This is analogous to the Anglo legal principle of felony murder: if someone dies as a side effect when one is committing a felony (a hostage or a bystander inadvertently shot by policemen, say) then one is guilty of murder, and one's accomplices (even those not directly on the scene) become accomplices to murder. The older rules of war under which the American civil war was fought also supposedly included a provision that a military unit or group which refused to surrender while holding hostages thereby put itself outside the protection of the rules of war and could be massacred. The difficulty which caused several revisions of the Geneva conventions is that in modern mass warfare there is no longer such a clear dividing line between military and civilians. The older rules, worked out in early modern Europe, afforded no protection to people who used arms not in uniform and not in legitimate chain of command, but this put various resistance and national liberation fighters in a very difficult position, because they often did not have either. Not only did irregular formations become important, with the rise of industrial war, the civilian status of industrial workers producing munitions also became dubious. If a piper, who does not bear arms but encourages soldiers with his music, is a combatant, then why not the worker who turns out shells? Such considerations were used to justify WWII long distance bombing campaigns.
Arguably the people who authored and signed the various protocols of the Geneva conventions did indeed contemplate entities like Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, Hamas, etc. and provided the legal answer of "not protected" and fair game as to the membership and "tragic, but permitted when minimized to the extent necessary to ensure security" for civilian casualties and collateral damage. The trouble since is twofold. First the bad faith inconsistently in interpretation and application of the rules, and second, various attempts to extend protection (again, playing favorites with regards to which side these groups are on) beyond signatories through """norms""" and conveniently bogus claims of """customary""" international law. That's what the US claimed allowed it to move against Syria when it had could not be said otherwise to have violated the requirements of a treaty it never signed.
You are right that the Geneva conventions and other treaties have a hard time with civilian contributions to the war effort and all kinds of "dual use" infrastructure, because there is no non-arbitrary point where one can say some indirect commercial relationship with, application by, or benefit to military operations crosses the line.
This is especially true with private contractors of various kinds. It reaches new heights of humor and absurdity in the case of civilian specialists maintaining and operating "cyber" systems thousands of miles from any battlefield.
There is a whole legal niche of people whose job it is to satisfy the demand for some opinion memos the content and reasoning of which no one reads or cares about, except to the extent it gives them CYA and permits them to say "The lawyers said it was ok if we did it like this." And "like this" might as well be any primitive ritual as far as they're concerned if it gets them off the hook. They'd be perfectly happy to follow a druid's arrangement of the computers into serverhenge or a witch doctor's moves in the DDOS rain dance. Last I read about it, the moment it comes time to deploy some capability, they either have to step away from the keyboard and have a military officer grab the mouse to left-click "ok" such that the unholiness contaminating the peripheral at that precise moment does not electronically travel up the arm of the civilian and make him Most Unclean, or, even more laughable, the civilian is considered to be a kind of reservist who is very, very, temporarily put on active duty to that he can wear the military selection from his dual hats while performing the deed of pressing the enter key or whatever.
The Geneva conventions were definitely not designed for circumstances in which it could be hard or impossible to attribute responsibility in a timely manner for attacks causing major damage to particular entities, states, or forces.
It is certainly laughable, but it is still homage paid by vice to the principle of separation of military and civilian. Is the alternative (no separation) as it currently exists really preferable?
As to your first paragraph: exactly. That's why I wrote "this put various resistance and national liberation fighters in a very difficult position". The rules of Geneva conventions have grown out of the pre-WWI Hague conventions laid down in an era when well-defined sovereigns waged war on one another (although even in Napoleon's wars the British-backed Spanish guerillas prefigured what was to come, or rather to retvrn, later). As the late Jerry Pournelle wrote, putting the words in the mouth of a terrorist guerilla fighter modeled on the various third-world anti-colonialist/national-liberation movements, such rules favored established well-defined sovereigns whether intentionally or not.
"Is the alternative (no separation) as it currently exists really preferable?"
I don't think it's preferable for civilized countries to throw up their hands because of the conceptual difficulties in these novel cases and give up on the whole attempt and approach to bounded armed conflict, especially as regards treatment of prisoners. The states themselves do not seem much bothered by the lack of legal consensus on those novel matters, though I suppose that could change should they become more critical to modem warfare.
There are two much bigger problems. One is the old one of enforcement against particularly large and powerful states that are hard to deter from using unlawful tactics after one starts running out of "soft power" penalties, without dramatic escalation of the conflict.
The second is the question of what to do with all the groups of illegal combatants with their "standard operation is nothing but war crimes layered upon war crimes" approach. In these cases the problem is mostly political in terms of the international community pretending to apply the """law"""" in extremely biased, selective, and inconsistent fashion, like the "results-oriented" activist judge putting his thumb on the scale, giving some groups a pass while holding some states to impossible standards incompatible with the maintenance of security.
