By Tal Fortgang
Thursday, September 19, 2024
It has become a cliché to point out that there is a
difference between criticism of Israel and denial of its right to exist. The
former is well within the boundaries of acceptable discourse, as it is with any
country; the latter is not, as it entertains the possibility of dismantling a
sovereign state (that just so happens to be the world’s only Jewish state),
which is not considered a legitimate geopolitical option in any other context.
But the distinction can be elided by disguising rejection of Israel’s right to
exercise sovereignty — including the right to conduct defensive wars — as mere
criticism of its conduct.
Not everyone attempts the disguise. Open Israel-haters
like U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese deny that Israel has any right
to self-defense, because they consider it an illegitimate state to begin with.
Some call Israel’s military actions “genocide” not because of Israel’s conduct
but because the war occurred within “the system of settler colonial apartheid
that the Israeli government has built and maintained over the past seventy-five
years,” as the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace wrote less than a
week after October 7.
These extremists deny that Israel has any right to wage
war against Hamas, even after October 7. Even if Israel killed only Hamas
terrorists, and destroyed only weapons caches, and conducted a miraculous
operation without harming a single civilian, Israel would still be in the
wrong. Indeed, on this view, Israel could escape such condemnation only by
accepting violence against its citizens or ceasing to exist — in other words,
by forfeiting its most basic obligations as a sovereign nation. It is easy to
see why most other Israel-haters would avoid making such an argument outright:
When it is that easy to identify, it is easily dismissed as extreme, immoral,
and, frankly, impractical.
What complicates things, however, are the frequent calls
for “cease-fire” couched in terms of criticism of Israel’s conduct in the war.
Most of Israel’s critics — humanitarians and opportunistic Hamas-sympathizers
alike — have adopted this line. This is where classical just-war theory comes
in. The theory holds that, for a war to be just, two distinct conditions must
be met: First, a nation that resorts to war must do so for legitimate reasons.
Second, the war itself must be conducted according to some basic principles
that restrain soldiers from needless cruelty. These two parts of the theory
have been wielded against Israel in a deliberately confusing manner since it
launched its counteroffensive to destroy Hamas. This conflation strikes at the
heart of our ability to speak and think clearly about Israel’s war against
Hamas, and about what it would take to satisfy Israel’s supposed critics,
including, occasionally, America’s most important elected officials and
diplomats.
Critics of Israel’s conduct in the war, then, say that
Israel launched its attack for justifiable reasons but that its conduct in Gaza
has been so unjust as to warrant ending the campaign. There are some signals
that these criticisms are not being leveled entirely in good faith. For one,
the objections began making the rounds almost immediately after Israel’s
response began. For another, the same warmed-over accusations of Israeli
misconduct are trotted out every time Israel is dragged into war, without accounting
for the particulars of the latest operation. But for those disposed to take the
criticism seriously, some examination of the logic (or lack thereof) behind the
accusations is warranted. Do any of the criticisms hold water? Or are they
really rejections in disguise of Israel’s right to wage war?
***
One common criticism, repeated by lawmakers and activists
alike, is that too many Gazan civilians, especially children, have died or are
suffering on account of the war. “Far too many Palestinians have been killed”
in Gaza, said Secretary of State Antony Blinken in November, not even a month
after Israel’s military response began. If true, Israel’s conduct could violate
the principle of proportionality: Military actions can harm civilians (or
civilian infrastructure) only to the extent they are necessary to achieve
legitimate military objectives.
Proportionality is a confusing principle and hard to
apply in the best of circumstances. Civilian harm and military advantage are
incommensurable, meaning they share no common standard of measurement. There is
no way of knowing how much of one is worth trading for the other. It does not
help that many analysts and commentators mistake it for, or misrepresent it as,
a requirement that casualty numbers be roughly equal on both sides of a
conflict. But one element of proportionality is clear: It is logically impossible
to infer a violation simply by looking at civilian casualty numbers. The
circumstances of each death are crucial, not just because some of the deceased
are combatants whom Hamas claims as civilians but because the extent of
collateral damage must be weighed against Israel’s need to attack a particular
military target in a particular way. That is true writ small and writ large:
Just as any given air strike or raid cannot be determined to be just or unjust
by looking solely at casualty counts, Israel’s military campaign as a whole
cannot be judged on that same basis without a thorough investigation of its
achievements.
