“The Most Moral Army in the World”

When the Israeli army embarked on its offensive in Gaza the political and military leadership must surely have foreseen the death and devastation that would ensue.  The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, and it would have been evident to Israeli leaders that a large-scale military adventure there would lead to large numbers of civilian casualties.  But what the Israeli leadership also knew was that their military was guided by a new “ethical code” in Gaza, one that explicitly attaches less value to the lives of Palestinian noncombatants than Israeli combatants, which would have the inevitable effect of increasing civilian casualties even further.

According to the latest figures released by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Israel’s war on Gaza left 1415 people dead, 1190 of whom were civilians, including 319 minors under the age of 18.  That would put the proportion of civilian deaths at around 85% of the total, and the proportion of children at 23%.

After the dust had settled in Gaza, reports were leaked to the Israeli press of allegations by military recruits that they had engaged in war crimes.  One Israeli squad commander described his experience in a heavily populated part of Gaza City as follows: “At first the specified action was to go into a house. We were supposed to go in with an armored personnel carrier called an Achzarit [literally, Cruel] to burst through the lower door, to start shooting inside and then ... I call this murder ... in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified--we were supposed to shoot.”

The same officer elaborated further on military conduct in Gaza: “You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn't have to be with a weapon, you don't have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman, on whom I didn't see any weapon. The order was to take the person out, that woman, the moment you see her.”

In response to this and several other quotations in the media, Israeli politicians such as outgoing Minister of Defense Ehud Barak intoned that the Israeli army was “the most moral army in the world.”  Indeed, it has always been a mainstay of Israeli military propaganda that Israeli soldiers uphold the doctrine of “purity of arms” and that they are bound by a rigorous ethical code.

The actual content of this ethical code is not widely known, though its admirers have trumpeted its emphasis on the importance of preserving human life.  However, as the late Israeli philosopher Ruth Manor has observed, “the Code specifies that the solider should spare human life except when it conflicts with the success of the military mission at hand…” (“Reasonable (and Unreasonable) Goals and Strategies, and the Hope for Peace in the Middle East,” American Philosophical Association Newsletter on International Cooperation 4 (2004), pp.10-13, at p.12; original emphasis).  In other words, Manor noted, the supposed highest value, human life, is subordinated to the success of the military mission.

In its own words, the ethical code states that the military serviceman “will place himself or others at risk solely to the extent required to carry out his mission.”  This wording clearly undermines the claim that the preservation of human life is a supreme value in the military code.  But a follow-up document, which was adopted recently by the Israeli army, goes well beyond this--not only does it subordinate the value of human life to the success of the military mission, it also subordinates the value of the enemy’s civilian lives to those of one’s own combatants.

The document, which is designed specifically to spell out the ethical principles governing the fight against “terror,” does not appear to be available through the website of the Israeli military.  However, an academic journal article defending this new doctrine has been published in which two of the doctrine’s authors justify it and spell out its guiding principles.  They point out that their article “is a result of work done within the framework of the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] College of National Defense,” but that “the paper itself is not an official IDF document” (“Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: An Israeli Perspective,” Journal of Military Ethics 4 (2005), pp.3-32, at p.29)  Though it may not be officially sanctioned by the Israeli military, it is clear that this academic article is designed to provide the justification for the new military doctrine of the Israeli army.

The authors, Asa Kasher, a philosophy professor, and Amos Yadlin, who was at the time affiliated with the College of National Defense and is currently head of Israeli military intelligence, propound a new doctrine dedicated to the “military ethics of fighting terror.”  Their paper articulates a number of “ethical principles” that should govern a military campaign against terrorism.  Three aspects of their analysis are particularly worth attending to, since they shed crucial light on the Israeli army’s recent conduct in Gaza and the civilian death toll there.

The first of Kasher and Yadlin’s innovations is that their definition of “terrorism” does not restrict “acts of terror” to those committed against civilians, as is customarily the case.  Instead, the authors emphasize: “...we define ‘act of terror’ in a way that makes it possible for the victims of such an act to be combatants, even exclusively so” (p.5; emphasis added).  Thus, an organization that confines its attacks solely to military targets could be considered a “terrorist” organization in their view.

What, then, gives “fighting terror” a special moral status, necessitating a new ethical doctrine for the Israeli military?  What is distinctive about it, for Kasher and Yadlin, is that it is a fight against organizations and individuals that are not under “effective control of the state.”  Military actions “against terror” are different from police actions, in their view, in that they are directed against organizations based in areas over which the state has no control.  What this means is that “...an anti-terror squad will often be right in assuming that almost all the persons it encounters during a mission do not support it since they endorse activities of terror and are not its victims” (p.7).

