Michael Goldfarb comes out in favor of killing children to make a point. In reaction to news that Israel, in the process of killing senior Hamas leader Nizar Rayan, also killed Rayan’s four wives and nine of his children, Goldfarb says this:
The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it’s not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man’s entire family, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t give his colleagues at least a moment’s pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions.
As Matt Yglesias correctly notes, ”he’s not saying that it’s sometimes okay to kill a bad guy’s innocent children as part of a military operation directed against the guy. He’s saying it’s better to kill his children than it would be to avoid killing them.”
There’s a word for people who think killing children is a good way to achieve a political end. Those people are called terrorists.
Over at my site I’ve attracted a troll of late, one who appears convinced that I’m totally in love with Hamas and totally hate Israel because I’m critical of the Israeli incursion into Gaza. Sorry, but I’ve got no love for Hamas; an organization that targets civilians is reprehensible, and Hamas is only going to drive its people further into degradation, until and unless it renounces violence and begins dealing with Israel as if Israelis have a right to exist.
But the sentence can be reversed. When you advocate killing, not just your enemies, but your enemies’ families, you’re on no higher moral ground then the cowards lobbing rockets into Israeli neighborhoods.
The fact is that too many on both sides view the other as subhuman. One cannot express satisfaction at the murder of children if one views them as children, and not simply pawns in a game. One cannot target civilian neighborhoods with death if one views those as neighborhoods full of human beings, rather than targets who need to be eliminated. Time after time, whether we’re talking about the 1948 ethnic cleansing in Palestine or the Passover Massacre, belligerents on both sides have chosen to view their opponents as others, as aliens, as non-humans.
Well, I’m sorry, but both sides are made up of people, people with legitimate claims on the same land, people who deserve what all people deserve: the right to live in dignity and peace, secure in their lives, free to live their lives according to the dictates of their consciences. There are too many on both sides of this conflict who simply do not believe this applies to the other side. But the truth is that both Israelis and Palestinians must be treated as humans, first and foremost. And both groups can only be secure when both groups recognize that. Until then, we’ll have more massacres, more attacks, more counter-attacks, more solemn moralizing that the other side deserves death because of what they’ve done. And all it will lead to is more death, more destruction, more hate, and more fear.
The following propositions are logically equivalent. I believe both of them.
If a cause isn’t worth killing civilians for, it’s not worth killing soldiers for.
If a cause is worth killing soldiers for, it’s worth killing civilians for.
Do you agree with these propositions?
I suspect that it would be both more humane and more effective to adopt the children out to Jewish families.
For myself, I do not claim any moral superiority to terrorists. I simply want to stop those who would kill me and those I identify with, and I don’t care what the means are.
I endorse the killing of children when killing of children makes me and those I identify with significantly safer.
For myself, I do not claim any moral superiority to terrorists. I simply want to stop those who would kill me and those I identify with, and I don’t care what the means are.
On what basis do you identify with others? I identify in large part based on shared values, one of which values is that it’s inhumane to kill innocent children. If your basis for identification is an accident of birth — if you identify based on race, language, nationality, etc. — then you might identify with me, but I don’t identify with you.
Doug S,
People like you terrify me.
Civilians and soldiers are qualitatively different and the fact that you see no problem in killing civilians during military action or killing children indicates that you are possibly quite dangerous. Did you miss the day they were handing out moral compasses?
Jeff, you had me until you demanded Hamas recognize Israel’s right to exist. Unfortunately, wouldn’t this go against the UN’s decision that Israel is an illegal military occupation of Palestinian land, and wouldn’t it oppose the “Right of Return” for Palestinians?
Doug, if you endorse situations where killing of children makes you safer, does that mean you’ll never endorse killing children? I can’t think of a single example where child slaughter won’t lead to retaliation.
Brandon,
While adoption by Jews beats homicide on the scale of treating Palestinian children humanely, I can think of so many reasons why that’s not going to turn out well that there’s got to be a better alternative than either of those.
jennhi, it seems to me that you can (and Hamas should) recognize Israel’s right to exist without recognizing that that have a right to exercise sovereignty over all of the land area that they currently do. But Hamas thinks that every square inch of such land is illegally occupied by Israel, and that’s not in accordance with U.N. resolutions.
