Yesterday I got into a comments war with Eamonn McDonagh over this post, in which Eamonn addresses the harrowing accounts of IDF misconduct during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. It was an unsatisfying exchange, and I take my share of responsibility for letting the tone get out of hand. But I stand by my charge that Eamonn’s post is cavalier, his arguments unpersuasive.
There has been much talk in the press in recent days relating to “revelations” about the behavior of some members of the IDF in Gaza. I put the word revelations in brackets above because nobody who knows anything about warfare can have imagined that sending large numbers of well-equipped combat troops to fight against irregulars in built up areas was going to produce anything but a significant number of civilian deaths.
That’s right, and that’s exactly why I opposed the Gaza incursion, because I knew it would cause a significant number of civilian deaths. During the operation itself, Eamonn and others were making a different case, assuring us that Israel was doing its utmost to prevent and avoid civilian casualties. So apparently it was he who believed a significant number of such casualties could in fact be avoided (and the deaths that did result could all be blamed on Hamas’s human-shield practices).
All armies depend for their effectiveness on channeling the most aggressive and brutal instincts of large groups of young men and, therefore, there can be little real surprise that some members of the IDF appear not to have taken sufficient care to protect the lives of civilians and to have damaged and destroyed civilian property just because they had the opportunity to do so with impunity. It is to be hoped that this story in Haaretz serves to see any abuses or crimes investigated and the guilty punished.
Ok, so Eamonn calls for investigation and punishment. Good. But “not taking sufficient care to protect the lives of civilians” is about the mildest possible way to put it. In fact, we read about the cold targeting of civilians by Israeli sniper fire. We read of those Israeli soldiers who went so far as to advertise their contempt for Palestinian life on t-shirts. Move on, suggests Eamonn; who could be surprised? But again, this is not the argument he made during the war. Rather, he seemed convinced that the IDF wouldn’t do such things. Now he chastises others — including me — for failing to adopt the necessary tough-mindedness about war and violence.
In any case, the fact that the accounts are not surprising does not render them any less disgusting.
The armies of the UK, the USA, Canada and the Netherlands are engaged in large-scale operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Any infantry unit from these countries that finds itself in difficulties immediately summons air support. What this means in practice is that large bombs are dropped on the area from which the European or North American forces are being fired on. This area may also be raked with fire from helicopter gunships. As warfare is an uncertain and confusing business, this constant resort to airpower regularly results in the death of large numbers of civilians. This loss of civilian life is reported in the press in Europe and North American and there appears the occasional op-ed piece lamenting it. Not much more than that. One sees little evidence of anyone being shocked or surprised.
Actually, in the case of Afghanistan, civilian deaths from airstrikes have prompted heated and continuous protest even from the pro-American Afghan government. This has resulted not only in very public shows of remorse on the part of coalition forces at the highest level, but also extensive review of military and political strategy in the region. Moreover, coalition forces in Afghanistan do not wear t-shirts that glory in the idea of killing pregnant Afghan women. No U.S. soldier has given an interview saying something like this: “What’s great about [Afghanistan] — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can simply shoot him.”
Few find it odd that, given a choice between risking their own lives and risking those of civilians, British, Canadian, Dutch and American soldiers decide they’d rather go on living and call in an F16 to destroy the location they are being fired on from or, for that matter, that they shoot the unidentified individual approaching their position in case he turns out to be a suicide bomber. In due course we’ll find out about acts of vandalism and insults to religion of the enemy too, because that’s what war is like.
No, that’s what war crimes are like.
Yes, multinational troops in Afghanistan sometimes make reasoned decisions that result in civilian deaths. But the Haaretz allegations rise to a different level, one in which a culture of outright contempt for Palestinian life leads inexorably to the committing of war crimes. Those conditions do not exist in Afghanistan. What’s more, Ethan Bronner
wrote yesterday on how the religious-nationalist settler ideology of Brig. Gen. Avichai Rontzki is gaining greater influence among some IDF battalions. In other contexts, Eamonn has rightly and eloquently
denounced the militant settler movement. But the fact that ideologues of that stripe recently ran amok during an offensive that Eamonn supported? “That’s what war is like,” Eamonn tells us.
When Israeli soldiers behave in a similar manner the reaction is different. There is much talk of “the truth coming out” and such like. Why the difference? Perhaps because for many commentators it’s only permissible for the Jews to have a state and an army if that state and that army comply with standards of behavior far higher than that required of other states, including their own. Any failure to live up to these standards tends to be taken as evidence of the basic illegitimacy of the Zionist enterprise.
Of course, there are those anti-Zionist (as well as antisemitic) opportunists who pounce on every account of Israeli brutality in order to advance their agenda. I continue to stand with Eamonn and others in opposing these ideologues of the extreme left and right. But that battle cannot blind us to the need to hold Israel accountable to universal human rights standards — not “higher standards,” but non-negotiable standards applied to every conflict.
Concluding his case that a double standard is at work, Eamonn writes:
Our own armed forces can be permitted and, if the need arises, forgiven for the killing of civilians and the destruction of their property in campaigns being carried out thousands of miles from our shores while we luxuriate in phony outrage occasioned by similar behavior on the part of Israelis fighting a short bus ride from their front doors in operations against an organization which is determined to liquidate their independence and which enjoys the support of a neighboring militant theocracy, a state that daily roars its determination to have done with the “Zionist entity” – and which is making rapid strides towards acquiring the means to make its dreams come true.
Yes, Hamas is a terrible, destructive force in the region; yes, Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas attacks. But there is nothing “phony” about my outrage at IDF abuses. And I’d remind Eamonn of the torture policies and other abuses carried out by the U.S. under Bush and Cheney that generated a huge outcry among many Americans — those of us who precisely did not feel that such abuses could be permitted or forgiven, even if we could accept in principle the U.S.’s right to defend against terror attacks. It is baseless and dead wrong to say that we are condemning in Israel what we forgave in America.
