On the front lines

In a wonderful article on ZNet the other day, Muhammad Ali Khalidi, cites ‘the late Israeli philosopher Ruth Manor’ who wrote of the IDF’s ethics doctrine, ‘the Code specifies that the solider should spare human life except when it conflicts with the success of the military mission at hand...’

Khalidi elucidates,

In its own words, the ethical code states that the military serviceman "will place himself or others at risk solely to the extent required to carry out his mission." This wording clearly undermines the claim that the preservation of human life is a supreme value in the military code.

Taken in isolation, this is a possible interpretation. But in the context of the following paragraph – the one headed ‘Purity of arms’, which I’ve had occasion to quote before – it strikes me as implausible.

Human Life - The IDF servicemen and women will act in a judicious and safe manner in all they do, out of recognition of the supreme value of human life. During combat they will endanger themselves and their comrades only to the extent required to carry out their mission.

Purity of Arms - The IDF servicemen and women will use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent and will maintain their humanity even during combat. IDF soldiers will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants or prisoners of war, and will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.

I think it’s clear that the intent is to enjoin soldiers to minimise risk to themselves within the parameters of the mission, but to eschew violence against noncombatants altogether. Of course, that’s what armies always say they do, even as they drop bombs on urban targets.

An interesting point, however, that Khalidi doesn’t mention is that the ‘Purity of arms’ clause condones using ‘their weapons and force to harm human beings who are’ prisoners of war. Now Article 3 (1) of the ‘Third Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War’ is unequivocal on this matter,

Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

So it turns out that even in articulating the principle of ‘purity of arms’, Israel is content to thumb its nose at the alleged norms of warfare. It wouldn’t be surprising if the hasbara brigade were to exert their casuistical skills to determine that those they capture are not technically within the meaning of the Convention’s definition of prisoners of war. But that would be irrelevant, as the doctrine countenances violence against PoWs, however defined.

The main issue Khalidi discusses, however, is

a follow-up document, which was adopted recently by the Israeli army, goes well beyond this--not only does it subordinate the value of human life to the success of the military mission, it also subordinates the value of the enemy's civilian lives to those of one's own combatants.

Asa Kasher, professor of philosophy and linguistics at Tel Aviv University, and Major General Amos Yadlin, currently head of Israeli military intelligence, have developed a new approach in their 2005 article ‘Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: An Israeli Perspective’ (Journal of Military Ethics 4 (2005), pp.3-32). [Kasher and Yadlin have another couple of articles apparently on related topics: ‘Assassination and Preventive Killing’ (SAIS Review - Volume 25, Number 1, Winter-Spring 2005, pp. 41-57) and ‘Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: Principles’ (Philosophia 34 (1) (2006)). The first two of these articles are apparently only available by subscription – nudge, nudge; wink, wink.]

Kasher [TAU photo]

Among the innovations Khalidi discusses is that ‘...we define ‘act of terror' in a way that makes it possible for the victims of such an act to be combatants, even exclusively so’. For reference, here is the definition of an ‘act of terror’ articulated in the 2006 article:

an act, carried out by individuals or organizations, not on the behalf of any state, for the purpose of killing or otherwise injuring persons, insofar as they are members of a particular population, in order to instill fear among the members of that population (‘terrorize’ them), so as to cause them to change the nature of the related regime or of the related government or of policies implemented by related institutions, whether for political or ideological (including religious) reasons.

Another is that ‘They enunciate a moral doctrine that attaches greater value to the lives of their own combatants than the lives of non-combatants’. Dismissing ‘many centuries of theorizing about jus in bello (laws concerning acceptable conduct in war)’, Kasher and Yadlin write,

We reject such conceptions, because we consider them to be immoral. A combatant is a citizen in uniform. In Israel, quite often he is a conscript or on reserve duty. His blood is as red and thick as that of citizens who are not in uniform. His life is as precious as the life of anyone else.

