Via Kevin Drum, this quite disgusting claim from Alan Dershowitz.
Hezbollah and Hamas militants, on the other hand, are difficult to distinguish from those “civilians” who recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate their terrorism. Nor can women and children always be counted as civilians, as some organizations do. Terrorists increasingly use women and teenagers to play important roles in their attacks. The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit.
Irish and British readers may find this line of reasoning familiar. It was advanced by the IRA at the height of its murder campaign. According to the IRA, civilian bystanders, including women and children, who were killed when bombs blew up police officers or soldiers should have known better than to be associating with the security forces or socializing in places that they were known to frequent. These bystanders were complicit in their own deaths. It was an utterly contemptible argument then. It’s just as contemptible today.
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It’s hard to come up with original arguments for killing noncombatants.
Billmon has a post up on the subject. Warning: contains an extremely disturbing picture, whose ugliness is only matched by Dershowitz’s war crimes apologeia.
Another, related, favourite line of the Provisional IRA and the INLA back then, say after they had blown up a number of innocent bystanders with a carbomb: “We issued a warning 45 minutes beforehand, the authorities obviously failed to clear the area, therefore any casualties are their responsibility, not ours.” The parallel with Israel’s current ‘warnings’ is not perfect, though, since now civilians are responsible for clearing themselves from the area.
It’s hard for Israel to admit that its tactics are tantamount to those of other “terrorist” organizations, because they use the defense that their actions are defensible because they are surrounded by terrorists. I just posted this on my site, from Human Rights Watch: “In principle, it is permitted to target the location where a combatant resides or works. However, as with any attack on an otherwise legitimate military target, the attacking force must refrain from attack if it would disproportionately harm the civilian population or be launched in a way that fails to discriminate between combatants and civilians. “
Could we start a campaign in favour of administration members and defenders learning something about Northern Ireland and the IRA? I’mnot being entirely facetious—it might stop them saying as many evil things and might even stop them doing some stupid things.
Could we start a campaign in favour of administration members and defenders learning something about Northern Ireland and the IRA?
In the case of Dershowitz, the result would probably be articles about situations where knee-capping is morally justified.
Not only does this line of reasoning mirror the IRA but it mirror the approach of al Queda to get around Muslim prohibitions on the killing of innocent civilians.
Condition One: The Norm of Reciprocity
The sources of Islam provide clear prohibitions against killing civilians, but al-Qaeda argues for reciprocal attacks. This is justified with reference to Quran 2, 194: “And one who attacks you, attack him in like manner as he attacked you.” Thus, if the enemy uses tactics that are prohibited in Islam, these tactics become legal for the Muslims. Since the document makes the case that America has purposely targeted Muslim civilians, it presses readers to accept the logical conclusion that civilian targeting, as in September 11, is now legal. This point is emphasized with particular reference to the Palestinian struggle:
There currently exists an extermination effort against the Islamic peoples that has America’s blessing, not just by virtue of its effective cooperation, but by America’s activity. The best witness to this is what is happening with the full knowledge of the world in the Palestinian cities of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah and elsewhere. Every day, all can follow the atrocious slaughter going on there with American support that is aimed at children, women and the elderly. Are Muslims not permitted to respond in the same way and kill those among the Americans who are like the Muslims they are killing? Certainly! By Allah, it is truly a right for Muslims.
For al-Qaeda, the evidence points to a clear conclusion:
It is allowed for Muslims to kill protected ones among unbelievers as an act of reciprocity. If the unbelievers have targeted Muslim women, children and elderly, it is permissible for Muslims to respond in kind and kill those similar to those whom the unbelievers killed.
Condition Two: Inability to Distinguish Civilians from Combatants
When attacking an enemy “stronghold” it may be difficult to distinguish combatants from non-combatants, particularly if enemy fighters hide among the general population. The Arabic term the document uses for “stronghold” (hisn) has an interesting semantic range in light of the targets of September 11. It refers to a place that is immune to attack either because it is well fortified or because great height makes it impregnable.25 The connection with the targets is obvious—what American sites have been more clearly associated with fortification and height than the Pentagon and the World Trade Center? Al-Qaeda argues that so long as the stronghold is a legitimate target and enemy fighters are present, Muslims can attack, even if this means civilian casualties: “It is allowed for Muslims to kill protected ones among the unbelievers in the event of an attack against them in which it is not possible to differentiate the protected ones from the combatants or from the strongholds.” So even if one grants the argument that there were innocent civilians in the buildings, which al-Qaeda does not accept, the buildings can still be attacked.
The document cites as evidence a story in which Muslims asked about the offspring and women of unbelievers who stayed behind with the enemy fighters and were killed. The prophet was said to reply, “They are from among them.” In this story, the women and children of the enemy preferred to remain with their men rather than flee to safety. Once they made that decision, they ceased to be innocents because they had aligned themselves with the combatants and were now legitimate targets for the Muslim forces. The al-Qaeda document suggests that those in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon should be viewed in the same way. The distinction between combatants and civilians is thereby erased since some of the latter chose to remain in “enemy territory.”
Condition Three: Assistance of Civilians in “Deed, Word or Mind”
In Islamic law, the legitimacy of a target in the context of a war is typically determined by the capacity of that target or individual to fight against the Muslims. This includes enemy soldiers and leaders, as well as advisers to the military and the enemy leadership, including civilian advisers. The vast majority of civilians, however, are excluded from target lists because they are not actively engaged in battle, especially women, children and the elderly, whose capacity to fight is considered minimal in most cases.26
Al-Qaeda, however, broadens the definition of active participation to include roles that indirectly assist the enemy:
It is allowed for Muslims to kill protected ones among unbelievers on the condition that the protected ones have assisted in combat, whether in deed, word, mind or any other form of assistance, according to the prophetic command.
This is based upon a story about Duraid Ibn al-Simma, a well-known Arab poet who strongly opposed Muhammad and the message of Islam. According to tradition, he was brought to the battlefield to advise the Hawazin troops about battle procedures in a conflict against the Muslims. As a very old man, he posed no physical threat to the Muslim forces, but the intelligence he provided to the enemy made him a target and led to his death in battle.
But al-Qaeda’s use of this story creates an expanded understanding of combat assistance that includes not only direct support through physical participation or advice to war planners, but less direct support as well. From this perspective, the press and journalists are legitimate targets because they are American propaganda tools in the war against al-Qaeda. Academics and intellectuals working on Islam and/or terrorism can be killed because their studies and publications help inform government officials and provide knowledge that can be used against the Muslims. Employees working in businesses that supply the government and/or military can be targeted because they provide equipment and services that support the war or the leaders waging the campaign.
http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/vp01.cfm?outfit=pmt&folder=10&paper=540
“…it might stop them saying as many evil things and might even stop them doing some stupid things…”
Not sure: I think doublethink comes all too easily – the notorious Congressman Peter King (R-NY), for example, was/is both a long-time SF/IRA supporter and big war-on-terror supporter too.
Astrongmaybe, that’s putting it mildly. We’re talking about the same folks who financed and armed the Contras in Nicaragua and the Mujaheddin in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. To suggest that they just haven’t thought things through is giving them far too much credit.
I guess those who voluntarily remain in the US and Israel have become complicit too.
Dershowitz: “the continuum of civilianality.”
They’re coming up with the reality faster than anyone can come up with the parody.
Just as those who were stranded in New Orleans when Katrina hit were complicit in the hurricane.
