One of the Principles of "Just War" Theory is that Wars Cannot be Made Morally Impossible

"Can you imagine Hamas laying down guide marks for what you may or may not do in an attack on Israel. In any case, they don't even make a pretense of doing so."

Here is a self-styled "ethicist" explaining the logic of Hamas choice of war ethics:

Baroness Jenny Tonge, in a letter published in the Independent:

" It should come as no surprise to anyone that suicide bombers in Iraq are Palestinians.... Israel's security wall is forcing them to export themselves to another arena to fight in this ridiculous "war" against terrorism..."

The security fence is so effective in its prevention of terrorism that some convoluted reasoning has to be invented to somehow blame Israelis for the death of Iraqis. Those exploded should have been Jewish kids. It is Israel's fault that instead of blowing up Jewish kid Palestinians are obliged to outsource their explodable bodies to kill Iraqi kids. They need to kill someone and if they are prevented from killing their enemies then they are forced to kill enemies by six-degrees-of-association.

And therein lies the deep fault in the whole "proportionality" argument. What people are outraged by is not so much the death of Palestinians as they are by the relatively fewer casualties on the Israeli side. It is the absence of more dead Jewish kids that agitates people's moral compass. If they cared about Palestinian deaths they would have insisted that Hamas should stop endangeriing the living.

I don't understand what is it about Israel that drives the British chattering classes to such distraction. Really, what is it with those people?

amidut
"I don't understand what is it about Israel that drives the British chattering classes to such distraction. Really, what is it with those people?"

As the Brit mackernzie shows they are obsessed with Jews, especially with Israel.

I think it's the effect of their having lost an Empire. It reminds one of the way the Germans blamed the Jews after WW1 for their loss of the war. Of course the Brit are too dishonest to admit it. (Not all of them of course.)

Helena Cobban, another Brit, on the Jews:

Noah Pollak - 10.29.2009 - 2:04 PM

Helena Cobban sits on the board of Human Rights Watch and was a member of the blogger panel at the J Street conference. She recently ruminated on the question of why so many Jews are disgusted with the Goldstone/HRW treatment of Israel (hat tip: Richard Landes). Her answer:

“But the Michael Goldfarbs, the Norman Podhoretz’s, the Alan Dershowitz’s, and Robert Bernsteins of this world truly don’t get this. They truly think there is something so “special” about Jewish people and their experience in the world that somehow the [sic] (and especially the allegedly “Jewish” state, Israel) deserve to be given a free pass on the application of any neutral standards of behavior, such as would be applied to anyone else.”

Ah, so the Jews think they’re superior to everyone else — where have we heard that one before? And what is the “allegedly” Jewish state? (Sorry, I’ve misquoted her. That’s the allegedly “Jewish” state.) Her writing is so sloppy that it’s impossible to discern what specific slander she has in mind.

Cobban concludes:

“So now, frustrated by their inability to dream up a “Cast lead II,” Israel’s hardliners are taking out their frustrations by railing against Goldstone and “demanding deep changes in the laws of war.””

The pop psychology here is entertaining but of a thematic piece with the rest of her thinking. The criticism of Goldstone, she intones, is not serious or rational — it is in fact the redirected frustration of a predatory and sadistic people whose desire for more war on Palestinian civilians has been thwarted. Get it?

Just to remind people again: this petulant woman sits on the board of Human Rights Watch.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/pollak/147252

Here is an article about another British antisemitic organization supported by Jenny Tonge a famous British liberal member of Parliament and open antisemite:

"Christian Aid and Israel: Some hard facts for liberal Jews (and concerned Christians)"

Your View, October 28th 2009, 8:30 pm

from the article:

"The Tonge Connection

I’ve already hinted that my objections to Christian Aid’s coverage of the conflict have to do with more than its sheer volume. At this point I take up the thread begun with the two quotations at the start of this post.

The name of the Liberal Democrat politician Jenny Tonge, now Baroness Tonge, will be all too familiar to many Jews. In 2004 a comment suggesting that Palestinian terrorism was an understandable reaction to the conditions of occupation led to her being sacked by party leader Charles Kennedy from the Lib Dem front bench. Two years later her statement at the party conference that “the pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the western world, its financial grips. I think they’ve probably got a grip on our party.” was denounced by Kennedy’s successor Menzies Campbell as having “clear anti-Semitic connotations.” She is someone who has plainly moved way beyond legitimate criticism of Israel.