When these major breakdowns seem more the rule than the exception, sweating the small stuff like whose finger presses an enter key seems less like tribute to virtue than straining out gnats after having let a dozen camels through.
Arnold made the comments to his very related "Dying to please the moderates" post paid-subscriber-only, so I'm posting this comment here.
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I think you [i.e. AK] are unjust to IDF soldiers. They die to protect the civilized principle of limited warfare, a key tenet of which is the distinction between civilians and combatants. Hamas hiding behind this principle, and some people refusing to judge and punish it for that, are another matter.
There are different ways of interpreting the question, "Why did they die?" Some of it involves mind-reading, what was the primary motivation of the decision-makers? Perhaps they were thinking mostly of principles, but that's arguable. Perhaps it's like you say that even if everyone is practicing vices of realpolitik, they are at least paying the tribute of lip-service to the virtue of this principle, and it's worth preserving what degree of pressure comes from whatever degree of public loyalty to that principle that this lip-service maintains.
But I am skeptical of that. "Rationalized Hypocrisy" is a defining feature of contemporary leftism and makes a mockery of all public appeals to principles. Worse than a mockery, a tool to hurt any of their opponents foolish enough to think they'll receive the same protection of those principles when the shoe is on the other foot. The bitter right is always warning the naïve right again and again never to take this bait and trust in this 'bargain', but they never listen.
As we've been saying for over two decades, the most dangerous aspect of leftist / progressivism / PC / wokeness whatever is precisely the self-righteous ruthlessness of their power-relations-positional selective ethical framework, and their meta-principle trump card that provides the rationalization which transforms any purportedly timeless universal principle into one that can be applied as a unilateral weapon only they get to use against their enemies.
Oppressors deserve whatever bad things happen to them. The Oppressed have an ethical get-out-of-jail card and carte blanche right to do whatever they want to the Oppressors. "By Any Means Necessary" is already bad enough, but at least there's that theoretical implicit constraint of only what's 'necessary'. But even when the Oppressed go well beyond what could possibly be necessary, we are still always supposed to give them a pass for anything above lip-service I-condemn-buts, out of sympathy for the understandable passions unleashed by their pitiable plight and long victimhood.
What's that old dark joke, "Hypocrites? Not following any principle? Sure there's a principle. The principle is f*** you!" "Rights for Me, not for Thee."
This gets back to Auster's "Unprincipled Exceptions". In this case, actual civilized principles like that of limited warfare -are- the exceptions, in any situation they contradict the meta-principle, and so, sooner or later, they get rectified in the direction of The-Oppressed-Have-No-Limits-As-The-Oppressors-Have-No-Rights.
Any society such as ours that has allowed such a all-dissolving-acid of a meta-principle to become the state religion has sworn fealty to Evil and Oblivion.
> I don't think it's preferable for civilized countries to throw up their hands because of the conceptual difficulties in these novel cases and give up on the whole attempt and approach to bounded armed conflict
The Ukrainian forces have used human shields. This was systematic in Mariupol where the Azov battalion used systematically the local pro-Russian population as shields or even hostages, knowing that the Russian forces would take significant precautions to spare them (which is clearly not the case for the IDF). And yet the Azov fighters were widely presented as heroic in the Western media. and I don't remember reading any comment from you about this. Very selective outrage,
Hyperdupont, the Russians are in my tribe, and so are the Israelis.
Ethnically Russian (by language and religion) citizens of east Luhansk and Donetsk have been continuously shelled, attacked, and killed by Azov--the Ukrainian nationalist paramilitary--since 2014. Svoboda probably did too, prior to Azov. Lots of poor families and elderly people live in those two counties (oblasts?). For years, Russia provided urgent medical care and pensioner aid when Ukraine should have... but didn't. The Western media reported this. Radio Free Europe reported it! Yet Western leaders (Merkel, the former French PM) lied and disregarded the 2 oblasts' vote for independence. NATO kept pushing to have nukes pointed to Moscow from a few hundred miles away in Ukraine. The special military operation began.
The EU, US, and UK have spent billions of dollars to stop Russia from helping Russians in a neighboring country. That neighboring country, Ukraine, stores its weapons and ammo in civilian buildings. They use civilians as human shields. Two examples:
1. In 2022, safe corridors were announced near Kharkiv and Mariupol, for civilians to escape. Most never opened. I saw videos of women and children trying to leave the area but being pulled out of cars and buses, forced to stay. Russian soldiers didn't do it. Azov did.
