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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
A big set of questions that much of the Israel/Gaza and many other conflicts revolve around is the use of violence in the international sphere. For this, I will postulate one basic prior that informs all subsequent ones. The international order is fundamentally anarchic. Nation-states do not answer to other states, except by greater power of one over another. They cannot be tried by any court, they can only be defeated by a rival. This is part of what national sovereignty means. Might may not make right, but it does often make facts, and facts that remain factual long enough become "right" over time.
Sovereignty, in turn, implies both the right to engage in collective violence against both one's citizens (policing, putting down rebellions, civil wars etc.) and foreign powers. Sovereignty is the corporate structure of the people, and thus they bear some responsibility for it, to the degree of its legitimacy of a government. The key aspect of any government that makes it a government rather than just a claimant, is the monopoly on violence. No government can claim legitimacy if they cannot substantially police the actions of their citizens, and direct the organs of state violence. Power and responsibility are entertwined. Who is and is not a nation has large implications for who we think is legitimate in waging war.
When we map this onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we begin to see why the problem is so intractable. Israel is a conventional nation-state. They have all the powers, legitimacies and crimes of a normal government. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are not (yet?) a nation. They currently have two separate territories semi-governed by two separate and mutually hostile terrorist organizations. They have never been able to unite enough to form a government, or declare independence, or most crucially, stop other internal groups from launching military and terror attacks at Israel (and a few of their neighboring countries). Fatah doesn't even fully control their own military wing, much less Hamas. Hamas does not speak for the PLO or the West Bank. Who exactly is Israel to make a deal with, even if that were their goal?
Ordinarily, if the power differential is large enough and the terror group small-scale enough, we can use the police power rather than resorting to warfare. But the Palestinians are bigger and more organized than a simple terror organization and they control territory. They largely provide their own self-government at the internal level, even if it is fractured by faction. The Palestinian people have been formed by their resistance to Israel into a political compact that they never had historically. It may yet produce a nation.
This does not currently alter the fact that there has never been a Palestinian state. This is a part of the world traditionally ruled by Egyptian or Mesopotamian empires. In the more recent years, power passed from the Ottoman empire to the British. The british followed their usual book and partitioned the territory between Jordan and Palestine, then tried to partition the remainder before giving up and pulling out. There are strong similarities here between India/Pakistan and the middle east. The bloodletting from that split was far greater in the subcontinent, but for other reasons it is the Israel/Palestine scuffle that has drawn so much more attention.
These reasons range from anti-semitism to the large constituency of educated jews and arabs in the west. But it is also because both India and Pakistan are nation-states. They fought several wars, and state-funded terrorism is ongoing, but fundamentally this is all within the international order. Palestine, neither fish nor fowl, is more confounding. Too weak and fractured to be a country as of yet, they are too big and powerful to be policed by others, and too violent to be tolerated without response. Much of the controversy is because the nature of Palestinian quasi-statehood creates vagueness over who exactly is the legitimate representatives of Palestine, and who exactly is responsible for the actions of (Hamas/IJ/PLO etc). We can hold Israel responsible for the actions of their military, and their citizens, and we should. We seem to differ on how much we hold Palestinians and Palestine responsible for the actions of their elected governments. In my view, because they are not governments at all. At least not yet.
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
To the degree that Hamas is not the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, they have no right to attack a foreign country on behalf of those people.
Sovereignty is the corporate structure of the people, and thus they bear some responsibility for it, to the degree of its legitimacy of a government. The key aspect of any government that makes it a government rather than just a claimant, is the monopoly on violence.
If the government has a monopoly on violence, that would remove the people's responsibility for its actions, because they have control over it.
We can hold Israel responsible for the actions of their military, and their citizens, and we should. We seem to differ on how much we hold Palestinians and Palestine responsible for the actions of their elected governments. In my view, because they are not governments at all. At least not yet.
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
I think the tricky part here isn't defining whether Hamas is a government, but definining what "bearing responsibility" means. What does responsibility for the actions of your government look like?
Does it look like "If your government oppresses Palestinians you aren't allowed to safely go to a music festival?" Does it look like "If your government goes out and kills some civilians, your apartment building may be bombed at any time?" "If your government maintains troops overseas engaged in warfare against Muslims, better not work in an office in downtown Manhattan?"
Your definition of responsibility much moreso than any question of the anarchic state of international relations is going to decide whether most find your framework to actually resemble anything workable.
But anyway, the idea of international relations as anarchic is kind of a modern interposition, that would have been totally foreign to our cultural ancestors. It is fine to quote the Melian Dialogue but it must be remembered that it was a dialogue, a live controversy, that there were those who agreed and those who disagreed with the speaker.
