So, Aziz (using a name provided in a previous post) chains a baby to his tank and goes into combat - the tank is shot with an anti-tank round, and the baby dies. It’s not Aziz who is at fault, but the shooter? 
The use of human shields is universally considered a war crime.
If the school Hamas dropped a rocket on had not been empty, I’d have expected them to.
I find it similar to Americans, much after WWII, who believe that Japan should have been invaded at a great loss of American lives, rather than have atomic bombs dropped on Japan, at great loss of Japanese lives.
Again, and subject to those limitations, I disagree.
For example, the use of human shields by Hamas is, simply, wrong. It is wrong even if one happens to hold the view that Hamas is a justified freedom-fighting group fighting against oppression.
Disproportion of casualties has nothing to do with the issue. In fact, it strikes me as a bit of a red herring. There is no priniple in just war theory that requires one side to allow the other to inflict proportional casualties upon it.
The issue is whether Israel, when inflicting those casualties, has legitimate military aims in doing so, and the casualties inflicted were “proportionate” to those aims (or not). That question can be determined regardless of whether Israel is (a) justified in protecting itself, or (b) an evil entity without any right to exist.
Not really comparable, as both of those sides took it for granted that Japan had to be completely defeated. Also, invading Japan would also have cost numerous Japanese lives.
The comparison would be with some hypothetical third group of Americans, who hold the position that Japan should have been left alone after its capacity for aggressive warmaking had been destroyed, and America (and the world) simply put up with the occasional Japanese attacks.
Then you’re making background judgments without realizing it.
Suppose it were true that Hamas was justified in engaging in violent resistance against Israel, and that given Hamas’s access to technology, were justified in launching unguided rockets at the Israeli state. Suppose further that there is nowhere to effectively hide those rockets in Gaza that is not near a substantial number of innocent civilians.
What result then? Obviously, you may disagree with those premises, but my point is that the premises have to be considered, implicitly or explicitly.
That is a lot of “supposing”.
I can accept the proposition that Hamas is justified in violent resistance. The rest, I cannot.
The use of unguided rockets agains enemy civilians fails the “jus in bello” test. The test being: is there any legitimate military object for this action? Are the likely civilian casualties of the action “proportional” to these legitimate military objects?
Where the only “military object” of such attacks it targeting or terrifying civilians, the test cannot be met.
nm
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Yes, that’s the point. I believe you are relying on your own implicit answers to broader questions, about which there is much dispute, when you claim to be issuing a narrow moral judgment without reference to the broader conflict.
IMHO, Hamas is not justified in engaging in crude rocket attacks against Israel. But I recognize that this opinion has embedded within it a number of premises about the larger conflict that not everyone accepts.
For one, you’re assuming that the only object of rocket attacks is terrifying civilians. I don’t know that Hamas would agree. They pretty regularly claim to be shooting at military targets, albeit unreliably (using Google Earth, they once claimed). At other times, they say that the military objective is to disrupt Israeli government operations. Still other times, they say the end is to impose an economic and psychological cost to continued occupation–which is presumably what you’re referring to.
I don’t think you can ignore all facts about the occupation and who is responsible and intelligently answer the question of whether it is moral to impose an economic and psychological cost to continued occupation. Is there no one-sidedness of responsibility and severity of harm from occupation that would ever justify tactics of attempting to impose economic and psychological costs on the people supporting that occupation? In other words, if you thought Israel was 100% responsible, that the occupation was absolutely horrible, and that Hamas had no way of fighting the occupation other than this tactic, would you still conclude that it was obviously immoral?
(In my view, the responsibility is very far from one-sided, and the toll of the occupation is not so severe as to justify such a tactic, but that obviously involves a bunch of dispute big picture premises.)
You have asserted this, but I think it is “not disprovable”.
None of your counter-factuals actually engage the issue of the ‘broader consideration of the conflict’.
For example, you have stated that it is possible that Hamas does, in fact, have “military objectives” in mind with its rocket attacks. That is an issue of fact. It either does or does not. That determination has nothing to do with a moral position on the rights and wrongs of the larger conflict.
For example, I may well support Israel against Hamas, but why would that preclude me from accepting that Hamas had strictly military objectives in mind with its rocket attacks - if there were facts that demonstrated that this was true?
The way to disprove it would be to offer an example of a moral calculation (such as that unguided rocket attacks are wrong) that does not require reference to judgment about the larger conflict to justify the calculation. Hence the below dialogue.
They aren’t issues of fact, they are opinions (or at least mixed issues of opinion and fact). To repeat:
If your opinion was that Israel was 100% responsible for the occupation, that the occupation was absolutely horrible, and that Hamas had no way of fighting the occupation other than this tactic, would you still conclude that it was obviously immoral to launch rockets as a way of creating some economic and psychological cost to continued occupation?
Maybe you would. Maybe I would to. But I’m not yet convinced that one can properly reach that moral judgment without any reference at all to those broader issues.
Killing the children is worse.
Look, nobody says using human shields is good. Nobody here is on the side of Hamas. There is nearly universal agreement in this thread, and wide agreement in the news media, that Hamas is a bad guy. Hamas bad. Use of human shields bad. We agree on this, no?
