At the risk of becoming unduly preoccupied with the conflict in Gaza upon returning to blogging, I thought I might add a few remarks to the conversation that Freddie started with this post. Conor referred to the post in passing while responding to an earlier Joe Carter post, which prompted Carter’s reply, and the original post led Max to criticize Freddie’s moral certitude. John Schwenkler (from atop his new Culture11 perch) answered some of Carter’s remarks with a defense of naivete, but as I will lay out in a moment I don’t think naivete enters into it at all. Max and Carter’s responses are particularly striking, since they take the same argument to be an example of moral certitude and relativism respectively. Specifically, Carter objects to Freddie when the latter says this:

Firing rockets indiscriminately into Israel is a putrid crime. Shelling Palestinian civilians is no less. What’s the difference, for our purposes?

In fact, what Carter objects to here is not really moral relativism (which would not permit such full-throated condemnations of these acts as crimes), but, as he says elsewhere in the post, moral equivalence. However, it is not clear to me that Freddie is claiming moral equivalence between the two belligerents here. He does not say that the intentions of the actors on both sides are the same and morally equal. Freddie is condemning the practice of indiscriminate warfare in all cases, and he is asking, reasonably enough, what the difference is between different examples of such warfare. As it happens, I think there is a difference, but not nearly as great a difference as Carter holds.

If Max finds Freddie’s remarks all together too theoretical and frustrating, I find the constant recourse by defenders of Israeli (or, for that matter, American) military actions to the good intentions of one side to be even more so. When you endorse indiscriminate warfare, as Freddie correctly says, you are effectively endorsing the consequences of that warfare. Indiscriminate warfare as such is wrong. To admit that both sides engage in indiscriminate warfare, but then protest that one side doesn’t really mean to injure or kill civilians is not persuasive. Regardless of whether one side “means” or “intends” to do this or not, it is doing it. This truth does not make the IDF morally equivalent to Hamas, and I don’t know of anyone in this conversation who makes such a claim, but it does mean that the Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli strikes are of equal worth in our moral reasoning to the Israeli civilians killed by Hamas rockets. This is what I was talking about two years ago when I referred to a “necessary moral equivalence” concerning the war in Lebanon.

The war in Lebanon again seems useful as a comparative example. Two years ago, we heard many of the same arguments, albeit with more references to human shields last time than this time. Despite the fact that the far greater proportion of fatalities in Lebanon was made up of civilians, the appeal to good intentions was among the most frequently made. In other words, even when the indiscriminate nature of the campaign was unmistakable and undeniable, indiscriminate warfare was somehow justified by intending to do the right thing. Certainly, in judging the severity of crimes intention is a relevant and important factor. Deliberately killing the innocent and non-combatants is significantly different from doing so unintentionally. There is a moral difference between indiscriminate firing that kills civilians by accident and indiscriminate firing that is undertaken with the specific goal in mind of killing civilians, but both are still crimes. Freddie here is not showing moral naivete, but has instead pushed through the sentimentality that tempts us to make excuses for the crimes of one side in a conflict. In doing so, he has perhaps not stressed enough the distinctions between the different kinds of crimes, but I suspect this is mainly because he wants to make a strong claim that neither side is exempt from moral standards.

As I said many times two years ago, it is the friends of Israel who have the most reason to hold the Israeli government to a high standard, just as it is important for friends and citizens of the United States to hold our government to a high standard, and this means holding those governments accountable when they commit excesses and crimes. Those most inclined to defend a government’s actions will focus on the good intentions of members of the government at the expense of the practical effects of its policies, which allows the government to persist in folly and remain blind to the problems it is creating for itself in the future. It is ultimately a disservice to the people whom they want to support.

Update: Freddie has another post remarking on the argument from good intentions and the utterly lopsided coverage and commentary on the conflict.