I suspect that it would be both more humane and more effective to adopt the children out to Jewish families.
Just like they used to do to Jewish children whose parents were targeted for persecution by Catholic nation-states! It’s the circle of life.
Taking children from their parents is not humane. It is a genocidal tactic, one with a long and totally destructive history. Two generations are bereft, and one is orphaned and disinherited, displaced forever. It’s a really good way to destroy an entire people, and that would be its working objective.
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Three of Goldfarb’s words tell the whole tale: not like us.
Not like us is hard-wired by evolution (it comes along with forming social groups and forming categories, both absolutely necessary survival skills), and it’s the cause of at least half the atrocities great and small on this planet.
jennhi, it seems to me that you can (and Hamas should) recognize Israel’s right to exist without recognizing that that have a right to exercise sovereignty over all of the land area that they currently do. But Hamas thinks that every square inch of such land is illegally occupied by Israel, and that’s not in accordance with U.N. resolutions.
“Right to exist” implies that their actions were justified and that would also mean that the Palestinians give up their right to return for free. Israel doesn’t want the Palestinians to return, but they also dont want to offer compensation to those whose lands were taken. The PLO went for ‘the right to exist in peace as a neighbour’, which is a formulation that seems acceptable to Hamas.
If you aim for a two State solution you also have to recognize the Palestinian right to an independent and viable State. Israel has never done that either.
The Geneva Initiative were a rather hopeful development I thought, as were the Taba negotiations. But you need to parties to make it work.
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Just like they used to do to Jewish children whose parents were targeted for persecution by Catholic nation-states! It’s the circle of life.
keeps us on our toes,
like a sock in the jaaaw,
like a punch in the no-ho-hose
This was done “for the greater good” to aborigen Australians for ~50 years in the 20th century. Awful conditions as well…
I’d like to be dangerous, but basically all I do to that end is say scary things in blog comments. If you try to put me in a position in which I have the authority to put my ideas into practice, I’m going to run the hell away, because nobody is going to like the results. Not even me. Frankly, I’m a coward, and my opinions about when and how to fight reflect that.
Consider the first wording of my proposition:
“If a cause isn’t worth killing civilians for, it’s not worth killing soldiers for.”
If a cause isn’t good enough to justify a massacre, then it’s not a cause worth taking up arms for. It’s damn hard to justify a massacre, but you can do it.
WWII has many examples of justifiable massacres. The firebombing of Tokyo, for example, was a war crime even under international law as it that existed at the time. The two fission bombs dropped on Japan were also used on civilian targets. Germany didn’t escape unscathed either, as the city of Dresden was largely destroyed in a bombing campaign intended to cripple Germany’s industrial capacity: the intended targets were civilian factory workers, and not soldiers.
Note that, if you’re an unarmed human shield, you’re a legitimate target, even under today’s international law: using human shields to protect military assets is a war crime. If Hezbollah builds a school on top of an ammo dump, and Israel blows up the school and kills children in the process, then Hezbollah is guilty of a war crime and Israel is not.
As I said, it’s damn hard to justify a massacre, but you can do it. I almost never believe in starting wars, but I do believe in ending them. In spite of having learned history in the United States, I believe the American Revolution was probably unjustified; had I lived in that era, I would have been loyal to England. I also believe that United States involvement in World War I was unjustified, and that the whole conflict was both monumentally stupid and didn’t need to happen.
Not much justifies massacres, but I do think that being attacked by someone else’s army does. Over 2000 years ago, Sun Tzu wrote that, in order to win a war, you must convince your enemy that he has lost. If nothing less than killing my enemies’ family will convince my enemy that he has lost, then I’m going to go kill his children. I won’t be happy about it, and I’ll feel sick afterward, but I will do it.
This is an old article, but it bears repeating.
Doug S, World War II has examples of massacres that were unjustifiable, but that happened because the alternative — inaction — was more unjustifiable. Concentration camps don’t make the firebombing of Dresden right, and the Rape of Nanking doesn’t justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The fact is that we define soldiers and civilians as different for a reason. Now, one can take a strict pacifist stance, and say that one never is justified in fighting — I will disagree with you, but I can respect it. But to say that killing a soldier, a man or woman who is fighting under the flag and colors of his or her country, is no different than killing a noncombatant who is not capable of fighting — well, that’s the difference between self-defense and first-degree murder.
