Bombed Beirut
Photo: AP
Air strikes in Lebanon legitimate?
There are moral limits to what Israel is entitled to do even in a just war against a ruthless enemy
As the intensive air campaign Israel is waging in Lebanon entered its fifth week, most Israelis still believe that it is good for Israel. Others claim that the campaign creates more enemies than it kills and weakens rather than strengthens Israel’s security. But even if the campaign is good for Israel, this does not yet make it legitimate.
No one can seriously question Israel’s right to defend itself against an organization that challenges its very existence and threatens its residents. Israel is entitled to use its military might against Hizbullah’s people, ammunition, and activities. There are, however, moral limits to what Israel is entitled to do even in a just war against a ruthless enemy.
When we ask what’s good for us, we are not required to take into account losses to others, except insofar as they affect our own interests. But the legitimacy of the air campaign is a moral issue and morality is largely impartial between the interests of Israelis and non-Israelis. When we assess the campaign’s legitimacy, the interests of Lebanese civilians must receive equal or at least similar weight.
Is Israel’s ongoing air campaign legitimate? Rather than answering this question, I wish to clarify it and criticize one common defense of the campaign.
Israel's right to defend
The first thing to say is that the legitimacy of the air campaign is in principle separate from that of Hizbullah. Hizbullah is an illegitimate terrorist organization. Its attacks on Israeli are unjustified. Its tactic of using residential areas as launching pads for rockets into Israel and hideouts is despicable and makes it partly responsible for the death of innocent civilians.
Morality
Liav Orgad
Was the Israeli strike at Qana village a disproportionate military response? According to International Law, not necessary
First, there are policies Israel should not adopt even with respect to Hizbullah guerillas, torture for example. Much more important, Israel must give appropriate weight to the interests of innocent third parties.
Responsibility
Not all Lebanese civilians are equally innocent. Some are guilty of actively aiding Hizbullah. Others of passively letting it use their towns. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the hundreds who have been killed in Israel’s four-week air campaign really are innocent.
Think of people who are not responsible for anything Hizbullah does, children for example. As many have stressed, Hizbullah bears responsibility for the death of these people, which it cynically exploits to its advantage. Unfortunately, Israel is also partly responsible for their death. Justifiably or not, Israel has killed them.
Moreover, Israel has not killed them by accident or mistake. Of course, Israel has no policy of killing civilians for the sake of killing them. But Israel does have a policy of killing civilians as a necessary by-product of fighting terrorism. This policy has been practiced in the West Bank and Gaza and is now practiced in Lebanon. You can’t consistently claim to have a policy of bombing Hizbullah terrorists wherever they go, including crowded residential areas, without having a policy of killing civilians.
Unfortunate side-effect?
To be sure, Israel’s pilots do everything they can to avoid casualties. But given their mission of bombing crowded residential areas, it is no accident that innocent civilians get killed; it’s an “occupational hazard”.
Again, there is no suggestion that every civilian casualty is or can be foreseen by Israel’s air force. Some are killed by mistake. But when Israel decides to chase Hizbullah aggressively in crowded residential areas with jet fighters and combat helicopters over a period of weeks it also decides to kill a great many civilians. The death of these civilians cannot be dismissed as an unfortunate accident or bad luck. It requires justification.
Following Israel’s bombing in Qana, which killed several dozen civilians, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: “We did not try to harm them, and did not want their death. We do not fight against the Lebanese people. We fight against ruthless terrorists.”
In other words, even if we kill civilians, we never aim at them. Their death isn’t an intended consequence of our actions; it is an unfortunate yet unavoidable side-effect of fighting terrorists who operate in their vicinity.
The commercial flight dilemma
But is it really true that Israel air campaign has not targeted civilians? And how exactly does it help the moral case for the campaign?
Take the first question first. Suppose that a pilot’s mission is to kill Hizbullah’s leader. The only way to do so is by shooting down the commercial flight he is on. Predictably, most of the other passengers on board are innocent civilians.
