This was written to a Jewish email-group in response to someone who claimed "From so far away it looks to me like Israel has acted with a degree of disregard for civilian life in Lebanon that really upsets me."
Dear Ploni
Like you, I am very upset about the number of civilian casualties in Lebanon. Whenever a democratic country is in a war against a dictatorship, this moral question comes up because the tyrants use their civilians as shields and weapons. Often the people have no choice; the dictators purposefully destroy the line between solider and civilian.
Lebanon is a Terrorarchy - it's effectively controlled by Hezbollah. Note, according to Joe Klein, Iran is also controlled by the same terrorists. The Palestinians are also now a Terrorarchy; Hamas uses the same tactic as Hezbollah in Lebanon - they use innocents as weapons. We can even hold aside the fact that many Lebanese families knowingly and happily house the Hezbollah missiles - we are concerned about those who are as innocent a civilian as can be.
The particular terrorist groups the world faces now are often not in the freedom-fighting genre (which could possibly be applied to the Basques, the IRA, or even the PLO in an alternative universe). The terrorists we now have are the mindless genocidal slaughter variety. These terrorists are committed to the eradication of their enemies across borders and time. Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda would gladly kill my two year old son in Connecticut tomorrow even if Israel were to disappear today.
These terrorist groups are the individual equivalent of psychotic serial killers - people who take joy in the killing, who will not stop even if you accede to their demands. They don't mind killing their "own" - as we see with suicide bombers. And they value death over life.
For example, in Israel right now, Hezbollah and Hamas hide behind innocent people to fire rockets at other innocent people. What can anyone do to defend themselves from a psychotic serial killer who uses innocent victims as weapons? On 9/11 al-Qaeda used American citizens to destroy the twin-towers... if al-Qaeda tried to use a plane-bomb again today, what should we do? Shoot down the plane, saving the lives on the ground, or let the plane continue its course?
The former is now assumed to be the policy, but the latter may be more morally palatable - at least we don't actively kill innocents. Or do we assume that any innocent being used as a weapon loses individual rights and is considered part of the terrorist threat?
All of the conclusions at this level become horrible. The terrorists transform almost everything they touch into a threat. And because they turn innocents into weapons, these terror groups are the greatest evil the world currently faces. They are a super-evil because they transform hostages, victims and innocents into more evil. Groups like that need to be destroyed quickly, utterly.
Moreover, by nature of this particular enemy, the moral conclusions need to take a long term view. Halakha understands this in a number of occasions.
Mishna 2:5 in Rosh Hashanah explains that Rabban Gamliel ruled that people who violate Shabbat to rush to save people from a collapsed building can violate Shabbat to return to their homes after the rescue is over. The counter-argument was that since the life- threat is over, there's no allowance to violate Shabbat any more. Rabban Gamliel felt that in the long term, in a future incident, people would not rush to save lives on Shabbat if they would not be able to get home afterwards. (This is why we allow Haztalah paramedics to return home after driving to a hospital on Shabbat).
Unfortunately, war is filled with these long-term goods that involve short-term evils. To look short term in war would mean you could never order a soldier to shoot a man or to take a hill, because the success of the individual act does not measure up to the cost of an individual human life. War must be fought in the aggregate. War is hell for many reasons, but for me, the biggest is because it requires so much faceless, individual evil.
Despite war's hell, we can demand that Israel take precautions to act as morally as possible. They do that, as far as I've read, by warning the Lebanese to evacuate specific places. Why this isn't the same as Hezbollah saying "Hey! We're gonna hit Haifa" is that the IDF is hitting an area only to neutralize terrorists/missiles and Hezbollah is purposefully targeting the innocent.
Another way Israel, and we, will act morally is to mourn the loss of all innocents. We do not champion the deaths of the Lebanese. In fact, Israel seems to care more for them than Hezbollah does. I know I care more about the innocent Lebanese than the terrorists do. That's the whole point.
Note, we don't even want to kill terrorists - we would prefer the terrorists to JUST STOP KILLING PEOPLE. If they would lay down their missiles and just, ya know, drink coffee, eat couscous, get a real job, whatever, I'd be perfectly happy.
The psychic pain we feel at the death of innocents is ironically not a reason to stop the warplanes - it's the reason we need to use them, if they will destroy Hezbollah and Hamas.
My bottom line is that I support Israel's effort to destroy both Hezbollah and Hamas. If my analysis is correct, that they are psychotic serial killers who will not stop killing and who purposefully use innocent people as part of their terrorism, then they need to be stopped immediately.
{2009 Update: pic from here.}
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