Earlier in 2006 Baroness Tonge had been appointed a Trustee of Christian Aid. After her conference speech the charity sought to portray it as irrelevant to her work with them. However, her position had evidently become untenable and she resigned her Trusteeship soon afterwards. I have little doubt that this was a result of pressure put on CA by responsible church leaders, but Tonge was no less certain that the pressure had come from a different quarter. As she wrote in an e-mail to a student:

‘After criticizing the lobby in a fringe meeting at conference (just after the publication of the book I mentioned [i.e. Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby]) I had to stand down from the board of Christian Aid because they had been warned by the BOD [Board of Deputies of British Jews], that my membership would endanger projects going ahead in the West Bank and Gaza.’

So was this the end of Christian Aid’s association with this deplorable conspiracy theorist? By no means. The connection is now a little less direct, but it is nevertheless alive and well. Baroness Tonge is currently a Patron of Friends of Sabeel UK, a group which promotes the nationalist liberation theology of the Palestinian Anglican Canon Naim Ateek. Its declared aim is to work for a just peace, which it may or may not be doing; what is evident from its website is that it promotes a one-sided propagandist narrative of the conflict and its origins, and that it campaigns against the Israeli security barrier without acknowledging that the barrier is a response to the deliberate killing of hundreds of civilians.

Friends of Sabeel UK declares prominently on its website that it is a partner of Christian Aid. It can be assumed that the partnership is to FoSUK’s advantage financially; Charity Commission records shows it raising barely half as much as it spends. The honour of being a Patron is one that Baroness Tonge shares with, among others, Professor Michael Taylor, former director of Christian Aid, Michael Langrish, Bishop of Exeter and a Trustee of Christian Aid, and John Gladwin, Bishop of Chelmsford and Chair of Christian Aid from 1998 to 2008.

The point of establishing this connection is that by now it would take pretty high levels of anti-Israel obsessionalism - and a pretty insouciant attitude towards anti-Semitism - to make anyone want to make common cause against Israel with Baroness Tonge. Two Liberal Democrat leaders have distanced themselves from her; the top brass of Christian Aid are doing quite the reverse...."

Read it all:

http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/10/28/christian-aid-and-israel-some-har...

I want to know if I got this right: IRA gunmen blowing up a bus full of British schoolchildren is bad, but Palestinian gunmen blowing up a bus full of Israeli schoolchildren is good (or understandable)?

"If I had to live in that situation - and I say that advisedly - I might just consider becoming one myself." Tonge refused to apologise: "I was just trying to say how, having seen the violence and the humiliation and the provocation that the Palestinian people live under every day and have done since their land was occupied by Israel, I could understand..."

Let's replace Palestinian with Northern Irish Catholic and Israel with Britain, shall we? Except in this case, the British were actually worse, far worse. Yet I could never, ever advocate or understand the killing of innocent British citizens. What a stupid slag.

Really small point: I hate the word "ethicist" too.

I hate the word "ethicist" too. If not discouraged, sooner or later we'll have "estheticists", too.

"Baroness" Tonge should be nominated for the 2009 Upper Class Twit of the Year Award. blackton, I thought that's an excellent point about the British in North Ireland.

The Walzer link is broken. All it is is
(after the http stuff) just 'walzer'.
Can't read the essay without a proper
link to it. Anyone who can help, please do.

The proper link to the Walzer essay, or
a proper link to it in pdf form is
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/09spring/walzer.pdf

yerubal,

If you mean the Walzer hyperlinks on the phrase "writes frequently for" in the first paragraph of Peretz's post,

writes - http://www.tnr.com/article/talk-talk-talk

frequently - http://www.tnr.com/article/mercenary-impulse

for - http://www.tnr.com/article/talk-talk-talk

For some reason, Walzer's name doesn't show up under the title of each article (shows up as "author info needed", but appears at the end.

I mean the link in the text that goes as follows:
The essay, titled "Responsibility and Proportionality in State and Non-State Wars," set about protecting the moral integrity of his argument of a quarter century ago and defending it against its abusers and distorters.

yerubal,

Thanks for the corrected Walzer link for the third last paragraph - very helpful. I hadn't read through the the links that far.

bl462

Should we get married or d'ya' wanna' just live together first to test things out?

There were many IRA and INLA bombs on mainland Britain during the decades of the NI conflict, and they killed some people and injured many more, but I don't believe the IRA ever specifically targeted a bus full of schoolchildren. The IRA also never attacked airports or planes.

The wiki entry on the Republican bombing campaign says

"During the IRA's twenty-five year campaign [1973-98] in England 115 deaths and 2,134 injuries were reported, from a total of almost 500 attacks."

