, for example, criticized the “utterly disproportionate … carnage.” Two and a half years later, during the Gaza War of 2008-09, the same charge was leveled against Israel by some of the same institutions and individuals; it also appeared throughout the controversial U.N. report about the conflict (the “Goldstone Report”).
This criticism reveals an important moral misunderstanding. In everyday usage, the word “proportional” implies numerical comparability, and that seems to be what most of Israel’s critics have in mind: the ethics of war, they suggest, requires something like a tit-for-tat response. So if the number of losses suffered by Hezbollah or Hamas greatly exceeds the number of casualties among the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), then Israel is morally and perhaps legally culpable for the “disproportionate” casualties.
But these critics seemed largely unaware that “proportionality” has a technical meaning connected to the ethics of war. The long tradition of just war theory distinguishes between the principles governing the justice of going to war (jus ad bellum) and those governing just conduct in warfare (jus in bello). There are two main jus in bello criteria. The criterion of discrimination prohibits direct and intentional attacks on noncombatants, although neither international law nor the just war tradition that has morally informed it requires that a legitimate military target must be spared from attack simply because its destruction may unintentionally injure or kill noncombatants or damage civilian property and infrastructure. International law and just war theory only insist that the anticipated collateral damage — the “merely foreseen” secondary effects — must be “proportionate” to the military advantage sought in attacking the legitimate military target. This sense of proportionality is the second jus in bello criterion; it has to do almost entirely with the foreseen but unintended harm done to noncombatants and to noncombatant infrastructure.
[…]
All the loose talk about proportionality during the last two Israeli wars provoked the prominent just war theorist and political philosopher Michael Walzer to jump into the fray. In an essay in Parameters, the professional journal of the U.S. Army, he noted the “anger over the ratio of deaths in the recent Gaza war — 100 to one, Gazan to Israeli, according to figures accepted by the New York Times.” If those deaths “were all soldiers (fighters or militants) on either side,” Walzer wrote, “a ratio like that would simply be a sign of military victory, the deaths regrettable but probably not immoral.”
Walzer was perhaps being too charitable. The notion that a lopsided casualty ratio between the IDF and Hezbollah or Hamas militants is sufficient evidence of some moral failing on the part of the IDF so radically departs from any recognizable understanding of the requirements of proportionality and so evidences a lack of moral seriousness that one cannot help but wonder whether something even more pernicious was involved. Even some liberal political pundits were led to question the critics’ motivations. In the Washington Post, for example, columnist Richard Cohen argued that the critics’ appeals to proportionality were little more than “a fig leaf for anti-Israel sentiment in general.” Lanny Davis, the liberal lawyer and pro-Israel activist, called the appeal to proportionality a “double standard that is hypocritically applied to Israel.”
[…]
While anti-Israel sentiment surely accounts for some of the criticism, the abuse of the concept of proportionality has deeper intellectual roots. Walzer notes that when we argue about aggression, military intervention, and the conduct of battle, we now regularly use the language of just war; in 2002, he called this the “triumph of just war theory.” His critics responded by insisting that this did nothing more than provide new ways to justify war, to which Walzer now replies (in his Parameters article) that just war theory has more often than not been used the way it should be used: “to call for military action in a particular case and to reject military action in other cases.” Those who have followed the debate over just war and pacifism for the past several decades will recognize the pattern. But then Walzer gets to the crux of the matter:
Many clerics, journalists, and professors, however, have invented a wholly different interpretation and use, making the theory more and more stringent, particularly with regard to civilian deaths. In fact, they have reinterpreted it to a point where it is pretty much impossible to find a war or conflict that can be justified. Historically, just war theory was meant to be an alternative to Christian pacifism; now, for some of its advocates, it is pacifism’s functional equivalent — a kind of cover for people who are not prepared to admit that there are no wars they will support.
Walzer is not the first to notice what has variously been called a “crypto-pacifist” or “functional pacifist” reinterpretation of just war theory. As early as the 1960s, Paul Ramsey identified the problem, labeling it a bellum contra bellum justum (war against just war). Its fundamental line of reasoning is that all modern warfare — supposedly unlike pre-modern warfare — is inherently both indiscriminate and disproportionate. Therefore, since no war can meet the jus in bello tests of discrimination and proportionality, no war can be fought justly. And if no war can be fought justly, then the only moral option for a vast cohort of “clerics, journalists, and professors” has been pacifism — less the principled theological pacifism of the so-called “peace churches” than a modern “functional” pacifism. Among the most important and influential contemporary critics of this revisionist view of the just war tradition are James Turner Johnson of Rutgers University, who has conclusively demonstrated that such functional pacifism and moral confusion have no place within the just war tradition, and George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who for the past two decades has challenged such revisionist interpretations of the tradition among American Roman Catholics in particular.
While Walzer’s remarks on the tendency toward functional pacifism are not particularly novel, it is nonetheless important for two reasons. For one thing, Walzer is arguably the most influential public intellectual in the fields of military ethics and just war theory. His Just and Unjust Wars (1977) is rightly considered a classic not merely in academia, but also throughout the U.S. military’s formal education system, including the military academies, the command and staff colleges, and the war colleges. Second, Walzer is most decidedly a man of the left, so his reflections on this particular point cannot be dismissed as special pleading for conservative or neoconservative ends. He is an editor of the political quarterly Dissent, he is a contributing editor to The New Republic, and he regularly writes for that magazine as well as the New York Review of Books and other prominent outlets. It is not insignificant that Walzer, as an eminent left-wing academic, has acknowledged this fundamental distortion of the just war tradition and that he explicitly locates the recent charges of Israeli “disproportionality” within the context of that more fundamental controversy over how to understand the just war tradition. Indeed, Walzer acknowledges that the tendency toward thinking of the just war tradition as functional pacifism “is especially strong on the left,” adding that this is why “it is stronger in Europe than in the United States.”
[…]
Walzer is right to suggest that before discussing issues of proportionality we should ask questions about responsibility; the matter of just who put noncombatants at risk in the first place is logically and morally prior to questions of proportionality. That is just another way of saying that any morally informed discussion of the jus in bello proportionality criterion must first be considered in proper relation to the principle of discrimination. Walzer notes, for instance, that when Hamas or Hezbollah fighters choose to fire rockets from heavily populated areas, when they deliberately choose to make a response to their rocket attacks morally difficult by hiding among civilians, or seek to ensure that a response will be condemned throughout the world, or decide to use civilians as human shields, “the primary responsibility for [civilian] deaths then falls on the Hezbollah or Hamas militants who were using them.”
Yet in any discussion of civilian deaths in warfare — not just in Lebanon and Gaza, but also in the U.S. operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere — the argument from proportionality is nowadays given priority over the argument from discrimination and responsibility. As Walzer puts it, “given our natural aversion to civilian deaths, it makes for an easy critique.”
[…]
But at least since the publication of Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer has proposed a modification to the traditional understanding of discrimination and proportionality. Traditionally, the two jus in bello principles of discrimination and proportionality are understood to be related through the doctrine of double effect: An attack that harms civilians can be morally licit so long as, first, harming civilians is neither the goal nor the means of the attack but a side effect (that is, a “double effect”), and second, the harm done is not disproportionate to the good sought through the attack. The proportionality principle governs the extent to which collateral damage is permissible.