2. A few months later, Amnesty International reported on the Ukrainian military's preference for taking positions in hospitals, nursing homes, and facilities for the disabled, without evacuating the patients first.
I am heartbroken that the US and UK supported Ukraine. They should have supported Russia and censured Ukraine, when Ukraine used civilians as human shields, as in the two examples I gave above. (There were many more.)
Russia truly tried to minimize harm to Ukrainian civilians. How so? Russia could have used conventional weapons to quickly reduce Ukraine's infrastructure to rubble--railroads, airports, hospitals, schools, water treatment facilities, warehouses, office buildings, churches, non-nuclear power plants, factories, government buildings--in a wide swathe from east Luhansk to Kiev, IF they had wanted to. They didn't want to. That's why it took so long. Russia didn't want the mass slaughter of their neighbors, people who are culturally, racially, religiously similar.
Here's the difference between Russia - Ukraine and Israel - Hamas/Palestine. Other than neo-Nazi Banderites, most Ukrainians don't believe that the greatest good in life is to kill every Russian from Rostov-On-Don to Vladivostok, nor is it a bedrock of Ukraine Orthodox Church doctrine. In contrast, Hamas and the 80% of Palestinians who support them DO want to kill every Jew from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. Hamas and most Palestinians want a one state solution, i.e. they want all the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River for themselves: No Jews, no Christians, no atheists allowed, ever. This is explicitly stated in section 2 of Hamas's charter. Hamas has been the government since 2006.
Also, the civilians of Luhansk and Donetsk viewed the arrival of Russian soldiers as friendly liberators at best, or as troublemakers from across the border at worst. They speak the same or a mutually understandable language, eat similar foods, are Christians. Russian soldiers don't have to worry that Ukrainians, not even Azov (I hope), would use their young children and teenagers as suicide bombers. Israeli soldiers do have to worry about that with Palestinians. Finally, recall how Poland, Romania, and Germany took in so many Ukrainian refugees. Gaza is surrounded by some VERY wealthy Muslim nations yet none has offered refuge to even one Palestinian. Sorry for the long comment.
Bullshit. Russians have never been known to care a rat's ass for civilian casualties, any more than they care for their military casualties (Soviet Russian human wave attacks in WWII are notorious). Ukrainian towns which AFU chose to defend were destroyed by Russians with no regard for civilians, and towns from which AFU retreated without mounting a defense were not. That's all the difference. Bakhmut was at least as heavily damaged as Mariupol or Grozny, and Popasna damaged so much that Russians themselves decided it was not worth rebuilding. In contrast Lysychansk and to a lesser extent Severodonetsk got off lightly.
This situation is not unprecedented. During the Nineteenth Century (except for the Civil War), the US government spent 8% of its budget on the Indian Wars. Whatever atrocities you saw last week, remember that Hamas has nothing on the Comanches, or the Lakota, or for that matter the Aztecs or ... on and on. Historians can argue all day about who was at fault, but unfortunately it finally ended only when one side was completely and utterly defeated.
What’s Gaza and the West Bank if not ‘reservations’? Didn’t Israel at great expense and trauma evict Jews from settlement in Gaza in 2005/6 to make Gaza entirely Palestinian and autonomous, or did I dream that?
And when the Israelis moved out, not having them to fight, the Palestinians fought each other as a turf war broke out between the PLO and Hamas - the latter won. Maybe a dreamt that too.
Palestinians want Israel minus its inhabitants - nothing else can be home, anywhere else is a de facto refugee camp - they even have those in the West Bank or used to. They have had 70 years, same as the Israelis, to turn where ever they are into a prosperous, peaceful home - as Israelis have. They haven’t because it doesn’t suit their purpose. Nothing less than the eradication of the Jews and ownership of the territory of what is Israel will suffice.
This is unexpectedly harsh. I’ not saying it’s right or wrong: wrong and harsh are different things. But it makes me curious whether Arnold followed his usual rule of putting a post in the publication queue for a few days before it goes out.
No, the real war criminals are the real war criminals.
This is your second post in a row where you place the greatest blame on people who are - at worst - wishy-washy. At the risk of stating the obvious, Hamas putting civilians in harm's way is infinitely worse than complaining about a difficult situation. If criticising a government policy is a war crime, then free speech is dead - it seems there are no classical liberals even 5000 miles from a foxhole.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that you are placing blame based on social proximity rather than actual wrongdoing. You don't know any Hamas supporters, or even people adjacent to that, so you're latching your venom on the closest thing you do know, which is people who hum and haw and say "it's complicated" and carefully avoid making any realistic suggestion. And sure, those people are annoying, and the more influential among them may be obstacles to a real solution, but they're not war criminals, or even remotely close, and you know this in your heart.
