The Israeli Defence Forces’ ethical standards are different from, and in some ways higher than, the British army’s, says Paul Robinson, but in the end the question is not whether IDF actions are moral, but whether they are wise
This week David Cameron joined his shadow foreign secretary William Hague in denouncing elements of Israel’s operations in Lebanon as ‘disproportionate’. This view has not gone down well with some on the hawkish Right, but it has been met with approval among the Conservative Arabists and lefty humanists who think that everything Israel does is disproportionate. Very few of the hawks, or lefties, or Arabists, however, seem to know what proportionality in war really means, or how Israel, in particular, understands it.
‘Proportionality’ is an element of Just War theory. This body of thought, which has evolved in Western philosophy from Augustine through Aquinas, is the framework through which almost all Western leaders, consciously or unconsciously, view warfare. It springs in part from one of the key principles of moral philosophy: that the end cannot justify the means. In Just War theory, proportionality has a role in both ‘jus ad bellum’ (the rules which determine whether you may wage war at all) and ‘jus in bello’ (the rules which determine what you may do during the war). In the first category, the theorists postulate that it cannot be just to wage war when the possible harm done by the war is disproportionate to the possible good which will result. In the second category, it is impermissible to attack a specific target of the opponent’s when the possible collateral damage will be disproportionate to the military value of the target.
That does not mean that any attack which causes collateral damage is deemed to be unjust. The first test is whether you deliberately target non-combatants. If you do so, your action is automatically unjust. If you do not, but non-combatants are nevertheless harmed, the next test rests on the doctrine of double effect. Every action has both intended and unintended effects. If the unintended collateral damage was proportionate to the payoff, or was disproportionate due to unforeseeable factors, the action may yet be called just. If the collateral damage was disproportionate and you knew that it would be before launching the attack, then the action was unjust.
This reasoning balances moral judgments based on intentions with those based on consequences. As long as your intentions are good, some unintended negative consequences are permitted — although not unlimited ones. The problems are that you cannot accurately foresee consequences, and that it is hard to rate them as proportionate or not when they are so disparate. How can you measure the value of an innocent human life lost when a bridge is destroyed, against the value of that bridge when used to resupply the enemy?
This difficult consequentialist judgment links closely with another Just War criterion, that of ‘reasonable chance of success’. To fight in a doomed cause is not proportionate, because it involves doing harm in the knowledge that no good will come of it. So, for instance, any violence committed by the French army in 1940 after it became clear that France’s position was hopeless would have been disproportionate, for the simple reason that defeat was certain. To a large degree, therefore, assessments of the current Israeli actions depend on the degree of forecast success. Those who believe that future catastrophe is certain unless action is taken, and that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) will triumph over the adversary and provide long-lasting security to the Israeli people, may consider its actions proportionate. Those who doubt the magnitude of the threat and consider the attacks on Lebanon ill-conceived and predestined to fail, will not.
Let no one say, however, that Israel has failed to give much thought to the situation. The IDF is in many ways far more advanced in ethical training than the UK armed forces. The IDF operates according to a Code of Ethics entitled ‘The Spirit of the IDF’. This comes out very well when compared with similar documents produced by the British military, such as the booklet ‘Values and Standards of the British Army’. As I have pointed out in my latest book, Military Honour and the Conduct of War, the British pamphlet provides a list of military virtues which are meant to guide the honourable soldier but then ruins the effect by counselling actual recourse to a utilitarian ‘Service Test’: ‘Have the actions or behaviour of an individual adversely impacted or are they likely to impact on the efficiency or operational effectiveness of the Army?’ Thus, the message of the British army’s official ethics document is that, ultimately, what is moral is what works. There is no consideration of the rights of others, the value of human life, or in fact anything beyond achieving the mission.
In contrast, ‘The Spirit of the IDF’ specifically lists ‘the sanctity of life’ as an overriding principle. The IDF serviceman, it says, ‘will, above all, preserve human life, in the recognition of its supreme value and will place himself or others at risk solely to the extent required to carry out his mission. The sanctity of life in the eyes of the IDF servicemen will find expression in all of their actions.’ When, in the current campaign, some IDF pilots over Lebanon were reported by the Observer to be deliberately missing their targets or aborting their missions because of fears that innocents would be killed, the pilots specifically cited the terms of the IDF Code of Ethics as their reason.