But Walzer argued in 1977 and he continues to maintain that the traditional doctrine of double effect is too lenient. The traditional doctrine of proportionality “makes things too easy for the attackers,” he writes in his Parameters article. “For the most part,” proportionality has been a “darkly permissive principle.”
As a corrective, Walzer has proposed a revision that has been called the doctrine of double intention. It is not enough, he argues, for a belligerent to merely not intend to strike noncombatants; the belligerent must also positively intend to reduce the risk of harm to noncombatants. There must be, as Walzer writes in Just and Unjust Wars, “a positive commitment to save civilian lives,” reducing the foreseeable evil “as far as possible.” To put it another way, not only should combatants not attempt to harm civilians; combatants should attempt not to harm them. An attacker has a moral obligation to “take positive measures to avoid or minimize injury to civilians in the target area,” he argues in Parameters, “even if it appears likely that the number of deaths caused by the attack would not be ‛disproportionate to’ whatever the relevant measure might be.” It is not enough to warn noncombatants in a combat zone that an attack is imminent, or to plead with them to leave. In Walzer’s view, soldiers have a moral obligation to place themselves at an increased risk of harm even for the sake of enemy noncombatants.
Walzer’s proposed doctrine of double intention has been criticized by adherents of the more traditional understanding of double effect. Cohen, for instance, in Arms and Judgment defends the traditional view as reflected in the moral reasoning behind the 1907 Hague Conventions. “The law of war implies that soldiers are not obligated to raise their already high stakes to even higher levels in order to lower further the risk to innocents in combat zones. This seems particularly reasonable in tactical combat, where civilians are usually free to leave the combat zone.” Cohen suggested that a simple moral guideline was the basis for the traditional understanding, namely “that the attacker may, given the presence of innocents in a combat zone, do anything that it would be permissible to do if there were no innocents there — subject to the restrictions entailed by the principle of proportionality.”
J. G. Fleury, a colonel in the Canadian military, also defended the traditional understanding in a 1998 research paper written for the Canadian Forces College. Fleury argues that Walzer’s conviction that combatants should assume greater risk “conflicts with military logic and the psychology of command.” The traditional principle of double effect, Fleury writes, “provides the moral guidance necessary in such circumstances.” What’s more, “soldiers do not have the same positive duty to protect innocents among the enemy population, as they have to protect their own population, although they have an obligation not to harm innocents intentionally regardless of their nationality.”
Rising to defend Walzer’s revised doctrine, Steven Lee, a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, claims that Fleury’s arguments wrongly assume “that the moral status of civilians results from their being enemy civilians. Rather, their moral status, their right not to be attacked, results from their status as human beings, irrespective of their nationality.” Lee here cites Walzer’s own justification from Just and Unjust Wars: “The structure of rights stands independently of political allegiance; it establishes obligations that are owed, so to speak, to humanity itself and to particular human beings and not merely to one’s fellow citizens.”
[…]
The radicalism of Walzer and Margalit’s proposed guideline is evident in their insistence that it should apply even when noncombatants voluntarily intermingle with the terrorists. For the sake of argument, let us concede that the IDF (or any other military in an analogous situation) has a moral obligation to behave in the same way in the first three scenarios. But what about the fourth scenario? Are we really to say that whatever personal risks Israeli soldiers assume in the first scenario, they must also assume in the fourth scenario — even if the noncombatants voluntarily intermingle with the Hezbollah combatants, and even if other positive measures short of increased risk to the lives of IDF soldiers have been pursued?
[…]
Walzer and Margalit’s intentions are admirable. They rightly insist that “the crucial means for limiting the scope of warfare is to draw a sharp line between combatants and noncombatants.” They rightly observe that terrorism is “a concerted effort to blur this distinction so as to turn civilians into legitimate targets.” And they rightly say that “when fighting against terrorism, we should not imitate it.”
But Walzer and Margalit are plainly wrong to claim that the only way to demonstrate opposition to terrorist tactics is “through the risks the soldiers themselves accept in order to reduce the risks to civilians.” Israel or any other country’s opposition to terrorist tactics can be vindicated by not engaging in terrorism. It can be vindicated by condemning without equivocation those who do. It can be vindicated by not using civilians as shields.
Moreover, Israel’s intentions not to harm civilians can be manifest by other efforts to minimize collateral damage. As Kasher and Yadlin mention in their New York Review reply, Israel’s military actions in Gaza were preceded by “widely distributed warning leaflets, more than 150,000 warning phone calls to terrorists’ neighbors, and nonlethal warning fire — unprecedented efforts in every respect.”
Walzer and Margalit, in their final rejoinder, complain that these efforts are morally insufficient. It is not enough, they say, to warn civilians; an army must “try to find out whether civilians have in fact left — and any effort to collect that kind of information will probably put soldiers at risk.” But it is radical, indeed morally perverse, to claim that an army that strives to forewarn civilians fails, like terrorists hiding behind civilians, to behave morally.
There is an obvious practical downside to the Walzer position. Kasher and Yadlin mistakenly impute to Walzer and Margalit the claim that collateral damage is “never morally acceptable.” They don’t quite go that far: their actual claim is that responsibility for collateral damage is transferred from regular combatants to irregular combatants only when the regulars significantly put themselves at risk to decrease the collateral damage. Still, Kasher and Yadlin are correct to assert that by supplanting the doctrine of double effect with the doctrine of double intention, Walzer “encourages and enhances terrorism” in a practical sense by insisting that moral state actors assume new operational obligations to protect civilians, by providing a greater incentive for terrorists and insurgents to hide among civilians, and by even providing an incentive for terrorist sympathizers to offer themselves up as hostage shields.
All this is not to suggest that counterinsurgency and counterterrorist military forces should not put their soldiers at greater risk in order to minimize collateral damage. In many counterinsurgency efforts, such risk-taking and heightened standards of civilian protection will be an essential part of a larger strategy to win the trust of the local population and to separate civilians from insurgents. But that increased risk stems from strategic calculation — from the fact that counterinsurgency operations require boots on the ground instead of just precision-guided munitions — not from a moral or legal obligation. Pace Michael Walzer, the moral and legal obligation to enemy civilians, including those who willingly offer themselves to terrorists and insurgents as human shields, remains exactly where the traditional doctrine of double effect locates it: Never attack them directly. Never attack them as means to get at the enemy. And limit the unintended harm likely to fall upon them to that which is proportional to the just tactical and strategic objective. For the law of war to seek more than this is to incentivize what Paul Ramsey called the “wickedness” of using noncombatants as shields — and even the wickedness of terrorism itself.
Perhaps because I was assigned Walzer’s book as an 18-year-old cadet*, I’m closer to his view on the matter than Pavlischek’s. I take it as a given that it’s the duty of the professional soldier to take great pains—and increased risk to both force and mission—to protect noncombatants. But Pavlischek is certainly right that not only is that notion not universally accepted, where one draws that line is murky, indeed.
___________
*That this was 39 years ago is not lost on me. Just and Unjust Wars was already a classic but only seven years old at the time.