They *are* worse than supporters of Hamas. They are specifically supporting the Hamas strategy of using Palestinian civilians as human shields. By doing so, they are causing more harm than anything that Hamas has done so far. They are complicit in the deaths of more civilians than Hamas has killed. That is not being wishy-washy. That is aiding and abetting murder.
Such complaints only make Hamas strategy more effective if they get purchase in Israeli strategy. By your logic, Israeli decision-makers who heed UN complaints are also war criminals - perhaps the primary ones. Horseshoe theory once again.
I continue to believe that terrorism is worse than being a little too idealistic (or indeed, a little too callous) about collateral damage.
Israel has a duty to try to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties. It also has a duty not to reward the human-shields strategy. Ignoring the second duty means causing civilian casualties in the future. It is not "a little too idealistic" to take public positions that ignore the second duty. It is morally outrageous.
Yes, neglecting second-order effects is morally outrageous. It's also, sadly, very normal in political debate. But it's not as morally outrageous as wanting people prosecuted for ordinary political disagreements.
Oh yes. Letting terrorists get away with holding hundreds of thousand of people hostage is a "second-order effect." But I'll let you have the last word. However you respond, I'm done.
How does one separate a civilian population which has bred its offspring for decades to foster visceral hatred of another Society, to believe that they are its victims, believe it must be wiped out, that its people are not Humans, and that it is justified, glorious even, to slaughter and butcher their number, from its offspring doing what it has been taught and instructed to do?
I think that Israel’s problem actually is with the Palestinian people. Palestinian factions derive great prestige, and thereby popular support, from attacking Israel. Hamas moved into a vacuum created by the PLO officially swearing off such attacks. Israel needs to sever this road to power.
The US problem with the various plains tribes was similar, exacerbated by the fact that the young men could not marry unless they were proven warriors.
We also see this problem in ethnic enclaves where people generally, but especially women, applaud hostility towards the authorities. The young men dare not cooperate, for fear that it will damage their reputations. Nobody wants to be seen as a collaborator, even if the results don’t include wearing a burning tire necklace.
Agree 100%. This problem seems completely insoluble with our current technology, unless we blur or scrap the distinction between combatants and civilians.
Hamas has got to go. The most realistic option is this war with Israel. So complaining does nothing, but this is war, these are the Jews, and this is the Promised Land. If war is inevitable, complaining certainly is.
I find the unqualified support for Israel in the US extremely disturbing and I am especially miffed at how a particular class of people has banded together to purge activists from universities *only* after realizing that 'colonizer' included their own. Like, should college courses teach anti-racists how to tell a "colonizer" (basically the "n" word for european people at this point) apart from a jewish person (e.g. by appearance and surname) so that they can direct their ire at the correct targets? Like... really?
I am absolutely not on the side of the Israelis in the general sense.
That being said, you're right as far as I can tell. There is essentially no way for Israel to fight Hamas that doesn't involve some kind of war crime. Missile strikes on HQs? Mass collateral damage. Blockading the city? Hundreds of thousands dead in a matter of weeks. Kicking out the population? Ethnic cleansing.
It was telling that people were celebrating the Hamas attack before Israels response. Not quite as big as the crowds that gathered after Israels response though.
(Aside: #1 Not to mention that urban combat being essentially an attritional thing. It might destroy the IDF even without outside intervention from the north)
(Aside: #2 Gazans are right I suspect in believing that if they leave Gaza, and Israel occupies the city that they will never, ever, be allowed back in)
More specifically, Hamas fighters wear civilian clothes, drive around in unmarked cars and other vehicles, and store their weapons and ammunition in civilian buildings. These acts are in direct violation of the laws of "distinction" within the broader body of the laws of war. Distinction requires that combatants be, well, clearly distinguished from civilians. Failure to distinguish *one's own* military personnel and materiel puts civilians at risk -- a war crime. Israel does what it can to avoid civilian casualties, but under the law such casualties are at the hands of Hamas.
There are crimes and then there are crimes. Using human shields is murder, and what the UN is doing is more like accessory to murder.
Edit: Geneva Conventions never anticipated the UN!.