12: “Al”, Kevin Drum’s house troll, made that comparison exactly. Or maybe it was Fake Al.
Point taken, kvetch, but by ‘doublethink’ I wasn’t trying to suggest they were just naïve. I’m never sure of what to call that kind of posturing. It is cynicism of a sort, but is ultimately a pernicious and systematic bullshit which goes beyond cynicism, in that it is somehow believed and not believed at the same time. ‘Ideology’ comes close, but to me that suggests something too much outside of whomever it is who is spouting it. A character like Dershowitz, for instance, is obviously ‘fervently immune’ to logic, if I can put it like that.
This is actually very similar to Ward Churchill’s much resented rhetoric: ‘little Eichmanns’ and so on. The rot in academia, I guess. Although Churchill’s rhetoric seems a bit more rational, at least he has the decency not to include children into this.
Having read the whole Dershowitz column, I’m surprised to discover that everything he says in it strikes me as sound apart from (i) the risible neologism “continuum of civilianity” and (ii), much more significantly, the following two despicable sentences that others have rightly strongly condemned:
“The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit.”
At the risk of bringing to mind the line “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”, I’d be interested to know what else, apart from these two things, people found objectionable in the column.
Point taken, kvetch, but by ‘doublethink’ I wasn’t trying to suggest they were just naïve. I’m never sure of what to call that kind of posturing. It is cynicism of a sort, but is ultimately a pernicious and systematic bullshit which goes beyond cynicism, in that it is somehow believed and not believed at the same time.
I could be wrong, but this is pretty much what Harry Frankfurter was getting at, isn’t it? But I see your point; “bullshit” doesn’t really get across the borderline-depraved kind of cynicism on display here.
Sorry for the messed up tags.
I don’t have a problem with the ‘we’re all complicit’ concept, but only if it’s applied consistently to all actors. When it is applied consistently, it’s a logical and healthy approach. But unfortunately it’s almost always hypocritically applied to the opponent only.
I’m sure Mr. Dershowitz doesn’t consider himself a combatant, yet I’m sure he did Ahmed Yassin, for example.
“The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit.”
One of the interesting things to note is that a certain common line of Zionist justification for not allowing the refugees of 1948 to return to their homes in what became Israel was that by leaving the war zones they had become complicit in the war on Israel. It seems to be difficult to avoid complicity whether staying or leaving a war zone.
Alan Dershowitz is a fascist thug.
The BBC had an Israeli general in an interview this evening. He made exactly this point. He also complained that at least he was giving the civilians a chance to get out, unlike certain people who invaded Iraq a while back, he said.
Bloody good point, cheryl—how do you argue with that? It’s tough to analyze the current situation sometimes, with a straight face.
Mike O. I also found objectionable Dershowitz’s suggestion that there was a far clearer line between combatants and non-combatants in Israeli society than in Shiite Lebanese society. That doesn’t strike me as obviously true given the near-universality of Israeli military service and the paramilitary nature of many of the settlers.
“I’d be interested to know what else, apart from these two things, people found objectionable in the column.”
The problem with the rest of Dershowitz’s column, it seems to me, is that it will rarely ever be possible, in a situation of war, to reliably draw all the distinctions that Dershowitz claims need to be drawn. The fine-grained mode of assessment he’s envisaging is appropriate in the courtroom, to determine after the fact what degree of punishment people should receive for their varying degrees of collaboration in a past crime. But how is a military commander to make such fine-grained distinctions in the heat of battle? There’s also the problem, of course, that in the courtroom the distinctions will be drawn by a neutral third party, whereas they will be drawn by the combatants themselves in the heat of battle. It is hard to see how the interpretive leeway that would be opened up by Dershowitz’s view could fail to turn into a license for for the more powerful of the warring parties to impose its own, self-interested understanding of who should and who should not count as a civilian.
Another to put the same point is that Dershowitz misrepresents the function of the civilian/ combatant distinction. The function of that distinction is not to track fine-grained moral judgments about people’s moral culpability. It is to prevent war from turning into all out slaughter. It is essential to this preventative function that warring parties be denied the right to make the kind of judgments that Dershowitz talks about in the heat of battle. Once we admit that the warring parties have the right to draw the distinctions Dershowitz talks about, because there is no such thing as a clear cut concept of ‘civilianality’, we will also have to admit that we cannot object to what the warring parties do as long as they try to apply Dershowitz’s fine-grained view in good faith. And of course, it will hardly ever be possible to show, at least not during the war and from the outside, that the commanders on the ground lack good faith in assessing degrees of ‘civilianality’.
So either we accept that there’s a bright line, or there likely will be no real restraint in battle. If we accept that there needs to be a bright line, we must be prepared to live with the fact that the category of ‘civilianality’ is likely to be overinclusive from a post facto moral point of view.
Dershowitz isn’t prepared to live with that. Rather, he’s trying to insinuate that everybody in Lebanon is a little bit of a terrorist. But if everyone in there is a little bit of a terrorist, who’s to say, as an external observer sitting somewhere in London or Washington, that Israel goes too far? Dershowitz’s objectionable conclusion that all those who don’t leave forfeit their status as civilians is rather intimately connected with his general line of argument.
Just a short addition to the previous post. The distinction between civilans and combatants is not, as Dershowitz implies, a distinction between people who are morally innocent and people who are morally guilty and thus liable to punishment. Being a combatant is not a crime, after all.
What Otto just said should be repeated and amplified. Staying is regerded as an act of war now, but in other very similiar circumstances fleeing was regarded as an act of war.
And, of course, quite a few people have been killed while fleeing. The justificatory argument (I’m not sure I’ve seen it as baldly as this, but it’s implicit in many of the statements I’ve read, and in the rejection of pleas for a temporary ceasefire to enable flight) is that they may be providing cover for fleeing combatants.
Everything old is new again:
Door Gunner: Git some! Git some! Git some, yeah, yeah, yeah! Anyone that runs, is a VC. Anyone that stands still, is a well-disciplined VC! You guys oughta do a story about me sometime!
Private Joker: Why should we do a story about you?
Door Gunner: ‘Cuz I’m so fuckin’ good! I done got me 157 dead gooks killed. Plus 50 water buffalo too! Them’s all confirmed!
Private Joker: Any women or children?
Door Gunner: Sometimes!
Private Joker: How can you shoot women or children?
Door Gunner: Easy! Ya just don’t lead ‘em so much! Ain’t war hell?
Bloody good point, cheryl—how do you argue with that?
Bush’s pre- and post-Iraq-invasion bullshit has been a treasure trove for the Israelis. I heard the ambassador to the UN say that ‘you can’t distinguish between Hezbollah and Lebanon’ in a way eerily similar to Bush’s ;umping of Iraq and al-Qaeda.
The problem with the rest of Dershowitz’s column, it seems to me, is that it will rarely ever be possible, in a situation of war, to reliably draw all the distinctions that Dershowitz claims need to be drawn.
Which was the same problem with his ‘torture warrant’ argument. I think we have a pattern here.
Wahn, Wahn, überall Wahn!
The funny thing about Dershowitz’s attempt to change the vocabulary of the conflict to make Israel’s strategy more palatable is that neither the US or Israeli governments seem to be all that uncomfortable with the current language. Secretary Rice is at a total loss as to the advantages of a ceasefire. Apparently the cessation of killing is not enough of a reason on its own.