That, to be grisly, is about 1 fatality every four attacks, or .25 of a fatality per attack. No Palestinian militant would be satisfied with such a pathetic little body-count.

basman, you crack me up!

....and it usually takes something on the exalted order of "The Life of Brian" to crack me up.

irony,

The IRA targeted Heathrow repeatedly in March 1994 with mortar attacks. I remember flying into Heathrow around that time and being surprised at the sight of tanks (yep, tanks) and many, very serious looking and very heavily armed soldiers there as a result of the attacks.

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Sky-News-Archive/Article/20080641080073

b, I'd forgotten about that -- or I'd never been aware of it. From what I read, however, it was more in the way of making the runway unusable than of directly targeting passengers or aircraft. I think the IRA stopped short of that kind of attack because they knew it would push beyond what their mainstream supporters would go along with. The IRA was generally -- but not always -- careful not to breach certain unspoken limits.

It sure made me think about how you could lock down an airport and meticulously screen everyone and everything going through it (I'd never seen such tight security and screening before or since - they physically went through everything being carried on or checked through the airport as well as interviewing every passenger) but still be vulnerable from outside the airport security perimeter. I'll bet that was the message that the IRA was trying to send. If so, I sure got it.

I read Walzer's essay. I liked it very much.

It’s illuminating to compare and contrast this essay with his essay co-authored with Avishai Margalit--http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22664. I think the essays can be read together and complement each other, the latter, as I say, illuminating the former.

In the latter essay the issue is:

"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?"

in the context of terrorists who embed themselves amongst civilians.

They cite the argument of Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin that:

"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."

Mragalit and Walzer restate the argument after jettisoning any distinctions between terrorists and combatants (by assimilating both to the stipulation that the war is just) thusly:

"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."

They attack this reframed claim on a number of grounds. Here are some of them:

1. It elides differences between combatants and non combatants—crucial to just war theory;

2. It erodes therefore the limits set by just war theory even in the context of a just war on the distinction between a just war and its just or unjust conduct;

3. Doing so is the imitation of terrorism even when terrorists are the enemy;

4. Hamas and Hezbollah are accountable when they make civilians the primary targets of their attack—and also when they deliberately use civilians as human shields. But neither of these crimes allows their enemies to give up their own obligation to avoid or minimize civilian injuries and deaths.

5. An understandable but morally misguided sentiment creeps into the Kasher-Yadlin paper when they write: "A combatant is a citizen in uniform"—so as to convince us that we should not ask our soldiers to take risks to save the lives of noncombatants on the other side.

6. Israel is morally required to behave towards non combatants in all those cases the way it would behave in the when—according to an example they construct— its citizens are held by Hezbollah in a “mixed vicinity." Which is to say, as they say: “Whatever Israel deems acceptable as ‘collateral damage’ when its own captured citizens are at risk—that should be the moral limit in the other cases too.”

7. “Israel’s soldiers must, by contrast with its enemies, intend not to kill civilians, and that active intention can be made manifest only through the risks the soldiers themselves accept in order to reduce the risks to civilians.”

Walzer and Margalit quote Yadlin and Kasher as saying, “…that ‘jeopardizing combatants rather than bystanders during a military act against a terrorist would mean shouldering responsibility for the mixed nature of the vicinity for *no reason* at all.’” Their rejoinder to this argument is that “no reason” obviates the moral and legal requirement carefully to attempt to minimize civilian casualties in the circumstances, a point stressed emphatically by Walzer in his essay on “Proportionality and Responsibility”. It’s been a while since I considered the translated essay by Yadlin and Kasher, but if memory serves me correctly, Margalit and Walzer are overstating the others’ argument. For surely this is hyperbole:

“If there is "no reason" for responsibility of this sort, if the lives of "our" soldiers really take priority over "their" civilians, then why couldn't the soldiers use those civilians as shields? Since they have not created the "mixed vicinity," why can't they in turn take advantage of it? We don't see how Kasher and Yadlin can avoid providing justification for a practice that Israel officially condemns and that we believe they believe is despicable: the use of noncombatants as human shields for combatants.”

I’d suggest, contrary to Margalit and Walzer, that Yadlin’s and Kasher’s argument is in fact consistent with the claim in Walzer’s proportionality essay that the stricture in just war theory against killing civilians cannot morph into a functional equivalent to pacifism. It is inconceivable that Kasher and Yadlin are arguing for the unmeasured killing of civilians in order to save the lives of Israeli soldiers.