A pair of long reads, indeed.
Thanks for bringing this one up. I’m going to be chewing on this for a while.
I can’t think of another site where we’d get this topic, presented in this manner, with an open forum for conversation.
I reject proportionality. Proportionality sets a price and dares the bad guys to pay it. I don’t like giving the enemy a ceiling on the pain they’ll suffer. I believe in the Chicago way:
Proportionality is an invitation to a game of tit for tat. What if I don’t want to play tit for tat? What if I don’t want to wait in suspense for the enemy’s next move? Why should I surrender the initiative that way? Why let the enemy define the game?
It’d be fantastic if there really was some sort of body capable of upholding the various rules of civilization. There isn’t. International law is voluntary, generally followed in trade and finance, but something groups and nations simply ignore when it suits their purpose.
A man swings on you, you don’t just block the punch and leave him free to swing again, you break his arm. And his legs.
@Michael Reynolds: I, like Walzer and most Just War advocates, reject that version of proportionality. If we could kill every member of Hamas with the push of a button, I would push it myself. It’s harder when killing Hamas requires killing civilians.
Let me suggest a little different point of view. IMHO there’s no point debating whether Truman should have dropped the atom bombs. Given the circumstances, there was no way he wasn’t going to. Just as in current circumstances there’s no way Israel isn’t going to move into Gaza and a lot of people, guilty and innocent, are going to die. The real test is what Israel does afterwards. Do they take steps to resolve the Palestinian situation in some intelligent and humane way or do they double down on what got them here?
@gVOR10:
There is no intelligent and humane way to solve the problem.
The following is a ridiculous strawman (which is why I don’t believe that Pavlischek is arguing in good faith):
No serious commentator has criticized Israel for killing too many Hamas or Hezbollah combatants.
Rather, the problem is that Israel kills too many noncombatants – which is, generally speaking, a strong indication that Israel ignores the principle of proportionality. (There are also plenty of specific instances where this can be positively proven.)
Revealingly, the authors who Pavlischek attacks (Walzer and Margalit) never said that killing too many enemy combatants is morally wrong. In fact, they explicitly say that this isn’t the case.
If you need a strawman to make your argument appear more credible, that usually means that your argument is dumb.
I think it is very telling that people who argue against Israeli restraint must tell ridiculous lies to make their positions palatable (“people object to the killing of combatants,” “it’s only a short and easy hike,” etc., etc.).
@Michael Reynolds:
So why doesn’t Israel simply just kill every single human in Gaza. Just kill them all. Then kill every human in the West Bank. Doesn’t that solve the problem.
@Michael Reynolds:
Another example of a dumb statement to make Israeli war crimes appear reasonable
Do you think that the Taliban would have been justified in blowing up an entire passenger plane taking off from O’Hare just to kill a single active duty soldier?
Not justified? Then you don”t reject proportionality.
Justified? Get help.
@Beth:
Because that would be the actual genocide eager Israel-bashers accuse it of already precipitating. And it would be rather impractical, kinda hard to pull off. You have American Optimist syndrome: everything has a simple solution if only X would Y. And yet I have seen not a single such solution proposed by you or anyone else.
@drj:
Justified? WTF does ‘justified’ have to do with it? It’s war, not a college seminar. The object of war is to win. War is not meant to be fair or even-handed. The Japanese had bayonets and shitty tanks; we had B-29s, napalm and nukes. The Iraqis had shitty tanks, shitty jets and shitty soldiers. We had all the money, hi-tech toys and training we have. We’re not jousting or playing football, we’re killing a lot of ‘them’ so that they can’t kill a lot of ‘us.’
Holding Israel to a higher standard is not accurate. We have – or should have – one standard for the conduct of war. We don’t have one standard for Israel and another one for Hamas. What we have are different expectations. We expect Israel to be better when it comes to conforming to those standards for the reasons you cited. And we expect that Hamas won’t because of their behavior and their stated goals and intentions.
And Israel is, in fact, acting and behaving much closer to established norms than is Hamas, which you wouldn’t know given the amount of criticism Israel gets compared to the amount Hamas gets. This asymmetry is exactly what I was talking about.
Instead, what we are seeing is a “choose your own adventure” type of morality, which, in fact, does set separate standards of behavior for Israel and for Hamas. And, conveniently, Israel’s critics have – as I said – set an impossible standard for Israel and no standard at all for Hamas. The effect of this – and I believe the intention – is to create a permission structure that allows one only to criticize Israel and downplay the significance and importance of Hamas’ heinous acts.
This “choose your own adventure” standard-setting conveniently allows Israel’s critics to elide, putting responsibility to anyone else for things that Israel isn’t wholly responsible for. For example, I’ve pointed out a few times the multiple ways in which Hamas deliberately puts Palestinian lives at risk for the deliberate purpose of creating more civilian casualties and for the goal of deterring Israeli attacks – which, I would say again – are unambiguous war crimes. Yet that context is largely ignored in the condemnations of Israel killing civilians in the course of its military operations.
And think about the logic of that for a minute – Hamas uses civilians to deter Israeli attacks. Hamas does this because it works! And why does it work? It works because Israel cares much more about avoiding civilian deaths than Hamas and often doesn’t attack legal targets to avoid killing civilians. But you wouldn’t know if from those who continue to ignore it and expect Israel to conform to the impossible standard they’ve set.
This same “choose your own adventure” morality is also how we get the administrations of elite universities and others on the progressive left acting with this same asymmetry. The amount of rhetorical condemnation over the years for the evils of various thought crimes and microaggressions by people and organizations who stand by and do nothing or do the absolute minimum, “we’re not defending Hamas,” when student organizations openly condone murder. As one example that popped into my head, we had a student organization put”Trap House” on a party invitation and that was called racist and racist harassment requiring the intervention of the university administration to try to bully the offending student into apologizing. But when other student groups in the past week have openly condoned the murder of Jews, university administrations seem not to think that condoning murder might be construed as racist harassment against Jewish students. That some of these elite universities had to be bullied into making any statement at all speaks volumes about the asymmetry I’m describing.
This is also manifested in other ways by the emergence of hard-core utilitarianism by some, but only for this issue, where the only thing that matters is the body count numbers. And since Israel is likely to end up killing more civilians in its war against Hamas, that makes – very conveniently – Israel the only party open to criticism.
And all this is why I think a universal moral construct is necessary. And this is also why I think it is critically important to understand distinctions and intentions.
No, we do not have different standards of behavior. There is one standard that everyone should be measured against. And we can disagree and debate what that standard and and should be, but regardless of where the line falls, all parties must be measured against that standard.
And this is what international law, and even things like the Bill of Rights, is based on and attempts to do. And when you look at it from that perspective, Israel has done a lot of bad shit in terms of how it is slow-rolling the takeover of the West Bank. And they have not been as careful as they could be and have previously been when it comes to avoiding civilian deaths, although whether they are committing war crimes is debatable. If people are interested, I could do a compare and contrast of Russia’s air operations in Syria and Ukraine compared to Israel’s in Gaza. Let me tell you , it’s night and day.