It seems to me that rather than muddy the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, we should simply accept that Israel’s strategy involves the killing of civilians (“intentionally” or not is really beside the point) and judge the legitimacy of the strategy based on its potential to achieve a good outcome. Anyone think it will?
On the Lehrer News Hour the other night I heard someone advancing a slightly different line, that since Israel was more precise in bombing with its F16’s than Hezbullah with its Katyushas, Israel was obviously less at fault in the death of innocents.
The 10:1 kill ratio makes it less than obvious, at least to me.
Emboldened by his efforts with respect to torture, Dershowitz now endeavors to make collective punishment acceptable. He does seem to have slid some way down this particular slippery slope.
Why, though, does he think that destroying Lebanese bridges, airports, silos, ambulances or whatever, have anything to do with containing Hezbollah? In effect, he holds the entire country responsible. The very small point he might have made was lost at the onset of the butchery.
Chris B.—You’re right. I noticed that controversial claim regarding Israelis versus Shiite Lebanese only after I posted my remarks. One could add to the near-universality of a period of regular military service in Israel the liability till their mid-forties of civilians to annual one month reserve duty, and hence the line that civilians in Israel are actually soldiers on 11-month furlough.
Dershowitz doesn’t just defend warcrimes, he also likes to participate:
It’s not only about military service. He spells it out: “recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate”. On ‘our’ side this includes pretty much every Israeli and American citizen. You pay taxes in Israel or the US - you’re a financier. You have to be unemployed and homeless to avoid being complicit. I think it’s fair and has to be understood by everyone.
As far as giving a notice to civilians to leave – that’s what the indigenous people of the region have been giving constantly to the Europeans coming to Palestine for the last 60 years. If he thinks that those who stayed behind are a fair game – that’s fine too and he should stop whining when his team is hit. What’s fair is fair.
This Irish and British reader (first generation Briton, family immigrated from Ireland) finds Dershowitz’s description familiar for another reason. I did and do indeed find the Americans who financed, harboured and facilitated IRA terrorism difficult to distinguish from the IRA terrorists themselves. The difference between us is that I never advocated strafing New York in reprisal.
Something still unresolved that came up over at Unfogged: just how big is Dershowitz in the legal community? I have always assumed that he’s one of the top guys, and believe that he has been on the Democrats’ Supreme Court nomination list.
Others say that he just a second rank law professor whose prominence comes from being a publicity hound. I have no clue about who is right.
This isn’t quite accurate about the IRA. They didn’t claim that civilians in vicinity of security forces were legitimate targets (which would have been difficult, given that soldiers did rather make a point of patrolling republican areas). Rather, they complained that civvies didn’t distance themselves sufficiently, and for this reason many IRA attacks had to be called off. Dershowitz makes quite a different claim: civilians in the free-fire zone are not just inconvenienmces, but de facto targets.
The IRA, of course, killed a lot of civilians: some sectarian, a lot ‘collateral’ (quite a few from their ‘own’community), suspected informers of course (a number fingered by the security forces in black-ops) and – particularly as the campaign dragged on – in an ever widening definition of the war-machine: workers on security contracts etc.
I find Dershowitz’s positions on this issue biased and untenable, but he is correct in stating that women and children are capable of committing terroristic acts—and, in fact, DO increasingly commit them.
But, innocent until proven guilty remains the key measure. His attempts to generalize from this fact to a blanket condemnation of civilians is pathetic.
As far as I can see, Dershowitz has taken the line from one of his most prominent clients (“I will do everything I can to find the real killers”) and run with it.
NB also that the rationale for bombing infrastructure in Gaza (that Palestinians had democratically elected the Hamas government which had been responsible for atrocities and were thus collectively responsible) was identical to that of Mohammed Siddique Khan for the 7/7 bombings.
Thanks for the post and the comments, I learned something.
Dershowitz’ argument is frankly crap, but a few comments on the comments (is that meta, or what :)):
1) Liz (#4): That HRW quote is only half right. The laws of war require that the risk or damage to civilians must be porportional to the military value of the target. However, AFAIK, subject to that condition, there is no requirement that “indiscriminate” weapons not be used. Bombs, artillery, and tank shells are almost inherently indiscriminate (even when they’re precisely guided, you can’t control who’s in the kill radius).
2) Bad jim (#34): I always find arguments which bring up the kill ratio as a condemnation of Israel to be rather baffling. The fact of the matter is, while about half of the Israel casualties are military, AFAIK none of them were killed in military bases. Hizbullah is exclusively targeting Israeli civilian population centers rather than military facilities – and unlike in Hizbullah’s case, Israel has no military facilities in those centers. The much lower rate of Israeli civilian casualties is due mainly to Israel’s greater preparedness in civil defense. So what, we need to apologize because we bothered to build shelters, rather than fortifications for Katyushas?
As for bombing roads, bridges, and the airport, remember that Hizbullah is getting its armaments from (or through) Syria and Iran.
3) ~~~~ (#36): first I’ve heard that a non-Israeli was on that comittee. In any event, I consider such assassinations to attacks against enemy combatants rather than executions of civilians (this is an area where the laws of war are somewhat lacking; ironically, under GC4 Article 5, Israel could quite legally do them inside the Green Line.
Besides these, a general comment. Israel is currently faced with the prospect of eliminating the Hizbullah positions on or near the border. Many of these positions are hardened bunkers placed inside villages. So Israel basically has three options:
1) Attack the village (either by air or ground) without warnings, to try and destroy the emplacements. This will almost certainly entail heavy civilian casualties.
2) Warn the villagers to leave, and then attack. This will reduce or prevent civilian casualties, but will entail….well, look at this thread.
3) Do nothing and hope none of the rockets launched from that emplacement kill anyone.
Which of these options do you consdider the most reasonable?
(that Palestinians had democratically elected the Hamas government which had been responsible for atrocities and were thus collectively responsible) was identical to that of Mohammed Siddique Khan for the 7/7 bombings.
It’s also quite close to bin Laden’s ‘letter to America’:
( c) Also the American army is part of the American people. It is this very same people who are shamelessly helping the Jews fight against us.
(d) The American people are the ones who employ both their men and their women in the American Forces which attack us.
(e) This is why the American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.
…
He gives the notice to leave the war-zone as well, rather more elegantly worded than Israeli Army’s one:
Marc – I’m pretty sure that they did. I’ll try to drag up the reference (although my access to Irish research material on this side of the Atlantic is limited – Tim Pat Coogan and Padraig O’Malley’s books are the only ones to hand).
I think what’s most offensive about the article is that like so many of his political arguments it exudes a lack of intellectual integrity. Regardless of the quality of his argument, it’s painfully evident that his methodology is to begin with the unquestionable assumption that whatever we or our allies do is morally correct, then to dig up an argument to defend anything that might seem to suggest that assumption is false. The man lacks intellectual hygiene.
Thinking about it a little more, I think Dershowitz has a reply to the claim that there’s no very clear distinction between combatants and civilians in Israel either.
His rape analogy suggests that he’s denying that Hezbollah fighters are legitimate combatants. Rather, he takes it that they are criminals, like the rapists in his example. Lebanese civilians, from that perspective, are at least suspect of being collaborators in the punishable crimes of Hezbollah fighters. If they are collaborators, to whatever extent, they are to that extent morally guilty and hence legitimate targets of violence.
