Israel: Civilians & Combatants

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22664

From the May 14th issue of the New York Review of Books

By Avishal Margalit and Michael Walzer


Excerpts:

"In 2005, Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin published in an American academic journal "Assassination and Preventive Killing,"<1> an essay that explores the issue of "assassination within the framework of fighting terror." There are good reasons to believe that the political and practical significance of this essay goes far beyond its academic interest. Asa Kasher is professor of professional ethics and philosophy of practice at Tel Aviv University and an academic adviser to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Amos Yadlin is a major general who at the time the article appeared was the military attaché of the embassy of Israel in Washington; he is currently the head of Israeli army intelligence."

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"We are not going to deal here with the issue of targeted assassination, which is the paper's explicit subject. Instead we want to challenge what the authors say is their most "important and sensitive" claim. Kasher and Yadlin ask:

What priority should be given to the duty to minimize casualties among the combatants of the state when they are engaged in combat...against terror?

When they write of combatants of "the state," the authors mean states in general, including the armed forces of the state of Israel. By "terror" they mean the intentional killing of civilians, as by members of Hamas in recent years. And this is their answer:

Usually, the duty to minimize casualties among combatants during combat is last on the list of priorities, or next to last, if terrorists are excluded from the category of noncombatants. We firmly reject such a conception because it is immoral. A combatant is a citizen in uniform. In Israel, quite often, he is a conscript or on reserve duty. His state ought to have a compelling reason for jeopardizing his life. The fact that persons involved in terror are depicted as noncombatants and that they reside and act in the vicinity of persons not involved in terror is not a reason for jeopardizing the combatant's life in their pursuit.... The terrorists shoulder the responsibility for their encounter with the combatant and should therefore bear the consequences.

And they go on:

Where the state does not have effective control of the vicinity, it does not have to shoulder responsibility for the fact that persons who are involved in terror operate in the vicinity of persons who are not.

One quick remark is in order. There is nothing in these quotations that hinges on the word "terrorists." Replace that word with "enemy combatants" and the argument remains the same. Kasher and Yadlin are simply assuming that the war against the enemy is a just war. Their claim, crudely put, is that in such a war the safety of "our" soldiers takes precedence over the safety of "their" civilians.

Our main contention is that this claim is wrong and dangerous. It erodes the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, which is critical to the theory of justice in war (jus in bello). No good reasons are given for the erosion."

This bit sums it up for me:

'There is nothing unusual in this demand, and nothing unique to Israel. When soldiers in Afghanistan, or Sri Lanka, or Gaza take fire from the rooftop of a building, they should not pull back and call for artillery or air strikes that may destroy most or all of the people in or near the building; they should try to get close enough to the building to find out who is inside or to aim directly at the fighters on the roof. Without a willingness to fight in that way, Israel's condemnation of terrorism and of the use of human shields by its enemies rings hollow; no one will believe it.'

that it wouldn't make a bit of difference to the haters who only "criticize" Israel. That said, Israel will inevitably have to fight again and it's imperative the IDF tries to fight as 'clean' as it can. This is a good article that typifies the standards that the IDF seeks to attain.

The distinction between terrorists and legal combatants is that terrorists want to kill as many people as will produce a desired propaganda effect, while legal combatants want to kill as many people as will make them feel secure.

It must be said that while any general has a duty to protect and conserve his forces, it is a strange sort of army that considers that protection of combat troops is it's primary objective. Usually wars are fought to obtain political and military objectives, and the sacrifice of troops for those ends is what the game is all about.