The question is whether it’s ok to bomb a school or a hospital despite that. The firebombing of Dresden is widely acknowledged (with the lens of history) to be a war crime because it targeted civilians. The V2 rocket attacks in the same war were also war crimes for the same reason. The Russians were widely blamed in the Moscow theater hostage crisis because they killed a lot of the hostages. It’s the same principle at work here.
The Nazis were bad and should have been killed; the people of Dresden should not have been. The hostage takers in Moscow were bad and should have been killed; the hostages should not have been. Hamas has committed war crimes and should be eliminated; the Palestinian people should not.
I have offered three such examples so far - that use of “human shields” is wrong, that torture and murder of POWs is wrong, and that use of unguided rocket attacks targeting civilians is wrong.
I do not believe that any of these three require “reference to judgment about the larger conflict to justify the calculation”. All are wrong, regardless of judgment about the “larger conflict”.
You have asserted otherwise, but I cannot understand your argument as to why.
I disagree. The intent behind an attack is a matter of fact. You and I may not be in possession of that fact, but fact it remains.
Yes I would. An example of making such a moral calculation would be the Allied fire bombing campaign in WW2. The Allies were unquestionably in the right as far as the war was concerned; the use of fire bombing on civilians was still wrong IMO, even though (arguably) it may have been the only way, for a time, of fighting back against the Nazis.
And I explained, as I now explain again, that my position is not that conduct issues are logically inseparable from broader conflict issues. My opinion is limited to the actual moral dilemmas that are happening in this particular actual conflict.
I think you’re only reading the first sentence of that paragraph and ignoring the rest. Yes, I offered up the fact that Hamas sometimes argues that it has a different intent. But the whole rest of that post, and the entirety of my subsequent post, was pointing out that even if we take as given that the goal is to impose a cost on the civilian population, that doesn’t quite get you to a clear moral conclusion without some reference to the other issues.
So even if you believed that the fire bombing was the only way to fight back against the Nazis, you would not have engaged in the fire bombing?
That isn’t the question. Read my initial post again. The (rhetorical) question posed by the cartoon I was responding to (the one, BTW, that you posted) was “Which is the more heinous and cowardly act?”
So no, the authour of the cartoon does not simply agree that “use of human shields is bad … we agree on this”. He (or she) is directly asking the question - which is worse?
My answer is that the answer is obvious (to me): use of human shields is “worse”. The reason: killing human shields can sometimes be justified (the ‘just war theory’ test is - if those deaths are proportional to a legitimate military requirement). Use of human shields can never be justified.
The equivalent to the question posed in your cartoon would be “which is worse … the Moscow hostage-takers, or the blundering rescue operation that resulted in a bunch of dead hostages”? Again, I would imagine the answer would be obvious. Note that this is not a defence of blundering that gets hostages killed!
Presumably asking which is worse implies that both are bad (although you could logically ask “Which is worse: getting stock options or getting a bonus”, the implication is that they are both bad, which is ludicrious with this example but not so with the Gaza conflict).
As for the rest of your post, I think we simply disagree. We both consider human shields to be bad and the killing of civilians to be bad, but I don’t think the killing of human shields in this instance is justified. I suppose it’s a value judgement at this point, but if you’re killing scores of children to get a couple of targets, you may want to rethink your methods.
The target was a ball bearing factory important to the German war effort.
Targets who trying to kill children.
Presumably they are asking which is worse. Which implies, in the context of an editorial cartoon that is supposed to be “pro-Palestinian” (your characterization) that one is supposed to think that either the Israeli action is “worse” or that they are morally equivalent.
My point is that my reaction was that ‘obviously, the guy using human shields is worse’.
The issue is whether, in any particular case, a military operation is “justified” under “just war” theory.
Any war (outside of some sort of prepared arena) risks killing civilians. Killing civilians is always bad, but that does not mean it is always a crime. The issue is whether the risks to civilians is “proportional” to the legitimate military objective that risks those civilian lives.
No-one could doubt that “counter battery fire” (that is, shooting at weapons that are shooting at you, or your civilians) is a “legitimate military objective”. The issue is whether the risk to civilians is “justified”. That depends on knowing a bunch of facts that we don’t yet know.
For example, I have heard it alleged that the counter-battery fire in this case is unjustified because the rocket fire in question is wholly ineffective. However, that position ignores an unknown: namely, whether the rocket fire is (in part) ineffective because of the counter-battery fire - that is, that Hamas cannot aim their rockets well because of fear that remaining in one location and plotting the fall of rockets (necessary for accuracy) risks death at the hands of the Israelis.
If that theory is correct (and I don’t know whether or not it is), then a case could be made that killing civilians in pursuit of counter-battery fire is “justified”, as the alternative is dead civilians at the hands of (more accurate) rockets.
However, there can be no case made for the use of “human shields”. Thus, the two are not equivalent.
I wonder if Palestinian parents ever try to move their children away from Hamas weaponry locations that are likely to be struck by the Israelis, especially in time of combat.
Surely they know that being a human shield means being likely to be…killed by enemy action? 
They send leaflets and phone the people ahead of time. Short of sending in limos filled with roasted lamb and humus there isn’t much else that can be done to entice people away from hanging out with the missile launching crowd.