But it simply cannot be denied that Israel conforms to international norms to a much greater degree than Hamas, and it’s not even close. This is across any dimension you want to use – political rights, democracy, women’s rights, religious freedom, LGBTQ rights, etc.
Hamas is by far the worse actor here. Hamas is by far the evil actor here. Hamas is the actor that seeks genocide. Hamas is, as should be clear, objectively bad for the cause of creating a viable Palestinian state. Hamas, is, I would argue, a much bigger and worse obstacle to any kind of peace than even the Israeli right wing. The Israeli right-wing can be voted out of power. Israel is a democracy and most Israelis want peace with Palestinians. Hamas doesn’t want that and they are an authoritarian theocracy that doesn’t act in the interests of Palestinians generally. Hamas has been in charge of Gaza for almost two decades and has done nothing but constantly prepare for and carry out attacks designed to murder Jews. And yet the rubes who use the “choose your own adventure” morality ignore all of this because…why? I don’t know. But I can think of no charitable reasons.
The jaw-dropping liberal/progressive cluelessness about war goes a long way to explaining how we manage to keep losing to right-wind nutjobs.
I mean, Jesus Christ, read some history occasionally. Do you notice a lot of fairness? Do you think we got this sea-to-shining-sea country by being fair or just? Fairness and justice are what you strive for before the war starts. Once it starts, it’s just about who can kill who. Then, when the war is over, we once again examine issues of fairness and justice. Until the next war. Rinse and repeat for a couple millennia.
@Andy:
Why, then, do you seem to be implying that we should give Israel more leeway because Hamas is worse?
And if that isn’t what you are implying, what do you want?
@Michael Reynolds:
If that’s that case you should have no problem with Hamas.
Warfare like it always was. Tribe against tribe and let the weaker be vanquished.
I would hasten to add that the above isn’t meant as some kind of partisan defense of Israel. In the main, it’s a defense of using a single standard when evaluating the conduct of two parties at war. As I’ve previously said, I am mostly against Hamas in this conflict and not blindly pro-Israel.
And when I see Israel committing an incontrovertible war crime, I have no reluctance to call it out.
And frankly, if I didn’t have to spend so much time on this soapbox about the asymmetry of Israel’s critics, I would be spending much more time analyzing this war from that analytical perspective because I think Israel is making a lot of mistakes that are not war crimes, but are nevertheless bad.
Regulars here should also note that I didn’t need to get on this soapbox WRT to Ukraine because everyone recognized and agreed that Ukraine is by far the less evil combatant in that war and everyone agrees that Ukraine’s mistakes and potential and probable war crimes are less serious as a result compared to Russias. And that doesn’t mean Ukraine should get any exceptions from criticism. I only think we ought to apply standards evening and considering the distinctive difference in conduct compared to those standards, as well as the intentions of the combatants.
@drj:
First, it’s just a fact that Israel conforms to international standards regarding the conduct of war to a far higher degree than Hamas – by an order of magnitude or more. And the same is true across other dimensions, as I previously argued. If you want to suggest this is not true, then be my guest, let’s hear the counterargument.
Secondly, applying standards evenly does not give anyone leeway. But it does mean we can look at how each party to a conflict applies those standards overall and determine which one is better or worse. And in this case, Hamas is worse. Much worse. That so many ignore that with the “choose your own adventure” moral framework and only criticize Israel also implies certain things.
@James Joyner:
It depends on what you mean by “proportionality.” And I honestly hope that, as a veteran and educator for Marine officers, you understand what proportionality means in LOAC.
This whole idea of “proportionality” as a requirement that one can only respond at the same scale and level of violence as an attacker, is another one of those asymmetries that is, curiously, only applied to some parties and not others and is also intellectually incoherent, ahistorical, and has nothing to do with international law.
@gVOR10:
I agree with that, but there are two sides to this coin. The other side: Will the Palestinians accept the defeat of Hamas and work to make a society like Japan did after Truman dropped the bombs and defeated them? Or will they double-down?
@Andy:
The more I think about this, the more astonished I am.
First, there is the obvious reason that Israel is not a nihilistic death cult. Criticizing them might still do some good right now. This shit us so blatantly obvious, that I wonder how it is possible to miss this.
The second reason is that blind and indiscriminate revenge by Israel can only make it harder to solve the underlying conflict. It does not bring peace any closer.
But the third reason is even more important. Not criticizing Israel is bad for us. It highlights (again) our double standard when we talk about international law and human rights. For instance, I am fairly certain that even more countries would have been persuadable to join the anti-Russia coalition if it wasn’t for our blatant hypocrisy regarding Iraq and Guantanamo.
And that is a bad thing, because respect for the international order benefits us all. Much more directly than you might think.
Do you really think that people are criticizing Israel here because they hate Jews?
Wow.
@drj:
I’m just catching up with earlier comments. And, sweet Jesus, you are the poster child for what I argued in my main post. You complain about Israel killing too many noncombatants while saying nothing about Hamas “killing too many noncombatants.”
And, just so you don’t sound stupid, you should use Google to understand what “proportionality” actually means in the context of an armed conflict. It’s not at all what you think it is.
@Michael Reynolds:
Remember your rule of winning applies to the PR aspect.
Even dogs have a documented sense of fair play. This fortunately, most of the time, applies to humans. The debating of the unenforceable legalisms of war is not where that contest will be waged, it’s in the hearts and minds of people and not any court.
@Michael Reynolds:
Over here in real life Democrats control the Senate and White House, and are on an unprecedented winning streak in special elections in 2023.
Facts matter.
@Andy:
That’s because your repeated assertation that student groups “openly condoned murder” is a rightwing propaganda strawman argument. What they did was blame Israel for the death and destruction. You may not agree with that position, but to insinuate that there’s any mass of student groups openly condoning murder is nakedly dishonest.
Student groups didn’t argue for funding and bolstering Hamas. The Israeli government did that.
@Andy:
Where’s the evidence of this? The Israeli government’s blockade and support of settlement-building in contravention of international law and US policy has resulted directly and indirectly in the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
The American government cares about civilian deaths but I don’t see much evidence that the Israeli government does. Particularly since it pursued a policy of uplifting Hamas.
@Andy:
Criticism from who? Hamas has been almost universally condemned in the West.
Meanwhile, critics of the Israeli government are being fired, doxxed, and canceled.
@Andy:
Among those critical of the Israeli government right now — and thus in the parlance of the day “openly condoning murder” — are Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Glenn Greenwald. I don’t think they are members of the “progressive left.”
Thetes definitely an assymetry between the approbrium directed towards the perceived anti-Israel left and the relative free pass given to the perceived anti-Israel right.
@drj:
God you’re dense. I should have no problem with Hamas because I accurately describe war as one side killing another? Did I at any point suggest war is a good thing? Did I say I was happy about killing? Seriously, go back to the seminar.
@DK:
Well then, I must say I am relieved to learn that abortion has not been outlawed in a dozen states, and no one is passing anti-trans laws, and no one is pulling books out of libraries because they tell the truth about race. Hallelujah, I can stop worrying about my children’s future.
@Michael Reynolds:
Sarcasm isn’t going to change the fact that your repeated insistent that Democrats are losing everythung is just an oversimplistic lie.
Facts don’t care about your feelings.