The Romans were famously solicitous of only waging war when they felt it was just. Besides the many ritual niceties that must be observed before going to war:
The Romans wanted to make sure that they were fighting wars that were not driven by greed for gain, but were just. In fact they managed to make such claims for every single war of expansion they fought, and when they won, it confirmed their belief that they were in the right: after all, if the gods hadn’t supported them, they would have lost. But how were the Romans so sure that their wars were just before they saw divine support via victory? Part of the answer sounds strange to us; the other half, perhaps, does not. First, the Romans observed specific religious rituals to ensure divine favor, such as looking for omens in the entrails of sacrificed animals before declaring war. Through these omens they would know if the gods supported their proposed course of action. And if they had to account for a defeat, there were often explanations that the unfavorable omens had been ignored. For example, when the Romans lost the naval battle of Drepana in 249 BC it was clear why they had lost, at least in retrospect. It seems that when the admiral Publius Claudius Pulcher asked whether the sacred chickens on board the ship were eating their grain (even chicken antics could be an indicator of divine favor), he learned that on that particular morning they had refused their breakfast, a very bad sign. After trying to coax them into a few nibbles, Pulcher lost his temper and threw them into the sea, shouting “If they don't want to eat, then let them drink.” The Romans lost that naval battle, and Pulcher was tried for incompetence and impiety and fined a large sum by the court.
[T]he Romans were pretty sure they were the good guys even without these rituals telling them when to go to war. It helped that they believed their civilization and their political system were better than those of the peoples they invaded, and that they were doing these subject nations a favor. As the historian Livy wrote, “There was one nation in the world which would fight for the liberties of others at its own cost, with its own labor, and at its own danger. It was even ready to cross the sea to make sure there was no unjust rule anywhere and that everywhere justice, right, and law would prevail.” In his Republic, Cicero claims that the Romans got their empire almost by accident through helping out their allies. “Our people, through repeatedly defending their allies, have ended up as master of the world.” And in the Aeneid, the national epic of Rome’s rise written in the first century BC, it is made clear that Rome’s military expansion is actually its divine destiny: The god Jupiter proclaims, “On the Romans I impose no boundaries of time or place: I have granted them empire without end.” The epic hero Anchises says as much to his son. “You, Roman, remember to rule the nations with power --this will be your skill. Impose the custom of peace, spare the vanquished and defeat the proud.”
To my knowledge, and I'm open to seeing a counterexample!, there has never been a primary source written by/from the perspective of any ancient conqueror that did not find some tenuous (to our eyes) way of justifying their actions. William the Conqueror claimed that Edward the Confessor had promised the throne to him, not Harold Godwinson. Alexander claimed he invaded Persia in retribution for Persian violence against the Greeks (Greeks his father had just conquered). Might makes right may have always been the underlying material truth, but it has never been broadly accepted without a superstructure of morality to motivate and justify the violence.
Might makes right may have always been the underlying material truth, but it has never been broadly accepted without a superstructure of morality to motivate and justify the violence.
Yes, we humans usually find it necessary to conceal our predatory designs beneath a banner of truth and justice. We are very good at conflating our material interests and partisan politics with "right".
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
It's not. It controls Gaza, Fatah controls the West Bank.
Secondly, they froze elections after they came to power.
Thirdly, any analysis where you conclude that the average person holds non-negligible responsibility for something like government of all things must explain what exactly the analyst thinks is okay to do to that person with said responsibility. Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
I've heard "Silence is Violence" enough to try on the horseshoe.
If your government freezes elections after coming to power, and you disagree strongly with the actions of that government, you:
Have the responsibility to resist
Must prepare for the consequences of their actions being ascribed to you
As an American white male, it's perhaps not fair that I'd be targeted by Muslim terror organizations for our government's actions in the Middle East. Especially since I've resisted this insofar as any voter who moonlights as a political speaker at social events. Nor is it fair that I face disparate amounts of interracial violence supposedly as a result of perceived structural racism. But because I didn't resist these things strongly enough, I do have to be prepared for those consequences.
This is not the same as saying it's just or even reasonable for those actions to be ascribed to you.
Yes - and I specifically state the opposite. This whole thread is about what's fair, what's not, and what is the reality of inter-group violence/resistance. For Israel and Palestine, these governments and pseudo-governments' subjects are considered a single group.
How many Americans despise foreign interference? How many whites aren't racist? My guess would be a plurality and a significant majority, respectively. Which proportion justifies violence against the group? How many Palestinians want to wipe Israel off the map?
Those are a lot of question marks. I think the Palestinians should be doing more to vocalize against and sabotage the actions of their organized terrorist groups.
It's not. It controls Gaza, Fatah controls the West Bank.
Yes, this is part of what I'm talking about
Secondly, they froze elections after they came to power.
After they won an election, which is more legitimacy than many real governments can manage.
Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
Not in my opinion, but we can start bombing military targets without worrying too much about civilian casualties. At Hiroshima, we bombed a military base. The rest of the town was just in the blast radius. Not, perhaps a hugely practical distinction, but one with real bite in the theory of just war. As ever, there's a discussion to be had about proportionality and whether such actions make further conflict more or less likely.
