Month: January 2009

Some Data Points

This is instructive:

In 2002, at the height of the second intifada, more than 1,000 Palestinians were killed, compared with about 400 Israelis. In the past eight days of war, more than 460 Palestinians were killed, and four Israelis died by rocket fire.

From 2-1 to 100-1 in six years is a big gain in killing efficiency. Just so long as the Israelis never expect any actual relationship with any actual Gazans, it works after a fashion. But does it deny Hamas a psychological victory?

Filling The Vacuum

Yglesias worries about "catastrophic success in Gaza":

…something you need to look at here is the risk that weakening Hamas will only lead to the rise of more extreme groups. The high level of power that Hamas had achieved as of last week was, after all, precisely the result of a deliberate Israeli campaign to weaken Fatah. The hope was that this would bring some more accommodationist Palestinians to the fore, but instead the reverse happened. And now that Israel is going about trying the same thing with Hamas, one needs to worry that Hamas will be displaced by Salafist groups who think Hamas is too weak-kneed.

Distinctions

Conor goes out on a limb and makes one:

Hamas is a despicable organization. That it triumphed in an election speaks very poorly of the Palestinian polity. But that is different from saying that everyone voted for Hamas because they want to blow themselves up in an Israeli discoteque. The very fact that Hamas performs lots of social service functions implies either that they are by nature philanthropists or that doing so helps them to bolster their popularity.

I have a little less hope for Palestinian society than I do for Iraq in the foreseeable future. But I assume there is some distinction between a Hamas mafia boss and the average Gazan. Of course, that distinction has largely been erased – for the time being – by Israel’s aggression. And the blockade and destitution within Gaza – and its emergence as an isolated, battered terrorist-run township – may also have elided the distinction further. But I don’t believe the distinction has never existed or cannot exist. Larison, meanwhile, contrasts the Georgia and Gaza conflicts:

…comparison with Western reactions to the war in Georgia is useful. Most politicians and pundits deplored Russian “aggression” and disproportionate Russian actions following the initial Georgian escalation. Indeed, I also said that the Russian response was disproportionate, because it seemed to be so, but for most Western observers the importance of proportionality seems to come and go like the tide depending on the military action in question.

Two years ago and again this year, Israeli military action has appeared to be proportionate to most of the same people who were deeply offended by Russian actions, or else they will insist that proportionality is irrelevant or impossible to define. If the consensus-supporting politicians and pundits are creative, they may argue both things at the same time. What never fails is their willingness to make excuses for one side while falsely claiming that their opponents in the debate are doing likewise. If there is one thing that most of the critics of U.S.-allied governments have in common, it is the desire to get Americans to stop making excuses for their allies when the allies are in error.

Proportionality And Terror

Noah Pollak asked me to provide some framework for a discussion of proportionality and just war theory with respect to the Israeli attack on Gaza. In re-reading my Catechism and brushing up on just war theory, I am struck first of all by how alien the context seems for the current war. The asymmetric nature of the threat and the emergence of failed states run by mafioso religious fanatics makes everything more complicated. You could argue that this makes just war theory more important, rather than less, since we are in danger of having the rules of war dictated by barbarians. Or you could argue, along with the neocons, that Jihadist barbarism demands a response in kind. I favor the first view. And it is nonetheless fair to say, I think, that Israel’s actions in Gaza fail every traditional just war justification.

In the history of the West, the laws of war are clear enough. You do not launch a just war if it leads to greater evils than the status quo Sderotdavidsilvermangetty ante. There must be a reasonable proportion between means and ends. Both sides should be able to acknowledge common human values, even as they fight over territory or ideology. And yet Hamas has never done this; has no capacity for abiding by even minimal moral norms, believes it has a moral responsibility to eradicate the Jewish state, and certainly finds the universalist and liberal moral law embedded in Western and largely Christian culture meaningless outside Islamic hegemony. Israel, for its part, is on a different moral plane than Hamas. Its internal critics write op-eds; they are not taken out and shot. But, in the face of what is, essentially, a 60 year war against enemies on all sides and within, it has long since disappeared down the self-reflecting mirrors of survivalist logic and existential panic. It looks to me like a society in danger of losing its sense of restraint to the logic of violence. It is lashing out because it feels it can do no other and senses its long-term survival at stake. Even if violence does not solve the problem and may make it worse, war can seem a better option now than disappearing passively in the next couple of decades. The stunning near-unanimity of Israelis behind the Gaza attack is proof of this. In Israel, it seems, it is always America in 2002.

But the point of just war theory is to give us a vantage point outside any particular contingency. Even though I may provoke a Jewish-Catholic fight here, the Catholic Catechism has as useful and concise a statement of the right of self-defense as anyone:

At one and the same time:

  • the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
  • all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
  • there must be serious prospects of success;
  • the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

Let’s take each condition separately.

Is the damage Hamas has inflicted on Israel "lasting, grave and certain"?

