But Our War Crimes Were Heroic and Honorable
Jacob Sullum | August 31, 2007, 10:57am
Hezbollah is angry about a new Human Rights Watch report that condemns the group's rocket attacks on civilians during last year's war with Israel. Since Hezbollah deliberately launched thousands of anti-personnel rockets into Israeli towns and bragged about doing so, it cannot very well deny that it committed war crimes. Instead, its leaders argue that Human Rights Watch should save its criticism for Israel, whose air attacks on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon killed far more civilians than Hezbollah's crappy rockets did.
But Human Rights Watch, which plans to release what will undoubtedly be a scathing report about Israel's conduct during the war next week, insists this is not a numbers game and that two wrongs don't make a right: Deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on civilians are always wrong. "The fact that more Israeli civilians didn't die is not a tribute to Hezbollah but a tribute to Israeli bomb shelters," says Sarah Leah Whitson, director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division. "The point we're making is that even though they say 'only 43 Israeli civilians were killed' that doesn't make it OK."
Israel's war with Hezbollah was disastrous in several ways, not least because of the many innocent people it killed. To the extent that the Israeli government could have reduced or avoided those deaths (by responding to Hezbollah's initial cross-border raid in a less dramatic fashion, for example), it is culpable for them. And even if the invasion and air campaign had made sense, there are reasons to question some of Israel's judgments about which targets to attack and how. But Israel was at least ostensibly attacking legitimate military targets and inadvertently killing civilians in the process, as opposed to deliberately targeting civilians, which strikes me as an important moral distinction. To put it another way, the IDF considers killing civilians a mark of shame, while Hezbollah wears it like a badge of honor, which is why its leaders are dismayed by the criticism from Human Rights Watch.
Mr. Nice Guy | September 1, 2007, 9:30am | #
Several people have started with the "I don't care who started it" business to be addressed by those who then say "it is important who started it, and it was the Arabs, so the deserve what they got" (or in the words of one commentator, they "got off lightly" in just having some lands occupied indefinitly). This is silly, for two reasons:
1. If you really want to go back to who "started it" you have to go back to the Zionist movements wacky dream of taking people and plopping them down half a world away in the midst of peoples of who were currently inhabiting the land. What the Zionists did was akin to what Jim Jones and his movement did in S. America, with the qualifier that the Zionists wanted to create their own little nation in the Middle East. Their historical connection to the land was ancient and their cultural connection to the land was negligible. It's hard not to be sympathetic to the Zionist dream considering the horrible treatment these people got at the hands of Euorpeans (and Africans and Arabs for that matter), but it really was wacky if you bracket it and look at it for what it entailed. It was bound to start trouble.
2. Again, as edna has helpfully pointed out, the people in the occupied territories had little say in their governments actions towards Israel. How in the world can it be justified for them and their descendants, including women, children, old men, etc., who had no part in hostilities towards Israel, to be occupied against their consent for decades? If Iraq somehow defeated us, would they be justified to occupy your hometown and tell you and your kids what to do for several decades? Would you go along with this occupation, or would you resist? And would it be helpful for the world to suggest that you just learn to accept some form of limited autnonmy and get along and stop making trouble?
edna-You're dancing around the issue. I suspect you're jewish and feel some solidarity with Israel here, and that's understandable, but a spade is a spade whether it is in the hands of a jewish or arab gardner. Again, is it justifiable to occupy a people against their consent, whether the occupation occurred in a defensive or offensive action? What in the world is "fuzzy" about these words or this rather plain question? I'm using occupation and consent in the usual, normal ways. I think you realize that its Israel's supporters arguments that are indeed fuzzy (like that its usually wrong but we need this security [of course the latter can never justify the former, the Soviets occupied the Warsaw Pact nations as a "security buffer;] or we keep trying to give back the land but they don't want it [all current offers have involved limited autonomy that few peoples could or should have to accept]).