That is, of course, unless it is predetermined that no
military achievement could be worth any civilian death — which is
another way of saying that the war itself is illegitimate.
The proportionality argument as it has been wielded
against Israel therefore fails in spectacular fashion. Determinations that
Israel’s Gaza campaign has violated the principle of proportionality are
categorically premature. It is logically impossible to conclude at this
juncture, with the intelligence thus far available to parties other than the
combatants, that Israel has violated the principle of proportionality. That
supposed “critics” have made such determinations nonetheless says more about
the critics than it does about Israel. The only way their “criticism” makes any
sense is to construe it as a claim about the war’s justness, that no Israeli
aim is worth any of the collateral damage that comes with war — a claim
no less extreme, immoral, and useless than in its unmasked form.
***
Another criticism of Israel’s conduct is that
it is being reckless in its attacks. An international chorus of condemnation
took this line in the wake of Israel’s tragic April 1 strike on a convoy of aid
workers from the World Central Kitchen (WCK), which killed seven. What Israel
claims was a mistake (and an investigation suggests may have been a diabolical
Hamas ploy) was taken to be proof that Israel is being insufficiently careful
to protect civilians in Gaza. Blinken exhorted Israel afterward to “do more” to
avoid civilian casualties. President Biden “threatened,” according to Reuters,
“to condition support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza on it taking concrete
steps to protect aid workers and civilians.” (Those who take this line
sometimes slip into unhinged slander, as when WCK founder José Andrés went so
far as to accuse Israel of striking his workers “deliberately” as part of its
“war against humanity itself.”)
The respectable-sounding version of this ostensible
criticism suffers from the elementary error of logic that one mistake proves
pervasive recklessness. That is akin to concluding from one plane crash that
air travel is unsafe. Plane crashes happen, even occasionally as a result of
human error; but it is logically fallacious to infer from this fact that
boarding a 747 poses some unusual risk. Israel takes extraordinary steps to
ensure that its attacks are targeted and based on firm intelligence. The WCK
strike happened (by all accounts, among those who acknowledge that it was not
“deliberate”) because Israel believed that Hamas terrorists were in the
volunteers’ vans. It is not because the IDF didn’t bother to check readily
available information, or because they don’t care one way or another. In this
instance, they were wrong. But mistakes of this kind — reasonable but incorrect
conclusions based on imperfect intelligence — do not, without significant
further evidence, indicate systemic wrongdoing. They are things that happen in
war.
Choosing to frame a mistake as a symbol of reckless
disregard for civilian life is an act of sheer motivated reasoning. There is no
allegation that the mistake stemmed from a policy of shooting first and asking
questions later, or from some equivalent sign of systemic recklessness. To the
contrary, the facts that emerged in the weeks after the WCK tragedy suggest
that Hamas manipulated Israeli intelligence to draw a strike against the aid
workers. (The individual IDF personnel who ultimately authorized the strike
were fired nonetheless.)
The mere fact that Israel has made mistakes with tragic
consequences does not prove — nor could it prove — that those very
systems are broken, or geared toward callousness to civilian life. It proves at
most that they are imperfect.
If Israel’s critics believe that perfection is the proper
standard to which all militaries should be held, they should say so — and in
the process declare that they have adopted a principle that discriminates
against decent actors, who care about meeting such standards, and emboldens
indecent ones, who don’t. What is far more likely is that this standard is yet
another way to redefine acceptable military conduct to exclude whatever Israel
does — another way in which Israel’s ability to conduct war altogether is
backhandedly denied. In other words, it is a jus ad bellum argument that
has nothing whatsoever to do with Israel’s actual conduct. The fact that even
Israel’s supposedly friendliest and most sophisticated critics, in the highest
echelons of government leading its primary ally, can muster only vague
exhortations about “doing more” (more what?) and taking “concrete steps” (such
as?) to achieve unstated standards of care for a population held hostage by an
enemy terror organization, speaks to the way critics set a standard for Israel
that requires perfection. Any prosecution of a war, therefore, is liable to
this criticism at any time, for any reason. It is another way of revoking
Israel’s right to wage war whenever the critics find it convenient.