This is analogous to the Anglo legal principle of felony murder: if someone dies as a side effect when one is committing a felony (a hostage or a bystander inadvertently shot by policemen, say) then one is guilty of murder, and one's accomplices (even those not directly on the scene) become accomplices to murder. The older rules of war under which the American civil war was fought also supposedly included a provision that a military unit or group which refused to surrender while holding hostages thereby put itself outside the protection of the rules of war and could be massacred. The difficulty which caused several revisions of the Geneva conventions is that in modern mass warfare there is no longer such a clear dividing line between military and civilians. The older rules, worked out in early modern Europe, afforded no protection to people who used arms not in uniform and not in legitimate chain of command, but this put various resistance and national liberation fighters in a very difficult position, because they often did not have either. Not only did irregular formations become important, with the rise of industrial war, the civilian status of industrial workers producing munitions also became dubious. If a piper, who does not bear arms but encourages soldiers with his music, is a combatant, then why not the worker who turns out shells? Such considerations were used to justify WWII long distance bombing campaigns.
Arguably the people who authored and signed the various protocols of the Geneva conventions did indeed contemplate entities like Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, Hamas, etc. and provided the legal answer of "not protected" and fair game as to the membership and "tragic, but permitted when minimized to the extent necessary to ensure security" for civilian casualties and collateral damage. The trouble since is twofold. First the bad faith inconsistently in interpretation and application of the rules, and second, various attempts to extend protection (again, playing favorites with regards to which side these groups are on) beyond signatories through """norms""" and conveniently bogus claims of """customary""" international law. That's what the US claimed allowed it to move against Syria when it had could not be said otherwise to have violated the requirements of a treaty it never signed.
You are right that the Geneva conventions and other treaties have a hard time with civilian contributions to the war effort and all kinds of "dual use" infrastructure, because there is no non-arbitrary point where one can say some indirect commercial relationship with, application by, or benefit to military operations crosses the line.
This is especially true with private contractors of various kinds. It reaches new heights of humor and absurdity in the case of civilian specialists maintaining and operating "cyber" systems thousands of miles from any battlefield.
There is a whole legal niche of people whose job it is to satisfy the demand for some opinion memos the content and reasoning of which no one reads or cares about, except to the extent it gives them CYA and permits them to say "The lawyers said it was ok if we did it like this." And "like this" might as well be any primitive ritual as far as they're concerned if it gets them off the hook. They'd be perfectly happy to follow a druid's arrangement of the computers into serverhenge or a witch doctor's moves in the DDOS rain dance. Last I read about it, the moment it comes time to deploy some capability, they either have to step away from the keyboard and have a military officer grab the mouse to left-click "ok" such that the unholiness contaminating the peripheral at that precise moment does not electronically travel up the arm of the civilian and make him Most Unclean, or, even more laughable, the civilian is considered to be a kind of reservist who is very, very, temporarily put on active duty to that he can wear the military selection from his dual hats while performing the deed of pressing the enter key or whatever.
The Geneva conventions were definitely not designed for circumstances in which it could be hard or impossible to attribute responsibility in a timely manner for attacks causing major damage to particular entities, states, or forces.
It is certainly laughable, but it is still homage paid by vice to the principle of separation of military and civilian. Is the alternative (no separation) as it currently exists really preferable?
As to your first paragraph: exactly. That's why I wrote "this put various resistance and national liberation fighters in a very difficult position". The rules of Geneva conventions have grown out of the pre-WWI Hague conventions laid down in an era when well-defined sovereigns waged war on one another (although even in Napoleon's wars the British-backed Spanish guerillas prefigured what was to come, or rather to retvrn, later). As the late Jerry Pournelle wrote, putting the words in the mouth of a terrorist guerilla fighter modeled on the various third-world anti-colonialist/national-liberation movements, such rules favored established well-defined sovereigns whether intentionally or not.
"Is the alternative (no separation) as it currently exists really preferable?"
I don't think it's preferable for civilized countries to throw up their hands because of the conceptual difficulties in these novel cases and give up on the whole attempt and approach to bounded armed conflict, especially as regards treatment of prisoners. The states themselves do not seem much bothered by the lack of legal consensus on those novel matters, though I suppose that could change should they become more critical to modem warfare.
There are two much bigger problems. One is the old one of enforcement against particularly large and powerful states that are hard to deter from using unlawful tactics after one starts running out of "soft power" penalties, without dramatic escalation of the conflict.
The second is the question of what to do with all the groups of illegal combatants with their "standard operation is nothing but war crimes layered upon war crimes" approach. In these cases the problem is mostly political in terms of the international community pretending to apply the """law"""" in extremely biased, selective, and inconsistent fashion, like the "results-oriented" activist judge putting his thumb on the scale, giving some groups a pass while holding some states to impossible standards incompatible with the maintenance of security.
When these major breakdowns seem more the rule than the exception, sweating the small stuff like whose finger presses an enter key seems less like tribute to virtue than straining out gnats after having let a dozen camels through.
Arnold made the comments to his very related "Dying to please the moderates" post paid-subscriber-only, so I'm posting this comment here.
