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Tough Love: The Moral Choices in the Gaza War
By Haim Watzman / January 6, 2009
One series of questions posed to Israeli soldiers in discussions of war ethics goes something like this: If you were ordered to blow up a house where a terrorist commander was hiding, and you had reason to believe that enemy civilians were in the house, should the order be refused? If you were ordered to blow up the house and you were told that an Israeli soldier was being held hostage in the house, should you agree to do so? If you were ordered to blow up the house and your father was being held hostage there, would you obey? 
These hypotheticals are telling because they assume a moral instinct that journalists and commentators often forget, dismiss, or explicitly condemn: that all lives are not equal. But, as Sahil Mahtani points out, that’s the way the numbers work when we are talking about war and defense. And as Ross Dothat notes, rules about war will be useless—in fact, pernicious—if they does not take into account the realities of the moral choices faced not by armchair theorists but by leaders, commanders, and combatants charged with protecting their societies, soldiers, and friends. That all lives are equal is a fundamental principle of law in Western societies, and rightly so. A government cannot be just if it values the life of some citizens over the lives of others without due cause. But when faced with the life-and-death situations involving survival and war, this principle breaks down. Closeness makes a difference when we value lives. If I am told that an Eskimo is hanging from an Alaskan cliff and that a rescue operation would require risking the lives of a dozen alpinists, I could consider the case more or less dispassionately and might suggest that it is not reasonable to for twelve men and women to face death in order to save one man. If the person hanging from the cliff is someone I know and feel close to, I might point out that the members of the rescue team freely chose a risky profession and that they must rescue my poor friend. If the victim is my son, I would accept no moral calculus at all—no effort and no risk would be in any way equal to my son’s life. This instinct of ours is not the vestige of primitive tribalism, a prejudice we should seek to cure ourselves of. It lies at the very core of our humanity and our ability to forge human relationships, communities, and cultures. We should not be surprised, then, that most Israelis are not moved by the fact that hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in their country’s attack on the Gaza Strip as compared to only a handful of Israelis by Hamas rockets. Nor should we be surprised that many Palestinians are unmoved by the prospect that one of those rockets might strike a school, hospital, or supermarket and kill dozens of Israelis. If a high death toll on the other side brings peace, security, and justice to my people, most Israelis and Palestinians will tell you straight out, then it’s a price worth paying. The mistake both sides make, the mistake that keeps the Israel-Palestine conflict going, is the assumption that death and destruction will in fact produce peace, security, and justice. In abstract terms, the Palestinians have every right to use force to defend themselves and to seek to right the wrongs they have suffered. And Israel has every right to use force to defend its population and its existence. Both sides err in their valuation of the efficacy of force, in their belief that violence can achieve their goals. But if Palestinians blow up a bunch of buses, killing and maiming hundreds of Jews, yet do not achieve their goals, can that ever be forgiven? And if Israel kills hundreds in Gaza only to return, in the end, to a modus vivendi not all that much different from the one before the invasion, how can they claim that those Palestinian deaths were collateral damage in a justified military operation? In fact, the reason Israelis condemn Palestinian violence so vociferously, and the reason Palestinians Israeli aggression so stridently, is that we both see the other side’s violence not just as bloody but as futile. Seeing the solidarity, determination, and fundamental justice on our own side, we cannot conceive of how a reasonable enemy could think that violence could achieve his goals. Therefore, we see violence with a justifiable purpose on our side, and gratuitous violence on the other. Preaching to the Palestinians about the turpitude of launching missiles against Israel will get us nowhere, and neither will preaching to the Israelis about the incommensurability of the Palestinian versus the Israeli death toll. Leaders, and citizens, on both sides are quite right and justified in valuing the lives of their countrymen over the lives of their enemies. Moral condescension from writers outside the war zone whose families, friends, and fellow-citizens are not at risk will not change any minds. If I’m to persuade my fellow-Israelis that this war is useless and wrong, the only way to do it is to show them that we are shedding blood and getting little or nothing in return. That may sound callous to the referees on the sidelines, but I’m not ashamed to say that I love my son more than my friends, my friends more than my fellow-Israelis, and my fellow-Israelis more than my enemies. What kind of father, friend, and Israeli would I be otherwise? Read more by Haim at South Jerusalem
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It’s rich to hear Watzman speak scornfully of "armchair theorists" presuming to pass judgment on the moral choices made by those facing combat, then to play the armchair theorist himself.
