I have not posted here in quite awhile, but Michael Totten's piece on what an Israeli "proportional" response would look like prompted me to add my two cents.
Michael is quite right, of course, and the charges of disproportionality thrown at Israel are hurled with no evidence that the accusers have ever actually studied Just War theory, of which proportionality is one tenet.
For example,The top U.N. human rights official says Israel's military response to the firing of rockets at its territory by Palestinian militants is "disproportionate." U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay says she is distressed at the enormous loss of life in Gaza and calls on Israel to prevent collective punishment and the targeting of civilians.I wrote on my own blog about what proportionality really means in Just War theory and why it does not mean tit-for-tat responses or responses limited in type, duration or nature to the attacks Hamas has launched against Israel. If it did mean that, then Israel would be justified simply to fire rockets back at Gaza with no regard of where they fell or whom they killed, and they'd have several thousand of such responses left to go. That is, after all, exactly what Hamas has done to Israel.
Under 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. Israel is not expected to make Kassam rockets and lob them back into Gaza. 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."There is a difference in Just War theory between proportionality and discrimination. The latter means that a belligerent must identify enemy locations, personnel or facilities that are valid military-related targets and which are not. A command headquarters is valid. A schoolhouse is not. Yet a combatant does not gain immunity from attack of its headquarters by locating it inside a schoolhouse. The Geneva Conventions specifically forbid the militarization of protected facilities and also state that once they are militarized they are no longer protected.
That's discrimination - taking the necessary steps to minimize (not eliminate) noncombatant casualties. Proportionality means using the violence necessary to achieve the just end of the campaign, but not more violence than necessary. It does not mean trying to make a calculus of violence where Israel cannot use more than Hamas.
As I pointed out in "Intentional Lethality," Israel's attacks are intended to do four main things:1. Kill as many high-level Hamas figures as possible. 2. Reduce the ranks of Hamas rank and file by causing casualties among them.This is to say, Israel's objective is not simply to stop the rocket attacks for now, but permanently. Is that objective a just aim of its warfare against Hamas? Most certainly. Hence, Israel's obligation to the principle of proportionality is twofold: One, not to use more violence than necessary to achieve that end, but second - and this is critically overlooked by critics - to employ the level of violence necessary to attain the end. In other words, Just War theory says that if the aim of the war is just, then it is waging unjust war to stop short of attaining the just end or to fail to use the measures necessary to attain it.
3. Provide disincentives for Gazans' support of Hamas' control of their political future and hence,
4. Delegitimize Hamas' authority.
Israel aims to do two things, broadly: first, eliminate Hamas's present capability to launch its rockets by destroying its materiel and personnel and second, set conditions that hopefully eliminate the chances of the attacks being resumed later.
Even some voices putatively supporting Israel's campaign don't grasp the nuances. Lionel Beehner, in The Huffington Post, writes,A state is legally allowed to unilaterally defend itself and right a wrong provided the response is proportional to the injury suffered and is immediate, necessary, refrains from targeting civilians, and requires only enough force to reinstate the status quo ante. Also implied in this argument is the right of Israel to prevent Hamas from carrying out future cross-border attacks.Reinstate the status quo ante? Even Gen. William T. Sherman understood that the only rightful aim of war was to establish a more just peace. The status quo is what Israel found so intolerable that it went to war. How can just war be fought to maintain an unjust status quo? It cannot. Furthermore, if, as Mr. Beehner says, "implied in this argument is the right of Israel to prevent Hamas from carrying out future cross-border attack," how is that like the status quo ante, during which Hamas did carry out such attacks? Mr. Beehner in the end gamely tries to hold up the Left's criticism but trips up on his own contradictions. (In fact, he concludes by saying that Israel should have responded not at all to Hamas' rocket attacks!)
However, the vapidity of the disproportionality criticism can be seen by examining our own system of crime and punishment. Criminals are not sentenced to carefully calibrated punishments that exactly match the damage they caused in the crime. If someone steals your car, the judge doesn't merely make him forfeit his own car. The crook both goes to jail and must make restitution to you. A victim of an armed robbery may lose only a few dollars and suffer a bad fright, but the robber goes to prison for a mandatory seven years here in Tennessee. Finally, the "disproportionate" critics would have to agree, I presume, that a murderer's death sentence is just and proportionate to his crime - take a life, lose yours. But they won't, you betcha.
Also see The Reformed Pastor's thoughts about, "The Gospel of Proportionality."
The issue of Proportionality cames also from Desproportionality of Hamas treatement of its civilians and how its behavior puts them at risk, and how Israeli behavoir towards its civilians instead save lives. If Israeli behavior towards its civilians was like Hamas toward their civilians then we would have much more Israeli casualities and the Proportionality issue would not happen. So a civilized behavior would be rewarded by more accusations by proportionality gang.