If this is Dershowitz’s argument, then Isreali civilians are in the clear. Israel’s forces are punishing criminals, and it certainly can’t make anyone guilty and fit for punishment to cooperate with or support that effort. Hezbollah fighers simply have no right to kill Isrealis, whether combatants or civilians. But the IDF has a right to kill Hezbollah fighters and to act against those who support them.
However, if this is what Dershowitz is saying, then the point about the difficulties of distinguishing between civilians and combatants because Israel’s enemies are not wearing uniforms is a red herring. The argument I’ve just attributed to D. would have applied in full force to German civilians in WWII (on the plausibe assumption that they collaborated in or supported Nazi crimes). But the ‘technical’ distinction between German civilians and combatants was crystal clear and I’ve yet to hear any serious just war theorist claim that it would have been right for the allies to disregard it.
It seems to me that Dershowitz’s article is really confused. He vacillates between the complaint that Hezbollah violate ius in bello constraints, which seems plausible but doesn’t give him what he wants, and the claim that they are criminals who lack the status of legitimate combatants. But I doubt he can have it both ways.
Marc, Henry – I’m not sure about the IRA, though I’m pretty sure examples might be found. But in the case of the 1982 INLA Ballykelly bombing, there was an explicit calculus of civilian death based on an idea of proximity, although this shades into ‘fraternization’. (For those unfamiliar with the background: the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), an armed republican splinter group, famous even in that context for its ruthless violence.)
The Ballykelly incident was a bomb attack without warning on the “Droppin’ Well,” a disco-bar used by off-duty British soldiers and local civilians. Four people were found guilty of the bombing and given life sentences in 1986. In court, one of them said that the INLA team had carried out several reconnaissance missions intended to “see if there were enough soldiers to justify the possibility of civilian casualties”. Apparently there were: 11 soldiers and 6 civilians were killed, most of the latter being women aged between 17 and 21.
Wikipedia has the basics on the incident here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballykelly_disco_bombing with links to a couple of media articles using the courtroom quote.
Deliberately targeting civilians is clearly wrong. However, are we to make it a rule of war that, to be legitimate, no civilians are allowed to be killed? What about foes who then use civilians as shields? Isn’t such a rule, then, tantamount to giving such foes free reign to do what they please?
Also, how do we draw the line between Hezbollah and Lebanon? Hezbollah makes a significant portion of the official government of Lebanon, and hides behind the civilians population. Are they to be allowed to do whatever they wish, just so we can hold the “principled” view that no civilian deaths are allowed and that Hezbollah is not synonymous with Lebanon?
A couple points on reading the comments above:
1. Even if you think, following Dershowitz’s argument, that the line between Israeli combatants and civilians isn’t clear, Hezbollah doesn’t purport to draw any such distinction with respect to Israelis—not even the weak distinction between innocent children and the disabled that Dershowitz recognizes. Or, at least, if there is an attempt to draw this distinction, I haven’t seen it.
2. I don’t agree with the conclusions that Dershowitz draws from his argument, but as Mike notes above, he’s not wrong that there is a range of culpability with respect to involvement in military actions. And his underlying concern is that the standard model (based on two well-defined national armies) for evaluating an appropriate response is inadequate to the reality at hand. How does a nation state, with a defined military, respond legitimately to a guerilla force with significant popular support? That is a large and difficult question—certainly beyond facile answers in an op-ed piece. But at least Dershowitz is asking it.
Hezbollah hadn’t been rocketing Northern Israel recently unless you count a small disputed area. The rockets, like the two captured soldiers, are merely a pretext for a campaign that had been planned for years—as in the instance of our invasion of Iraq, the war was a given, the excuses continue to evolve.
Hezbollah is not synonymous with the government of Lebanon.
Yes, I know. The point I was making is that often people who say this use it to justify their position that Israel is in the wrong in taking any military action in Lebanon. Such a view, I think, means that Hezbollah is given free reign to do whatever they want.
Albert,
Can you provide a single example of somebody taking the position you describe in your comment (1:45 pm)?
How does a nation state, with a defined military, respond legitimately to a guerilla force with significant popular support?
Different cases require different solutions. George III fought them and lost. Abraham Lincoln fought them and won. David Lloyd-George struck a deal with them after a short struggle. In all three cases, their forces sometimes broke the sort of laws that bother Dershowitz so much. Yet I don’t know of any gain which flowed from those violations. Torture didn’t produce any war-winning intelligence and killing civilians didn’t produce any breakthroughs.
Hezbollah doesn’t purport to draw any such distinction with respect to Israelis
Indeed, and that’s deplorable. Having just watched the footage from Beirut—have you seen the pictures Micah?—it would be tempting to respond that the Israeli airforce merely purports to draw such distinctions with respect to Lebanese civilians. I’m sure that would be too strong and that some discrimination is being practised some of the time. But not enough, not nearly enough.
How does a nation state, with a defined military, respond legitimately to a guerilla force with significant popular support? That is a large and difficult question.
It may be large and difficult, but “not like this” would be a good starting point.
Asking questions is easy—I agree that “How does a nation state, with a defined military, respond legitimately to a guerilla force with significant popular support?” is a serious and interesting question, one that serious people should have been attempting to answer for the past 60 years at least. Is Dershowitz committed to doing any of the intellectual work involved in providing an answer? Is he willing to ask whether his purported answer applies with any level of generality (e.g. by considering whether it applies to states dealing with the IRA, the ANC, or, in the more distant past, stateless zionists)? I’d be surprised if so. From what we can see of the footage and what we hear from the reporters I’m inclined to agree with Chris; and doing so implies no sympathy for the actions or aims of Hezbollah.
…and killing civilians didn’t produce any breakthroughs.
One could argue that it did produce something like a breakthrough in the case of 1945 Japan, though.
Oh, Japan wasn’t a guerilla force, of course, but nevertheless.
I think GR. in comment 27 has it exactly right.
The distinction between civilian and combattant doesn’t involve any morality.
In the normal interpretation of the laws of war there’s no difference between someone volunteering his home for ammo storage, and someone forced to. And with good reason.
The argument of Derschowitz looks as little more than a perverse casuistry about civilian casualties and proportionality. It is not just the “disgusting claim” that’s wrong.
The fact that no-one (at least no-one here) is trying to defend Hezbollah tends to mean that there is much more focus on Israel’s actions, and on untenable defences of them like that of Dershowitz.
But Hezbollah deliberately started the current war, and has done nothing to end it. It is therefore fully responsible for all the consequences, including the death and destruction inflicted by the other side. (That doesn’t change Israel’s responsibility for its own actions – all parties to a war of choice are fully and jointly responsible for the death and destruction they cause.)
Exactly the same is true of the US in Iraq. The US chose to start the war and is responsible for the consequences. Again this doesn’t excuse or mitigate the crimes of terrorists, death squads and so on.
Is Israel’s attack on Lebanon a war between two democracies?
Eyal, I think the death ratios are significant because as far as I can see the Israeli plan is to maintain the status quo by maintaining continued actions such as the assault on Lebanon which does not have an end in site. It may reassure the electorate that something is being done and may even reduce the scale of the problem for a while but without permanently depopulating southern Lebanon the same people will be scratching the same itch, most likely in the same way. That need not matter to Israel any more than it does now but israel will go on with its several eyes for an eye policy and pretending that the situation is the fault of the leaders and not vice versa.
Put this another way, has Nasrullah’s position been weakened? It looks like both sides need each other. It takes quite a monstrous enemy for Israel’s behaviour towards its neighbours to appear reasonable and I’m not sure how happy Nasrullah would have been with Ivana Trump and company disrupting the moral and financial economy of the Lebanon.