"The mistake both sides make, the mistake that keeps the Israel-Palestine conflict going, is the assumption that death and destruction will in fact produce peace, security, and justice."Â
"Death and destruction, oh my!" Listen, Dorothy, sometimes death and destruction do in fact produce "peace, security and justice". It’s one side’s heeding the equivocators, the second guessers, the moralizers, listening to inane preachers of moderation, of "proportional" or "measured" response, as Israel unwisely has done — as if war weren’t in itself immoderate and amoral – which turns decisive victories into far more costly wars of attrition.  If Korea and Vietnam have taught us anything, it’s that limited war is equivocal war, the coward’s war, the failure’s war.
What’s truly nauseating about the "give peace a chance" punditry is its sanctimonious arrogance born of chronic historical amnesia.  The first peaceful solutions began 60 years ago, when the Palestinians were offered partition, i.e. a two-state solution. The Arabs responded with 60 years of murder, treachery, stupidity and corruption, which have only succeeded in bringing them back where they started – sixty bloody wasted years!  There was Begin and Sadat. There was Arafat-Rabin.  There were the Oslo Accords.  Then, the pullout from Gaza…. Oh no, Israel has never given peace a chance.
"Both sides err in their valuation of the efficacy of force, in their belief that violence can achieve their goals."
Folks like Watzman talk as if the military option is Israel’s default response, when in fact, restraint, patience, forebearance and taking it on the chin on the advice of sob sisters on the sideline has been the true history. They talk as if the military "option" against Lebanon and Gaza is business as usual, instead of the extraordinary response to relentless provocation by Isreal’s would-be annihilators.Â
When will this pompous hectoring of Israel end? As long as there are adolescents, academics and pundits in need of showcasing their superior sensibilities at the expense of honesty, and a media intent on milking strife while piously calling for peace in their op-eds, probably never.
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WWSD? (What Would Spock Do?)
 No, we most certainly should not be getting our ethics from big-budget commercial sci-fi films. Still, it can sometimes be enlightening to see what the screenwriters have to say (often distilled & simplified from such worthy texts as Ethics of the Fathers or the Torah).
 In Star Trek II, Spock (played by Jewish actor Leonard Nimoy) justifying his act of self-sacrifice – which led to his (temporary, of course) death – told Kirk "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few … or one."
Then, just one sequel later (Star Trek III), Capt. Kirk (played by Jewish actor William Shatner) justified his own sacrifices (the destruction of the Enterprise, the death of his son, the risking of the lives of the Enterprise crew including himself) by contradicting Spock : "The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many".
This is textbook Star Trek philosophy discourse. Spock representing pure logic. Kirk representing pure emotion. And neither of them being entirely correct.
My problem with your argument is that you’re comparing Israeli public opinion with Palestinian public opinion. While the first one matters in Democratic Israel (without popular support, the military operation would simply not take off), while the latter is, from what we observe as the military struggle continues, a non-issue to the ruling and fighting faction on the Palestinian side, the Hammas. They do not fire rockets to achieve peace or justice, and they do not accept Israeli casualties because it is a fair price to pay for the safety of their own people. Heck, we’ve seen as the struggle continues more and more examples of how little the Hammas values the lives of its people!
The core of the issue is that in the long run, there is no point in negotiationing with the Hammas. They represent a foreign faction in the area, that uses the Palestinian cause as a means to a different end, which is the end of the secular west’s foothold in the region, and this is one goal Israel must make sure will never be achievable
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