As for the question of UN resolutions and Israel’s right to exist — Israel has a right to exist, but it doesn’t have a right under international law to control the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, and some other parcels of land as well.
Should Israel pay a price for the 1948 ethnic cleansing? Morally, I think the answer is yes. Practically, it probably represents a bridge too far if one wants to see a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ultimately, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only going to be resolved through peaceful negotiation from both sides, one that will require good-faith actions by both sides. Israel will have to tear down the settlements; Hamas and Israel will have to recognize each other’s rights to exist; both sides will have to draw up the boundaries they want and then find a middle ground between the two. (And no, I have no idea how to divide things up to everyone’s satisfaction.) That will bring an unsatisfying and imperfect end to the battle, but that’s the best either side can hope for.
Ultimately, the template will be Northern Ireland, which is, of course, land illegally occupied by a foreign force. Despite that, in the end women and men of good conscience came together to craft a fragile peace, focused not on the mistakes of the past but on hope for the future.
Hamas and Israel will have to recognize each other’s rights to exist
Out of curiosity, why does Israel have to recognize Hamas? Israel can recognize Palestianians’ claim to the land outside Israel’s pre-1967 borders without recognizing a specific organization that seems to have been founded on the premise of denying Israel’s right to exist. Hamas is merely a political party, and one that has been detracting from the possibility of a peaceful resolution for years. Their use of Gaza as a base of attacks simply reaffirms some Israelis’ belief that it was stupid ever to have ceded any land to the Palestinians at all.
Out of curiosity, why does Israel have to recognize Hamas?
Because if Palestine becomes an independent nation, Israel will have no legal right to interfere in their domestic politics. They may dislike Hamas, but they don’t have the right to invade Palestine simply because the Palestinians vote them in.
This, of course, is a ways down the line from where we are now.
So, given that you’ve decided some people need to be killed, it’s better that the people you want to kill be able to fight back? Would the death sentence be more or less moral if we, say, gave the condemned a sword and sent him to fight an expert duelist, promising to let him go free if he won? A soldier don’t consent to being killed any more than civilians do. As General Patton said, “The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.”
One place where we seem to disagree is whether or not civilians can be a threat. Well, if you hire a hit man to kill somebody, the law will find you guilty of murder even though you didn’t fire the gun yourself. Civilians are often accomplices and accessories to the killings committed by soldiers. As a certain terrorist has argued, the citizens of a democracy have at least some responsibility for the actions of their government, because they support and maintain their government.* I agree with him. If you grow food for soldiers, and the soldiers couldn’t fight without your food, then stopping you from growing food stops the soldiers. If you’re making tanks in a factory, and I blow up the factory, that’s fewer tanks that I have to to stop. The Manhattan Project scientists were civilians. Once you become an accessory to war, as far as I’m concerned, you should lose your protected civilian status.
* Stable republican government is not possible when a sizable minority of the population would rather wage war than lose an election. Both modern Iraq and the American Civil War provide examples of republics failing in exactly this manner.
Jeff, I agree with you: the Israelis may be OK viewing civilians as necessary collateral damage (in rare circumstances) but it is never acceptable to target them intentionally and directly.
That is not what happened here, of course.
What you may or may not know is that this particular bombing turned a very unusual corner for israel. Historically, they have avoided targeting people with families in circumstances such as these. As a result, Hamas could use their families or other civilians as human shields. To the degree that Israel avoided killing them as aresult, this both benefited Hamas and also cemented the concept that the use of human shields was not as high risk for the civilians involved.
In this case, the man killed declined to send his family to safety, secure in the assumption that Israel would not attack him. (given his writings, it’s also quite possible that he was fully OK with the idea of them all getting killed and viewed as martyrs.)
They may not have a right to invade, but each country is allowed to act in a manner which reflects its own security and the security of its allies. So just as Israel might well be justified initiating a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, they could be justified in either attacking hamas directly or in interfering with their commerce, depending on security reasons.