After they won an election, which is more legitimacy than many real governments can manage.
It's not a relative scale, and suspending the democratic process because you won is inherently delegitimizing, the people can no longer peacefully oust you if you lose their favor.
Not in my opinion, but we can start bombing military targets without worrying too much about civilian casualties. At Hiroshima, we bombed a military base. The rest of the town was just in the blast radius. Not, perhaps a hugely practical distinction, but one with real bite in the theory of just war.
This is a recipe for far greater death and destruction than anyone would ever tolerate upon themselves, you included. Any such position should be heavily scrutinized far more than its reverse. I think it is immoral to the highest order to declare that simply because a government has legitimacy with its people that you can ignore civilian casualties or simply care less about them.
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory? Because I disagree strongly, there is no way it could be given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory? Because I disagree strongly, there is no way it could be given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
You can disagree all you want, but you're conflating proportionality and protection of civilians who are not present on military objectives.
Protection of civilians comes in two main forms: civilians should not be harmed as long as they are not part of/adjacent to valid military objectives, and that disproportionate force should not be used against even valid military objectives. The first has always had the language that a legitimate military objective renders a do-not-target objective into a valid-for-targetting objective, not the other way around (i.e. putting human shields doesn't turn a previously-legitimate target illegitimate), and the second has always been about the scale of expected benefit and, implicitly and relevant to your argument, alternative forms available to achieve it. 'Discriminatory' weapons, in so much that they do exist, are only legally obliged because they allow a means to achieve an effect that makes the alternatives illegitimate. If the means didn't exist, the alternatives wouldn't be excessive to the alternatives.
The international law objection to using nukes against valid military objectives is that you probably don't actuallly need a nuke to neutralize or destroy the miltiary objective, which renders the nuke excessive. If you actually do need the nuke to service the target- or if the alternative means of servicing the target to the same effect are on the same scale or even higher- there's no actual legal barrier from that font.
The international law objection to using nukes against valid military objectives is that you probably don't actuallly need a nuke to neutralize or destroy the miltiary objective, which renders the nuke excessive. If you actually do need the nuke to service the target- or if the alternative means of servicing the target to the same effect are on the same scale or even higher- there's no actual legal barrier from that font.
You're correct. I was speaking practically, as we've yet to see a case where a nuke was needed by this standard.
I disagree. Legitimacy is not binary, and is mostly determined by the citizens of a country anyway, not the opinions of outsiders. I think it is very much a relative scale.
suspending the democratic process because you won is inherently delegitimizing
I agree, it's just not totally delegitimizing. Many countries don't even bother with elections, is that more or less legitimate than holding one free election, one time? How do you account for the strong legitimacy of monarchies for eons? Legitimacy is not about votes specifically, though in our modern context we often conflate the two.
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory?
I'm saying it was justified by the people who ordered it under all the theories that they thought were important.
Because I disagree strongly
Truman agreed. Your opinion, and mine, is irrelevant. You can apply your interpretation of just war theory to your own use of nuclear weapons.
given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
I disagree. Legitimacy is not binary, and is mostly determined by the citizens of a country anyway, not the opinions of outsiders. I think it is very much a relative scale.
Indifference and a willingness to tolerate almost anything in the name of survival is universal amongst humans.
I'm saying it was justified by the people who ordered it under all the theories that they thought were important.
The moral standards of bombardment and killing non-combatants were degraded with time in WW2. There were international treaties barring attacks against undefended non-military targets and people were to be given a chance to evacuate. This was not extended to air attacks, but not for a lack of trying. By and large, such things were considered unacceptable before the war, but people grew to desire revenge and were fine with sating it on the civilians of the enemy.
So appealing to the fact that people thought it was okay back then is pointless. There are many things people thought okay that we have decided is not, and their arguments weren't that great anyways.
Not a thing. Neither can a hand grenade.
The radius might be a bit bigger on a nuke, let me verify.
There are many things people thought okay that we have decided is not, and their arguments weren't that great anyways.
Everyone who lived before 2015 was not a moral monster. A lot of people put a lot of thought into the moral structure of our past societies, their conflicts and wars. So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here. Perhaps, in our excessively peaceful modern society, we have lost touch with the basic facts of the world and allowed our moral theories to outrun physical and psychological reality.
I think there's a sense of relativism you're missing here. People in the past had good reasons for doing what they did. And they were still, in many cases, wrong or insane. Just like they had plenty of good reasons to use herbs to treat open wounds instead of soap, but that's still insane. So the wars of past societies can have a lot of thought, and many good reasons behind them ... and still be insane.
So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here.
What follows is a tangent on 'all of human history'.
I challenge you to elaborate a non-contrived standard of morality under which most people who lived before, like, the Enlightenment weren't moral monsters?