The second crucial assumption that Kasher and Yadlin make is that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not areas over which Israel has effective control.  They distinguish a territory over which the state does not have effective control from a situation of “belligerent occupation” in which the sovereign power is replaced by a military occupation force (p.15).  Their discussion clearly implies that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not under military occupation by the state of Israel, thus justifying the treatment of their civilian inhabitants differently from other civilians, who are the direct responsibility of some state or another.

This glaring denial of an obvious fact, that the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been under continuous Israeli military occupation since 1967, flies in the face of countless international resolutions, not to mention the facts on the ground.  Yet it would seem to constitute Kasher and Yadlin’s pretext for deciding that the usual rules of war should be suspended in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and that they should be replaced by new principles that sanction actions that would otherwise be prohibited by morality and international law.

This brings us to the third and most crucial assumption in Kasher and Yadlin’s entire argument, namely that in the fight against “terrorism,” the lives of Israeli combatants are prioritized over the lives of Palestinian non-combatants.  They enunciate a moral doctrine that attaches greater value to the lives of their own combatants than the lives of non-combatants who are neither their own citizens nor residing in areas under “effective control of the state,” which as mentioned above, includes the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Privileging the lives of combatants over non-combatants is in direct contravention of the norms of international law during wartime, not to mention many centuries of theorizing about jus in bello (laws concerning acceptable conduct in war).  Kasher and Yadlin are very explicit about the fact that they are contradicting prevailing moral conceptions concerning the difference between combatants and non-combatants, justifying it thus:

We reject such conceptions, because we consider them to be immoral. A combatant is a citizen in uniform. In Israel, quite often he is a conscript or on reserve duty. His blood is as red and thick as that of citizens who are not in uniform. His life is as precious as the life of anyone else (p.17).

In fact, according to their moral principles, his life is more precious than that of a Palestinian civilian.  This is clearly articulated in the article and was explicitly reiterated by Kasher in an interview with Haaretz after the war in Gaza: “If it's between the soldier and the terrorist's neighbor, the priority is the soldier.”

At this point, it is worth recalling the moral basis of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants in wartime.  Needless to say, color and thickness of blood do not enter into it.  The moral distinction is based on the fact that combatants have intentionally embarked on acts of violence and are actively seeking to endanger others, whether they are conscripts or not, thereby forfeiting their right to security and to be left in peace.  In addition, combatants are armed, prepared for combat, and capable of defending themselves militarily.  These two crucial considerations put combatants in a different moral category than non-combatants according to prevailing conceptions of morality and international law.

If it were generally considered morally legitimate to attach greater value to the lives of one's own combatants than to the enemy's noncombatants in wartime, all manner of war crimes would be morally justified.  If this principle were further enshrined in international law, giving legal justification for soldiers to preserve their own lives over the lives of innocent non-combatants, it would make a mockery of any provisions to protect civilians during wartime, as required by the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties.

To sum up, the new Israeli military doctrine for fighting “terror” explicitly devalues the lives of Palestinian civilians on the flimsy ethical grounds (not to mention the preposterous factual grounds) that they live in areas that are not “under effective control of the [Israeli] state,” and are therefore not the direct responsibility of the state of Israel.  Moreover, the doctrine sanctions such immoral conduct against Palestinian civilians even if the “terrorist” adversary it is fighting were to refrain meticulously from targeting Israeli civilians.

When the ethical principles enunciated at the highest levels of a military hierarchy devalue the lives of noncombatants on the other side, one can safely expect that the conduct of soldiers in the field to depart even more radically from prevailing moral norms.  One of the significant features of the statements of the Israeli soldiers whose testimony was leaked to the media shortly after the war in Gaza is the extent to which they attributed the conduct of soldiers to orders issued by their superiors.  One solider recounted that his battalion commander made it clear that “an important lesson” from the war in Lebanon was that soldiers’ lives could be protected “by means of firepower,” and the same should go for Gaza.  Another soldier recalled that “from above they said it was permissible” to storm a densely populated building.

An article in the New York Times on the Israeli military's conduct in Gaza conveniently portrayed the “mistreatment of Palestinian civilians” as the work of religious extremists who have infiltrated the armed forces.  But Kasher and Yadlin’s article demonstrates that the devaluation of Palestinian civilian life is part of the military doctrine of the Israeli army rather than the work of a minority of right-wing rabbis.

It is hardly surprising that an Israeli soldier identified as “Ram” summed up the mood within the army as follows: “The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they [Israeli soldiers] are concerned they can justify it that way."