I have a question for those who know more about AD than I do.
Did he always (meaning pre 2000) have views on civil liberties more or less in line with what I take to be his current thinking (torture warrants, limited civilians status for Lebanese, ah, civilians), or is he someone who has been driven mad by 9/11 and terrorism against Israel and abandoned all his former positions? Or perhaps a bit of one and a bit of the other?
I agree that asking question is easy, but so is criticizing. I don’t think it’s enough to say “not like this.” It’s also not enough to lack sympathy for Hezbollah. If you think Israel is entitled to defend itself against a continous threat of indiscriminate rocket attacks from its northern border, you have to ask what kinds of actions it can take to reestablish security. A ground invasion of southern Lebanon might make it possible for Israeli forces to target Hezbollah militants more accurately and reduce risk to civilian targets. Would that be preferable? What are Israel’s alternatives? Or should it be resigned to the occasional rocket attack from the north? (Prior to the recent action, does anyone really think the U.N. or any other international organization would have placed an effective peacekeeping force in the area?)
I’ve seen footage from Lebanon and from northern Israel, and it’s all deplorable. But so is having to live under constant fear because of state-sponsored terrorism. I’m not defending all of Israel’s actions here, but the criticism should flow both ways. And so far, it’s been directed mainly at Israel and restricted to the events of the last few weeks, as if the problem of Hezbollah attacks is a new one.
For comparison with the recent casualties from rocket attacks against Israel, readers may be interested in this account from the Imperial War Museum in London of the results from the V1 flying bombs (the precursor of cruise missiles) and V2 ballistic rockets directed against London from June 1944 until March 1945, shortly before the war in Europe ended in early May:
http://london.iwm.org.uk/upload/package/4/dday/pdfs/VWeaponsCampaign.pdf
The V weapons, as the flying bombs and ballistic missiles were known, killed 8,938 civilians in Britain. In June 1944, a V1 flying bomb landed down one end of the road in inner London where I lived then and a V2 rocket down the other in January 1945. As I recall, life continued as best it could in wartime and we kept going with the hope that the war would soon come to an end.
Marc, Henry, astrongmaybe:
I think another correlation can be drawn a little closer to home so to speak in light of the current conflict.
The 1946 King David Hotel bombing led by the Irgun and Menachem Begin.
According to Wikipedia, the attack killed 91 “mostly civilians” and “The Irgun blamed the British for the deaths due to failure to respond to the warning…” that was claimed by Begin to have been sent 25 minutes prior to the blast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing
I know that there is a lot of contentiousness surrounding this attack, however, for a little “moral clarity” in light of the current administration line on terrorism should reveal that there is no claim of righteousness in such actions.
From what I’ve read about him at secondhand, Dershowitz has always been a defender of torture and war crimes when conducted by the Israelis. Someone with more firsthand knowledge is welcome to confirm or deny this.
Here is the relevant article from the Fourth Geneva Convention, courtesy of http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fourth_Geneva_Convention
Now if somebody can explain how Dershowitz goes beyond what is permitted by the Geneva Conventions, I’d be much obliged.
Article 28
The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.
I don’t think it’s enough to say “not like this.”
Well I didn’t say it was “enough” did I? I said it was a good starting point. I really don’t think critics of policies which involve, at best, reckless disregard for the lives of innocents are required to answer “What’s your alternative?” questions.
the criticism should flow both ways
Sure. When someone pops up in our comments threads who is (a) worth engaging with and (b) defends indiscriminate rocket attacks on civilians by Hezbollah, I’ll criticize them. As it is, we seem to have a surfeit of people who either defend Israel’s military tactics or who, faced with pictures of whole areas of Beirut flattened and blood spattered children say “I don’t defend this but what would you do?”
Shalom Beck,
On my reading the GC does not support the claim that “Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit.”
The fact of the matter is, while about half of the Israel casualties are military, AFAIK none of them were killed in military bases
Not to minimize any deaths, but I’ve read: 36 total Israeli deaths, 17 civilian, 19 military. About half of the military deaths were from the initial raid which killed 9(?) IDF soldiers and captured two, and the other half from close-in fighting during brand-new Israeli ground operations in Lebanon. (maybe incorrect)
The WashPo says 372 dead Lebanese, 1500 wounded, 20 of which are Lebanese soldiers, 8 Hezbollah guerrillas. So, 90-98% of the dead are civilians, 1/3 children.
But yeah, Hezbollah rockets aren’t hitting military targets. The rockets are “militarily insignificant”. They’ve launched over a thousand, killing 17 people. So the vast, vast majority must be landing in the desert somewhere. Their only purpose apparently is to 1) terrorize Israeli citizens, 2) allow Hezbollah leaders to pretend to be “doing something” and standing up to the Israelis, and 3) indirectly, allowing the casus belli of Israeli actions to slip from “kidnapped soldiers” to “raining rockets”.
“Israel is currently faced with the prospect of eliminating the Hizbullah positions on or near the border
“faced with the prospect” makes it sound like they are forced, elides the choice Israel is making.
[should they] Do nothing and hope none of the rockets launched from that emplacement kill anyone?
Unless the rockets were being fired into Israel before Israel’s current aerial bombardment of Lebanon (I’m not sure) then I’d say, “yes, doing nothing is correct choice.”
I don’t like arguments for preventative attacks, based on perceived threats, usually against actors who “conveniently” are irrational, impervious to deterrence or negotiation.
The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones.
There’s something that bothers me about that sentence. It seems to imply that Fate turned those areas into war zones, rather than Israelis, deliberately targeting areas with a minimal content of Hezbollah, intent on wreaking havoc on the whole populace.
This recent book by a British philosopher is a timely reminder that the moral issues raised by the bombing of civilians in pursuit of war aims are certainly not new:
“Deliberately targeting civilians is widely considered terrorism nowadays, but during World War II both the Britain’s Bomber Command and the United States Army Air Force deliberately targeted civilians.
“The British philosopher A. C. Grayling, in his new book Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan, points out that the two air forces combined killed perhaps 600,000 German civilians and another 200,000 Japanese. He makes the case that at least by our current standards we were terrorists, and it logically follows that the attacks were war crimes.”
http://www.americanheritage.com/events/articles/web/20060406-bombing-strategic-world-war-ii-grayling-among-dead-cities-germany-japan-civilians-royal-air-force-atomic-bomb-richard-pape-terrorism-russia-axis.shtml
Even so, the RAF and USAF were not the pioneers:
“The bombing of Guernica was an aerial attack on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War by the German Luftwaffe squadron known as the Condor Legion against the Basque city of Guernica. It was the first aerial bombardment in history in which a civilian population was attacked with the apparent intent of producing total destruction.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica
“Something still unresolved that came up over at Unfogged: just how big is Dershowitz in the legal community? I have always assumed that he’s one of the top guys, and believe that he has been on the Democrats’ Supreme Court nomination list.
Others say that he just a second rank law professor whose prominence comes from being a publicity hound. I have no clue about who is right.”
I can’t really speak for the legal community-I’ve only been a student, never a professors.
He’s got an office on the fanciest floor at Harvard Law School, but I’d be shocked if he were seriously considered for the Supreme Court. I’d say he’s more famous than respected. Especially after the “torture warrants” stuff, and now this.
Interesting statistic: After 76 comments, the word “Jew” was only used twice.
Bro B. wtf is your point?