@Michael Reynolds: ” Fairness and justice are what you strive for before the war starts. Once it starts, it’s just about who can kill who.”
I really don’t understand why you keep condemning Hamas, then. They’re exactly the same as the USA and every other country that’s ever gone to war. According to your own logic.
@DK:
What in the hell are you talking about? Trump is polling even with or a little ahead of Biden, the GOP has a voter ID edge, we hold the Senate by a Manchin and a Sinema and will have a hell of a time keeping the Senate next year given the map. And the House is held by people who actively supported murdering House members.
But sure, victory unto victory, never mind the fact that this shouldn’t even be a contest. Yay team. Can I stop giving money to Democrats now that we’re winning so hard?
@Andy:
This is Nir Avishai Cohen, a major in the reserves of the Israel Defense Forces, writing in the New York Times yesterday:
Obviously, Major Cohen’s words imply he’s just a rube who hates Jews, since there couldn’t possibly be any other charitable reason in this face for placing blame on bothsides, while refusing to compare and contrast. No other possible reason at all.
Hopefully, this Israeli soldier survives this horrific war as the American keyboard warriors who know better are safe in their homes.
@wr:
You don’t understand how I can accurately describe war and yet not be in favor of war? If I accurately describe ebola does that make me a fan of ebola?
@Michael Reynolds:
Romney was polling ahead of Obama throughout much of 2011 and 2012. You know polls this far out don’t matter, pretending otherwise to try make your lies true is embarrassing.
Your insistence that Democrats aren’t winning anything is a lie, no matter how times you repeat it.
Facts matter.
@DK:
Why yes, people behaving like assholes sometimes leads to war. Breaking news. And what is the major’s solution to the problem? Is it the same as yours? Crickets followed by tumbleweed?
@Michael Reynolds:
This is Nir Avishai Cohen, a major in the reserves of the Israel Defense Forces, writing in the New York Times this week:
Just another naïve, clueless, sanctimonious, moralistic liberal — according to the safe-at-home bloviating, blustering keyboard warriors of America.
@Andy:
With Ukraine, it is very easy for anyone even gently steeped in reality to tell who the aggressive party is. I think we naturally give a lot of deference to the people defending themselves.
With Israel-Palestine, it’s far more ambiguous, depending on how far back you want to look. If you start a week ago, clearly the Israelis are the victims. If you start from the abandonment of a two state solution, and the blockade of Gaza, the Hamas attack was a completely inevitable, foreseeable consequence of Israeli policies that they have had the opportunity to change over the past twenty years (or 75, depending on how far back you go, or pick your favorite milestone).
There’s also a tendency to hold the stronger power to a higher standard.
I will say this: Israel cutting off water to Gaza has confirmed all of my prior assumptions about Israel being the worse party. It’s an attack on every civilian in Gaza. It’s less initially brutal than Hamas’s attack, but against a far larger section of the civilian population.
@Michael Reynolds:
The major is on his way to fight the terrorists the Israeli goverment funded and bolstered.
What’s your solution? More angry screeching and yelling online, like an immature crank?
Hamas is evil, let’s hope they all get killed. It’s fine if a bunch of Gaza civilians get killed in that process.
” That some of these elite universities had to be bullied into making any statement at all speaks volumes about the asymmetry I’m describing.”
I went and looked it up. It took Harvard 4 days to issue a statement condemning the Russia attack on Ukraine, while it took 3 days for the first negative to come out about Hamas. Also, what I have seen is students trying to support Palestinians. Can you cite any specific instances where they were pro-Hamas? At any rate, why would the behavior of a few students, many more supported Israel, have nay bearing about how Israel responds?
“There is one standard that everyone should be measured against. And we can disagree and debate what that standard and and should be, but regardless of where the line falls, all parties must be measured against that standard.”
How will that work with terrorist groups? It’s been claimed they are the legitimate government of Gaza, yet there was only one election in 2007. Internal polling shows that Gazans would prefer someone else govern. As a practical matter the only way to make it work is that we all abide by the standards set by the terrorists.
“It works because Israel cares much more about avoiding civilian deaths than Hamas and often doesn’t attack legal targets to avoid killing civilians. But you wouldn’t know if from those who continue to ignore it and expect Israel to conform to the impossible standard they’ve set.”
It’s a big world, but I haven’t seen anyone say it isn’t OK for Israel to kill some civilians. Did you actually read the stuff James cited and wrote? The questions are about how many is it OK to kill in response, stopping food, water and power from going into the area and the forced mass migration. It’s your right to go argue against claims made by some college students somewhere, after all you will win, but the difficult questions have been posed above. No easy answers as Israel clearly has the rights to an aggressive response.
Steve
@DK:
When did I say we aren’t winning anything? You misrepresent me and then call me a liar. I said we’re getting our asses kicked, and on trans issues and abortion and free speech and student loan forgiveness, we are. Or am I just lying about abortion being outlawed in a dozen states? Did I just imagine that millions of American woman just had control of their own bodies transferred to Republican legislatures?
@drj:
That you are more concerned about criticizing Israel and spend no effort on the incontrovertible crimes of the nihilistic death cult known has Hamas speaks volumes.
If Israel were behaving in the manner you suggest – with blind and indiscriminate revenge – then you’d have a point. But they aren’t. But again, what about Hamas? Do their actions qualify as blind and indiscriminate rage? Will their actions bring peace any closer?
This is more of the asymmetry that I think is morally bankrupt.
Since I’m betting some will object to my contention that Israel isn’t acting blindly or indiscriminately. Let me give you a concrete example.
I don’t know the stats today, but a couple of days ago, Israel published that they had dropped 6,000 bombs in their conflict with Hamas. That is a huge number. A massive number. Probably more ordnance than the US has dropped in a comparable time frame since the first Gulf War in 1991 and maybe even more. And most of those, from what I can gather, were 2,000# JDAMs – very large GPS-guided weapons, the largest weapons the US or Israel has beyond specialized munitions.
Now, that same day, Hamas said that about 1,200 civilians had been killed by Israel up to that point.
So, let’s do the math and see how indiscriminate Israel is, and then speculate about what would happen if the situations were reversed.
6k bombs vs 1.2k civilian deaths is very strong evidence that Israel isn’t intentionally targeting civilians. It’s very strong evidence that Israel is not engaging in “blind and indiscriminate” revenge. Just based on the averaged raw numbers, that means for every six bombs dropped, 1 Palestinian civilian was killed. That is surprisingly low for that amount of ordnance dropped in such a short amount of time during a war in a densely populated urban area. I honestly expected Israel would be much worse on this score.
Now let’s speculate what would happen if the situations were reversed. What would Hamas do if they had 6k JDAMs they could precisely target where they wanted? How many civilian deaths would there be? What measures would Hamas take to avoid killing civilians? Remember who is the nihilistic death cult.
Well, as I keep stating, I don’t think Israel should be spared from criticism. Again, they should be measured against the standards, laws, and norms of warfare, not the standards that Israel’s critics would like, which are intentionally impossible for any country to meet. So what I object to are the people who only apply those impossible standards to Israel but also give Hamas a pass. Because you know what is also bad for us? Not confronting and calling out a nihilistic death cult that is willing in capable of murdering Jews whenever they are given the chance.