Under any conceivable egalitarian/utilitarian 'killing people is, like, bad' perspective, they're monsters because they supported ideologies/religions that killed a lot of people for reasons that obviously don't matter as much like 'whether you're protestant or catholic' or 'which ruler rules you'. Neighboring city-states could, in fact, declare peace or unify instead of killing and raiding each other (as they eventually did).
There are other standards! Maybe war is awesome or noble or glorious, and killing the weak is a moral duty to purify the human race of weakness. Even then, though, wars are a very poor way of conducting eugenics, because the strong and weak are fairly evenly distributed between neighboring countries and within armies the strong only die slightly less than the poor do. Also, a lot of the killing around before the Enlightenment was done in large part for obviously 'slave morality' reasons like 'my sect of Christianity better serves God and the immortal souls of the population than yours does'.
Again, it depends on your perspective, but there's just a lot of ways past-people are moral monsters. Stuff like 'it's totally legal to beat and rape your wife if you so desire', stuff like 'the German race are bloodthirsty animals who must be put down', whatever.
Now, to be clear, you can apply the same standards to our time. We're moral monsters too. We torture our young and old with technological confusions, we sell people drugs and fattening food, our smartest and most passionate devote themselves to maximizing the live-length mundane pleasures of the weak. Again, it'll depend on your perspective, but whether it's humans or AI that exist in 500 years, they'll have a lot of quite harsh criticisms of us.
But older people were monsters and we're right to strongly reject the ways in which they were. Just like there are views today that we should strongly reject - if only we knew what better views should replace them.
Everyone who lived before 2015 was not a moral monster. A lot of people put a lot of thought into the moral structure of our past societies, their conflicts and wars. So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here. Perhaps, in our excessively peaceful modern society, we have lost touch with the basic facts of the world and allowed our moral theories to outrun physical and psychological reality.
They don't need to be moral monsters to be indifferent, but there was 100% a faction of the pro-bombing crowd which justified what they did on the basis of "better them than us" and "an eye for an eye", or even just "If it's your government, we'll kill you just the same" like Curtis LeMay. Arthur Harris is a good example, which choice quotes such as "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."
Now, you may argue that Harris isn't out for blood just to see it run, but he's only doing it in retaliation. Regardless, this is precisely what there had been numerous treaties to address in the first place, and even during this time, there was continued debate over the ethics of bombing civilians and cities.
Moreover, the idea that we've lost touch with the reality of war is ludicrous, given that the idea of restrictions upon how war could be declared and conducted goes back millennia who would have been very familiar with war and what it could do.
It's not a relative scale, and suspending the democratic process because you won is inherently delegitimizing, the people can no longer peacefully oust you if you lose their favor.
You've never heard of the popular system of "one man, one vote, one time"?
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory? Because I disagree strongly, there is no way it could be given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
To the degree that Hamas is not the legitimate government of the Palestinian people
Lately, I've found myself wondering quite a bit about the responsibility to overthrow illegitimate governments engaging in terrorism and war crimes. On one hand, there is a lot of hiding behind failed state governments and claiming "they don't represent us" or similar. On the other, I'm not completely comfortable with the idea that random citizens are responsible for their government's actions -- are average Americans valid targets because of [acts of imperialism]? I suppose one answer is yeschad.jpg with the caveat that doing so makes you a legitimate target for American ordnance too.
If the US were to pop off a few long-range rockets (Trident II or Minuteman III, naturally) at it's foe-of-the-month and the claim that the chain of command wasn't legitimate ("the Commander-in-Chief only won a minority of votes in the last election!"), I doubt anyone would believe cries of "collective punishment" to justify ignoring the attacks and not responding in-kind.
So while I'm not really happy with the idea, the concept that if you have failed (or even morally bad) governance you have not just the right, but the responsibility to establish something morally better with more popular sovereignty. But at the same time, that's not always easy (see the KGB and Gestapo).
It seems like a hard question about when (attempting to) overthrow an immoral government is morally obligatory: there seems a continuum between, say, your average Vietnam War protester, and Stauffenberg attempting a coup in Nazi Germany. It doesn't admit easy, morally clean answers.
are average Americans valid targets because of [acts of imperialism]?
Generally speaking there is a hierarchy of legitimate targets based on the scale of conflict. In full civilizational struggles like a World War, even civilian populations become targets (not saying this is right or wrong, just seems to be the way of the world). The smaller the scale, the smaller the group of legitimate targets. Maybe just government employees, or military/police specifically. This is all controversial, of course, and hotly debated within any specific context.
I would say that American soldiers in a foreign country are legitimate targets of people who don't want US troops in their country. If you want to kill civilians on a mass scale, you best be ready to face the same in response.
What about situations where there is a recognized government that has made an agreement with the US to station US troops in the country? Even if that government is undemocratic, my gut reaction is that attacks on American troops would be illegitimate. (I'd separate out puppet states into a different category, though that line can be murky. E.g. South Vietnam. I guess it depends on how much the government relies on the presence of said troops to maintain its status as a government.)