#63-“But Hezbollah deliberately started the current war, and has done nothing to end it. It is therefore fully responsible for all the consequences, including the death and destruction inflicted by the other side. (That doesn’t change Israel’s responsibility for its own actions – all parties to a war of choice are fully and jointly responsible for the death and destruction they cause.)”
That first sentence assumes a consensus that doesn’t seem to exist anywhere real. And the rest of the paragraph sounds like the rules to an RPG.
Someone upthread suggests Dershowitz may have been driven mad by events and circumstances. My impression is that would have been in his case a very short trip indeed, but there is that aspect saturating virtually all this nightmare. That somehow the entire Jewish people have been driven into a state of near-insane insecurity from which any action that resembles defense is justified.
This is a moral view diametric to the “everyone must take responsibility for their own actions” idea. And certainly the other parties could make a similar claim to their own insecurity.
Grief is not logical, nor is fear.
Terror is so powerful a descriptor, or at least it was until recently, because the state of mind it describes is so overwhelming.
Someone who is terrified can’t be held to the same standard as someone who is calmly sitting at home. But the idea that anyone in this shoot-out entered with a clean slate and only malevolent intent is naive and unproductive.
I’ve suggested before a close reading of the Hatfield-McCoy feud of late 19th c. America.
Hillbillies for some reason known only to the Hollywood zeitgeist are generally perceived as buffoons and legitimate objects of scorn and ridicule. Though they were mainly Celts driven or drawn to the New World by severe oppression and dislocation from the Old.
It’s an instructive tale that feud. Bloody as any image now emerging from Lebanon, in intensity if not volume. And each side after the first few blows just as valid in their thirst for revenge as the other.
I agree with the early gr, and with luc. Law is a blunt instrument, which needs bright lines. I would suggest that Dershowitz knows this perfectly well…
As for Dershowitz’ lawyer-cred, the Independent calls him, as I recall, “America’s leading liberal lawyer”. Which only shows that the Independent is full of shit, at times…
(cf. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1154084.ece)
I was a fan of Dershowitz before 9/11; I thought he was a reasonably consistent civil libertarian, and that he used his media celebrity to speak out effectively for the right of everyone including murdering scum to a vigorous defense in court, the right of everyone including nasty bigots to speak their minds unmolested, and other such good unpopular things. His old The Best Defense is a nice commentary on some aspects of the criminal justice system, and though it’s a bit self-promoting, it gives a tour of some worthwhile causes he championed.
I was vaguely aware that he had something of a moral blind spot where Israel was concerned, but it didn’t take center stage in his public persona until 9/11. And I can’t imagine him having publicly advocated “torture warrants” for terrorist suspects before then.
The idea that all this can only be understood as a blood feud, so no moral standards can apply, might not be naive, but it certainly seems entirely unproductive. If you are going to get anything out of the vendetta model, presumably you want to look at how these feuds ended, which, I imagine, was that the survivors got sick of fighting.
And once you’ve reached that stage, the point about people being responsible for their own actions applies to anyone who chooses to restart the feud with new provocations, or to react disproportionately. So it doesn’t look as if the analogy gives us any insight we didn’t have already.
Dershowitz first proposed torture warrants back in 1988, according to this Harvard Gazette piece—
link
My link didn’t work, dang it. Try again tomorrow maybe.
#78
The real question: Why the Jews? So listening to much fretting about the tactics of tiny Israel surrounded by those that don’t wish peaceful coexistence, but wish for Israel to be simply “wiped out,” I can only think that before the state of Israel, most Europeans more or less felt the same, the want for the Jews among them to just go away, or disappear. This has been going on for over two thousand years, this hate, this scapegoating of the Jews for everything bad under the sun. So in recent history we have Ahmadinejad wishing Israel to be wiped out, the same Iran that helped to create Hizbullah and is now arming them. So I would ask, if surrounding folks left Israel alone, what would happen? I think nothing, Israel would go about being the vibrant nation that it is. So, what would happen if Israel left the surrounding folks along? I think the attacks would and will continue, because too many simply hate Israel, or more precisely, hate the Jews, for no other reason than they are Jews.
A ground invasion of southern Lebanon might make it possible for Israeli forces to target Hezbollah militants more accurately and reduce risk to civilian targets.
Actually, according to Israeli sources, a ground invasion would have produced MORE civilian casualties. I’m not sure why this is, but it certainly seems plausible. With guerrillas mixed in with the population, it’d be essentially all house-to-house fighting. Machine guns and hand grenades are not precision munitions.
More broadly: The decision to restrict military action to air strikes, artillery, and targeted raids is an effort to devise a new strategy to counter the asymmetric warfare practiced by semi-state armed groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Hezbollah uses its non-state status to escape major military retaliation: a state which kidnapped its neighbor’s soldiers would be inviting total war and could then be blamed for the consequences, but Hezbollah seeks to stay under the radar and evade responsibility. By refusing to accept responsbility for the territory and population it controls, it keeps options open and evades annoying consequences.
Israel’s previous responses to such organizations involved invading and occupying territory. This ultimately became counterproductive because Israel was forced to assume responsibility for hostile populations. So Israel, in the post-”Yesh Gvul” era, is trying a new strategy: retaliation without occupation. They retreat, build a wall, and launch retaliatory raids—in this case, massive ones. The goal is to leave the hot potato in the other guy’s hands, and pummel him. Hopefully this will force him to accept responsibility for the territory he controls and for halting military actvitity inside it.
The problem is that this strategy has not been very successful so far. Authorities in Gaza and South Lebanon have not materialized to take responsibility for restraining militia violence. Rather, Israeli violence has promoted the most extremist armed groups, who claim to be the only ones capable of protecting civilians against the Israelis, or at least of “making them pay”. Some anger towards irresponsible militants is generated, in both Gaza and Lebanon; but the sense of helplessness and anger in the face of Israeli violence is at least as strong, which leaves the field to the militants. It is not clear whether there is any realistic way out of this conundrum for the Israelis (or the Palestinians or Lebanese, for that matter).
The idea that all this can only be understood as a blood feud, so no moral standards can apply, might not be naive, but it certainly seems entirely unproductive. If you are going to get anything out of the vendetta model, presumably you want to look at how these feuds ended, which, I imagine, was that the survivors got sick of fighting.
This presumes that the blood feud will eventually end. It may, but perhaps not within the lifetimes of anyone involved, or of their great-grandchildren. If you look at the landscape this way, then the most rational question is not how to end the feud, but how to survive best in the context of the feud.
I have been watching this conflict since 1981 – not so long, really. My idealism is gradually being drummed out of me.
63—But Hezbollah deliberately started the current war, and has done nothing to end it. It is therefore fully responsible for all the consequences, including the death and destruction inflicted by the other side. (That doesn’t change Israel’s responsibility for its own actions – all parties to a war of choice are fully and jointly responsible for the death and destruction they cause.)
So if I punch you and you retaliate by dropping a bomb on my house—killing me and my family, including my innocent children—I’m fully responsible for the death of myself and my children? I’m fully responsible, no matter how unjustifiably disproportionate the response to what I deliberately started? I don’t think so.
(PS re #89: I don’t mean to imply that Hezbollah’s initial act in this conflict was no more than a punch. I’m simply questioning what I take to be the general principle that John is relying on to draw his inference in the second sentence of what I’ve quoted.)
