A very thought-provoking piece from Zack Beauchamp at Vox about the next steps for the Israel war. It’s complicated and well worth reading in its entirety, going into all the global, military and political implications, but this is a taste of the kind of thinking that’s gone into it and I think it’s impressive:
The moral case for counterterrorism
Bradley Strawser, a former US Air Force captain, has an unusual job: he is a moral philosopher working for the US Navy. His title is professor of philosophy in the defense analysis department at the Naval Postgraduate School; his actual job description is teaching America’s special operators how to fight wars as ethically as possible.
When I asked Strawser how he would approach the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, he said that it was essential to hold two ideas in one’s head at the same time.
First, that Israel had not only a right but a moral obligation to respond to Hamas’ vicious attack on its civilian population.
This may not seem obvious, as a ceasefire would certainly lead to some immediate reduction in civilian suffering. Indeed, a temporary ceasefire to provide humanitarian relief before further Israeli escalation might well be a good idea.
But an indefinite ceasefire is politically impossible in Israel — no major faction could countenance it — for reasons that speak to the very purpose of having a state. Governments owe their citizens a duty of protection, to keep them safe from external threats. If Hamas is not militarily degraded and deterred by the end of this operation, the Israeli state will have failed in this basic task.
“Even with all the history, and even with their culpability and failures and how they’ve [wronged Palestinians] for decades, this is self-defense against horrific aggression. You have to respond,” Strawser says.
Second, that no matter how barbarous Hamas’ conduct, Israel cannot itself ignore the laws and moral codes governing warfare in response. While civilian casualties are a terrible inevitability in warfare, there are clear moral rules that any state must follow — even when facing a brutal enemy who disregards all of them like Hamas. Unfettered, a modern military like the IDF could cause carnage on an even more horrific scale than it already does.
“If you’re going to become the monster you fight, what’s the point of fighting the monster?” Strawser asks.
The dilemma he poses — Israel must act, but it must do so within moral limits — is the heart of the moral case for replacing a regime change strategy with counterterrorism. It is a way, perhaps the only way, to satisfy Israel’s legitimate security needs without crossing the line into brutality.
A regime change operation, one that sends IDF tanks into the urban core of places like Gaza City in the north, would inherently threaten civilians in the densest parts of the Strip, far more than the current bombing offensive. Though Israel has warned residents of the northern Gaza Strip to leave, this is exceptionally difficult to accomplish in practice.
They cannot get out entirely: neither Israel nor Egypt will accept mass numbers of Gazans into their borders. Within Gaza, they have trouble getting south: armed Hamas fighters have warned them not to leave, and the roads themselves are difficult and dangerous thanks to Israeli airstrikes. Nor is it obvious they’re willing to flee: given the history of Palestinian dispossession at Israeli hands, they have legitimate reason to worry that they will never be able to return if they leave.
So long as there are large numbers of Palestinians where Israel wants to invade, there is virtually no way for it to fight without massive civilian casualties.
Moreover, it matters morally that Israel has no clear endgame. If the post-invasion situation is almost certainly going to be a bloody insurgency, one that could strengthen Hamas in the long term, Israel would need — morally speaking — to make the case that it has a credible plan for achieving civilian security in the postwar environment. It would be profoundly unjust, and cruel, to either leave Palestinian civilians in anarchy or subject them to an painful occupation and years of bloody counterinsurgency.
Some of the tactics Israel has resorted to in preparation for such an expansive war — most notably the cutoff of electricity, water, and humanitarian supplies — are themselves obviously indefensible.
It is widely accepted that it’s immoral to intentionally starve civilians as part of a tactic to weaken your opponents: this kind of siege has, in recent history, been used only by the world’s most vile regimes (like Bashar al-Assad in Syria). If you think about the war against Hamas as a total existential war, it opens the moral door to a much more expansive set of potential tactics designed to facilitate this much more expansive objective — some of which amount to atrocities.
In moral terms, then, the case for limiting Israel’s ambitions is fairly straightforward: nothing it can hope to accomplish with a regime change operation can outweigh the harm it will do to civilians in the process.
In fact, there’s a very good case that there’s less tension between morality and military necessity in Gaza than it seems. A counterterrorism campaign would likely produce better strategic outcomes than a larger invasion in part because it kills fewer civilians, denying Hamas horrific imagery it could use to recruit more fighters or galvanize external forces like Hezbollah to come to its aid.
“The most important thing [strategically] is to separate Hamas, as a military organization, from the Palestinian population,” says Kurth Cronin, the Carnegie Mellon professor.
What force Israel may use, permissibly, needs to be tightly limited and designed to accomplish feasible ends. Regime change is not one of them — however understandable it may be for Israelis to want Hamas annihilated.
There’s a lot more at the link and I think it’s important. This is not a “black and white, good ‘n evil” issue even though a whole lot of people want to think it is. Whether or not anyone in power on either side is thinking it through this comprehensively is unknown. We’ll just have to see how it unfolds.