naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
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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.
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?
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.
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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.
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?
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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