The Redhunter

What exacrtly is the Objection?

Those who say the Israeli attacks, officially Operation Cast Lead, are disproportionate, need to tell us what they would have Israel do. I've surveyed leftist sites, as well as news media reports, and for the life of me I cannot find any concrete proposals. The most I get is that Israel shouldn't have attacked at all.

Any commenters here who say the Israeli attacks are disproportionate are advised to make clear what they would have Israel do.

The Just War

Just War Theory (JWT) is a specific body of thought that has built up over the past few hundred years. Primarily Catholic in origin, it is used by many today, Christian and secular, as a model for determining whether a war is just or not. At it's most basic, it can be broken down into two parts; Recourse To War (jus ad bellum) and Conduct In War (jus in bello).

The entire body of thought is quite complex, and for our purposes we will only consider that part of it relevant to the current charge against Israel, that of using force disproportionally (See my entire series on JWT here).

Proportionality comes up twice in JWT, once as part of Recourse To War, and again in Conduct In War.

Here are the essentials of what I wrote about Proportionality as part of Recourse to War

Proportionality in the decision to go to war means "...that the damage to be inflicted and the costs incurred by war must be proportionate to the good expected by taking up arms."

...we need to consider the cost of not resisting aggression.

...One must beware of a strict "cost-accounting" approach. Quality of life, or values, matters too. Who would accept life as a slave by any of the aforementioned tyrannies?

This is the type of stuff you can twist any way you like if you're not careful. Looking at all three criteria above:

The question in whether the cost of going to war is greater than the good expected depends on Israel's objective. If they just hit Hamas for a few days and then stop, Hamas retains it's strength and will continue it's rocket attacks. If they have a credible plan for ending Hamas' ability to launch attacks, then it seems more justified.

The cost of not resisting Hamas' aggression is not only more attacks with Qassam rockets, but an encouragement to Hamas to obtain larger, more powerful rockets. As we can see in the below chart (via Wikipedia), as it is the attacks have steadily escallated

There have been reports for some time of Hamas attempting to obtain longer range rockets. From their standpoint, if Israel never responded, why not obtain and launch them?

One can say that the rocket attacks weren't killing very many Israelis, and it wasn't inconveniencing too very many of them. Quality of life is pretty subjective. One can also say that Hamas doesn't have the ability to destroy Israel, but that's only true if Israel sits back and lets them build up strength.

In the end, I say Israel is justified according to this criterion.

Turning to Conduct In War, here is what I wrote that is relevant to our discussion (quotation marks mean I am quoting Joseph Martino, see link above)

"The principle of proportionality with regards to conduct in war "deals not with a whole war but with a single military action in that war. The criterion requires that the good to be achieved by the action be proportionate to the damage done. Again, this means values preserved compared with values sacrificed, not a single cost-accounting of lives and dollars." ...

Giving our enemy a sanctuary is unacceptable. Yet we must not be callous and "hardcore" and simply state that any and all accidental civilian casualties are acceptable....

On the one hand, a "...we have to reject the view that simply concentrating the deaths in one location makes the total disproportionate when the same total would be proportionate if it were distributed widely." In other words, concentration or dispersal of civilian deaths is irrelevant.

On the other hand, "...the total values to be preserved by going to war, the values forming the basis for the jus ad bellum proportion, amount to a budget of values." This is not to imply a precision such as one has in financial accounting. Rather, we must keep in mind that there is a "total budget" available in a war, and we exceed it we risk making the entire war disproportionate.

In other words, "...we may not attack anything and everything of some military value in the enemy nation, simply 'because it's there'". Some people, of course, would have us do just that. We must reject that extreme view....

There's a lot to digest here. Despite a plethora of information from the media and other sources we see through a glass darkly, with the Nelsonian fog of war obscuring exactly what is going on. How precise are the Israeli strikes? How much care are they taking to avoid civilian casualties? The answer you get seems to depend on your source, and frankly I don't have the time to do a complete survey.

Hamas, like Hezbollah, deliberately locate their bases and stage their operations from civilian areas, knowing that no matter how precise the attack civilians will be killed. They do so for the most cynical of reasons; to get good propaganda. The world is catching on to these tactics, yet there are those who seem to think that they should be allowed what amounts to a sanctuary because any attack on them will result in civilian casualties. This view must be rejected.

In the end, I'll assume that Israel is taking reasonable care to only strike military targets. That civilians are killed is primarily the fault of Hamas.

An Israeli View

Dore Gold is a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations 1997-1999) who is now President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA). Two years ago I reviewed the book he wrote about his experiences at the UN, Tower of Babel: How the United Nations has Fueled Global Chaos. The title pretty much says it all.

Call it biased if you like, but the JCPA has published a useful primer by Dore Gold explaining why in his opinion Israel is not using disproportionate force. Following are a few key excerpts:

* Israeli population centers in southern Israel have been the target of over 4,000 rockets, as well as thousands of mortar shells, fired by Hamas and other organizations since 2001. Rocket attacks increased by 500 percent after Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. During an informal six-month lull, some 215 rockets were launched at Israel.

* The charge that Israel uses disproportionate force keeps resurfacing whenever it has to defend its citizens from non-state terrorist organizations and the rocket attacks they perpetrate. From a purely legal perspective, Israel's current military actions in Gaza are on solid ground. According to international law, Israel is not required to calibrate its use of force precisely according to the size and range of the weaponry used against it.