In a February interview with Ha’aretz’s Amos Harel that Khalidi cites, Kasher says,

Sending a soldier there to fight terrorists is justified, but why should I force him to endanger himself much more than that so that the terrorist's neighbor isn't killed? I don't have an answer for that. From the standpoint of the state of Israel, the neighbor is much less important. I owe the soldier more. If it's between the soldier and the terrorist's neighbor, the priority is the soldier. Any country would do the same.

In other words, in the view of these philosophers, an individual or a group resisting occupation is not justified in targeting occupation soldiers, but a state is justified in targeting unarmed civilians just because they live in proximity to ‘suspected terrorists’. Kasher and Yadlin’s 2006 article in Philosophia is much more nuanced than this, resting on a cascade of definitions and an elaborate, but unelaborated, risk analysis mechanism. But I think Khalidi captures the gist of it fairly.

Yadlin [Wikipedia]

Khalidi recalls ‘the moral basis of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants in wartime’, pointing out that combatants ‘are armed, prepared for combat, and capable of defending themselves militarily’and ‘have intentionally embarked on acts of violence and are actively seeking to endanger others’. It may be worth emphasising the other side of the coin – we civilians do not threaten combatants and are defenceless against them, even if we deliberately act as ‘human shields’.

But according to Kasher,

The concept of proportionality has also changed. There is no logic in comparing the number of civilians and armed fighters killed on the Palestinian side, or comparing the number of Israelis killed by Qassam rockets to the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza.

What I find particularly frightening is that, echoing the sentiments of Bush’s anonymous ‘senior advisor’ on ‘the reality-based community’, Kasher told Harel,

The Geneva Conventions...were appropriate for classic warfare, where one army fought another. But in our time the whole business of rules of fair combat has been pushed aside. There are international efforts underway to revise the rules to accommodate the war against terrorism...We in Israel are in a key position in the development of law in this field because we are on the front lines in the fight against terrorism. This is gradually being recognized both in the Israeli legal system and abroad...What we are doing is becoming the law...

Bloodstained notebooks

Ha’aretz’s Gideon Levy reports in a moving article ‘The children of 5767’ [hat tip to Sam Bahour], that he has spent much of the last year investigating some of the 92 Palestinian children killed by the Israeli Occupation forces in the West Bank and Gaza. On Rosh Hashanah last year, the IOF blew Mahmoud al-Zakh to smithereens.

The next day, when the Israel Defense Forces "successfully" completed Operation Locked Kindergarten, as it was called, leaving behind 22 dead and a razed neighborhood, and left Sajiyeh in Gaza, the bereaved father found the remaining parts of the body and brought them for a belated burial.

Among the other incidents Levy describes,

Bushra Bargis hadn't even left her home. In late April she was studying for a big test, notebooks in hand, pacing around her room in the Jenin refugee camp in the early evening, when a sniper shot her in the forehead from quite far away. Her bloodstained notebooks bore witness to her final moments.

It’s definitely worth reading the whole article to get a taste of what would be described as a murderous rampage, were it not the work of the most moral army on the planet.

'No knowledge of this incident'

"The IDF has no knowledge of this incident, nor has any complaint about such a matter been received by the Liaison and Coordination Administration." That’s what the IDF Spokesman's Office said, according to an article by Gideon Levy in today’s Ha’aretz.

The parents, Sana and Daoud Fakih, had already lost two children to illness, seven years apart. Having known such sorrow, they never left their precious Khaled alone for a moment.

That's how it was exactly three weeks ago, as well, on Thursday night. Daoud went to bed early, at 7 P.M., in anticipation of getting up later to relieve Sana. Slightly after midnight, she woke him. Khaled was having another attack of shortness of breath and convulsions.

…After about fifteen minutes, they reached the Atara checkpoint north of Ramallah…At this hour there were no other cars waiting.

