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The Goldstone Illusion: What the UN Report Gets Wrong about Gaza and War

[New Republic] Moshe Halbertal - In 2000, I was asked by the Israel Defense Forces to join a group of philosophers, lawyers, and generals for the purpose of drafting the army's ethics code. The aim of the IDF ethics code is to strike a coherent and morally plausible position that provides Israel with the effective tools to protect its citizens and win the war while also setting the proper moral limits that have to be met while legitimately securing its citizens. Three principles are articulated in the IDF code concerning moral behavior in war. The first is the principle of necessity. It requires that force be used solely for the purposes of accomplishing the mission. If, for example, a soldier has to break down the door of a home in order to search for a suspected terrorist, he has no right to smash the TV set on his way in. The second principle articulated in the code is the principle of distinction. It is an absolute prohibition on the intentional targeting of noncombatants. In the first minutes of the war, Israel targeted Hamas police, killing dozens. Goldstone's accusation that targeting of the police forces automatically constitutes an attack on noncombatants represents a gross misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict. Israeli intelligence claims that it has clear proof that in Gaza the police force was just a way of putting combatants on the payroll of the state, while basically assigning them clear military roles. The third principle is proportionality, that the foreseeable collateral death of civilians will be proportionate to the military advantage that will be achieved by eliminating the target. The IDF code states that soldiers have to do their utmost to avoid the harming of civilians. The claim that Israel intentionally targeted civilians as a policy of war is false and slanderous. To create standards of morality in war that leave a state without the means of legitimate self-protection is politically foolish and morally problematic; but real answers to these real problems cannot be found in the Goldstone report. What methods can Israel legitimately apply in the defense of its citizens when more lethal and accurate missiles strike the center of Tel Aviv, causing hundreds of civilian deaths? The writer is a professor of philosophy at Hebrew University and the Gruss Professor at New York University School of Law.
2009-11-06 06:00:00
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