naraburns nihil supernum
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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 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.
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.
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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.
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.
/images/16974787653048427.webp
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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