As I’ve said before, much of that analysis and justification would stem from the combination of what Hamas does and what Hamas says. So long as Hamas maintains openly that it would like to wipe Israel off the map, israel is entitled to treat it as a hostile nation.
Sailorman has a good point – the unspoken fact about the two-state solution is that two states can declare war against each other (or engage in “police actions”) in accordance with international law.
dutchmarbel
jennhi said that she (I presume) thought that asking Hamas to recognize Israel’s right to exist would violate various U.N. resolutions. But there is a U.N. resolution recognizing Israel’s right to exist. The validity of that resolution is not a function of subsequent actions by either Israel, other Middle East nations or non-state actors. If Hamas won’t recognize the validity of that resolution the status of other resolutions are moot.
According to that link:
“Hamas’ political leader Khaled Meshal on Monday said Hamas would accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip along Israel’s pre-1967 borders, and would grant Israel a 10-year hudna, or truce, as an implicit proof of recognition if Israel withdraws from those areas.”
A hudna is not a recognition of the right to exist in peace as a neighbor. It’s a halt in overt hostilities for a specific term until such time as hostilities can be re-opened in circumstances more favorable to (in this case) Hamas. It is NOT an implicit proof of recognition. It’s looking for an opportunity to recruit and reload.
Hmm. I think I can doe better than Goldfarb’s paragraph.
Because apparently Goldfarb’s reptilian brain is incapable of performing the simplest of analogies, he’s managed not to understand that the reaction to a violent attack tends to be resentment and violent revenge, that it tends to bring the most resentful, violently vengeful elements of the attacked society to the top, and that unless you rampage like the Romans through Carthage, utterly annihilating your opponents, the violent attack will not have the effect he thinks it will.
It’s tribalicious!
More disturbing than the tribalism itself is the tendency of those who are engaging in it to claim that while the other guys may be muddle-headed tribal animals, we are motivated only by the highest of abstract principles. It’s become depressingly familiar. (Different context, same “mold that grows on lazy minds“, as Tim F. would say.) The problem is made even worse because the worst bias is meta; people learning about cognitive biases like tribalism tend to become more defensive and tribe-ish rather than less.
(David Brin wrote something well-put and specific about the idiocy of expecting one’s enemies to react in the opposite way that we would, but I can’t find it now.)
I admit to being a muddle-headed tribal animal.
People, including myself, ask “What does Israel hope to accomplish by invading Gaza?” But it now occurs to me to ask, “What did Hamas hope to accomplish by shooting hundreds of rockets into Israel?” What did Hamas think was going to happen?
I think people expect a bit more out of the state of Israel because it’s supposedly a modern, functioning democracy; when it kills people, that’s an expression of the will of its populace and something for which the state itself and the people therein may be held accountable. On the other hand, Hamas has now joined the democratic process, and presumably carries some kind of legitimate authority, though it’s easy to ignore it, since any ruling they do is over rubble.
On the gripping hand, though, it seems that anyone in a decision-making capacity has more hate for the other guys than they have love for peace, which is the tragic part.
If I had to guess, I’d say that once they realized Israel had made fools of them and would never keep the other end of the bargain, they decided that doing nothing would cost them their positions in Palestinian society. Whereas doing something (e.g. following Dalek logic for what-to-do-if-a-hostile-nation-attacks) had some non-zero chance of letting them win more elections.
I have no quarrel with Hamas having won an election. But the fact that Hamas did so does not legitimize their charter to destroy Israel, or does it forbid Israel from trying to stop Hamas from realizing their objective.
grendelkhan, I’m afraid your statement regarding Israel vs. Hamas is not responsive to the question of “What did Hamas hope to accomplish?”
Hamas hoped to accomplish remaining politically viable among Gazans by visibly responding to Israel breaking the ceasefire and (more importantly) to Israel’s embargo of Gaza.
This is strongly parallel to what Israel’s government hoped to accomplish among Israelis, by the attack on Gaza.
I don’t think there’s any hope of peace from either side unless third parties step in much more forcefully than has so far been the case.