Taking the vantage point of the conflict from May 2007 on, Hamas has fired several thousand Qassam Gaza2abidkatibgetty rockets with such imprecision that no distinction between civilian and military targets is meaningful (which is to say they were all war crimes). Until the recent conflict, Israel suffered 11 military deaths, 131 wounded, 8 civilian deaths and 83 wounded, with more than a hundred treated for shock. In a country of several million, these deaths and injuries were sustained within a relatively small and limited geographical area. (Gazans, in the same conflict, with a much smaller population and far more geographically concentrated, suffered 409 military deaths, 436 injured, and 92 civilian deaths – before the current outbreak even started.) The idea that the indefensible damage Hamas has inflicted on Israel makes an "all-out war" on all of Hamas and Gaza morally necessary in Charles Krauthammer’s typically nuanced view, is obviously a non-starter. But one recalls that Krauthammer also believes in the moral imperative of torture.

Have all other means of ending Hamas’s aggression been shown to be impractical or ineffective?

At some level, this is meaningless with Hamas. It exists in order to wage total war on Israel. But it is also unclear if the brutal economic embargo on Gaza – imposed by Egypt, Israel and the West for more than a year – was not actually already weakening Hamas from within, and rendering it less popular. It’s certainly a plausible reading of recent history. And under just war theory, any possibility that the goal of restraining Hamas or undermining it could be achieved by non-military means renders the current Israeli counter-attack illicit.

Are there serious prospects for success?

We will see. Perhaps the "don’t fuck with the Jews" message will finally be heard and a profound shift will occur in the hearts and minds of Gazans. But the Middle East’s history of the past two decades (and its culture of eternal revenge) is not exactly encouraging in this regard.

If the goal is to prevent any further missiles ever reaching Israel from Gaza, I can’t see it working either. Even if it is immensely successful as a military operation, this is a very hard test to meet. Even a few missiles will represent a "victory" for Hamas among those Muslims whom we need to appeal to. Even if Hamas is effectively wiped out in Gaza, its leadership massacred, its infrastructure badly damaged, it is hard to see who would replace it, or how a completely failed state in Gaza would then be more likely to restrain Islamist violence than even Hamas. If the goal is to persuade Gazans to ditch Hamas, the war has so far been counter-productive, and has certainly exposed the Sunni Arab dictatorships’ de facto alliance with Israel against Iran-backed Hamas. So far, the big winner – again! – is Iran.

Is the evil inflicted by the war greater than the evil prevented?

It seems clear to me at this stage that the answer is yes. The loss of life this past week has been huge – far greater than any other stage of the conflict, and out of all proportion to the damage Hamas has inflicted on Israel. In terms of casualties, we are talking about ratios of roughly a hundred to one. That makes this far from a close call morally. There is a reason, in other words, for many Europeans’ horror. This is an extremely one-sided war, with one side essentially being attacked at will in a way that cannot avoid large numbers of civilian deaths. It is all very well understanding and sympathizing with Israel’s dilemma in tackling Jihadist terror, as we should and must; it is another thing to watch women and children being terrorized and killed as they currently are in Gaza, with very little tangible gained as a result in terms of Israeli security. Maybe the long-term gains will shift the balance here. But those now arguing for exactly that proposition are those who believe the Iraq war has been a great success.

I need to repeat: There is no "just war" excuse for Hamas’ murderous terrorism or for its refusal to acknowledge or peacefully co-exist with Israel. But there’s no reading of traditional just war theory that can defend what Israel is now doing and has done either. Maybe I am missing an element here. Or maybe just war theory cannot account for modern terrorism. But if that is the case, then an argument must be made for a new framework of just warfare that can account for that. It does seem to me that the combination of apocalyptic terror and WMDs shift the equation. But with Hamas, we are not talking about WMDs. And we have to acknowledge something the neocons rarely do: Hamas is more democratically legitimate than the King of Jordan, an unelected plutocrat who runs a torture state.

Maybe Noah has a response to these points. I’m happy to air it. These are provisional thoughts and I reserve the right to adjust them. But until neoconservatives can do a better job at defending the morality of the current assault, they will lose the battle for global opinion, and deepen the crisis that the Israelis face in the new century.

(Photos: a traumatized Israeli child in Sderot by David Silverman and a murdered Palestinian child in Gaza by Abid Katib. Both from Getty.)

Someone Else’s Problem?

Juan Cole has a long historical post on the origins of the Gaza conflict:

I was on the radio recently with John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, and he expressed the hope that Egypt would take back Gaza and Jordan what is left of the West Bank. You may as well dream of pink unicorns on Venus. It isn’t going to happen. The Palestinians are Israel’s problem.

War on them, circumscribe them, colonize them all you like. They aren’t going anywhere, and you can’t keep them stateless and virtually enslaved forever, occasionally exterminating some of them as though they were vermin when they make too much trouble. That, sooner or later, will lead to boycotts by rising economic powers and by Europe that could be extremely damaging to Israel’s long-term prospects as a state.

It may still be 10 or 20 years in the future. But because of Israel’s economic and demographic vulnerabilities, for it to lose the war of global public opinion may ultimately be more consequential than either macro-war or micro-war.

The Essence Of Cheneyism

Michael Goldfarb channels John Yoo:

To be clear, he’s not saying that it’s sometimes okay to kill a bad guy’s innocent children as part of a military operation directed against the guy. He’s saying it’s better to kill his children than it would be to avoid killing them.

Goldfarb favors a near-dictatorial presidency with the power to detain and torture. John Yoo was even prepared to countenance crushing the testicles of the children of terror suspects as inherent in the constitutional powers of the American executive. Yoo is a fellow at AEI, and Goldfarb was spokesman for McCain. This is neoconservatism, guys.