Radical Civility

Cross-posted from Cliopatria, a group blog composed of historians. I wrote the entry early this morning:

For weeks now I have been profoundly disquieted by the Israeli Defense Forces’ tactical approach to combatting Hezbollah. I have wrestled with it on my professional blog; I have discussed it with friends both in and out of the armed forces; I have let it distract me from my planned agenda of summer work. But then, the ethics of war — the problem of how to conduct war in a moral fashion — has engaged me for a long time.To date, an estimated 800 Lebanese civilians have died under the bombs and shells of the IDF’s F-16s and self-propelled howitzers. The campaign has been a humanitarian disaster, a political embarrassment, and so devoid of military success that the Israeli general in charge of the operation has been sacked.

But enraged by the kidnapping of two IDF soldiers, the murder of several more, and the indiscriminate rain of Katyusha rockets that has fallen on Israel since mid-July, killing about 100 Israeli civilians, the response of those who sympathize with Israel has been to shrug off the deaths of Lebanese civilians. The standard line is to place the entire blame on Hezbollah because Hezbollah is said to have intentionally established command posts and rocket launchers in populated areas. Another refrain is to blame the civilians themselves, on the theory that only Hezbollah supporters would be anywhere near a Hezbollah military position. And inevitably, those whose sympathies lie with Israel have blamed the media for showing what Israeli bombs and shells do to human beings.

They have gotten so far gone with rage that a number of them now proclaim:

Well, I’m not a fan of disproportionate response. The reliance on aerial and artillery bombardment troubles me; I cannot, try as I might, accept the proposition that it falls within the modern laws and usages of war. It violates the very core of those laws and usages: The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. Their deaths are permissible only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.

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