Rather they are addressing, I’d argue, the inevitable fact of civilian death in “mixed vicinities” controlled by the terrorists and arguing for a functional limit on Israeli soldiers’ deaths in such vicinities even if that means increased collateral damage. A clear example of this would be aerial bombardment as against boots on the ground in certain situations and under certain conditions. My contention, is on this reading of Yadlin and Kasher, is that they are consistent with in principle with the Walzer of the proportionality essay. (A corollary of this is that if Walzer is consistent in both of his essays, then they are all ad idem in principle throughout.) In a nutshell, Yadlin and Kasher are exploring the requirements and contours of the carefulness and responsibility that Walzer argues for in his own essay—to repeat, the necessary weighing of the extent to which Israeli soldiers must sacrifice their lives to protect civilians in mixed vicinities that they do not control.

For as Walzer writes in his own essay:

“It is a central principle of just war theory that the self-defense of a people or a country cannot be made morally impossible, and so the more successful Hezbollah and Hamas are in hiding among civilians, the less useful the proportionality argument is—or,
to be more precise, the less limiting it is.”

Just trying to get the link right:

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

Of course. Why didn't I think of that!

If all of us can agree on what does or does not constitute a Just War a major breakthrough in human relationships will have been achieved.

For example, we can go back to the wars [or as some call them "pogroms"] in the Old Testament and establish whether God was Just in waging them. From there we can assess the thousands of savage conflicts men [made in the image of God] have cooked up. One by one, applying our rigoursly worked out criteria for Good and Evil butchery, we can settle bets folks have been waging now for eons.

Eventually The Spine can become The Authority on Just War. Thousands will flock here every day in order to know for sure which side in the wars they are following in the media are, well, the Good Guys.

We can incorporate the operation. For a set fee, world leaders can forward war plans to us. We can point out how they should modify them in order to qualify as Just. We can publish yearly updates, tip manuals, how-to books.

But all this is predicated on firmly establishing THE criteria for Human Justice, right? We must come up with a set of conditions such that they become the gold standard. There must be no difference between assembling the components of a Just War and assembling the components of a Big Mac.

Let's go for it.

mp:

"And while we're into the deep stuff...."

Funny. Real funny.

Moshe Halbertal. A learned Philosopher. An Ethicist. A TNR kind of guy.

And yet the New York Times still picked Randy Cohen instead!

Explain that, Marty!!

george

Look, guys, I've been reading your contributions above and I have to say I don't think you are taking Marty's challenge seriously. You see, in philosophy...in ethics...before we get to the one size that fits all [mine] we have to try on all the other sizes too. I don't see that here. I see only, well, the usual bias and bullshit.

You could cost us both fame and fortune if you don't get out of the sandbox.

It's time to shape the fuck up. Practice what I've been preaching now for months. I won't let you myopic morons humiliate me with the whole world watching.

THINK! THINK!! THINK!!!

gw

Great post, basman.

Made me think of "...And you shall love your fellow as you love yourself" (Leviticus 19:18) and war and minimization of civilian casualties. Seems to me that "as you love yourself" does not mean and should not require you to love your fellow "better than you love yourself".

The unhinged George Walton is back with his usual, "i post therefore I am kind of comment."

If George thinks anyone takes seriously anything he says he is indeed deranged.

What a pathetic bigot.

bl:

"...And you shall love your fellow as you love yourself" (Leviticus 19:18) and war and minimization of civilian casualties. Seems to me that "as you love yourself" does not mean and should not require you to love your fellow "better than you love yourself".

george:

If the Olympics ever includes "splitting religious hairs" as a competitive event this may be good for the gold.

Let's see: If we butcher hundreds of kids it doesn't mean we love them less than our own kids. Besides, in war, loving others in the same way as you love yourself has got to be a lot trickier.

That's why I propose resolving it once and for all. For example, we might be able to figure out how many babies can be blown to bits before we cross the line from a just to an unjust military operation. I say no fewer than a 100.

But than I am an atheist, right?

george

Pathetic bigoted george is arguing with himself again.

It another one of his "i post therefore i am."

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't – till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"

"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master – that's all."

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again:
"They've a temper, some of them – particularly verbs, they're the proudest – adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs – however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"

"the self-appointed moralists"
Israel and its defenders have enough of a moral high ground that they don't have to use the 'mind your own beeswax' rhetoric of China et al, but even if they did, I'd hope they could do better than that ludicrous phrasing! ALL moralists are self-appointed, and speaking your conscience simply out of your own sense of duty is a virtue, not contemptible.