Comment by woodruffw
2 years ago
I have nothing to add here, other than to thank you for expressing this so cogently.
It’s not always “right” to measure just action in terms of lives saved or lost, but it’s hard for me (and so many other American Jews) to see anything right or just about 10 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli.
Take that logic further. Israel's enemies outnumber it by 10x or more and are more than ruthless enough to sacrifice as many as necessary*. There's no way ever that Israel could avoid having the other side having more casualties. The same would apply to every minority.
If your suggested law of war isn't 'majority or ruthless minority, get to do everything they want because they have more causalties', than you need an alternative. The alternative is the current laws of war, which allow for strikes with collateral damage (what Israel says it's doing), but not for terrorist attacks aimed at civilians.
* Suicide bombers, Iranian mullahs sending kids with 'plastic keys to heaven' to dismantle minefields, or current refusal of Hamas to allow civilians to use its tunnels as shelters. We could fill the page with examples really.
** Funny, I don't recall opposition to America's post 9/11 response based on counts. Almost as if the same rules don't apply.
I don’t think the majority of people killed so far in this conflict have been enemies of Israel per se, in the same way that most (nearly all?) of the people who died on October 7 were not enemies of Palestine. Even in the most hardened, cynical, irredentist view this wouldn’t be true.
“Collateral damage” is one of those bloodless wartime euphemisms for killing innocent men, women, and children. It’s a dirty, unavoidable reality. But I don’t believe for one second that Israel’s hands are so sufficiently constrained that the current degree of civilian death is necessary. I say that as a Jew, with family in Israel, who I worry about.
> “Collateral damage” is one of those bloodless wartime euphemisms for killing innocent men, women, and children.
It's not a just a euphemism, because there really is a difference. Justified or not, Dresden wasn't collateral damage - it was directly targeting and killing innocent civilians. Collateral damage really is something different.
> But I don’t believe for one second that Israel’s hands are so sufficiently constrained that the current degree of civilian death is necessary.
(For the record, I'm Israeli)
This is a hard question to answer. No one actually knows, because given fog of war and given the incentives of both sides, it's hard to get real numbers for what's going on. Not to mention that what even counts as "necessary"? Obviously zero civilian deaths is the only legitimate goal, but just as obviously this is impossible to achieve in practice. (I'd also add that zero deaths of militants is the goal, if possible - anyone that can be stopped by arresting them or causing them to surrender should be dealt with that way - though obviously this is even harder to achieve.)
Given all that, I think a few points I'll say, again speaking as an Israeli citizen with my own particular biases:
1. While I highly mistrust our current government (like many Israelis), I certainly don't think most of our government would condone killing civilians completely unnecessarily. At least not the ones in charge, mostly.
2. More importantly, I trust the IDF a lot (and this is probably a big difference between me and most non-Israelis). While I'm sure that not literally every civilian death is legitimate, I do trust that the IDF is only attacking valid targets given reasonable intelligence, and that it's not knowingly targeting civilians for the most part.
3. Most importantly - taking the outside view - the IDF estimates that it's killing roughly 2 civilians for 1 militant killed. If you believe that number - it's roughly in line with similar wars fought by Western countries.
Note: While I talk about civilian deaths here as a "statistic", every death is a horrible tragedy. In a good world, no one would ever have to die of violence, and good people should mourn the deaths of any person on any side of this horrible situation.
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> I don’t think the majority of people killed so far in this conflict have been enemies of Israel per se
How do you know? hamas overstates death, has had ‘journalists’ with weapons, ‘children’ than are 15-16 year old fighters, lied about the hospital being destroyed, has videos of people crying over dolls, and MrFAFO, the Johnny Sins of Hamasniks.
I do recall opposition to America’s post 9-11 response based on the same arguments, oddly enough.
The current laws of war do not allow, for instance, strikes at medical facilities: Israel’s argument is that they don’t have to follow the laws because Hamas is breaking them.
>I do recall opposition to America’s post 9-11 response based on the same arguments
Very much on the margins if any. The overwhelming consensus ignored these considerations.
>The current laws of war do not allow, for instance, strikes at medical facilities.
This is wrong. Medical facilities can be struck if they are used for war.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/08/504815234...
Moreover, this is not what happened in Gaza - there were raids but not dropping bombs from airplanes, the former being much less destructive.
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> The current laws of war do not allow, for instance, strikes at medical facilities: Israel’s argument is that they don’t have to follow the laws because Hamas is breaking them.
That is neither what the laws of war say, nor what the Israeli argument is (or at least, it's a misrepresentation).
The laws of war say that if a medical facility (or any other civilian infrastructure) is used by militants as part of the war effort, then it loses its protected status. Israel's argument, whether you agree or not, is that this occurred, thereby making those targets legal.
There was lots of criticism of disprortionality in the US' wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US also made a point not to conduct civilian death counts and they were little reported. But what numbers did exist were absolutely important for those opposed to the war.