All of them? No, Some of them? Yes.
At this point, I think it’s very clear there is a serious problem with anti-Semitism in left-wing ideology in America. Hamas is definitionally anti-Semitic and genocidal. I’ve mentioned how their tactics are like the Einsatzgruppen in Nazi Germany, and that’s not an exaggeration. Yet so many of you spend so much effort ignoring this while criticizing Israel for things that aren’t even confirmed war crimes.
As I relayed in my main comment, the left wing in America is fucking on-the-ball in policing even the slightest hint of anything that might be racist adjacent like the idiocy of “trap house” on a party invitation, and yet, when presented with an “attack” that is intentionally and unambiguously genocidal by Hamas, suddenly there is silence, or prevarication, or both sidesing, or even a failure to clear the very, very low bar of condemning the massacre and condemning those to champion the massacre. What else can explain why people who obsess about race seem suddenly indifferent to the deliberate of Jews?
@DK:
What’s my plan? I’ve said repeatedly: there is no plan. There is no solution at this point. But I note your surrender: you got no plan, not even a wild guess at a plan. And I’m a lunatic for pointing out that neither you, nor anyone else, has a plan. Oookay.
This is going to be my last comment on this thread. It’s Sunday afternoon, and I want to enjoy time with my family and appreciate how fortunate I am that I live in a country where the arguments we have here are fundamentally academic and none of us are in grave danger of being murdered by nihilist death cults or nations attempting to destroy those death cults.
So don’t expect me to respond to further comments or even read them because there are more important things in life than spending my time on internet debates. I leave what I’ve written to stand on their own merits.
@Andy:
I don’t think Hamas has one third of the population of the area they control deemed to be non-citizens and pushed into something that is a mix of reservation and open-air prison.
So, not every dimension.
Is this me being pedantic, or you missing the largest point? YMMV.
@Michael Reynolds:
You are a pathological liar. Again, Major Cohen, speaking for all decent people:
Stop lying, liar.
@DK:
Jesus, dude, give it a rest. Your “Speaking truth to arrogant, aging, affluent white boomers” shtick is beyond tired. There are actually important matters to discuss here. You’ve made it abundantly clear you disagree with MR – move on.
@anjin-san: Of course you attack me, not MR and his tired, profane, belligerent immaturity. Typical.
I didn’t say a word about “affluent white Boomers,” and I’m going to keep doing exactly what I’m doing. You’re not in charge here. Get over yourself.
<@DK:
In this thread? No. But you have made your feelings about this demographic perfectly clear on others.
Physician, heal thyself 🙂
When I was a young dude, I was a bartender for quiet a while. One type of guy I learned to spot was one that was in love with the sound of his own voice.
You’re a bright guy and you have some interesting things to say. One of life’s secrets is to identify our strong points and run with them while at the same time not indulging our less admirable personality traits.
@Andy:
I admire your patience and tolerance for abuse. Way more than I am able to handle. Plus, I really don’t have the time to engage the Gish Gallop of bullshit here, why I bailed yesterday.
@anjin-san: Like I said, the fact you chose to single me out for attack while you have nothing to say about Michael Reynolds shows your true colors, and that you’re not a fair or honest broker.
You having your feelings hurt about things said months ago is something for you to take up with your therapist. Since I was young, I’ve been dealing with the phony double-standards of “your demographic.” I can spot you from a mile away. I’m not the constantly devolving into into profanity and outright lies like your good buddy you have nothing negative to say about. You’re oh-so against people who love the sound of their own voice, but of all the posters here that qualify, I’m the one that you’re attacking. Phony af.
You will not bully me into silence. I don’t need your approval, and I don’t care what you think about me. Thanks.
@DK:
Of course you are. It gives you a chance to feel like a victim.
Oh God, you meant your “how dare an aging white man criticize Hillary rant?” I’m going to have to rethink my comment that you are a bright guy.
Ok, one parting shot:
@DK:
Lol. What a load of horseshit! I would be mad, but your attempted defense is so pathetic it’s borders being funny.
Let’s just make direct quotes: A collection of Harvard student groups said, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
How about we talk about the “George Washington University Students for Justice in Palestine statement”, which is still on their fucking Instagram account. And note their bio – “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea.” Do I have to explain to you what that statement means?
Or the various DSA and BLM chapters that have openly condoned the murder of Jews.
Here’s a clue: It’s not right-wing propaganda to quote the statements of the organizations that you are trying to make excuses for.
@anjin-san:
Oh no some random phony with absolutely no relevance to me at all doesn’t think I’m bright. How will I ever go on? Pfft.
You’re crying and whining about months-old comments that triggered your white fragility, while giving lectures about victimhood. Get real dude. Maybe take your own advice and move on? Although I know how you don’t like applying your own standards to “your demographic.”
@MR:
I just realized who you have reminded me of the last couple of days: Dick Cheney post 9/11.
You have been affected by a specific terrorist act and it has caused you to decide that the threat is such that very high costs, especially paid by people who are linked to the enemy (or, at least, between the violence you support and that enemy) is justified because of the horror of the terroristic act.
@Andy:
Per usual, you’re not being fully honest, which is why you’ve devolving into trying to win an argument by cussing and tantruming.
Your quote proves my point — most of the student groups blamed the Israel’s policies. We can disagree with that, of course. It’s quite dishonest to claim this quite equates to some mass of student groups condoning murder.
Journalists at Haaretz and The Times of Israel and the Jerusalem Post have also run headlines squarely blaming Netanyahu and the Israeli government. To claim Jewish publications condone the murder of Jews is just desperate.
Now if you want to criticize groups who are not student groups for condoning murder, there’s an argument for that. But that’s moving the goalposts.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Apropos. Makes no sense for people who claim to care about Israel to urge Israel to repeat our errors.
But as others have noted, many who claim to care about Israelis have other motivations. And much of it is just performative.
Sigh, I can’t help myself, OTB commenting is a borderline addiction. I am REALLY stepping away after this, for reasons discussed below:
@charontwo:
I appreciate you saying that. And to be honest, most of what I feel is contempt for the asymmetry and double standards. I really DON”T want to feel contempt, and I know that would be bad for me and unproductive for everyone else.
This weekend I have seriously considered abandoning OTB – not because I can’t handle disagreement and all the other stuff (which has been happening forever), but because I can see my feelings of contempt leading me to to dark places, and I don’t want to go there.
So know that I share your frustration. Also, I am gone for a while at least so I can reset and focus on things IRL and not get distracted by debates that don’t actually matter.
@Steven L. Taylor:
And here we have Israel setting themselves up for a Pyrrhic victory in Gaza. Sadat & Rabin are long dead & Netanyahu’s right wing polices have led Israel into a very bad place indeed.
How do we help the average Palestinian while recognizing Israel’s legitimate security needs? I don’t have any bright ideas…
The issues here are always tough,
A few years ago, I was booted off a blog for my comments on an issue regarding Israel and any possibility of a free Palestinian State. I took the position that in 2000 Arafat turned down a last best chance. And for at least a generation to come, Israel would be indefinitely subjected to regular acts of terror from outside pro-Palestinian groups. Well it degenerated into finger pointing and I was accused by the Binary Police of being Pro Israel. Predictably, I was ejected from that blog.