What today would be said of 70000 french dead because Allied bombings when trying to free that country?
I don't see Israel response disproportionate, neither the size or quality of its armed forces. They are simply at the level needed to tackle the enemies they face in the present international environment.
Because the problem isn't just Hamas...
Could you please expand a bit on what this means in the context of the rocket attacks? The linked article seem to focus mainly on achieving the goals of killing members and leaders of Hamas but the effects of the attacks on Gazans in general seems to be where most of the criticism is coming from.
Much obliged.
Thorley, by that I mean Israel is showing that Hamas cannot live up to the myth is has created about itself. Hamas is beign shown to have no true offensive capability against Israel and to significant defense againt Israel's attacks. Where does that leave Hamas as the self-proclaimed depository of Palestinians' hope and aspirations?
Remember that the Gazans elected Hamas to power in Gaza in 2006, predicated mostly on the PA's ingrained corruption and ineptitude, but also because of Hamas' promises to achieve the elimnation of Israel. As things have turned out, Hamas is no less corrupt than the PA and is now proven not to have the ability to subdue Israel.
Certainly, Israel hopes the Gazans will see that they have hitched their wagon to a falling star and should try something else (the PA being the only alternative, unfortunately).
Israel's message in deed and word has been plain: violence will come to Hamas specifically and collaterally to the people of Gaza, with all the associated suffering it entails, as long as Hamas calls the shots in Gaza.
Israel is not deliberately trying to make the Gazans suffer. As Charles Krauthammer notes today,
bq. “Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger. Hamas, which started this conflict with unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks on unarmed Israelis — 6,464 launched from Gaza in the past three years — deliberately places its weapons in and near the homes of its own people. . . . There’s only one grievance and Hamas is open about it. Israel’s very existence.”
Students of warfare have noted for centuries that all war is, at bottom, a contest of wills. Israel is trying to do, first, destroy Hamas, which is Israel's existential enemy, and second, change the will of the Gazans toward a more peaceful future.
it is not above using their suffering as an object lesson about Hamas.
Donald, thank you very much for the clarification.
Boy, was my response full of typos! Hope you were able to glean the meaning even so. Sorry!
Well written, but I would say that a better analogy to the criminal justice system is attempted murder. In many English common law systems, the attempt of murder is treated the same as murder, including the same mandatory sentencing. Even where they are not treated as equivalents, the offense of attempted murder is treated as seriously as any crime short of first-degree murder. It is murder or its doppelganger.
The reason for equivalency is to punish the criminal's conduct irrespective of the fortuity of failure in the attempt. Notably, this runs contrary to the philosophical argument that the state has no interest in punishing conduct that harms no person or property. Instead, the accepted view is that in the exercise of his free will, the criminal has manifestly chosen to become a murderer, even though he has not murdered.
In the current context, there have been several thousand murder attempts against the people of Israel. The notion that a Democratic government would treat them as anything less than murders in fortuity is certainly inconsistent with how we seek to protect ourselves.
(Not that I believe domestic criminal codes are applicable here.)
Gazans have earlier paid the price for electing Hamas in 2006. Now they're paying again. Where's the surprise?
One missile/bomb = one missile/bomb. Strikes me as parity.
I posted this on that Huffington site
have an idea for not only proportional responce, but identical responce.
Hamas uses specific types of rockets and mortors. It would not be difficult to figure out the trajectory that they came in on, nor would it be difficult for Israel to duplicate them.
SO
For every rocket or mortor shell that is fired across the border Israel should fire one exaclty the same, in the opposite direction at a random time.
Sitting back waiting for the howls of outrage ;-)
[NM: Dan, we appreciate substantive contributions, including yours. Please don't crosspost essentially identical content in multiple threads. Thanks.]
Jerry Pournelle over on his Web site seems to think this fight is over fuel oil. That's right, fuel oil. If you don't believe me, you could saunter over to his Web site and read what he has to say on this.
Apparently Israel maintains tight control about what comes and goes from Gaza apart from the smuggler's tunnels, on the face of it, for security reasons, and the effect of this is that Israel controls the supply of fuel oil to Gaza, which has Gaza "over a barrel" so to speak. (Keep with me on this, this is what Jerry Pournelle is claiming, these are not my claims).
The claim goes that the rocket war is over fuel oil, and if Israel would stop overcharging Gazans for the fuel oil, or mainly, allow Hamas to import their own fuel oil, Hamas would not have to attack Israel with rockets to get attention from the international community, and Israel would not have to engage in their bombardment campaign of Gaza.
What I want to ask people here -- I could ask Jerry Pournelle about this, but he gets huffy sometimes when his premises are questioned -- is what is the deal with fuel oil? Is this for real, or is it the "Fuel Oil Libel?"