Just do a web search restricted from 2001 to 2007 for discussions of the civilian death toll.
> Hamas to allow civilians to use its tunnels as shelters.
That is absurd. Israel bombs “facilities used by Hamas”, civilians going in Hamas tunnels will be a direct target for IDF.
It should not be difficult to declare a tunnel a shelter with the UN. Also, any one who could dig so extensively could dig shelters. Hamas officials have a more parsimonious explanation:
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/civilians-are-israel-un...
There has never been a war in history where one side stops because they killed enough people. War ends when the enemy surrenders.
The Japanese killed a few dozen civilians in Pearl Harbor. America killed 10,000x as many during their bombings of Japan. Had they not surrendered, they likely would have killed an order of magnitude more. The only alternative would have been for the US to completely blockade Japan indefinitely to prevent them from rebuilding their military. Actually, they wouldn't be able to do that either because that would make Japan an "open air prison."
By most standards, what the US did to the civilian population of Japan was an atrocity.
I don’t have easy answers here. But I think we’ve lost an important piece of the plot here if we can’t look at one terrible human tragedy, and then another, and then ask ourselves whether the first had to beget the second.
For sure we should ask the question, and it's totally valid to criticize Israel's actions. It's also totally in line to be in favor of Israel conducting a war against Hamas, but to be against specific ways in which it is fought.
I think a thing that should give you pause is if the conclusion to a train of thought is "and therefore, no war is ever justified". Some people think that's true! Some people think it's better for them and all their friends and family to die than to risk killing civilians. Most people (including me) disagree with that statement.
Well, the Japanese military was so evil, that the nazis literally had to tell them to chill out. Every civilian death is a tragedy, but as with most wars, the longer it goes on, the more casualties it will take. Sometimes people simply have to make the least evil decision, as the alternative is just worse.
This has been a fairly common rhetorical move for defenders of disproportionate Israeli violence, inflicted primarily upon civilians, in recent months. I've seen it done with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the firebombing of Dresden.
On TV in English, which atrocity is used to justify the current and growing civilian death toll in Gaza seems to depend on who the audiences. US audiences are appealed to with comparison to Hiroshima and UK audiences, to Dresden.
It's easy to read it cynically when it's an Israeli official excusing one war crime with another on television. It's stranger and sadder to see it done by an ordinary stranger online.
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> The Japanese killed a few dozen civilians in Pearl Harbor.
They killed 20M Chinese.
Japanese did enough evil through Asia during WW2 to more than deserve that.
I’d caution against using the word ‘deserve’ so loosely. While you may see it as meaning ‘imperial Japan had to be stopped by any means necessary’, it comes off more like retribution. It comes off like a bloodlust for revenge.
In general, ‘deserve’ should always be followed with ‘because…’. Just saying x deserves y assumes we agree on: what x did, an ethical/moral system, and that y is the best punishment/reward in that ethical/moral system.
Nobody deserves to die of radiation poisoning. There is no neighborhood on Earth in which all families living there deserve to be vaporized.
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"Israel is going great lengths to protect civilians."
No they don't. They never did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roof_knocking
> So you are suggesting an eye for an eye, we should kill a Palestinian for every one of our dead? Honestly, I find that thought disgusting.
I don’t know how you can possibly arrive at this interpretation from what I wrote.
> So you are suggesting an eye for an eye, we should kill a Palestinian for every one of our dead? Honestly, I find that thought disgusting.
Just to be clear: you find that more disgusting than killing over ten Palestinians for every dead Israeli?
Not that guy, but this mostly comes down to who you view as more just in a war. How many Germans died vs Americans in WW2? If we're going by ratio more than 100 German civilians were killed for every American civilian.
As a pragmatist, I see Israel as a relatively liberal democracy with Arab Muslims in their parliament, women and gays have civil rights, the society is open and innovative. Many Arab nations do not have these properties, and their ideologies often oppose them in principle.
That said, I do not think Israel should be defended to the inordinate degree it has, which is due to American imperial interests, the military industrial complex, and many elite Jews which have disproportionate influence in American society. Look at the major CEOs of corporations in tech, finance, media, etc.
It's also harsh and dark to imagine, but sometimes we benefit from being the inheritors of evil actions that finalized a blood feud or enforced homogeneity. China is unified in large part because of the repression of their totalitarian state. Roughly 92% of China is ethnically Han, which is mostly just a bunch of Chinese ethnicities that were culturally assimilated into being called Han after the Han dynasty. America doesn't have to deal with an insurgency of Comanches because they're utterly out numbered by American citizens and weaponry. Israelis do not have these advantages, and would be at major risk of being conquered by the many more numerous Arab Muslims, who too were the result of oppressive and evil military campaigns of Mohammad and subsequent Muslim warriors.
No, I find the idea of deliberately killing even a single Palestinian disgusting. Thank you for asking.
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