Because imposing peace on warring factions by force from above is a simple solution which can be applied once, definitively. Furthermore, it never erupts into a sectarian charnel-house once the stabilizing force is removed.
so grendelkhan, to adopt your tone, you’re saying that we should never adopt solutions which are other than simple, or perhaps that we should never adopt any third party solution which has a more-than-zero change of failing at some indeterminate point in time?
What you seem to be saying is that we should only adopt a solution if it is known to be perfect. Good luck with finding one; let me know if you do, ‘kay?
talk about flattening out the appalling power differentials here. a small example. in a week, hamas rockets have killed five israelis. in a week, israeli rockets and ground forces have killed over five hundred palestinians. the history of palestine is rife with figures very similar to these. how on earth can you talk of “both sides” as though they are equal.
From what I hear now, Israel is telling Egypt that the Gaza border with them WILL be closed to the weapons trade even if Israel has to come in there and blow up tunnels on a monthly basis. People are talking about an underground wall, but my guess is that buried seismic sensors would probably work fine.
Nope, but I do wish you success in your War On Straw.
I’m pointing out that, at first blush, Amp’s suggestion would make things worse. I certainly hope one doesn’t have to have a complete solution in order to point that out, because I certainly don’t have one, and I seriously doubt that anyone else does either. (I don’t consider outcomes such as “the Israelis kill all the Palestinians” or “the Palestinians kill all the Israelis” to be solutions.)
I’m a bit confused here, probably because I’m grossly underinformed about the situation in that region, but isn’t there a major humanitarian disaster going on over there because nobody can get food or medicine in? Is there some obvious reason why the border with Egypt is permeable to weapons but not humanitarian supplies?
The crossings above ground are official, controlled by the Egyptians, and closed. The tunnels below ground are unofficial, controlled by Hamas, and open. To an extent; a number of them have been bombed at this point. Humanitarian supplies have arrived at the border from the Egyptian side, but whether a) the Egyptians are letting them across and b) Hamas is actually using them for humanitarian purposes instead of supplying the belligerents is unknown to me.
Nice to know, but not what you wrote the first time, of course.
Weapons tend to get smuggled through weapons tunnels, which are generally secret. Humanitarian supplies tend to get shipped in via truck. It’s possible to smuggle food through a tunnel, but difficult, and it’s almost impossible to smuggle things like gasoline. I suspect that it is quite literally impossible to smuggle in things like emergency diesel generators for hospitals, as they are simply too heavy.
If you look at the size and weight of an ammo box, you can see that it holds really quite a few bullets, enough to supply a decent sized group of fighters for a fairly long time, provided they’re not spraying automatic fire willy-nilly. That same size box doesn’t hold much food at all, unless you happen to have it packed solid with emergency ration bars (and nobody has those.)
Anyway, in order to feed people, give them gas, and keep the hospitals stocked, they need to send in trucks.
Forgot to say: the people in the best situation to do that are Israelis, and not the Egyptians. That’s partly because they have all the access gates, and plenty of roads, and it’s close enough to Israeli shipping ports. The biggest reason is that the Israelis could presumably control whether or not they shipped rice and oil as opposed to grenades. That makes the protests about arms shipments moot.
Sailorman, I don’t understand your last post. Are you saying that prior to this action by the Israelis they controlled Hamas’ ability to smuggle in weapons?
I am saying that when the border gets opened to trade or to humanitarian shipments which are controlled by countries neutral (or unfriendly to) Israel, sometimes arms shipments end up being included in the package. When the wall of gaza was breached and people went back and forth to israel, some of them brought in food and others brought in arms.
Since such arms end up getting used against israel, Israel has a vested interest in stopping them. Since it is fairly hard to find weapons hidden in supplies that other people have packed, Israel is concerned about shipments from other countries. It is particularly (and justifiably) concerned about purportedly humanitarian shipments from its neighbors, who all have large populations that are very anti-Israel.
What i have never understood is why the other countries don’t just buy shit from israel and charter some israeli group to deliver them. Israel would presumably not be concerned that its own israeli peace-loving groups would attempt to sneak grenades into food shipments. And it’s not as if Israel-as-a-country can’t easily provide enough supplies for sale. Just drive the freakin’ supply trucks to the gaza entry and hand them over there, to the palestinian aid groups.
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