This blog is better than most in terms of limited flame-throwing exchanges.
@Steven L. Taylor:
The Dick Cheney associated with PNAC? Similar to this Netanyahu project?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strategy_for_Securing_the_Realm
I am truly impressed you can connect that to MR, my idea of a real false equivalence.
IOW, the PNAC people.
@charontwo:
That’s fine, and I know I won’t be able to convince you. But I stand by the association. MR is arguing in ways very similar to Cheney and other neocons after the 9/11 attacks (and long after).
It is the same logic that got us the Iraq invasion.
@anjin-san:
It is very difficult. It may even be that the Gaza invasion is necessary, but I have my doubts. It is not that MR is wrong that Israel has the right to defend itself, it does. And as I have noted, Hamas deserves destruction.
But the humanitarian crisis that is currently being created is unlikely to be a long term fix, quite the opposite. And I am not even sure it results in the destruction of Hamas.
Remember: the Iraq invasion is a major reason we got ISIS. And that invasion empowered Iran.
@al Ameda:
Because Arafat feared his family and those of his associates would be murdered if he accepted. That is the downside of creating a monster.
@Andy: And here I was thinking that given the general dynamic of the site — more conservative hosts often getting gang-piled by a more liberal commentariat — that the obvious thing would be for James to give you the keys to the place. 😉
@Andy: “What else can explain why people who obsess about race seem suddenly indifferent to the deliberate of Jews?”
Andy, I really try to respect your point of view and your knowledge. But honestly, speaking as an actual Jew who disagrees with you, I can’t get past a simple “fuck you.” Which is rude and not productive. But is it really any less rude and any less productive than claiming that people who disagree with you — including people who are actually Jewish — are indifferent to the mass murder of our fells Jews?
Can you explain to me why your comment deserves anything more mature than a “fuck you”?
@Andy: ” It’s not right-wing propaganda to quote the statements of the organizations that you are trying to make excuses for.”
No, but it is right-wing propaganda to take the agitation of a bunch of college students and use that to tar everyone to your left. College students are to a great degree kids who are just discovering that the world is unjust and that terrible things happen and they are outraged because no one seems to be doing the obvious things necessary to solve them. Many years from now, most of them will have a greater understanding of how the world works, and will come to see that what they once viewed as causes are actually effects, and that the simple solutions they preached would have been useless or worse.
You want to spend your time getting upset about what a handful of 19 year-olds are saying? Knock yourself out — you’ll always find something. But don’t then use them to smear everyone who doesn’t agree with you. It’s simply dishonest.
Consider.
What is the likely response of the Israelis to this?
Can that response be halted?
(Should it?)
I doubt it.
The question is, how to restore, or impose, some sort of order on Gaza after the IAF have run through it with fire and sword.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I can’t help thinking the ISIS-style barbarity of the Oct. 7 attack was a sucker play designed to elicit an overwhelming military incursion into Gaza, where Israel may find itself screwed, just as we were in Iraq.
Overwhelmingly superior firepower guarantees little except a great deal of destruction and death. It seems the Vietnam War’s lessons have been forgotten, as well as those of Iraq.
A general observation for this, and all these threads, none of us are in the Israeli cabinet nor the US government. It is ok to have various opinions as they are not of direct consequence.
@wr:
It’s stupefying that anyone would join Ron DeSantis in getting worked up about what a handful of college kids say about the situation in Israel/Gaza. Or anything else for that matter. I guess the outrage machine has to be stoked with something.
Hope things are good back east, you are missing some gorgeous Autumn days in the Bay Area.
@anjin-san:
The Bush administration was jonesing to invade Iraq prior to the 9/11 attacks, Dubya was on record saying that before he was even inaugurated.
All the 9/11 attack did was provide a pretext, and the Bushies were not too ignorant to know Saddam and Osama were enemies,
The Bushies had their PNAC ambitions, including reshape the Middle East bringing Democracy etc. Plus, as noted above, their friend Bibi liked their ideas.
@charontwo:
I bumped into Gen. Wesley Clark at a fundraiser once, and we talked – well, he talked, and I listened – about the days immediately following 9/11 and the hardon the PNAC crew had to invade Iraq.
The fallacy of nation-building is a stubborn one. In WW2, we relentlessly bombed Germany and Japan until their societies became malleable, giving us an opportunity to reshape them. So much misery was inflicted on them that they were willing to do anything to stop it, including change. I don’t see the set of conditions we had then happening again.
Reading through the comments from today, I’m glad I sat it out. Dr. Taylor, agree completely. I have some strongly-felt opinions that I will keep to myself for the time being.
@Andy: I think our disagreement is semantic. We agree entirely that LOAC is a universal standard against which all parties to the conflict should be judged. My point is similar to @drj‘s: we harp on Israel violations because they are a civilized nation with a professional military who we fully expect to comply, while we see Hamas as evil and unlikely to comply. That’s asymmetrical, to be sure, but the nature of the conflict. But the US was, rightly, held to a higher standard than our enemies in GWOT and, alas, too often fell short because we used the enemy’s evil as an excuse for not living up to our own moral standards.
@James Joyner:
You are describing your own position. That is not my interpretation of some of the other people sounding off on these topics.
@anjin-san: “Hope things are good back east, you are missing some gorgeous Autumn days in the Bay Area.”
New York’s pretty nice right now, and the leaves in Central Park are about to start changing colors… but there’s nothing like a Bay Area Autumn. Enjoy it!
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-760004
Another interview. I don’t know what to make of it, just something to think about.
@anjin-san:
Odd. She or he was addressing those matters. Their comments were about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Your initial comments ignored those matters for off-topic personal attacks about old, off-topic stuff you were stewing over. Seems hypocritical, the “important matters” and “move on” bit. Just a lurker’s observation.
That was an interesting interview. He puts the date at 2009, but it’s been clear for along time that Israel has given up talking with the Palestinians about long term resolution. Seems pretty clear the long term plan is to slowly push them out. That probably means a return to outside terror groups being more active but it would mean breaking the revenge loop where the, completely understandable and justifiably larger number of killings by Israel get them revenge but just create more terrorists in the long run.
Steve
@James Joyner:
This is part of what I mean by “sounding like Dick Cheney.”
https://balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/justwar_jihad.pdf
PDF:
Note: Dr. Silverman has, elsewhere, expressed the view that the same norms apply to everyone.
To me, it’s obvious people have different expectations of different players.
@ABauder:
I’m reasonably sure that remarks such as:
naïve, clueless, sanctimonious, moralistic liberal
white fragility
screeching and yelling
are not about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And I am definitely of the opinion that bringing a persons race, age, etc. into an exchange that has gotten snippy is not cool .
@James Joyner:
What though, are our moral standards? This is worth some discussion. Most nights of my childhood when the news was on, I saw more or less indiscriminate violence used in Vietnam, a country that did not attack us and did not threaten our national security.