Does it make sense to say that the missile that sent the plane crashing to the ground was aimed exclusively at Hasan Nasrallah? Can a pilot aim at one passenger without aiming at the rest? If not, can an air campaign that systematically aims at terrorists who systematically operate in densely populated residential areas fail systematically to aim at the residents as well?
But let’s assume PM Olmert is right and the air campaign does not aim at civilians and turn to the second and more interesting question: Does this help to justify the campaign? Many people think so, because they believe that there is a big moral difference between killing someone with the intention of bringing about his death and killing the same person, under the same circumstances, with the knowledge or foresight of his death but without such intention.
Which terrorist will you choose?
Compare two classic examples. Terror Bomber aims his bomb directly at a hospital, intending to kill dozens of civilians and thereby terrorizing the enemy into surrender and bringing an end to a protracted and bloody war. Strategic Bomber aims at a munitions factory with a view to undermine the enemy’s military capability and bring an end to the same war, knowing full well that the bombing will destroy the immediately adjacent hospital, killing the same civilians.
When presented with these hypothetical cases, most people say that terror bombing is a serious moral wrong but strategic bombing may well be permissible.
By this logic, Israel would be guilty of a serious moral wrong if it aimed its bombs and missiles directly at hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians, even if the resultant shock would expectedly induce the Lebanese government and international community to neutralize Hizbullah, but might well be permitted to target Hizbullah’s militants if this will expectedly produce the same result, even if it expects the bombings to kill the same hundreds of innocent civilians who live nearby.
Justified killing?
I do not share this common moral intuition. If we think the need to neutralize Hizbullah cannot justify the intentional killing of hundreds of innocent civilians, we should also think that it cannot justify killing hundreds of innocent civilians as a by-product of fighting Hizbullah. What matters isn’t whether we aim at hundreds of innocent Lebanese or simply know that they will die as a result of our actions, but whether their largely expected death is outweighed by the security the campaign is expected to provide Israel.
This key question is not a prudential one, about what’s good for Israel, but a moral question that requires giving the interests of innocent Lebanese civilians serious consideration. On one view, morality is perfectly impartial and requires us to give them equal weight. (Think about it this way: if God exists and is perfectly moral, will He treat an Israeli with more consideration than a Lebanese?)
On another view, morality allows us to give more weight to our own interests or those of people who are close to us. But on every plausible view, there is a difference between what’s good for us and what’s right. Unless we give the interests of Lebanese civilians serious consideration, we risk treating the moral question of right as a prudential question of self-interest.
Moral interest
That said, the prudential question of what’s in our interest is directly relevant to the moral question of right. If the air campaign in Lebanon is counterproductive from the viewpoint of Israel’s security, or if the same level of security could be achieved through less destructive means (say, by a combination of a limited military operation and diplomacy), it is harder to maintain that the benefits to the Israeli people outweigh the cost to the Lebanese people.
If on the other hand the campaign leads to a lasting solution to the security problem it seeks to solve without begetting new ones, and if such a solution could not be arrived at in a less destructive way (say, because only the sight of such destruction and human suffering can propel Lebanon and other countries to cooperate and disarm Hizbullah), then the moral case for the campaign is a lot stronger.
My own conjecture is that the havoc that the air campaign has wreaked in Lebanon over the past three weeks and continues to wreak with every day that passes - the loss of hundreds of innocent lives, the suffering of thousands of children, the destruction of infrastructure and entire towns, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands - cannot be easily outweighed.
It is hard to see how any local, partial, or provisional gain in security can possibly legitimize such astronomical devastation. It therefore seems that the legitimacy of the air campaign depends crucially on whether it leads to a global, comprehensive, and lasting solution to Israel’s northern security problem.
Hanoch Sheinman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rice University, Texas, USA, where he teaches legal philosophy and ethics