I know this debate has going on for some time. There are some who say that Israel could have peace if they were not so hard nosed about a) water rights, b) checkpoints, c) settlements, d) fuel oil. There are others who say that to the extent that Israel appears to be hard nosed on any of those matters, these are the consequences of the war being waged against it -- you know, the person in the dock for murdering their parents asking for sympathy from the court for an orphan.
On the other hand, if the dispute is really about fuel oil, is lobbing unguided rockets into Israel civilian areas really the way to get international support -- if Hamas went before the UN with their complaint about fuel oil, wouldn't they at least get some media coverage? Again, I haven't heard anything about fuel oil in the MSM in coverage of the plight of Gaza. Is this fuel oil thing for real, is this something that only Jerry Pournelle believes in, or is this another libel going against Israel?
I hold little brief for the Israeli government—while the bombing of Gaza may be a morally permissible response to the Hamas rockets (I would think so), its long-term value is not so clear to me—but the Fuel Oil story strikes me as unlikely. The Israelis would probably make good on promises to relax their blockade were Hamas to comply with a fairly modest set of demands (no rockets, continued cease-fire, return of Israeli POWs); there are no longer settlers in Gaza to complicate matters. Hamas says over and over that their intention is to eliminate the Israeli state as we know it, and I see no reason to impute such small goals to them, rather than to take them at their word.
Hamas cannot sanely have any expectation of eliminating "the Zionist entity" with Qassams or even truckfuls of Grads.
The expectation must be that if over enough time, Israel reacts with enough force, other Arab entities will somehow engage in a "shootin' war".
Assuming that sanity as I understand it is even a factor.
I am glad whenever Israel takes a tough stand in its own self defense.
I only wish India could do the same. Now THAT would be good.
Unless there is something I don't know about, can't Gaza get fuel oil from Egypt? Gaza borders on Egypt as well.
What Pournelle is getting at, and answering RHSwan's question, is that both sides have certain parties who are in a position to profit from the continuation of the status quo - i.e. blockaded Gaza with very limited trade, which profits the Israelis involved in the fuel oil concession and the Egyptians involved in smuggling into Gaza. (And, not least, the Hamas members involved in the same smuggling!)
No side is actually being run by those parties, except Hamas itself, but they're politically influential enough to shoot down what would otherwise be reasonable concessions that could lead to a future peace. The Israelis certainly have reason enough to want to control imports into Gaza as it is, so it might be unfair to wholly impute their motivations to profit (nor does Pournelle), but it's part of the mix too. Hamas has an active interest in making its citizens' lives wretched, so they can continue to agitate against Israel; prosperous Palestinians might ask themselves what they have to gain, or to lose, by continuing to tilt at their windmill. The Egyptians don't really have a reason to refuse trade with Gaza, but they don't have a big stake in it and thus the smuggling profits don't have to work very hard. Furthermore, continued tension between Israel and the Palestinians is a useful safety valve for Egypt's domestic problems with Muslim extremists.
As far as the idea of proportionality, it's crap to begin with. The US won the Cold War by embracing the exact opposite of proportionality, in an ambiguous nuclear policy that essentially read "if you detonate a nuke anywhere, at any time, we're prepared to absolutely annihilate your civilization in its totality, regardless of consequences to the human species". Having a policy of proportionate response invites potential adversaries to carefully calculate the amount of damage that they can inflict upon you, relative to the damage you're prepared to accept. A policy of disproportionate response may seem irrational - "millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!" makes little sense from an economic perspective - but it actually works far better in the long run.
I'm afraid that the only solution is going to be convincing Hamas that Israel is prepared to utterly destroy the Palestinians if they don't abandon the jihad. Sure, they believe that Israel could do it, but they also believe that they won't - that Israel will listen to the calls for peace and the cries for proportionality and hold itself back. In this sense, the best thing that the Israelis could do would be to formally tell the world to get bent and do some real damage...
Avatar: Yeah. "Rational Irrationality" is one of those real p***ers.
What you point out about Pournelle's explanation is one more piece of evidence that the real world of human motivations is a lot more multifaceted than most people (and media) are able to explicitly model well. Still we try.
Israel unquestionably has the right to these attacks in response to the Hamas rocket/mortar attacks.
The question here is a pragmatic one. What is Israel's endgame? What do they hope to achieve?
This campaign reeks of the last Lebannon debacle, it mirrors it almost identically. Olmert was a fool, entirely out of his depth then, and I see no reason to reevaluate that now.
Israel allowed Olmert to continue his administration after the Hezbollah debacle. Now they are about to see those results. This is the worst case for every party involved, but I don't see a particularly useful outcome of this campaign for Israel.