Recent events in Gaza, like the hospital bombing today, got me thinking about the limitations when bombing crowded populated areas with dumb iron bombs, like I assume the IAF is using because smart bombs are expensive and hard to guide when dropped from, say, fifty meters. But what sort of accuracy can be expected, given the difficult terrain and uncertain intelligence? And if the answer is “poor to middling,” as I suspect, that would make this a debate, not a general question, asking about the morality of bombing when civilian casualties cannot be avoided.
FTR, my father flew a B-17 in WWII, dropping bombs somewhere in the neighborhood of factories and population centers (high altitude strategic bombing was anything but accurate). He justified it as necessary to win the war, but he also came out of the war fucked in the head from the cognitive dissonance.
I wouldn’t assume the IDF is dropping iron bombs. It’s now rare among first world AF’s. They might be using (a/c) guns. Their armed helicopters might be using unguided rockets besides their missiles and guns. The IDF maybe be using artillery also on these short range strikes, which could be GPS ‘assisted’ shells, but could be unguided shells. But iron bombs from fixed wing a/c I think we’d need evidence of, it’s not a good default assumption IMO, though not impossible.
But it’s still unfortunately very easy to kill civilians with guided weapons. You can mistake the nature of the target. The enemy can deliberately make sure civilians are present at a legitimate military target. Guidance systems can fail. And for geolocation guidance systems (like GPS) the targeter can input the wrong coordinates. Or it can be done on purpose, though I know no evidence that’s the case with IDF and Gaza recently.
Rockets, rocket launchers, and artillery are legitimate targets of war. I don’t think it matters if they’re set up in a field, a military base, or a hospital. If you want to protect a hospital, don’t place offensive weapons there and don’t fire/launch them from there.
I didn’t know Counterbattery Fire was a new concept.
The definition of chutzpah used to be “killing your parents and then asking the judge for mercy because you are an orphan”. Nowadays it’s “putting your rocket launchers in hospitals and then complaining about civilian deaths”.
Regards,
Shodan
The pro-Palestinian comic is manipulative. It’s basically giving Hamas a free pass and saying that Hamas combatants should be allowed to wage war with impunity as long as they use human shields.
I thought these days even dropping unguided bombs was pretty accurate with a modern plane. The target is marked and the HUD displays how to engage that target.
At least that was how you did it on my old Falcon flight simulator on my PC. Granted that is a PC game but being a simulator it attempted to get the details right.
I don’t think there’s any question that the IDF knows it will be killing civilians when it does things like bomb hospitals. It calls ahead, but the hospital says on that call that they won’t be evacuating because there’s nowhere safe to take the patients.
So the moral question is whether it is permissible for IDF to knowingly but not purposely kill a bunch of innocent people in order to (maybe) destroy some rockets that are likely to cause Israeli property damage, psychological damage, and maybe kill or injure innocent Israelis.
I don’t think you can really answer that question out of the context of the rest of the conflict, because part of the answer turns on whether Israel has any alternative way to prevent rocket fire, and whether the Israeli government bears any responsibility for creating the circumstances. Depending on your views of the broader conflict, you may well come up with different answers to those questions which will likely determine how you answer the moral question at issue.
We like to think we can take these snippets and scenarios and remove them from the broader context so that we can at least say “whatever else you think, Hamas is wrong for X” or “whatever else you think, the IDF is wrong for X.” But the truth is, you can’t really separate the pieces out from the whole.
The game has changed now - Israel is actually involved in ground combat in Gaza. I don’t know whether or not the current civilian casualties are the result of the ground combat operation or not … but if they are, it seems to me that engaging in ground combat in a civilian populated zone is bound to cause civilian casualties. The only alternative is not to do it.
I think one absolutely can seperate out who is right in terms of the “broader conflict” from the question of whether the conflict is being fought ‘properly’. In Just War theory, these two questions are known by their latin tags as "the right to go to war’’ (jus ad bellum) and ‘‘right conduct in war’’ (jus in bello). The first concerns the morality of going to war and the second with moral conduct within war.
I’m not saying the concepts aren’t logically independent. I’m saying that answering the particular moral questions about the conduct of the war almost always involves looking at broader premises, such as: should Gaza be viewed as occupied territory that Israel controls? Are Hamas’s tactics morally justified by Israeli policy? Does Hamas have any alternative way to engage in violent resistance? Is the Israeli government doing all it can to resolve the situation diplomatically? Etc.
If you believe, for example, that there is nothing more Israel can do using non-violent means to stop Hamas from shooting hospital-hidden rockets at Israel, then you would think the IDF has greater moral justification for knowingly killing civilians than if you thought that the Israeli government had not exhausted alternative options.
I struggle to come up with a jus in bello question that does not turn on your answers to broader questions about the origins and circumstances of the conflict.
I’ve avoided this discussion in the past couple weeks…but I think a legitimate argument can be made that the onus of someone’s death is ultimately on the person pulling the trigger.
True, but there’s middle ground between not caring and not shooting. If Israel didn’t care at all how many Palestinians were killed, they’d just go all Dresden on Gaza.
During WW2, our Canadian soldiers were the “good guys” and the SS Stormtroopers they were fighting in France were the “bad guys”, without question. The “jus ad bellum” question was easy to answer.
However, if the Canadian soldiers simply tortured and executed SS POWs out of hand (as they sometimes did), they nonetheless were wrong to do so. jus in bello.
So if an enemy finds a way to always surround himself and his weapons with human shields, should Israel refrain from striking, and simply absorb attacks?
If I wasn’t clear, I was referring to the Israel-Palestine conflict when I said “answering the particular moral questions about the conduct of the war almost always involves looking at broader premises.” And I wasn’t talking about hypothetical extremes. If IDF starts cutting out the eyeballs of all the children they encounter, we don’t have to know anything about settlements or economic blockades to determine the morality of that action. But all the actual moral disputes in this conflict–the involvement of civilians, the targeting of homes, the disproportionate casualties, etc.–cannot really be assessed outside of the big picture issues.
