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The Sacred Oath Is Shattered

For weeks now I have been profoundly disquieted by the Israeli Defense Forces' tactical approach to combatting Hezbollah. I have wrestled with it on my professional blog; I have discussed it with friends both in and out of the armed forces; I have let it distract me from my planned agenda of summer work. But then, the ethics of war -- the problem of how to conduct war in a moral fashion -- has engaged me for a long time.

To date, an estimated 800 Lebanese civilians have died under the bombs and shells of the IDF's F-16s and self-propelled howitzers. The campaign has been a humanitarian disaster, a political embarrassment, and so devoid of military success that the Israeli general in charge of the operation has been sacked.

But enraged by the kidnapping of two IDF soldiers, the murder of several more, and the indiscriminate rain of Katyusha rockets that has fallen on Israel since mid-July, killing about 100 Israeli civilians, the response of those who sympathize with Israel has been to shrug off the deaths of Lebanese civilians. The standard line is to place the entire blame on Hezbollah because Hezbollah is said to have intentionally established command posts and rocket launchers in populated areas. Another refrain is to blame the civilians themselves, on the theory that only Hezbollah supporters would be anywhere near a Hezbollah military position. And inevitably, those whose sympathies lie with Israel have blamed the media for showing what Israeli bombs and shells do to human beings.

They have gotten so far gone with rage that a number of them now proclaim:

Well, I'm not a fan of disproportionate response. The reliance on aerial and artillery bombardment troubles me; I cannot, try as I might, accept the proposition that it falls within the modern laws and usages of war. It violates the very core of those laws and usages: The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. Their deaths are permissible only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.

Regarding this last point, a principle called "double effect" is often invoked as a standard for conduct. Michael Walzer’s formulation is perhaps the best: "Double effect is a way of reconciling the absolute prohibition against attacking noncombatants with the legitimate conduct of military activity," which may unavoidably expose noncombatants to harm. Its key contention is that "the intention of the actor is good, that is, he aims narrowly at the acceptable effect [e.g., the death or incapacitation of combatants]; the evil effect [death or injury to noncombatants] is not one of his ends, nor is it a means to his ends, and, aware of the evil involved, he seeks to minimize it, accepting costs to himself." (Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations, 2d ed. [New York, 1992], pp. 153, 155.)

Those inclined to dismiss such a principle as hopelessly naive might do well to examine a historical example in which an army actually employed it. The army was that of Israel. The occasion was its war with the PLO in Lebanon twenty-four years ago.

I discovered this while reading military analyst Richard A. Gabriel's account of that event, Operation Peace for Galilee: The Israeli-PLO War in Lebanon (New York, 1984). Having already studied the U.S. Army's performance in Vietnam, Gabriel was impressed by the importance the IDF placed on the exercise of restraint in war. Part of this was practical: the wholesale destruction of homes and civilians would undercut Israel's political objectives by inflaming both international and domestic opinion. And the IDF was convinced that the psychological well-being and military effectiveness of soldiers suffered if they were required to perform acts that were morally questionable. But much of it owed to the warrior ethos as it had evolved in the IDF. Wrote Gabriel:

The IDF perhaps more than any other army stresses in all aspects of its training and officer selection that the use of force within the Jewish historical and moral tradition has an ethical base. This doctrine permeates all aspects of IDF military life. It is the doctrine of Tohar Haneshek, or the purity of arms. The fundamental tenet of Tohar Haneshek is that military force may be used only in self-defense. Moreover, there is a clear notion that there is a proper "moral conduct of war"; a state may be engaged in hostilities, but that does not lower the standards of humanity that must be applied. It is a fundamental tenet of Israeli doctrine that destruction must be limited wherever possible, and, above all, human life must be preserved. (171-172)

In populated areas, the IDF eschewed the use of air strikes and artillery. Instead they sent in ground troops, who could more readily discriminate between civilians and enemy combatants. And in accordance with Walzer's definition of "double effect," they accepted costs to themselves to spare civilian lives:

In built-up areas, IDF soldiers were specifically forbidden to throw hand grenades or satchel chages into houses or buildings before entering them. It is a standard ground-assault technique in house-to-house fighting either to blow a hole through the wall or to throw a grenade through the door before entering. At the very least, one enters a house firing. All these tactics were denied the IDF simply to avoid killing innocent civilians. As a consequence, the PLO often ambushed Israeli soldiers from inside houses. It is a telling statistic that at least 55 percent of the total IDF casualties were inflicted by small-arms fire. The urban ambush using civilians as cover or shields became a basic PLO tactic. It was a tactic that the Israelis knew would be employed against them, and they chose nonetheless to restrain their troops rather than risk greater civilian casualties. (174)

This is not to suggest that Operation Peace for Galilee was pristine. It badly damaged Lebanon, it caused considerable dissent within Israel, tarnished its reputation abroad, led to eighteen years of occupation duty, and, as we are now witnessing, did not bring peace to Galilee. Moreover, despite the determined -- one might say heroic -- IDF effort to avoid harming civilians, Gabriel concluded that between 5,000 and 8,000 Lebanese civilians perished between June and September 1984 (in part because of PLO and Syrian action). It bears noting, however, that between 10 and 16 percent of that number of Lebanese civilians have already died, and Israel is nowhere near the operational success it achieved in 1982.

Why, one wonders, has the IDF so signally turned its back on the substance of the Tohar Haneshek? The answer may lie in the person of its chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, a former air force commander who in 2002 inaugurated a program of surgical air strikes to assassinate prominent Palestinian terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank. When these strikes produced unexpectedly heavy collateral damage -- on one occasion 15 civilian bystanders were killed by an attack that slew exactly one terrorist -- Halutz bridled at those who questioned whether such methods conformed to the IDF's traditional moral code, and he made plain that a ratio of 15 dead civilians to one dead terrorist was within acceptable limits.

But another answer may lie in the cost of Operation Peace for Galilee. In the six weeks of heavy combat and the first year of occupation that followed, the IDF lost 516 dead and almost 2,800 wounded. Relative to the population of the United States, Gabriel noted, that was equivalent to 32,460 dead and 163,380 wounded. Perhaps the IDF cannot nerve itself to endure such losses again.

Nevertheless, in terms of the laws and usages of war, it has no alternative. It cannot husband the lives of its soldiers, who are combatants, by sacrificing the lives of civilians, who are not. Soldiers engage in violence; civilians make no resistance. Soldiers have a chance to defend their lives. Civilians have none. Nor is it acceptable to say that because Hezbollah ignores the laws and usages of war, the IDF may do so as well. Such talk mocks the Tohar Haneshek. But for many years now, Israel has been embroiled in struggles with foes so hateful, so implacably hostile, that perhaps it has become what it beheld. If so, it would once again prove Aeschylus correct:

Far-stretching, endless time
brings forth all hidden things
and buries that which once did shine.
The firm resolve falters. The sacred oath is shattered.
And let none say, "It cannot happen here."

Posted on Wednesday, August 9, 2006 at 6:27 AM | Comments (35) | Return

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