Mike, what’s the issue? “That doesn’t change Israel’s responsibility for its own actions”, i.e. Israel is responsible too. Are you trying not just to implicate Israel, but actually to EXCUSE Hezbollah – i.e. to say they DON’T bear any responsiblity for the war in Lebanon?
PPS to #89: I might add:
I’m fully responsible, no matter how unjustifiably disproportionate and unpredictable the response to what I deliberately started?
brooksfoe—the issue I’m raising is the general validity of John’s inference. I’m not trying to excuse Hezbollah. Particular relevance to the case in question is not all that matters. See Harry B’s #59.
mike – I suppose I think that once a conflagration gets to the point where it appears disproportionate to the initial spark, the question of whether the initial provocateur should bear full or only partial responsibility will amost always have ceased to have any relevance. One might argue that the Serbian nationalist movement should not bear the full brunt of responsibility for all the deaths in World War I; but who cares, either way? Who would have cared even in 1915?
In the current case, there is universal agreement in the West that Hezbollah does bear the responsibility for having provoked a war. The conclusion is that they have to be separated from Israel by an international force which will shoulder some of the burden of ensuring they can’t launch any more military provocations. To what extent Hezbollah shares responsibility with the Israelis for the death and destruction in Lebanon…does this really matter to anyone? Why?
brooksfoe—Is it really of no interest to you whether (as John appears to think) it’s appropriate to condemn Hezbollah just as strongly as it’s appropriate to condemn Israel for the death and destruction Israeli bombs are wreaking on Lebanon?
“Actually, according to Israeli sources, a ground invasion would have produced MORE civilian casualties. I’m not sure why this is, but it certainly seems plausible. With guerrillas mixed in with the population, it’d be essentially all house-to-house fighting.”
And this has always been the problem. If Israel isn’t allowed to invade, and it isn’t allowed to bomb, what the heck is it supposed to do when missiles rain down on it from Lebanon and Hezbollah kidnaps (remember it isn’t a war because Israel can’t invade or bomb so they clearly aren’t POWs) its soldiers?
whether (as John appears to think) it’s appropriate to condemn Hezbollah just as strongly as it’s appropriate to condemn Israel
What is accomplished by condemning? How much time do you want to spend thinking about relative condemn-strength?
Mike, I agree that responsibility for your actions only extends to reasonably foreseeable consequences. But that’s not an issue here. Even if Israel’s reaction wasn’t foreseeable (and given that the situation matched that in Gaza, it obviously was foreseeable) Hezbollah has chosen to carry on fighting, refused to release its prisoners and so on.
The fact that a foreseeable response might be unjustifiable does not reduce your responsibility. To follow your analogy (with trepidation, since analogies are always dangerous) if you punch a neighbour whom you know to be prone to murderous rages, you are responsible for the consequences.
Bro. Bartleby,
I think the attacks would and will continue, because too many simply hate Israel, or more precisely, hate the Jews, for no other reason than they are Jews.
I don’t hate any Jews, yet the ‘wipe out’ rhetoric doesn’t seem to me entirely unreasonable or unjustified.
Because when Israel was created (quite recently, in the post-WWII civilized era) there was a community there that was wiped out by Israel. Some of those people are still alive, they, their children and grand-childeren live in refugee camps. They still have titles to their houses and farms, keys to their apartments.
The attitude of the Israelis (or a vast, vast majority of them anyway) is that these refugees should just move on, find themselves some other place to live. There are about 6 million of these people now, plus 3 million living under Israeli occupation. That’s 9-10 million direct victims, and you’ll probably find a couple of billion people who sympathize with them and believe in their cause.
Under these circumstances it doesn’t seem too surprising or unfair that a lot of folks think of Israel as an illegitimate entity that should be wiped out for the indigenous population to be able to come back home and achieve self-determination they are entitled to.
And that’s all there is to it, you shouldn’t assume an irrational motivation where there is a perfectly rational one right in front of your nose, brother.
John Q – What happened to end the Hatfield-McCoy feud was distance, through time, and the steady encroachment by larger, armed, entities. But it took a long while. I’m not in any way suggesting the answer’s there, but a platform for insight is.
The wikipedia entry on H-M isn’t as readable as James C. Simmons’ page, gone now save in the dust-free archives of Google.Contrary to #94 there is no “universal agreement in the West” that Hezbollah bears responsibility for having caused “a war”. There may be universal agreement in the media and officialdom of the West, and in those unfortunate enough to still listen to them uncritically, but that’s another thing entirely.
Hatfield-McCoy began with a very specific act of violent injustice, and a case could be made that everything that came after was caused by that – but there is the complicity and the furthering of revenge in its own cause, a nuance rejected more nearly universally than the attribution of blame for the present carnage is agreed on.
There are substantial moral and practical differences between the havoc in 19th c. Appalachia and in 21st c. Lebanon, but that’s one thing these events have in common.
What’s striking to me is the oxidizing of humanity in rage, fueled by grief and loss – the way the violence becomes a conflagration.
Rationality – rules and attribution of cause – requires a perspective that’s far removed from the mayhem. But that same distance diminishes the emotional content of action and reaction. And it’s emotion that’s driven these things throughout history, and drives them now.
It feels as though each step justifies the next, and is justified by the last, to the people for whom the violence is anything but abstract numbers and digital imagery.
But Hezbollah deliberately started the current war, and has done nothing to end it.
I don’t understand how an across the border raid by a militia amounts to starting a war between two states. You could say that they gave a reason to start the war, perhaps even a good reason, but they didn’t start it.
John at #98—Perhaps I’m fully responsible for the consequences of my punch if it provokes an uncontrollable human response that was foreseeable. This might be because the uncontrollable behaviour of another human being is relevantly like the causal effects of non-agents. So just as my responsibility for a death I cause by pressing a button that releases a payload isn’t reduced by the fact that the death is more proximately caused by the explosion of the bombs, it may not be reduced when death is more proximately caused by the uncontrollable, predictable behaviour of another. But if the deliberate and free (as opposed to uncontrollable) agency of another is a more proximate cause of death than my own agency, then it’s odd to claim that I’m fully responsible for the death even if I could have predicted what this person would do. This is because it’s odd to claim that I’m fully responsible for the deliberate and free acts of another—at least so long as we set aside special cases in which this person is acting on my orders or as my agents.
‘But Hezbollah deliberately started the current war, and has done nothing to end it.
I don’t understand how an across the border raid by a militia amounts to starting a war between two states. You could say that they gave a reason to start the war, perhaps even a good reason, but they didn’t start it.’
I thought it should be generally quite well known by now (at least in the blogosphere) that the idea that Hizbollah ‘deliberately started’ this war is a lie. I mean come on guys. This is an invasion. You think the Israeli’s wrote down their invasion plans on the back of a napkin at lunch at few days ago? Common sense alone would suggest that months, perhaps, years of planning would be involved in this, and common sense would be right.
Moreover, why do people tend to believe that Israel ‘wants to live in peace’ with its neighbours? What is the evidence for this? If it does, why does it keep on invading them? In terms of politics, people are inclined to make different political choices in a war situation. There are many politicians in Israel (perhaps most of them) who would simply not have been elected had they not been able to present themselves as being ‘military strongmen’ in a ‘time of war’. It is certainly not in these men’s interests to choose peace over war.
I’ve really enjoyed these posts, agreeing with much of what Mike Otsuka says.