If a legitimate government has invited troops in, the correct point of appeal is that government, not the person of the troops. If the government is not legitimate, or is a puppet of those troops, they may be legitimate targets.
If you want to kill civilians on a mass scale, you best be ready to face the same in response.
I don't completely disagree, but at some point this becomes "Gaza's (failed, questionably representative) government wants to kill Israeli civilians on a mass scale," and it seems to justify a "firebomb Tokyo" response. And that doesn't quite feel morally right either, does it?
I'd say that it feels about the same, myself. The rules of war are there to protect good actors, and to provide a Schelling point that enemies can agree on before hostilities. If your enemy abuses surrender and commits perfidy, then you shoot their wounded. If they hide among civilians, you bomb the civilians. And if they disassemble their farming infrastructure and use it to make rockets to shoot at you, then you bomb their farms, blockade their ports, and starve them out, until they cease hostilities and offer surrender with a commitment that you can trust.
In this specific case, I am reasonably sure that surrender would be total evacuation or death at this point. But if Japan's morale had not been broken by the atomic bombs, if they were continuing to perform Rapes of Nanking with their dwindling resources, and nestling their army inside their civilian population, then yeah, the moral action is to start with Tokyo and keep up the firebombing until the evil is defeated and the threat is gone.
Morals don't tend to have much support or actuality in interstate conflict. We can argue about what is "moral", but the only way that has any effect is if we manage to convince some more powerful nation (the US for instance) to put enough military force into the area to create the conditions we think preferable. This sort of thing doesn't tend to solve much.
I don't think firebombing Tokyo feels quite morally right, but trying to fight a war when constrained to conventional moral standards is probably never going to really feel right. Leveling Hamas-occupied areas of Gaza has more moral legitimacy in my mind than leveling Dresden did.
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
To the degree that Hamas is not the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, they have no right to attack a foreign country on behalf of those people.
Hamas didn’t ‘attack a foreign country’, they walked in and started murdering people. Nobody has the right to do that, sovereign or not.
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Notes -
A big set of questions that much of the Israel/Gaza and many other conflicts revolve around is the use of violence in the international sphere. For this, I will postulate one basic prior that informs all subsequent ones. The international order is fundamentally anarchic. Nation-states do not answer to other states, except by greater power of one over another. They cannot be tried by any court, they can only be defeated by a rival. This is part of what national sovereignty means. Might may not make right, but it does often make facts, and facts that remain factual long enough become "right" over time.
Sovereignty, in turn, implies both the right to engage in collective violence against both one's citizens (policing, putting down rebellions, civil wars etc.) and foreign powers. Sovereignty is the corporate structure of the people, and thus they bear some responsibility for it, to the degree of its legitimacy of a government. The key aspect of any government that makes it a government rather than just a claimant, is the monopoly on violence. No government can claim legitimacy if they cannot substantially police the actions of their citizens, and direct the organs of state violence. Power and responsibility are entertwined. Who is and is not a nation has large implications for who we think is legitimate in waging war.
When we map this onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we begin to see why the problem is so intractable. Israel is a conventional nation-state. They have all the powers, legitimacies and crimes of a normal government. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are not (yet?) a nation. They currently have two separate territories semi-governed by two separate and mutually hostile terrorist organizations. They have never been able to unite enough to form a government, or declare independence, or most crucially, stop other internal groups from launching military and terror attacks at Israel (and a few of their neighboring countries). Fatah doesn't even fully control their own military wing, much less Hamas. Hamas does not speak for the PLO or the West Bank. Who exactly is Israel to make a deal with, even if that were their goal?
Ordinarily, if the power differential is large enough and the terror group small-scale enough, we can use the police power rather than resorting to warfare. But the Palestinians are bigger and more organized than a simple terror organization and they control territory. They largely provide their own self-government at the internal level, even if it is fractured by faction. The Palestinian people have been formed by their resistance to Israel into a political compact that they never had historically. It may yet produce a nation.
This does not currently alter the fact that there has never been a Palestinian state. This is a part of the world traditionally ruled by Egyptian or Mesopotamian empires. In the more recent years, power passed from the Ottoman empire to the British. The british followed their usual book and partitioned the territory between Jordan and Palestine, then tried to partition the remainder before giving up and pulling out. There are strong similarities here between India/Pakistan and the middle east. The bloodletting from that split was far greater in the subcontinent, but for other reasons it is the Israel/Palestine scuffle that has drawn so much more attention.
These reasons range from anti-semitism to the large constituency of educated jews and arabs in the west. But it is also because both India and Pakistan are nation-states. They fought several wars, and state-funded terrorism is ongoing, but fundamentally this is all within the international order. Palestine, neither fish nor fowl, is more confounding. Too weak and fractured to be a country as of yet, they are too big and powerful to be policed by others, and too violent to be tolerated without response. Much of the controversy is because the nature of Palestinian quasi-statehood creates vagueness over who exactly is the legitimate representatives of Palestine, and who exactly is responsible for the actions of (Hamas/IJ/PLO etc). We can hold Israel responsible for the actions of their military, and their citizens, and we should. We seem to differ on how much we hold Palestinians and Palestine responsible for the actions of their elected governments. In my view, because they are not governments at all. At least not yet.
