The liberal obsession with "collective punishment" (which bothers nobody when calling for disinvestment from and boycotts against Israel) seems to me so much nonsense. All national actions are collective, certainly including war. Israel abandoned Gaza and south Lebanon to the Arabs, for which peace-making they were rewarded with the "collective punishment" of thousands of missile strikes over months. War was already being waged, by one side alone, when even Ehud Olmert, whose whole policy had been to give up land for peace, decided that enough was enough. Israel accepted war; and war is always collective. If the Lebanese did not want war with Israel, they had six years to disarm Hezbollah. If the Gazans did not want war with Israel, they could simply have avoided voting in a party whose platform is the destruction of the Jewish state. Everything else is masturbation. Anyone who, in time of war, is obsessed with his or her own personal self-righteousness, has lost sight of reality.
Bothers nobody? Several (most?) prominent liberals I've read came out strongly against the academic boycott of Israel, including the sometimes shrill and definitely rather leftish Juan Cole; the same with the calls for the disinvestment from Israel. (At least in the U.S., views on the conflict don't line up well with the stereotypical liberal/conservative divide.) I know it's popular among certain commentators to feign an inability to see the difference between Michael Walzer and Joseph Stalin, and I'm confident you are not one of them.
Thanks for the background on the conflict, though as it happens, I was familiar with it. Nobody is disputing that Hezbollah was the agressor in the conflict, and I have simply no sympathy for them at all. I visited Haifa and several other towns being attacked the last time I was in Israel, and I have two friends there. Hezbollah, unlike Israel, is targetting civilian populations, and that deserves the disgust of everyone. And Israel is certainly entitled to some form of military response; nobody could argue otherwise when over 800 missiles have been launched at northern Israel.
Nevertheless, the fact that some sort of response is warranted does not mean any sort of response is warranted. It doesn't follow from the fact that Hezbollah has done no good that Israel can't do wrong, nor does it mean Israel's actions are uniformly wise. The fact that Hezbollah cowardishly operates from within civilian areas means that a certain number of civilian casualties are unavoidable (and Hezbollah's fault); it doesn't mean that any number of civilian casualties are acceptable. Not leaving the area does not make targetting civilians okay, any more than it did when the IRA made the same argument.
Granted that Israel's goal is to defeat Hezbollah, and that their actions so far are actually condusive to that end, I think Israel's actions so far have been proportionate. That said, when livelihoods and lives are being destroyed, dismissing important questions with offhand remarks or simplistic analogies is really inappropriate.
(Surely the Catholic Church also strongly opposes collective punishment? I remember Elizabeth Anscombe pointedly protested against Truman being awarded an honorary degree for his role in the use of the atom bomb.)
The last I heard was that civilian casualties in Lebanon were about 400. Apart that this certainly disguises hundreds of Hezbollah fighters - it is becoming clear that Hezbollah is taking heavy casualties - it means that, for all the thousands upon thousands of heavy bombs dropped by Israel, they killed, in two weeks, two persons for every one killed in one minute in Mumbai or Madrid, and and one person for every nine killed in New York City five years ago. What on Earth are you asking for? Besides, it really is important that the Arabs civilians, whose decades-long hysteria has fuelled war after war, should feel on their own skin what war really means. If I were an Israeli leader, I would be a lot less careful than they are.
Oh, and Elizabeth Anscombe does not speak for the Catholic Church. Nobody does, but if you want to find someone who is more authoritative than the next guy, try Thomas Aquinas.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-07-26 04:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-26 05:17 am (UTC)Thanks for the background on the conflict, though as it happens, I was familiar with it. Nobody is disputing that Hezbollah was the agressor in the conflict, and I have simply no sympathy for them at all. I visited Haifa and several other towns being attacked the last time I was in Israel, and I have two friends there. Hezbollah, unlike Israel, is targetting civilian populations, and that deserves the disgust of everyone. And Israel is certainly entitled to some form of military response; nobody could argue otherwise when over 800 missiles have been launched at northern Israel.
Nevertheless, the fact that some sort of response is warranted does not mean any sort of response is warranted. It doesn't follow from the fact that Hezbollah has done no good that Israel can't do wrong, nor does it mean Israel's actions are uniformly wise. The fact that Hezbollah cowardishly operates from within civilian areas means that a certain number of civilian casualties are unavoidable (and Hezbollah's fault); it doesn't mean that any number of civilian casualties are acceptable. Not leaving the area does not make targetting civilians okay, any more than it did when the IRA made the same argument.
Granted that Israel's goal is to defeat Hezbollah, and that their actions so far are actually condusive to that end, I think Israel's actions so far have been proportionate. That said, when livelihoods and lives are being destroyed, dismissing important questions with offhand remarks or simplistic analogies is really inappropriate.
(Surely the Catholic Church also strongly opposes collective punishment? I remember Elizabeth Anscombe pointedly protested against Truman being awarded an honorary degree for his role in the use of the atom bomb.)
no subject
Date: 2006-07-26 05:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-26 05:32 am (UTC)