Just a bit more on the motivated reasoning inherent in
this criticism is in order. Even the best-trained and most ethical militaries
suffer from occasional intelligence failures, even in war zones less dense,
confusing, or rigged with human shields than Gaza. In October 2015, for
instance, the United States repeatedly bombed a trauma hospital in Kunduz,
Afghanistan, killing 42 and injuring 30. The Air Force (and Afghan authorities)
mistakenly believed that Taliban fighters were hiding there, when in fact it
was being used by Doctors Without Borders. The U.S. government apologized for
the tragic mistake. No good-faith critic of American actions thought to
extrapolate from this high-profile mistake that the U.S. armed forces were
anything less than well-trained and committed to legitimate war aims.
Because that sort of “criticism” is reserved for the
Jewish state, and portrays Israel as unreasonably cruel in its warfare,
Israel’s defenders have called this a modern-day blood libel. While that
freighted phrase might shed more heat than light on the discourse, what is
clear is that the accusation that Israel chooses where and how to strike its
enemies, and which ones, without due care is hardly a “criticism.” It is,
rather, at best, an excuse to call for Israel to lay down arms entirely.
Rather than aiming to disqualify this line of anti-Israel rhetoric by labeling
it antisemitic — a strategy to which the harshest anti-Israel voices are
immune, having convinced themselves that accusations of antisemitism are
reflexive and fleeting — it may be more useful for Israel’s defenders to show
that it suffers the dual disgrace of being illogical and deceptive, and all in
service of a peculiar double standard.
***
In campus encampments and other outposts of
anti-Israel animus, common rallying cries have included obvious eliminationist
language (“There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” “From the river to
the sea, Palestine must be free,” etc.). There was also the more general, more
emotive, and nonsensical assertion that Israel is not engaged in a war but a
genocide. On the premise of that absurd claim, Israel’s defenders are
disingenuously accused of lacking sympathy for displaced Gazan civilians, not
caring about dead children, and willfully overlooking Israel’s “indiscriminate”
attacks — that’s the word President Biden used in December to describe the
military campaign.
Making heads or tails of this cheap shot masquerading as
a criticism of Israel’s conduct is a challenge because it is not, at its root,
an argument at all. It is, in most cases, a dodge. Framed as something other
than an argument about proportionality or recklessness, the charge is that
Israel’s war against Hamas is just too bloody to be classified as a war
— not in terms of military advantages gained, or of what it would look like if
Israel made no mistakes, or of anything else. Just too bloody, period.
It draws its strength from the indisputable underlying reality that war is
hell. Indeed, it is. But that alone does not make a war unjust, much less a
genocide. If it did, all wars would violate the second principle of justice,
making the whole enterprise of just-war theory nonsensical.
By presenting depictions of war to a populace
unaccustomed to its inherent horrors, those who want to stop the war shift the
definition of “genocide” to mean “really bad war,” show pictures of Gazan
children maimed by Israeli air strikes (or sometimes pictures of children
caught in entirely different wars in other countries), and use other means to
bring the awful realities of war closer to home. They bank on receiving
visceral, sympathetic reactions: Nothing can justify such collateral damage;
this must not be a normal war; it must be as awful a war as has ever been
fought, the full weight of power coming down on the powerless — a genocide.
Arguments over semantics and legal definitions of “genocide” aside (not to
mention the moral inversion of accusing the Jews of perpetrating one), this
elision of the comparisons necessary to determine whether Israel is conducting
its war in an unusually lethal way is a means not of applying just-war analysis
but of circumventing it. Any decent person would demand that whatever party is
proximately responsible for unleashing hell must stop until it can come up with
a more humane way to achieve its goals. Cease-fire now.
The obvious response to those trading on the hellish
conditions in Gaza is that this is a war, and all wars produce
unspeakable horrors. If Israel must cease its fire simply because any civilians
are dying, because any human bodies are being tragically maimed, because
there is any horrible suffering — and all these things have undoubtedly
happened, because that is what happens in war — we have once again slipped into
the long-rejected argument that Israel may not wage war at all. (And again,
leave aside what provoked the war in the first place and the tactics Hamas uses
to maximize harm to its own civilians.) But even when this claim is construed
in its most favorable light — as an argument about the brutality of this war
relative to wars generally — it does not hold water.