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
To the degree that Hamas is not the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, they have no right to attack a foreign country on behalf of those people.
If the government has a monopoly on violence, that would remove the people's responsibility for its actions, because they have control over it.
At some point the people become the equivalent of draftees. You're permitted to kill the enemy's draftees.
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I think the tricky part here isn't defining whether Hamas is a government, but definining what "bearing responsibility" means. What does responsibility for the actions of your government look like?
Does it look like "If your government oppresses Palestinians you aren't allowed to safely go to a music festival?" Does it look like "If your government goes out and kills some civilians, your apartment building may be bombed at any time?" "If your government maintains troops overseas engaged in warfare against Muslims, better not work in an office in downtown Manhattan?"
Your definition of responsibility much moreso than any question of the anarchic state of international relations is going to decide whether most find your framework to actually resemble anything workable.
But anyway, the idea of international relations as anarchic is kind of a modern interposition, that would have been totally foreign to our cultural ancestors. It is fine to quote the Melian Dialogue but it must be remembered that it was a dialogue, a live controversy, that there were those who agreed and those who disagreed with the speaker.
The Romans were famously solicitous of only waging war when they felt it was just. Besides the many ritual niceties that must be observed before going to war:
To my knowledge, and I'm open to seeing a counterexample!, there has never been a primary source written by/from the perspective of any ancient conqueror that did not find some tenuous (to our eyes) way of justifying their actions. William the Conqueror claimed that Edward the Confessor had promised the throne to him, not Harold Godwinson. Alexander claimed he invaded Persia in retribution for Persian violence against the Greeks (Greeks his father had just conquered). Might makes right may have always been the underlying material truth, but it has never been broadly accepted without a superstructure of morality to motivate and justify the violence.
Yes, we humans usually find it necessary to conceal our predatory designs beneath a banner of truth and justice. We are very good at conflating our material interests and partisan politics with "right".
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It's not. It controls Gaza, Fatah controls the West Bank.
Secondly, they froze elections after they came to power.
Thirdly, any analysis where you conclude that the average person holds non-negligible responsibility for something like government of all things must explain what exactly the analyst thinks is okay to do to that person with said responsibility. Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
I've heard "Silence is Violence" enough to try on the horseshoe.
If your government freezes elections after coming to power, and you disagree strongly with the actions of that government, you:
As an American white male, it's perhaps not fair that I'd be targeted by Muslim terror organizations for our government's actions in the Middle East. Especially since I've resisted this insofar as any voter who moonlights as a political speaker at social events. Nor is it fair that I face disparate amounts of interracial violence supposedly as a result of perceived structural racism. But because I didn't resist these things strongly enough, I do have to be prepared for those consequences.
"I will apply your morality interpreted by me upon you for you-defined-by-me" is one of the most tribalistic things out there. Don't fall for it.
This is not the same as saying it's just or even reasonable for those actions to be ascribed to you.
Yes - and I specifically state the opposite. This whole thread is about what's fair, what's not, and what is the reality of inter-group violence/resistance. For Israel and Palestine, these governments and pseudo-governments' subjects are considered a single group.
How many Americans despise foreign interference? How many whites aren't racist? My guess would be a plurality and a significant majority, respectively. Which proportion justifies violence against the group? How many Palestinians want to wipe Israel off the map?
Those are a lot of question marks. I think the Palestinians should be doing more to vocalize against and sabotage the actions of their organized terrorist groups.
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Yes, this is part of what I'm talking about
After they won an election, which is more legitimacy than many real governments can manage.
Not in my opinion, but we can start bombing military targets without worrying too much about civilian casualties. At Hiroshima, we bombed a military base. The rest of the town was just in the blast radius. Not, perhaps a hugely practical distinction, but one with real bite in the theory of just war. As ever, there's a discussion to be had about proportionality and whether such actions make further conflict more or less likely.
It's not a relative scale, and suspending the democratic process because you won is inherently delegitimizing, the people can no longer peacefully oust you if you lose their favor.
This is a recipe for far greater death and destruction than anyone would ever tolerate upon themselves, you included. Any such position should be heavily scrutinized far more than its reverse. I think it is immoral to the highest order to declare that simply because a government has legitimacy with its people that you can ignore civilian casualties or simply care less about them.
Secondly, are you saying that Hiroshima would be justified under just war theory? Because I disagree strongly, there is no way it could be given that nukes are inherently not a weapon that can discriminate against non-combatants and combatants in a city.
You can disagree all you want, but you're conflating proportionality and protection of civilians who are not present on military objectives.