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I think you [i.e. AK] are unjust to IDF soldiers. They die to protect the civilized principle of limited warfare, a key tenet of which is the distinction between civilians and combatants. Hamas hiding behind this principle, and some people refusing to judge and punish it for that, are another matter.
There are different ways of interpreting the question, "Why did they die?" Some of it involves mind-reading, what was the primary motivation of the decision-makers? Perhaps they were thinking mostly of principles, but that's arguable. Perhaps it's like you say that even if everyone is practicing vices of realpolitik, they are at least paying the tribute of lip-service to the virtue of this principle, and it's worth preserving what degree of pressure comes from whatever degree of public loyalty to that principle that this lip-service maintains.
But I am skeptical of that. "Rationalized Hypocrisy" is a defining feature of contemporary leftism and makes a mockery of all public appeals to principles. Worse than a mockery, a tool to hurt any of their opponents foolish enough to think they'll receive the same protection of those principles when the shoe is on the other foot. The bitter right is always warning the naïve right again and again never to take this bait and trust in this 'bargain', but they never listen.
As we've been saying for over two decades, the most dangerous aspect of leftist / progressivism / PC / wokeness whatever is precisely the self-righteous ruthlessness of their power-relations-positional selective ethical framework, and their meta-principle trump card that provides the rationalization which transforms any purportedly timeless universal principle into one that can be applied as a unilateral weapon only they get to use against their enemies.
Oppressors deserve whatever bad things happen to them. The Oppressed have an ethical get-out-of-jail card and carte blanche right to do whatever they want to the Oppressors. "By Any Means Necessary" is already bad enough, but at least there's that theoretical implicit constraint of only what's 'necessary'. But even when the Oppressed go well beyond what could possibly be necessary, we are still always supposed to give them a pass for anything above lip-service I-condemn-buts, out of sympathy for the understandable passions unleashed by their pitiable plight and long victimhood.
What's that old dark joke, "Hypocrites? Not following any principle? Sure there's a principle. The principle is f*** you!" "Rights for Me, not for Thee."
This gets back to Auster's "Unprincipled Exceptions". In this case, actual civilized principles like that of limited warfare -are- the exceptions, in any situation they contradict the meta-principle, and so, sooner or later, they get rectified in the direction of The-Oppressed-Have-No-Limits-As-The-Oppressors-Have-No-Rights.
Any society such as ours that has allowed such a all-dissolving-acid of a meta-principle to become the state religion has sworn fealty to Evil and Oblivion.
> I don't think it's preferable for civilized countries to throw up their hands because of the conceptual difficulties in these novel cases and give up on the whole attempt and approach to bounded armed conflict
Indeed. My question was, of course, rhetorical.
The Ukrainian forces have used human shields. This was systematic in Mariupol where the Azov battalion used systematically the local pro-Russian population as shields or even hostages, knowing that the Russian forces would take significant precautions to spare them (which is clearly not the case for the IDF). And yet the Azov fighters were widely presented as heroic in the Western media. and I don't remember reading any comment from you about this. Very selective outrage,
Clearly the Russians are not "in your tribe" while the Israelis are.
Hyperdupont, the Russians are in my tribe, and so are the Israelis.
Ethnically Russian (by language and religion) citizens of east Luhansk and Donetsk have been continuously shelled, attacked, and killed by Azov--the Ukrainian nationalist paramilitary--since 2014. Svoboda probably did too, prior to Azov. Lots of poor families and elderly people live in those two counties (oblasts?). For years, Russia provided urgent medical care and pensioner aid when Ukraine should have... but didn't. The Western media reported this. Radio Free Europe reported it! Yet Western leaders (Merkel, the former French PM) lied and disregarded the 2 oblasts' vote for independence. NATO kept pushing to have nukes pointed to Moscow from a few hundred miles away in Ukraine. The special military operation began.
The EU, US, and UK have spent billions of dollars to stop Russia from helping Russians in a neighboring country. That neighboring country, Ukraine, stores its weapons and ammo in civilian buildings. They use civilians as human shields. Two examples:
1. In 2022, safe corridors were announced near Kharkiv and Mariupol, for civilians to escape. Most never opened. I saw videos of women and children trying to leave the area but being pulled out of cars and buses, forced to stay. Russian soldiers didn't do it. Azov did.
2. A few months later, Amnesty International reported on the Ukrainian military's preference for taking positions in hospitals, nursing homes, and facilities for the disabled, without evacuating the patients first.
I am heartbroken that the US and UK supported Ukraine. They should have supported Russia and censured Ukraine, when Ukraine used civilians as human shields, as in the two examples I gave above. (There were many more.)