As ever, the critical question for any criticism of
conduct is not whether many civilians, as an absolute number, have been killed.
That would preclude all wars, regardless of how righteous the mission and how
impeccable the military conduct. It is, rather, whether civilians have been
killed at an unacceptably high rate. Without even entering the proportionality
analysis, that is the barest evidence needed to present a prima facie case
that Israel is doing something wrong in prosecuting its war aims.
Is that case plausible? In mid February, Reuters cited “a
Hamas official based in Qatar” who said “that the group estimated it had lost
6,000 fighters” since Israel began its October counteroffensive. This appears
to be the last time, as of this writing, that Hamas has given any such number.
(Israel said at the time that the number was actually 12,000; its more recent
estimate is that it has killed 17,000 Hamas militants.)
For the sake of a hypothetical, let us use Hamas’s
number. Imagine further, against all evidence, that all subsequent
casualties in Gaza have been civilians. Though in moments of candor its
leadership admits that its tally may be off by as much as 25 percent, Hamas now
claims that the total death toll is around 42,000. And 36,000 of these, in this
hypothetical, would be civilians. Imagine yet further that Hamas has
undercounted and that there are 4,000 more civilians who have been
killed by the IDF. In this improbable and horrifying scenario, only 6,000 of
the 46,000 deceased — 13 percent — were combatants.
That number would still be an improvement on the
usual combatant-to-civilian ratio of deaths in wartime. According to the United
Nations, “civilians [account] for nearly 90 per cent of war-time casualties.”
The U.N.’s number includes all wars — not just urban wars like the one occurring
in Gaza, where civilians are densely clustered. Nor does it even begin to
account for Hamas’s rampant and well-documented use of human shields, its
prevention of civilian evacuations, and its theft of humanitarian aid, among
the many other ways it sacrifices civilian lives for cynical ends.
Of course, the hypothetical does not reflect reality. A
more reasonable, yet conservative, estimate is that Israel has killed two
civilians for every one combatant. Based on some revisions that the United
Nations quietly undertook in mid May, the number is likely even better than
that — but even a two-to-one ratio would be astounding, far and away the most
humane urban war ever prosecuted.
***
Such exceptional results are no coincidence.
They are, rather, a reflection of Israel’s long-standing commitment to go out
of its way to preserve civilian life within enemy territory. As
international-law expert Michael Schmitt has written, “There is no question
that the IDF’s warnings practice, in general, is the gold standard. Indeed, as
a matter of policy, the IDF typically exceeds what the law requires.” Israel’s
conduct in the war has indeed long been the source of much scrutiny by
international-law experts: “Israel’s 2014 operations in Gaza, and the extensive
efforts to provide such warnings, have elevated the discourse on this warnings
precaution to unprecedented levels,” according to a paper from the
International Law Association Study Group in 2017. “Some worry that the [IDF]
created an unrealistically high bar on when and how to provide warnings.”
It should come as no surprise, then, that even as the
current Gaza campaign progresses, as Israel has uncovered more intelligence and
improved its urban-warfare tactics, the casualty count has essentially
flatlined. True to form, the “critics” have pivoted to a new line of strained
objections to Israel’s behavior, especially that the Israeli government is not
doing enough to secure a negotiated release of the hostages still held by
Hamas. From this repeated inability to hold Hamas responsible for anything it
does — that it brought Israel’s response upon itself, that it endangers Gazan
civilians, that it murders hostages, indeed that it continues to hold hostages,
including two children, at all — one sees that scapegoating Israel, not
ensuring a just peace between it and its neighbors, is the goal of the critical
chorus.
Calling Israel’s conduct unusually brutal or bloody or “indiscriminate” is not just absurd; absurdity, like the hypothetical above, would not even get you there. Israel is quite obviously, by its enemy’s own implicit admission, fighting an exceedingly careful war. Yet that is not good enough for supposed “critics.” If this impeccably precise war still draws hysterical calls for Israel to cease its fire, perhaps it is time to stop entertaining the notion that the “criticisms” Israel faces every time it is dragged into war are anything other than expressions of the extreme denial of Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign nation. And perhaps it is time to stop referring to those “critics” as such for good.
No comments:
Post a Comment