Their Problem Is That Israel Won’t Roll Over and Die

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, September 18, 2024

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is hardly the only lavishly credentialed critic of Israel and its efforts to exercise its right to self-defense who has exposed her ignorance on the subject of warfare. Still, she will do to illustrate the ignorant, logically fallacious thinking that is so prevalent among that cadre.

If this is the reflex to which the Biden administration is prone, you can see why the Israelis declined to inform their American counterparts in advance of the spectacularly innovative and logistically impressive acts of sabotage targeting Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon and Syria this week.

 

How precisely does this “attack” violate “international humanitarian law”? Indeed, what is international humanitarian law? The International Red Cross defines the concept as a subset of “international law,” which is itself “contained in agreements between States,” as in “treaties or conventions,” which are binding. That’s a long way of saying that there is no “international law” outside the context of laws crafted, ratified, and (most importantly) enforced by individual nations. There is no international constabulary implementing international statutes. The geopolitical environment is anarchic, particularly in times of war.

 

There are, however, laws of armed conflict (LOAC) that are derived from treaty agreements recognized by individual states. There are applicable proscriptions against “booby-traps and other devices” for use against non-military targets, but rigged devices are only “restricted” when deployed against legitimate combatants in war. Exceptions to this rule include, for example, utensils or appliances used by or in “military establishments.” It’s hard to conceive of a more apt example of one of these exceptions than encrypted communications devices, access to which is limited to fighters and commanders in a terrorist group, which are explicitly allocated for use in combat operations.

 

These LOAC protocols proscribe weapons that have “indiscriminate effects,” but what could be more discriminating than an attack on devices Hezbollah itself distributes to its most prominent members? The thinness of AOC’s indictment suggests her objections to Israeli spycraft aren’t legal but moral. Where does Jerusalem get the nerve to disable thousands of Hezbollah fighters without exposing its own people to the horrors of warfare? Dirty pool, that. But when you consider the alternatives, the framework Israel’s critics have applied to the Jewish state is exposed as a double standard.

 

Israel has been under fire from Hezbollah rockets — 5,000 of which have been fired on Israeli targets — since the October 7 massacre. Thousands of Israelis are evacuated from their homes in regions of the country bordering Southern Lebanon. To allow that condition to persist is to all but formally cede Israeli territory to an Iran-backed terror group. Those who have not evacuated, like the Druze minority in the Golan Heights, have witnessed their own people, including children, slaughtered by Hezbollah missiles. To these provocations, Israel responded not with overwhelming force — which more than a few Druze demanded — but with a campaign of pinprick assassinations of ranking Hezbollah and Hamas targets. What could be more discriminating than the equivalent of an M80 going off in the pockets of terrorist operatives who were hand-selected by their own leadership? Footage of these devices going off indicates that even bystanders who were mere feet away from these explosions experienced little more than shock.

 

That is not to say that no civilians were harmed or killed in this operation. They were auxiliary casualties, some of whom were children. That may produce less needless death than would be incurred amid a full ground invasion, which would put far more Lebanese and Israeli civilians in harm’s way, but it’s tragic, nonetheless. The responsibility for that tragedy is not on the party responding to unprovoked attacks on its people and territory. Israel is not the aggressor in this conflict. It has been aggressed against. That, too, is a meaningful distinction in the rules governing armed conflict to which Israel’s critics appeal.

 

It is a war planner’s job to perform bloodless calculations about the level of acceptable collateral damage that could be incurred as a result of one operation or another. It is not a war planner’s job to succumb to moral paralysis over the prospect of any collateral damage. If Israel were handcuffed by the prospect of unnecessary death among the civilians its adversaries hide behind, it would have long ago disappeared from the face of the earth.

 

In Hezbollah’s case, Israel is being aggressed against by a terrorist organization operating from foreign soil at the invitation of its sovereign host government. We can debate whether the Lebanese and Syrians caught in the crossfire are a captive population or a responsible polity that should own the consequences of their leaders’ actions. And it should not be hard to concede that every civilian death in war is a preventable tragedy. But the standard to which Israel is being held by its critics would leave it vulnerable to foreign aggression. The only other avenue to relieve the pressure Hezbollah has put on Israel would beget more bloodshed, not less.

 

Of course, Israel’s detractors would object as vociferously to an incursion into Southern Lebanon to push Hezbollah back beyond the Litani River as they have to Israel’s use of subterfuge to disable as many individual Hezbollah fighters as possible. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the problem Israel’s critics hope to remedy is Israel’s petulant insistence upon its own existence.