Thursday, November 16, 2023
Elder of ZiyonThe Geneva Conventions of 1949 are quite brilliant. They balance the rights of civilians with the needs of the armed forces. They protect the innocent but do not make an army's job impossible.
They were written with input from humanitarian and military experts after World War II. They are considered customary international law nowadays, even for those who did not sign them.
Israel is adhering to the Geneva Conventions in every aspect in this Gaza war. Waving your hands and saying "children are being killed!" is not an argument. Every single attack has a specific target and a specific goal. Every single attack is weighed between the expected military advantage and the expected casualties.
And Israel has attacked roughly 15,000 targets.
Even if Hamas' casualty numbers are accurate - and previous wars show that usually the ratio of terrorists killed to civilians is higher than in any conflicts in history in urban areas - - that's less than one death per for each attack. That is hardly evidence for a policy of wanton killing!
Not to sound trite, but if you do not know what Israeli intelligence says about a target, and you do not know the military value of the target, you cannot say the attack is disproportionate. You can say it is tragic, you can call it unfair, but you cannot say it violates either international law or morality unless you know what was being targeted. You need both sides of the equation before making an accusation.
In Gaza, most of the targets are hidden. They are underground. Israel relies on intelligence to know what to hit. It is not going to share that intel with the world, nor is it obligated to, for obvious reasons. But according to the laws of armed conflict, , IDF commanders have to weigh what a reasonable military commander would do with the information they have at the moment of attack - knowledge of both the value of the target and the expected civilian loss.
That is international law. And that is the only moral choice. Because allowing Hamas to continue to exist, and to have fighting capability, is profoundly immoral.
If you are assuming that the IDF, with the massive amounts of information it gathers about every square meter of Gaza from SIGINT, HUMINT, IMINT and OSINT collated and cross checked in huge databases, is purposefully targeting civilians, or that they are recklessly endangering civilians for no good reason, and shooting very expensive smart weapons at apartment buildings without warning just for fun or without knowing the target underneath - I'm sorry, but you are simply an antisemite. Because any sane observer would see that Israel is a professional army, with multiple layers of oversight (including multiple layers of legal experts) and a very sophisticated integrated system for finding and firing at targets. It is not a two year old baby throwing a temper tantrum.
But some people cannot conceive of that.
Yes, the optics of thousands of dead Gazans is terrible. Israel knows this better than anyone - because it is on the receiving end of the world's wrath. It has zero incentive to kill Gaza civilians. It doesn't help the war effort. On the contrary, civilian casualties makes thee IDF's job harder. It has every incentive to save civilians.
The only party with incentive to see Gaza civilians dead is Hamas. This is exactly why they choose to place their military centers and bunkers and tunnels in and under schools and hospitals and apartment buildings. Denying that is denying reality.
And we know that Hamas has attacked their own people many times over the years. Sometimes accidentally with errant rockets (which they blame on Israel) and sometimes on purpose . Just yesterday a former USAID leader in Gaza said he has first hand knowledge of Hamas shooting civilians trying to escape a war zone in 2014. And there have been several reports of Hamas shooting at civilians fleeing from the north of Gaza to safety. Hams warned the people not to go from the start. So who has incentive to shoot them if they decide to flee?
This is the reality. And Israel will do whatever it takes - within the law and its own moral code that goes way beyond the law - to accomplish its mission.
If you want to see Israel fail in its mission to destroy Hamas, especially after October 7, then you are the one with a defective moral code.
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