The man who insisted that ‘sanctity of life’ be included in the Code of Ethics was Professor Asa Kasher of Tel Aviv University. Kasher is a tall, slim, grey-haired man, lively and forceful, who speaks excellent English. His son Yehoraz, born just a few days before me in 1966, was killed while serving as a major in the IDF in 1991, when I was a young captain in the British army, then under threat from the IRA. Kasher is no other-worldly philosopher. He understands soldiers and military life. When speaking to him I am always impressed by his realism and practicality in the search for solutions. Not only that, but he has participated in a quite enormous number of government and private committees and won a national literary prize for his book Military Ethics. He has also served for many years as a reservist in the IDF. With Major-General Amos Yadlin, he co-wrote an important recent article in the Journal of Military Ethics, outlining a theory of ethics for fighting terrorism. Yadlin, a former IDF chief of the air staff, has carried out more than 250 combat missions behind enemy lines during his service, including during the Yom Kippur war and the raid on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor.
Kasher and Yadlin make two major arguments concerning proportionality. The first is that when making judgments on this issue you have to consider not just the immediate consequences of a military attack, but also the longer-term ones. Killing defenceless civilians in an urban area while targeting terrorists nearby may be disproportionate in the immediate sense that the value of killing those terrorists was not sufficient for the number of innocents killed as collateral damage. But if you allowed the terrorists to escape, the threat would grow and in the long term even more people would die. Therefore, the attack may in fact be proportionate.
This is very logical, but of course the problem is the same as with many instances of consequentialist philosophy; namely, that you don’t actually know what the consequences will be. Perhaps doing nothing will indeed be catastrophic. But equally, perhaps it won’t be. So if you are balancing the deaths of possibly eventually a thousand helpless Lebanese women and children against the capture of two IDF soldiers and the deaths of several more, clearly that is disproportionate to the immediate situation. If you believe that Hezbollah poses a grave threat to the very existence of Israel and its citizens, then the equation looks different (and given their history and geography, Jewish Israelis have reason to hold such a belief). On the other hand, if you consider Hezbollah to be no more than a minor irritant, which lacks the capacity ever to threaten Israeli existentially, you will inevitably take yet another view of the proportionality equation.
The second argument about proportionality is more controversial. Israeli practice when making proportionality judgments is explicitly to weight the balance in favour of Israeli citizens. This is based on what Yadlin and Kasher refer to as the state’s ‘priorities on grounds of duties’. This means that a state’s duty is first to its non-combatant citizens; then second to non-citizens who live under the state’s control (e.g., Palestinians in the occupied territories); third to the combatants of the state; and only then, in fourth place, to non-citizens who live outside the effective control of the state (e.g., Lebanese civilians).
Thus, when making a judgment as to whether the loss of Lebanese life is proportional to the military value of a target, the Israelis will consciously rate a Lebanese life as being worth less than an Israeli life. As Yadlin and Kasher say, ‘the state should give priority to saving the life of a single citizen, even if the collateral damage caused in the course of protecting that citizen is much higher’.
In practice, this results in aerial tactics which are in no major way different from those used by Nato against Yugoslavia in 1999. In Lebanon, the IDF’s aim (to coerce a foreign power by inflicting intolerable damage on its national infrastructure), the targets (roads, bridges, TV stations, and so forth), and the consequences (roughly similar numbers of innocent deaths given the comparable length of the combat), are very similar. Those who oppose Israel today but supported Nato in 1999 perhaps need to reconsider either their current opposition or their previous support.
Not all aspects of the second proposition are controversial. A state’s primary duty is indeed to its own citizens. After all, most people would surely save their own children first from a burning building. Most people also believe, however, that all human life is equally valuable. This doesn’t mean that the state’s actions are necessarily immoral, but it does mean that there is a clash of moral systems, between ‘role morality’ and ‘ordinary morality’, between what is expected of the state in its role as a state and what is expected in terms of the general morality which values all life.
This has important practical consequences. The state may be acting morally in its own terms, but outsiders will not see it in that way, and will resent a situation in which they are deemed inferior. Consequently, those outsiders will consider that the state’s actions are immoral, and hence legitimise their struggle. The result of putting this ethic into practice may thus be increased opposition to the state. Perhaps, therefore, the question we should be asking of Israeli actions is not so much whether they are moral as whether they are wise.
Paul Robinson is the author of numerous works on international security, military history and military ethics, including most recently Military Honour and the Conduct of War: From Ancient Greece to Iraq (Routledge, 2006).