Have read Silverman before, but cant remember specifically reading this piece. The case he generally makes and does in this piece is that Islam in general and the West have very similar ideas about just war. If the state run militaries of an ArAb state fought with the armies of a western nation they would follow roughly the same rules. However, terrorists dont follow the rules. In that case a state can either descend to the rules followed by the teerorist group or fight by the usual rules of the West.
Of note he also covers wars between nation states when one of the states does not engage in just war. One of the best known cases is Germany and its bombings of London. Did that justify the Dresden firebombing. People disagree on it.
If you are going to read this stuff I think you should also read about the difficulties inherent in asymmetrical warfare.
Steve
@anjin-san:
Chile please. More hypocrisy and dishonesty.
The phrase “white fragility” came up after you brought age and race into this thread, because you couldn’t take your own advice and “give a rest and move on” from unrelated comments made about unrelated topics months ago.
Clueless, “sanctimonious and moralistic,” and antisemitic are just a few of the pejorative and alleged pejoratives flung by MR and others towards critics of Israel. But you have no complaint about that. Just about me sarcastically repeating his/their words. What a fraud.
@drj called MR “dumb” long before I entered this thread. You’re silent on that. You’re cool with profanity from MR and others. That’s all cool.
But me repeating their own words is what freaks you out lol Yeah, right. I think I know why you singled me out for attack. Same reason why you’re still ruminating over off-topic months-old comments (while giving hypocritical lectures about moving on and victimhood). And it’s all about the fragile ego associated with “your demographic.” Your double-standards are an old story. Phony, phony, phony.
@DK:
Yeah, it was a callback to comments you made the very first time I encountered you on OTB. But, it’s understandable why you don’t want to own your own words.
At any rate, for a guy who does not care what I think, it seems like you just can’t quit me. You might want to work on the boomer obsession 🙂
@ABauder:
Totally hypocritical. But don’t expect him to admit it, or even be able to see it.
Thank you for your sanity and honesty.
@anjin-san:
Hypocrite, heal thyself. Again: the first and only person to use the word “Boomer” in this thread is you.
I’m not the one still crying about irrelevant, unrelated internet comments someone made last year, honey. That’s you.
So you might want to work on your black gay millennial male obsession. You’ve made it abundantly clear your fragile ego has been permanently bruised by months-or-years-old comments on dead topics made by a stranger on the internet you don’t know and will never meet. Why? Well, as the Silents used to say: a hit dog will holler.
Give a rest and move on. 😉
@DK:
Another thing I remember about you – you actually plagiarize the people you are arguing with. Well, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Ok, I’m done here.
@anjin-san: Yeah, I know, for some bizarre reason you waste time remembering things about random, faceless internet strangers. Talk about obsession.
“Plagiarize” lololol some of you people really need to get over yourselves, or at least try to stifle the lack of perspective that sometimes comes from being too privileged for too long.
This is not a peer-reviewed journal, nobody here is being “plagiarized.” Get a life, bro. All this just to avoid admitting, “Yikes, I’ve been a raging hypocrite.” Amazing.
@steve:
IIRC, Chairman Mao observed that civilian populations are the water the guerrillas swim in. That is hardly an original (with Mao) understanding of reality.
Today, we read on the one hand that Hamas is setting up shop in hospitals and schools, obviously an efficient way to generate human shields. And, that already, a lot of civilians have died as a result. So, is the number of civilian deaths proportionate? I have no clue because being in no position to judge. DK is dead certain that they are excessive, so, per DK, I’m “callous” because I don’t see what to him is obvious. Whatever.
ETA: I am clearly more in agreement with the complete necessity to decapitate Hamas than the more morally correct people here.
@charontwo: I did not call you “callous.” That was drj on Sat Oct 14, responding to you with, “You come up with nonsense so that you won’t have to feel bad about your callous disregard for human suffering.” The same commenter who above called MR’s comments here “dumb” (correctly so, in my opinion) with no blowback. All cool with the Hypocrite Caucus of OTB.
The first person around here to use the word “decapitated” in reference to Hamas was…me. Which I did nearly a week ago, on Tues Oct 10, writing:
So much for Michael Reynolds repeating the obvious falsehood that no one is thinking of solutions.
Rather than lying about what I have and haven’t written, you and anjin-san and one or two others might refiect on your racist, bigoted attitudes that are causing you to put other people’s words in my mouth, so you can single me out for hypocritical and dishonest attacks — while saying nothing about those who’ve actually written things you purportedly disagree with.
I won’t hold my breath waiting for either of you to show any integrity, tho.
@DK:
Sorry for misidentifying who said what.
That’s fine, no problem.
Coming in late to this, but one difficulty with “proportionality” is that it assumes some sort of tit for tat, like if I kill twenty civilians, you get to kill twenty civilians.
But the goal of a defensive war isn’t to inflict a proportionate level of pain on the enemy then stop. The goal is to prevent them from being able to continue the aggression.
Which means the proper metric is the “minimum level needed to accomplish the goal.”
Which even then is wickedly difficult to ascertain.
Even now, 80 odd years after the fact, can we say definitively that the bombing of Dresden was the minimum level of violence needed to stop the Nazi war machine?
We just don’t know, because there isn’t any clean metric which tells us when the “OK, We Surrender” switch is going to flip.
Imagine if, even after the atomic bombing, the Emperor directed his people not to surrender, but to fight to the last man. It was entirely possible- we don’t know what thoughts crossed his mind or why he made the decision the moment he did.
So what is the level of violence which will cause Hamas to accept Israel’s right to exist?
I just don’t know. I’m not sure anyone does.
@Chip Daniels:
Hamas is a religion motivated subset of Palestinians. It is not in the nature of religious to compromise about their aspirations.
The West Bank settlers are also religious nutters, they do not do compromise either.
“ThisLandIsMine“
@DK:
Hmm. Does this mean that I am going to have to tell my wife – who is not white – that I am a horrible, awful racist?
I am sure DK will weigh in, having the last word (or 500 words) seems to be extremely important to him.
@Chip Daniels:
I remember reading an excellent article – who the author was eludes me at the moment – postulating that the fire bombing of Dresden had little or no impact on Germany’s ability or will to continue fighting, and that it was done strictly to impress advancing Soviet forces with how much damage we could do if we wished to.
@Chip Daniels:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/what-hamas-wants-israel/675648/?ref=deep-shtetl
snip
@anjin-san:
That makes sense, considering how obviously irrelevant most of the area that was bombed was to Germany’s war effort.
@anjin-san:
Strom Thurmond, once the biggest segregationist in Congress, had black children. As did any number of slave owners.
Hypocrite, heal thyself. How many extra comments have you made since you declared you were done here, and after entering the chat blowing hot air about “moving on?” And you’re worried about dudes who like the sound of their own voice. Start with the man in the mirror, champ.
Being a raging hypocrite who projects your flaws onto me is clearly important to you. Because you’re obsessed. And a pompous, fragile jerk who, like all bullies, can’t take what you dish.
What can I say? I’m waiting for some proofs, and a little bored. You are the blog equivalent of watching a crappy TV show to pass the time.
But now I know how much I have in common with Strom Thurmond and slave owners! I suppose I should be grateful…
@anjin-san:
“Yeah sorry, I’m full of crap,” would do.
Lol