Russia truly tried to minimize harm to Ukrainian civilians. How so? Russia could have used conventional weapons to quickly reduce Ukraine's infrastructure to rubble--railroads, airports, hospitals, schools, water treatment facilities, warehouses, office buildings, churches, non-nuclear power plants, factories, government buildings--in a wide swathe from east Luhansk to Kiev, IF they had wanted to. They didn't want to. That's why it took so long. Russia didn't want the mass slaughter of their neighbors, people who are culturally, racially, religiously similar.
Here's the difference between Russia - Ukraine and Israel - Hamas/Palestine. Other than neo-Nazi Banderites, most Ukrainians don't believe that the greatest good in life is to kill every Russian from Rostov-On-Don to Vladivostok, nor is it a bedrock of Ukraine Orthodox Church doctrine. In contrast, Hamas and the 80% of Palestinians who support them DO want to kill every Jew from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. Hamas and most Palestinians want a one state solution, i.e. they want all the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River for themselves: No Jews, no Christians, no atheists allowed, ever. This is explicitly stated in section 2 of Hamas's charter. Hamas has been the government since 2006.
Also, the civilians of Luhansk and Donetsk viewed the arrival of Russian soldiers as friendly liberators at best, or as troublemakers from across the border at worst. They speak the same or a mutually understandable language, eat similar foods, are Christians. Russian soldiers don't have to worry that Ukrainians, not even Azov (I hope), would use their young children and teenagers as suicide bombers. Israeli soldiers do have to worry about that with Palestinians. Finally, recall how Poland, Romania, and Germany took in so many Ukrainian refugees. Gaza is surrounded by some VERY wealthy Muslim nations yet none has offered refuge to even one Palestinian. Sorry for the long comment.
Bullshit. Russians have never been known to care a rat's ass for civilian casualties, any more than they care for their military casualties (Soviet Russian human wave attacks in WWII are notorious). Ukrainian towns which AFU chose to defend were destroyed by Russians with no regard for civilians, and towns from which AFU retreated without mounting a defense were not. That's all the difference. Bakhmut was at least as heavily damaged as Mariupol or Grozny, and Popasna damaged so much that Russians themselves decided it was not worth rebuilding. In contrast Lysychansk and to a lesser extent Severodonetsk got off lightly.
This situation is not unprecedented. During the Nineteenth Century (except for the Civil War), the US government spent 8% of its budget on the Indian Wars. Whatever atrocities you saw last week, remember that Hamas has nothing on the Comanches, or the Lakota, or for that matter the Aztecs or ... on and on. Historians can argue all day about who was at fault, but unfortunately it finally ended only when one side was completely and utterly defeated.
Kaiser Wilhelm invented the term ‘total war’, meaning a war involving all the enemy, not just battlefields.
He saw WWI as a war of attrition in which he expected Germany to be ‘last man standing’.
Then the USA joined in, and the game was up.
Carthage?
What’s Gaza and the West Bank if not ‘reservations’? Didn’t Israel at great expense and trauma evict Jews from settlement in Gaza in 2005/6 to make Gaza entirely Palestinian and autonomous, or did I dream that?
And when the Israelis moved out, not having them to fight, the Palestinians fought each other as a turf war broke out between the PLO and Hamas - the latter won. Maybe a dreamt that too.
Palestinians want Israel minus its inhabitants - nothing else can be home, anywhere else is a de facto refugee camp - they even have those in the West Bank or used to. They have had 70 years, same as the Israelis, to turn where ever they are into a prosperous, peaceful home - as Israelis have. They haven’t because it doesn’t suit their purpose. Nothing less than the eradication of the Jews and ownership of the territory of what is Israel will suffice.
It’s about time people understood that.
Further to that, surely no one thinks that the U.S. reservation system has been successful.
This is unexpectedly harsh. I’ not saying it’s right or wrong: wrong and harsh are different things. But it makes me curious whether Arnold followed his usual rule of putting a post in the publication queue for a few days before it goes out.
No, the real war criminals are the real war criminals.
This is your second post in a row where you place the greatest blame on people who are - at worst - wishy-washy. At the risk of stating the obvious, Hamas putting civilians in harm's way is infinitely worse than complaining about a difficult situation. If criticising a government policy is a war crime, then free speech is dead - it seems there are no classical liberals even 5000 miles from a foxhole.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that you are placing blame based on social proximity rather than actual wrongdoing. You don't know any Hamas supporters, or even people adjacent to that, so you're latching your venom on the closest thing you do know, which is people who hum and haw and say "it's complicated" and carefully avoid making any realistic suggestion. And sure, those people are annoying, and the more influential among them may be obstacles to a real solution, but they're not war criminals, or even remotely close, and you know this in your heart.