One thing I simply cannot grasp for the life of me is the two sides of Alan Dershowitz. On the one hand, he once championed rule of law and procedural justice in the high profile O.J. Simpson case. On the other hand, he now thinks that the enforcement of justice may require parting with precedent and breaking (international) law. I wonder how he’d defend Simpson now if the case ever arose….
Mike, I’m sympathetic to the point you’re making here, but surely we often make judgements that go the other way. And I think it is important to make the point that responsibiliity judgements aren’t zero sum. So we can judge, without inconsistency, that two human beings are both fully responsible for an outcome.
Imagine a German, at the end of WW2, contemplating the ruins of Berlin and saying “Hitler brought this on us.” I think that’s a true statement, and a statement ascribing responsibility, even though it is also true that nearly all the actual destruction passes through the free agency of others. I also think that we can blame other agents for their conduct in bringing about the outcome that the statement holds Hitler fully responsible for. So, amid the destruction, a Soviet soldier rapes a German woman. He is fully blameworthy for the rape, and we can also say “Hitler brought this on the Germans.”
In the present case, it seems to me that holding Hezbollah fully responsible is compatible with also holding the Israelis responsible for the bad things they do. Whether we ought to hold Hezbollah fully responsible, though, may depend on whether we judge that they started a conflict which wouldn’t otherwise have happened or whether their action merely provided the pretext the Israelis were looking for.
Astrongmaybe, you’re right about the INLA rationale behind the attack on the Droppin’ Well. I seem to remember that one of the perpetrators later committed suicide out of remorse. The INLA, of course, were not the IRA.
Henry, the IRA never adopted a ‘Dershowitz’ principle of simple proximity to armed enemy forces rendering civilians a legitimate target. They could not have done so, as Dershowitz is effectively treating civilian refusal to obey Israeli commands to evacuate the free-fire zone as a hostile act. (By this frightful rationale, it’s very hard to see how Israeli settlers in the occupied territories are not legit. targets). Northern Ireland allowed for no analogous situation. You would find better parallels in British counter-insurgency – bloc houses, concentration camps, secure villages etc) than IRA depredations.
What the IRA did do was take unacceptable risks of collateral damage in an unjust pursuit of military targets, and to define the British war-machine very widely (though, admittedly, less widely than is standard in conventional war). They also occasionally carried out sectarian atrocities, usually under a nom de guerre.
Pay attention, people: the Israeli soldiers WERE NOT KIDNAPPED.
They were apprehended IN LEBANON.
The Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement announced on Wednesday that its guerrillas have captured two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. “Implementing our promise to free Arab prisoners in Israeli jails, our strugglers have captured two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon,” a statement by Hezbollah said. “The two soldiers have already been moved to a safe place,” it added. The Lebanese police said that the two soldiers were captured as they “infiltrated” into the town of Aitaa al-Chaab inside the Lebanese border. [Hindustan Times 7/12/06]
According to the Lebanese police force, the two soldiers were captured in Lebanese territory, in the area of Aïta Al-Chaab close to the border, whereas Israeli television indicated that they had been captured in Israeli territory. [fr.news.yahoo 7/12/06]
Search the international press. The UK/US Media has an agenda, and it is NOT the truth.
If you define the ‘British war-machine’ sufficiently widely that it includes Birmingham pubs, Manchester shopping centers, and London office blocks, then you might as well not bother with a definition.
Soru, I was talking about the IRA definition of British ‘war-machine’ personnel, as more relevant to the theme of the thread. The IRA didn’t define the civilians killed in the ‘economic war’ as legit targets; rather as collateral (or disavowed altogether, as in Birmingham, though the perpertraters weren’t disciplined as far as I know). Civilian contractors, cleaners, construction workers etc on security force projects were defined as legitmate targets, particularly by the 1980s.
Of course, the very grreat majority of civilian victims of the IRA (about one quarter of all their victims), and in general, were in Northern Ireland rather than Great Britain.
Chris—I agree that responsibility isn’t zero-sum. But surely the raping Soviet soldier couldn’t justifiably claim that Hitler was as fully responsible for the rape of the German woman as he was. And it’s not clear to me why a third party should come to a different assessment of responsibility in this case. A better case for you is one in which the deliberate and free acts of allied soldiers are, unlike rape, morally required responses. So, to refine what I say at #102, I’m willing to concede that Hitler is fully responsible for the death and destruction caused by the Allies where Hitler’s aggression left them “no choice” (morally speaking) but to deliberately and freely respond as they did. But I don’t think people should be held fully responsible for the disproportionate or otherwise unjustifiable deliberate and free choices of others that they provoke.
1) Jim (#53): That’s simply incorrect. While attacks have occured in that disputed area (which, mind you, even the UN says is not Lebenese territory), they’ve not been confined to it. For example, last November, 11 Israelis (including 4 civilians) were injured in Ghajar*. In May there was another Hizbullah attack, which included an anti-tank missile striking a house in Metulah (which is quite some distance from the area). In addition, the attack in which the soldiers were kidnapped involved rocket attacks against Israeli communities in the area (injuring 5 civilians in the process).
2) jack (#64): you seem to assume that Israel has an interest in the status quo, or in a weak and divided Lebanon (or, for that matter, in maintaining – for no apparent reason – its “behavious towards its neighbours”). In point of fact, Israel has been trying to use diplomatic pressure to get Lebanon to change the status quo by taking control of southern Lebanon.
3) luci (#73): I don’t know the ratio of how many rockets strike cities rather than open areas (not “desert”, note – this is northern Israel, not Sderot). However, a lot of them do hit Israeli communities. But since Israel has prepared defenses (warnings and shelters) for the civilian populace, most of those rockets fail to do more than property damage (and relatively little – many of the rockets were converted to anti-personnel use, so they’re – relatively – less effective against hardened targets) and are thus not reported, or only offhand.
As I noted above, while Israel hasn’t been under continous attacks by Hizbullah, they have attacked Israeli civilian communities prior to the beginning of the Israeli attack.
As for Lebenese casualty numbers, there are some indications (though nothing definitive) that some of the “civilians” in the (Lebenese-supplied) statistics were actually Hizbullah fighters.
4) brenden (#103) – As I noted above, Hizbullah has been sporadically attacking Israel since the withdrawal six years ago. Nor is this the first time they’ve kidnapped Israeli soldiers since then (pesonally, I think that we could have avoided the current mess – at a much smaller cost to both sides – had we gone in after Hizbullah then, when it was obvious neither Lebanon or the UN were going to do anything to restrain them). The current situation was quite forseeable, and the IDF would have been derelict in its duty had it not had plans for such an eventuality.
5) corbetti (#107): The soldiers were kidnapped while on patrol between Shtulah and Zarit – both of which are on the Israeli side of the order. Furthermore, if Israel had crossed the border, it likely wouldn’t have been with reseve soldiers, who according to news reports were mustering out that day. Finally, not even Hizbullah is claiming they were on the Lebenese side. Note that both of yur sources are from the day of the kidnapping – it’s not unusual for initial reports to be wrong. For that matter, even later reports in the Hindustan Times describe the soldiers as “patrolling the border”.
*On the Israeli side; the border runs through the village.
‘As I noted above, Hizbullah has been sporadically attacking Israel since the withdrawal six years ago. Nor is this the first time they’ve kidnapped Israeli soldiers since then (pesonally, I think that we could have avoided the current mess – at a much smaller cost to both sides – had we gone in after Hizbullah then, when it was obvious neither Lebanon or the UN were going to do anything to restrain them). The cu