Israel's New Rules of War
October 7th a year ago changed Israeli calculations in ways that are still being revealed. The very bestiality of the event, with its torture, murder, mass rapes, and the like, was an expression of both Palestinian blood hatred and Iranian grand strategy. Soon after the event, the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, described October 7th as “great,” “blessed,” “heroic,” and “courageous,” even as his Shiite group rained down missiles on northern Israel, forcing 60,000 civilians to flee south.
Repelling such a war of annihilation is not pretty, especially for a democracy governing by the consent of the governed, which is therefore charged by its citizenry with protecting their physical and material well-being. Indeed, democracy entails obligations, which are not always benign. This naturally leads to adjustments in the military rules of engagement. Remember, there is a profound difference between imagining the worst that your enemy might do to you and then palpably experiencing it. October 7th left nothing to the imagination. It would have been both immoral and irresponsible if Israeli military thinking did not evolve as a consequence.
Up until October 7th, Israel had arguably an extreme and therefore admirable view on protecting civilian lives and and doing everything in its power to get back hostages and prisoners of war. Even when targeting the most ruthless terrorist leaders it would sometimes use the smallest bombs possible to avert civilian collateral damage, and would trade many hundreds of Palestinian terrorists in its jails in return for just one Israeli hostage. But those days are over. Israel is no longer pure, but it remains just.
Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, must live with the fact of releasing in 2011 over a 1,000 prisoners – including the chief perpetrator of October 7th, Yahya Sinwar – for the return of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas five years earlier. Was winning the release of one soldier worth an October 7th? After all, history is not just large, impersonal forces but Shakespearean contingency, and without the fascistic genius of Sinwar October 7th might not have even happened; or might have happened in a less widespread and barbaric manner.
Of course, the families of the Israeli hostages still held in Gaza constitute an exception to this line of thinking. When a loved one is in such a situation, one can only consider his or her well-being and not that of the state at large. But the leader of the state, charged with moral and bureaucratic responsibility for the whole population and its future, does not have that luxury. That is why the demonstrations by the hostages’ families are so poignant and, as cruel as it sounds, analytically beside the point.
But not giving in to exorbitant demands for the release of hostages is only one thing that Israel’s leaders, post-October 7th, must consider. Another is to what extent they should protect Arab civilians in proximity to leading terrorists. Israel must live with the knowledge of having missed the killing of high value targets in the past because of employing bombs that were too small, in order to avoid any civilian casualties. The assassinations of Hamas military planner Mohammed Deif in Gaza and Nasrallah in south Beirut, as well as the whole conduct of the war thus far, demonstrates that Israel will now err on the side of bigness, not smallness, when it comes to bombs. Tens of thousands of civilians have died in Gaza and in Lebanon because Israel will stop at nothing to assassinate key terrorists. Israel destroyed not only Nasrallah’s bunker but the apartment building on top of it.
And this, too, is profoundly moral - with a basis in modern history. President Abraham Lincoln in 1864 and 1865 took the war to southern civilians, not intentionally, but to destroy key property and infrastructure in order to shorten the Civil War and win it decisively. There was nothing pure about Lincoln’s war strategy. It was manifestly bloody, and many southern civilians died as a result. The Allied bombing of civilian cities in Germany in the latter stages of World War II is common knowledge, and regularly comes in for criticism from intellectuals and other moralists. But it was part of a strategy to defeat Nazi Germany as quickly as possible. For every day that Hitler and his extermination machine remained in power killed even more lives. Obviously, too, there was the use of atomic bombs to bring imperial Japan to its knees. Likewise, every day that the clerical-fascist regime in Iran remains in power is, in terms of lives lost, a greater moral abomination than anything Israel has done or is doing. There is a strategy to this war, that many pundits miss: it is to weaken the clerics in Iran, whose regime is already deeply unpopular among its own population. A new Middle East without a nihilistic Iranian state will not be achieved by the pure at heart.
By its willingness to incur significant collateral damage in terms of civilian lives Israel has ripped away the greatest strategic asset that Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the radical terrorists in the West Bank have: the ability to hide behind women, children, and the elderly. For all of these terrorists are suddenly naked without the protection of human shields. Netanyahu’s very bloody-mindedness in this regard has shown how Iran and its proxies have miscalculated.
Netanyahu knows that there is no modern world. In the Middle East there is only the continuation of the ancient. Despite technology, humankind has not morally progressed, even as Israel has to survive. We are in an age of total war, from disinformation to cyber-attacks to exploding pagers, to the chain-reaction of separate bombs that killed Nasrallah in his bunker. Navigating this world means adjusting one’s moral vision, just as Israel is doing, rather than losing it completely, as its enemies have long ago done.
In fact, the morally significant event of September 27 was not the walkout en masse of diplomats as Netanyahu began to speak at the United Nations. That was merely performance politics by members of the global elite. What was morally significant was Netanyahu use of a secure phone line from his New York hotel room to approve the strike that killed Nasrallah. It was that act that in the fullness of time is more likely to lead to peace.
About the Author: Robert D. Kaplan
Robert D. Kaplan is the author of “Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis,” forthcoming in January. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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