The driver stopped at the stop sign in front of the checkpoint, as required. After about a minute, a soldier emerged and approached them. In the back seat, Khaled's condition was worsening. His breath was getting shorter and his shaking was getting stronger.More long, fateful minutes that felt like an eternity passed. It was almost 1:00 A.M. Finally, the soldier came back. "Open the car," he instructed. The soldier checked the car, going through package after package, the one with the diapers and the one with the medicines and the milk, and so on. Daoud shouted: "I don't have time. Don't make my baby die here. He's dying." Sana's crying kept getting louder, the baby gasped harder for breath.

Sana grabbed the soldier by the arm. "Look at the baby," she pleaded. The startled soldier turned his weapon toward her…Daoud told him the baby was dying…But then the most terrible thing of all happened: Khaled suddenly stopped shaking. His tiny hands dropped to his sides and his breathing became slow and heavy. "Our baby is dead!," wailed Sana…

Just another night at the checkpoint. Just one less dirty Arab. About a month ago, ‘Muwafiz Rimawi, 34,… was seriously injured in an accident at his home and delayed at the Atara checkpoint for about half an hour, until he eventually died from the bleeding in his brain.’

Right to exist? Give me a break.

Those pesky natives!

‘David Fromkin, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, is the author of “A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.”’

As if setting out to prove Chomsky’s assertion that intellectuals are completely subservient to power, he published an op-ed entitled ‘Stuck in the Canal’ in yesterday’s Times.

The article purports to be a dispassionate look at the ‘Suez crisis’ in anticipation of its fiftieth anniversary today, coincidentally, Turkish Republic Day.

…the United States was engaged in an effort to hold the line against Russia…

The Middle East was essential to this policy of containment. The Arabic-speaking Muslim world had been taken in hand by Britain and France after the First World War, and though they had since achieved independence, the countries of the Middle East remained predominantly Western-influenced. European and American oil companies played an important role in Middle Eastern affairs. Britain retained a presence at the strategically vital Suez Canal in the form of a major military base and a garrison of more than 80,000 men.

The esteemed professor surely understands that the nonsensical expression ‘the United States was engaged in an effort to hold the line against Russia’ will raise few eyebrows among Times readers. We all know that it was the responsibility of America, ‘the leader of the free world’ to ‘hold the line’ against ‘Soviet aggression’. And yet, since 1924, when Stalin took control of Russia, with his profoundly antiMarxist doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’, fomenting workers’ revolutions was completely off the Soviet agenda. After WWII, Russia was very much on the defensive. It is not absolutely obvious who was holding what lines against whose aggression. In this context, the kind of Soviet aggression Professor Fromkin intends is the threat that the Greek anti fascist resistance might take power, and the successful attempts by the US and Britain to make sure that resurrected fascists regained control.

‘The Middle East was essential to this policy of containment’ because they were sitting on ‘our oil’. That might be why the beneficent British and French had done the poor deluded natives the favour of ‘taking them in hand’ after graciously freeing them from the Ottoman Sultan’s yoke. Funny that a Professor of History and author of a book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire can’t be bothered mentioning Sykes or Picot and the underhanded sellout of the Arabs, the Kurds, and anyone else they could think to betray. It was all the Turks could do to hang on to Anatolia and a little piece of Thrace, after fighting for five more years.

It is nice of the Prof to collocate ‘European and American oil companies played an important role in Middle Eastern affairs’ with ‘the countries of the Middle East remained predominantly Western-influenced.’ Obviously he wouldn’t want to prejudice our own conclusions by actually pointing out the nature of that ‘important role’. And that insignificant British ‘presence’ was sufficient to station a soldier every two metres along the 163km long canal.

The professor feels no need to clarify why it might be that, ‘As early as 1952, the C.I.A. was searching for an Arab leader to support, someone who would make hard, unpopular decisions.’ Must be their commitment to democracy that leads them to want to support a ‘leader’ ready to sell out the popular aspirations of the led.