* Ibrahim Barzak and Amy Teibel wrote for the Associated Press on December 28 that most of the 230 Palestinians who were reportedly killed were "security forces," and Palestinian officials said "at least 15 civilians were among the dead." The numbers reported indicate that there was no clear intent to inflict disproportionate collateral civilian casualties. What is critical from the standpoint of international law is that if the attempt has been made "to minimize civilian damage, then even a strike that causes large amounts of damage - but is directed at a target with very large military value - would be lawful."

Look at the second paragraph again. JWT does not require exact tit for tat. What it requires is that you size the bomb (missile, whatever) to the target so that collateral damage is limited. As civilian casualties have been very low, we may infer that Israel has been careful to do just this.

More from the JCPA document

When international legal experts use the term "disproportionate use of force," they have a very precise meaning in mind. As the President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Rosalyn Higgins, has noted, proportionality "cannot be in relation to any specific prior injury - it has to be in relation to the overall legitimate objective of ending the aggression." In other words, if a state, like Israel, is facing aggression, then proportionality addresses whether force was specifically used by Israel to bring an end to the armed attack against it. By implication, force becomes excessive if it is employed for another purpose, like causing unnecessary harm to civilians. The pivotal factor determining whether force is excessive is the intent of the military commander. In particular, one has to assess what was the commander's intent regarding collateral civilian damage.

When most people talk about Israel using "disproportionate' force they are comparing the Israeli attacks to the Qassam rockets. But as shown above, this is not the correct comparison.

Further, as I asked above, those who make this charge against Israel need to come clean. Are they asking Israel to hit back tit for tat? They fire one missile to every one fired by Hamas? If so, doesn't this perpetuate the "cycle of violence" Israel's critics are always complaining about?

One last quote

There clearly is no international expectation that military losses in war should be on a one-to-one basis; most armies seek to decisively eliminate as many enemy forces as possible while minimizing their own losses of troops. There are NATO members who have been critical of "Israel's disproportionate use of force," while NATO armies take pride in their "kill ratios" against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Bingo. We hear the charge that the United States uses disproportionate force against insurgents in Iraq and elsewhere. Would they be happy if more American soldiers were killed?

The long and the short of it is that most people who talk about Israel using "disproportionate' force don't know what they're talking about.

Analogies

On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the United States Naval base at Pearl Harbor. In the weeks and months to come, they attacked and overran our facilities across the Pacific, including Wake Island and the Philippines. The Japanese never had credible plans to attack the continental U.S., much less march into Washington D.C. Yet we sank every last ship in their navy, bombed their homeland into oblivion (this before the atomic bombs, ended their government and occupied their nation. Was our response, then, disproportionate?

On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda terrorists seized four civilian aircraft and crashed three of them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. Excluding the 19 terrorists, some 2,974 people were killed in the attacks. Neither al Qaeda nor their Taliban hosts had any credible plans to end our government and occupy our nation. Yet we ended the Taliban government and occupied their base country. I don't know the exact number of Afghan civilians killed by us, the insurgents, or through indirect causes, but it's a lot more than 2,974. Was our response, then disproportionate?

Conclusion

Of course our response to Pearl Harbor and the other Japanese aggressions were justified and proportionate, though one may dispute this or that U.S. bombing campaign. I think our fire raids on Tokyo were not justified, but without them Japan may not have surrendered, atomic bombs or no. Of course it was right and just for us to march into Afghanistan and end the Taliban as the government there and kill them and the al Qaeda, though again we may dispute this or that attack along the way.

The reason is that one does not proportion the response to the attack, but rather proportions it to what it will take to end the threat. In order to end the threat of Japanese fascism we had to end their government. The first step towards ending the threat of al Qaeda was to eliminate their sanctuary of Afghanistan. And in order to end the threat not only of Qassam and other rockets but of all terrorism from Gaza, Israel must eliminate Hamas as a fighting force, if not entirely.

Therefore, from what I can tell Israel is justified in using the level of force it has been using.

Update - January 1, 2009

Melanie Phillips has a much better post on this topic than I do, which is why she's a paid editorialist and I'm a hack blogger. Money quote:

If anything has been 'disproportionate', it's been Israel's refusal to take such action during the years when its southern citizens have been terrorised by rockets and other missiles raining down on them from Gaza. No other country in the world would have sat on its hands for so long in such circumstances. But whenever Israel defends itself militarily, its response is said to be 'disproportionate'. The malice, ignorance and sheer idiocy of this claim is refuted here comprehensively by Dore Gold, who points out that Israel's actions in Gaza are wholly in accordance with international law. This permits Israel to launch such an operation to prevent itself from being further attacked. Moreover, it defines 'disproportionate' force as when

force becomes excessive if it is employed for another purpose, like causing unnecessary harm to civilians.

But Israel has demonstrably not been targeting civilians but Hamas terrorists. Despite the wicked impression given by the media, most of the casualties in this operation have been Hamas operatives. Even Hamas itself has admitted that the vast majority of sites Israel has hit were part of their military infrastructure. UNRWA officials in the Gaza Strip have put the number of deaths at 310, of whom 51 were civilians. The rest were Hamas terrorists.

Read the whole thing.