Protection of civilians comes in two main forms: civilians should not be harmed as long as they are not part of/adjacent to valid military objectives, and that disproportionate force should not be used against even valid military objectives. The first has always had the language that a legitimate military objective renders a do-not-target objective into a valid-for-targetting objective, not the other way around (i.e. putting human shields doesn't turn a previously-legitimate target illegitimate), and the second has always been about the scale of expected benefit and, implicitly and relevant to your argument, alternative forms available to achieve it. 'Discriminatory' weapons, in so much that they do exist, are only legally obliged because they allow a means to achieve an effect that makes the alternatives illegitimate. If the means didn't exist, the alternatives wouldn't be excessive to the alternatives.
The international law objection to using nukes against valid military objectives is that you probably don't actuallly need a nuke to neutralize or destroy the miltiary objective, which renders the nuke excessive. If you actually do need the nuke to service the target- or if the alternative means of servicing the target to the same effect are on the same scale or even higher- there's no actual legal barrier from that font.
You're correct. I was speaking practically, as we've yet to see a case where a nuke was needed by this standard.
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I disagree. Legitimacy is not binary, and is mostly determined by the citizens of a country anyway, not the opinions of outsiders. I think it is very much a relative scale.
I agree, it's just not totally delegitimizing. Many countries don't even bother with elections, is that more or less legitimate than holding one free election, one time? How do you account for the strong legitimacy of monarchies for eons? Legitimacy is not about votes specifically, though in our modern context we often conflate the two.
I'm saying it was justified by the people who ordered it under all the theories that they thought were important.
Truman agreed. Your opinion, and mine, is irrelevant. You can apply your interpretation of just war theory to your own use of nuclear weapons.
Not a thing. Neither can a hand grenade.
Indifference and a willingness to tolerate almost anything in the name of survival is universal amongst humans.
The moral standards of bombardment and killing non-combatants were degraded with time in WW2. There were international treaties barring attacks against undefended non-military targets and people were to be given a chance to evacuate. This was not extended to air attacks, but not for a lack of trying. By and large, such things were considered unacceptable before the war, but people grew to desire revenge and were fine with sating it on the civilians of the enemy.
So appealing to the fact that people thought it was okay back then is pointless. There are many things people thought okay that we have decided is not, and their arguments weren't that great anyways.
The radius might be a bit bigger on a nuke, let me verify.
Everyone who lived before 2015 was not a moral monster. A lot of people put a lot of thought into the moral structure of our past societies, their conflicts and wars. So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here. Perhaps, in our excessively peaceful modern society, we have lost touch with the basic facts of the world and allowed our moral theories to outrun physical and psychological reality.
I think there's a sense of relativism you're missing here. People in the past had good reasons for doing what they did. And they were still, in many cases, wrong or insane. Just like they had plenty of good reasons to use herbs to treat open wounds instead of soap, but that's still insane. So the wars of past societies can have a lot of thought, and many good reasons behind them ... and still be insane.
What follows is a tangent on 'all of human history'.
I challenge you to elaborate a non-contrived standard of morality under which most people who lived before, like, the Enlightenment weren't moral monsters?
Under any conceivable egalitarian/utilitarian 'killing people is, like, bad' perspective, they're monsters because they supported ideologies/religions that killed a lot of people for reasons that obviously don't matter as much like 'whether you're protestant or catholic' or 'which ruler rules you'. Neighboring city-states could, in fact, declare peace or unify instead of killing and raiding each other (as they eventually did).
There are other standards! Maybe war is awesome or noble or glorious, and killing the weak is a moral duty to purify the human race of weakness. Even then, though, wars are a very poor way of conducting eugenics, because the strong and weak are fairly evenly distributed between neighboring countries and within armies the strong only die slightly less than the poor do. Also, a lot of the killing around before the Enlightenment was done in large part for obviously 'slave morality' reasons like 'my sect of Christianity better serves God and the immortal souls of the population than yours does'.
Again, it depends on your perspective, but there's just a lot of ways past-people are moral monsters. Stuff like 'it's totally legal to beat and rape your wife if you so desire', stuff like 'the German race are bloodthirsty animals who must be put down', whatever.
Now, to be clear, you can apply the same standards to our time. We're moral monsters too. We torture our young and old with technological confusions, we sell people drugs and fattening food, our smartest and most passionate devote themselves to maximizing the live-length mundane pleasures of the weak. Again, it'll depend on your perspective, but whether it's humans or AI that exist in 500 years, they'll have a lot of quite harsh criticisms of us.
But older people were monsters and we're right to strongly reject the ways in which they were. Just like there are views today that we should strongly reject - if only we knew what better views should replace them.
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They don't need to be moral monsters to be indifferent, but there was 100% a faction of the pro-bombing crowd which justified what they did on the basis of "better them than us" and "an eye for an eye", or even just "If it's your government, we'll kill you just the same" like Curtis LeMay. Arthur Harris is a good example, which choice quotes such as "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."