‘Eisenhower and Dulles believed that by their actions at Suez they were showing the nonaligned nations that, unlike the British and French, Americans were not imperialists — but the third world remained unconvinced.’ Those pesky ungrateful natives. They never appreciate what the white folks do for them. They probably thought the US had some nefarious reason for overthrowing the elected government of Mossadegh and installing that nice Shah in Iran just three years earlier, or the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954.

‘And in Europe, skeptics claimed the episode showed that the Americans intended to steal the empires of Britain and France.’ Now why would they think a thing like that? After all, it had already been over half a century since the US stole the Spanish Empire. On the leftwrites site, Robert Bollard recently reminded us of the origins of ‘the white man’s burden’, quoting from Kipling’s poem and an apropos anti-imperialist quote from Mark Twain.

Some say Kipling’s poem, apparently enjoining the US to accept the traditional ‘responsibility’ of the colonists of myth for the welfare of the colonized ‘sullen peoples’, was in reality intended as satirical. It begins:

Take up the White Man’s burden–

Send forth the best ye breed–

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild–

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.

Professor Fromkin may not be strictly accurate in writing ‘Within years of the Suez crisis, Britain and France began decolonization programs in which they released territories they had held around the world. The winds of change had begun to blow — and they had come from Suez.’ I seem to recall, however, that the Algerians and Vietnamese had quite a time persuading the French to leave, and the Tahitians, Marquesans, Martiniquains, and others still haven’t managed it.

And, as I wrote in response to Robert’s post,

It is also worth remembering that it’s not over yet. Some of the trophies acquired during the Spanish-American War, unlike the Philippines and Cuba, have remained US colonial possessions to this day. The most significant among these are Puerto Rico and Guam. Eastern (American) Samoa, another US colony, was acquired from Germany at the same time, in 1899. Although Hawai’i, annexed in 1898, was ‘granted statehood’ in 1959, and its people can therefore vote in US elections, it still looks very much like a colonial possession. By 1959, of course, the indigenous Hawai’ians were a small minority.

Although it doesn’t get as much attention as its French counterpart, the US colonial empire is actually much larger, both in area and population.

‘Israel compromised itself through its partnership with European imperialism — providing evidence to enemies who had asserted all along that Israel was no more than a European imperialist itself.’ It’s odd that Professor Fromkin can describe Theodore Herzl as among Israel’s enemies – some call him the founder of Zionism, with his 1896 pamphlet The Jewish state, where he writes, ‘If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.’

‘And its victory in the Sinai campaign — one of many dazzling triumphs — illustrated the paradox that the more Israel won on the battlefield, the further it got from achieving the peace that it sought.’ A curious paradox that the regional bully, after a long campaign of ethnic cleansing, consistently winning ‘dazzling triumphs’ against its neighbours fails to achieve peace. And obviously peace is precisely the objective of all the wars.

In this connection, it is worth remembering, although far be it from the Professor of History to remind us, that today also marks the massacre of 47 helpless ‘Israeli Arab’ civilians lined up against a wall at Kafr Qasem and shot for the crime of returning home after the curfew was declared and nobody had bothered to tell them about. Fortunately, another historian, Tom Segev, writing in Ha’aretz, has not forgotten this irrelevant detail.

A spokeswoman at the Education Ministry quoted Minister Yuli Tamir: "The massacre and the subsequent trial became a foundation stone in Israeli society's national consciousness and imprinted upon generations of commanders and soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces the moral boundary by which to act." In other words, we've learned the lesson. How nice.

How nice, indeed! It’s a relief to know that the IDF has known the moral boundary since 1956 and cleaves to its fabled purity of arms, never, ever hurting anyone who doesn’t deserve it.

On a happier note, ‘On Oct. 29, 1929, stock prices collapsed on the New York Stock Exchange amid panic selling. Thousands of investors were wiped out.’ Happy Wall Street Crash Day – here’s to many more!