They *are* worse than supporters of Hamas. They are specifically supporting the Hamas strategy of using Palestinian civilians as human shields. By doing so, they are causing more harm than anything that Hamas has done so far. They are complicit in the deaths of more civilians than Hamas has killed. That is not being wishy-washy. That is aiding and abetting murder.
Such complaints only make Hamas strategy more effective if they get purchase in Israeli strategy. By your logic, Israeli decision-makers who heed UN complaints are also war criminals - perhaps the primary ones. Horseshoe theory once again.
I continue to believe that terrorism is worse than being a little too idealistic (or indeed, a little too callous) about collateral damage.
Israel has a duty to try to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties. It also has a duty not to reward the human-shields strategy. Ignoring the second duty means causing civilian casualties in the future. It is not "a little too idealistic" to take public positions that ignore the second duty. It is morally outrageous.
Yes, neglecting second-order effects is morally outrageous. It's also, sadly, very normal in political debate. But it's not as morally outrageous as wanting people prosecuted for ordinary political disagreements.
Oh yes. Letting terrorists get away with holding hundreds of thousand of people hostage is a "second-order effect." But I'll let you have the last word. However you respond, I'm done.
Well, good luck to you then. I remain a big fan of your writing even if we don't see eye to eye.
How does one separate a civilian population which has bred its offspring for decades to foster visceral hatred of another Society, to believe that they are its victims, believe it must be wiped out, that its people are not Humans, and that it is justified, glorious even, to slaughter and butcher their number, from its offspring doing what it has been taught and instructed to do?
Truth. Great comment.
I think that Israel’s problem actually is with the Palestinian people. Palestinian factions derive great prestige, and thereby popular support, from attacking Israel. Hamas moved into a vacuum created by the PLO officially swearing off such attacks. Israel needs to sever this road to power.
The US problem with the various plains tribes was similar, exacerbated by the fact that the young men could not marry unless they were proven warriors.
We also see this problem in ethnic enclaves where people generally, but especially women, applaud hostility towards the authorities. The young men dare not cooperate, for fear that it will damage their reputations. Nobody wants to be seen as a collaborator, even if the results don’t include wearing a burning tire necklace.
Agree 100%. This problem seems completely insoluble with our current technology, unless we blur or scrap the distinction between combatants and civilians.
Hamas has got to go. The most realistic option is this war with Israel. So complaining does nothing, but this is war, these are the Jews, and this is the Promised Land. If war is inevitable, complaining certainly is.
as usual dislike your take of things
Jewish lives matter
Palistinian lives matter
we created the monster of apathied Isreal and they created the monster Hamas and the PLO
**peace brothers and sisters as Cornel West would say**
“We”. Who “we”?
Nobody outside the ‘We’ has independent agency, so all blame lies with the “We”?
I am curious, where do you get your news?
Unless combatants separate themselves and make themselves visibly distinguishable from non-combatants, there are no civilians.
Combatants have a duty to protect non-combatants on their own side.
Only when they do so can adversaries be obligated to do the same.
I find the unqualified support for Israel in the US extremely disturbing and I am especially miffed at how a particular class of people has banded together to purge activists from universities *only* after realizing that 'colonizer' included their own. Like, should college courses teach anti-racists how to tell a "colonizer" (basically the "n" word for european people at this point) apart from a jewish person (e.g. by appearance and surname) so that they can direct their ire at the correct targets? Like... really?
I am absolutely not on the side of the Israelis in the general sense.
That being said, you're right as far as I can tell. There is essentially no way for Israel to fight Hamas that doesn't involve some kind of war crime. Missile strikes on HQs? Mass collateral damage. Blockading the city? Hundreds of thousands dead in a matter of weeks. Kicking out the population? Ethnic cleansing.
It was telling that people were celebrating the Hamas attack before Israels response. Not quite as big as the crowds that gathered after Israels response though.
(Aside: #1 Not to mention that urban combat being essentially an attritional thing. It might destroy the IDF even without outside intervention from the north)
(Aside: #2 Gazans are right I suspect in believing that if they leave Gaza, and Israel occupies the city that they will never, ever, be allowed back in)
More specifically, Hamas fighters wear civilian clothes, drive around in unmarked cars and other vehicles, and store their weapons and ammunition in civilian buildings. These acts are in direct violation of the laws of "distinction" within the broader body of the laws of war. Distinction requires that combatants be, well, clearly distinguished from civilians. Failure to distinguish *one's own* military personnel and materiel puts civilians at risk -- a war crime. Israel does what it can to avoid civilian casualties, but under the law such casualties are at the hands of Hamas.