Now, you may argue that Harris isn't out for blood just to see it run, but he's only doing it in retaliation. Regardless, this is precisely what there had been numerous treaties to address in the first place, and even during this time, there was continued debate over the ethics of bombing civilians and cities.
Moreover, the idea that we've lost touch with the reality of war is ludicrous, given that the idea of restrictions upon how war could be declared and conducted goes back millennia who would have been very familiar with war and what it could do.
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You've never heard of the popular system of "one man, one vote, one time"?
That's not actually a requirement.
I have no idea what this is a reference to.
Sure. In practice, we have yet to see anyone make a weapon that is so colossal, dangerous, and widespread as to justify nuking a city.
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Lately, I've found myself wondering quite a bit about the responsibility to overthrow illegitimate governments engaging in terrorism and war crimes. On one hand, there is a lot of hiding behind failed state governments and claiming "they don't represent us" or similar. On the other, I'm not completely comfortable with the idea that random citizens are responsible for their government's actions -- are average Americans valid targets because of [acts of imperialism]? I suppose one answer is
yeschad.jpgwith the caveat that doing so makes you a legitimate target for American ordnance too.If the US were to pop off a few long-range rockets (Trident II or Minuteman III, naturally) at it's foe-of-the-month and the claim that the chain of command wasn't legitimate ("the Commander-in-Chief only won a minority of votes in the last election!"), I doubt anyone would believe cries of "collective punishment" to justify ignoring the attacks and not responding in-kind.
So while I'm not really happy with the idea, the concept that if you have failed (or even morally bad) governance you have not just the right, but the responsibility to establish something morally better with more popular sovereignty. But at the same time, that's not always easy (see the KGB and Gestapo).
It seems like a hard question about when (attempting to) overthrow an immoral government is morally obligatory: there seems a continuum between, say, your average Vietnam War protester, and Stauffenberg attempting a coup in Nazi Germany. It doesn't admit easy, morally clean answers.
Generally speaking there is a hierarchy of legitimate targets based on the scale of conflict. In full civilizational struggles like a World War, even civilian populations become targets (not saying this is right or wrong, just seems to be the way of the world). The smaller the scale, the smaller the group of legitimate targets. Maybe just government employees, or military/police specifically. This is all controversial, of course, and hotly debated within any specific context.
I would say that American soldiers in a foreign country are legitimate targets of people who don't want US troops in their country. If you want to kill civilians on a mass scale, you best be ready to face the same in response.
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What about situations where there is a recognized government that has made an agreement with the US to station US troops in the country? Even if that government is undemocratic, my gut reaction is that attacks on American troops would be illegitimate. (I'd separate out puppet states into a different category, though that line can be murky. E.g. South Vietnam. I guess it depends on how much the government relies on the presence of said troops to maintain its status as a government.)
If a legitimate government has invited troops in, the correct point of appeal is that government, not the person of the troops. If the government is not legitimate, or is a puppet of those troops, they may be legitimate targets.
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I don't completely disagree, but at some point this becomes "Gaza's (failed, questionably representative) government wants to kill Israeli civilians on a mass scale," and it seems to justify a "firebomb Tokyo" response. And that doesn't quite feel morally right either, does it?
I'd say that it feels about the same, myself. The rules of war are there to protect good actors, and to provide a Schelling point that enemies can agree on before hostilities. If your enemy abuses surrender and commits perfidy, then you shoot their wounded. If they hide among civilians, you bomb the civilians. And if they disassemble their farming infrastructure and use it to make rockets to shoot at you, then you bomb their farms, blockade their ports, and starve them out, until they cease hostilities and offer surrender with a commitment that you can trust.
In this specific case, I am reasonably sure that surrender would be total evacuation or death at this point. But if Japan's morale had not been broken by the atomic bombs, if they were continuing to perform Rapes of Nanking with their dwindling resources, and nestling their army inside their civilian population, then yeah, the moral action is to start with Tokyo and keep up the firebombing until the evil is defeated and the threat is gone.
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Morals don't tend to have much support or actuality in interstate conflict. We can argue about what is "moral", but the only way that has any effect is if we manage to convince some more powerful nation (the US for instance) to put enough military force into the area to create the conditions we think preferable. This sort of thing doesn't tend to solve much.
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I don't think firebombing Tokyo feels quite morally right, but trying to fight a war when constrained to conventional moral standards is probably never going to really feel right. Leveling Hamas-occupied areas of Gaza has more moral legitimacy in my mind than leveling Dresden did.
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Hamas didn’t ‘attack a foreign country’, they walked in and started murdering people. Nobody has the right to do that, sovereign or not.
First prior: states are actors in anarchy, there is no "right" or "wrong".
The strong do as they will and the weak suffer as they must.
We may criticize, but without a more powerful state to enforce it, everything is permitted. This is descriptive, not normative.
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