There are few military actions more difficult, more deadly, more dangerous, and more risky for non-combatants than house to house, urban assaults. It is thus inevitable that whenever Israel invades Gaza, as it recently has, civilians (that is, non-Hamas fighters) would be caught up in the violence of war, and would lose their lives. To our knowledge there has never been an urban military assault that managed to prevent all harm to civilians living in the city. This does not make the death of any civilian less tragic. It is simply a statement about reality.
In former times, when armies laid siege to a city, they usually followed the laws of siege warfare. They first of all offered terms of peace to the city. Surrender the city, or face a long siege. Everyone knew this was the right thing to do. It was right for the besieging army, since sieges were usually long, complex, and very costly affairs both in terms of materiel and lives. It was also the right thing to do for the city, since sieges were most often deadly to the general population. They usually did not end before thousands died of malnutrition, hunger, and disease. The final reason for offering terms was that the laws of siege warfare permitted a general slaughter, enslavement, looting all of value, and razing the city to the ground once the city walls had been breached. It was regarded as a just reparation for the costs borne by the besieging army.
Against this background, Israel's activities in Gaza seem excessively moral and highly ethical--the shrieks of outrage in the Western media and Commentariat notwithstanding.
E-mailing, texting, and phoning civilians in advance to warn of a coming bombardment so they can seek refuge would appear to be excessively solicitous of non-combatants and civilians to the ears of our military forbears. Imagine during the siege of Troy the Greeks announcing to the Trojan civilians, "Stay away from this part of the wall, Trojies. We are going to be hurling some projectiles there tomorrow."
Of course all of the efforts made to protect Gazan non-combatants could not be expected to protect everyone. Collateral civilian deaths are sadly inevitable in urban warfare. The key question is this: have all reasonable steps been taken to avoid or minimise civilian deaths to the best of one's ability? It seems that Israel has reasonable grounds to make such claims.
But to many in the West, Israel appears evil no matter what. The stench of hypocrisy and double standards is noisome and offensive. Here are three of the most offensive aspects of the West's response.
1. The outrage expressed when civilians huddling in schools and mosques were wounded and killed, while not having similar outrage at Hamas using such places as armouries and storage dumps for their rockets and other weapons of war. The UN has been a stentorian critic of UN schools being attacked, but strangely silent about, or professedly ignorant, of UN facilities being used as armouries by Hamas. Similar criticisms can be made of those running mosques permitting their facilities to be so used.
2. The deafening silence from many quarters at the Hamas attack tunnels, built at a cost of millions of dollars, and some stocked with sophisticated weapons, geared up for blowing up civilians, and taking copious prisoners (to be later used for Hamas political and fiscal purposes). Over forty attack tunnels have been discovered, most terminating under Israeli civilian installations such as kindergartens. Surely the Western Commentariat would be wondering where Hamas got the funds to build such an expensive military complex and be asking how muct Western aid monies had been diverted from Palestinian relief to fund Hamas's war preparations.
A map of a small portion of the tunnels meant to be used 9 weeks from now.
We defy any leader (or people) to announce to the world that they would permit the existence of such underground military incursions into their sovereign territory and would take no military action against them. Would the United States? Would Germany? Would the UK permit such tunnelling activity into Britain, were Scotland to become independent?
3. The wilful ignoring of Hamas's repeatedly stated objective of completely obliterating Israel, removing its very existence from the world, along with the killing of all Jews. The West has such cognitive dissonance in this instance that it simply cannot hear or register what Hamas is saying, let alone comprehend its implications.
Most risible has been the spurious moral equivalence deployed by Western harridans comparing what Israel has done with some of the most evil regimes in recent history. Here are some examples, all found in just one letter to the NZ Prime Minister--
1. genocidal practices (moral equivalence to the Nazis, the Pol Pot regime, the Isis Caliphate)
2. calculated murder (moral equivalence to actions like the 9/11 attacks and suicide bombers)
3. killing fields of Gaza (specific moral equivalence to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge)
4. unimaginable terror (moral equivalence to terrorist actions)
5. Israeli butchers (moral equivalence to Nazi death camps)
Such moral equivalences are so bizarre and stupid they inevitably raise questions about the sanity of those who make them. After all, the possession of a reasonable moral compass is one of the classical tests of sanity. The moral equivalences above are so extremely unreasonable they must call into question the sanity of the one who makes them.
The bottom line is this: defensive wars are just wars. The unintended deaths of innocent civilians during the conduct of defensive actions against an implacable enemy intent on killing one's citizens is inevitable and does not, in any way, undermine the claim to be fighting a just war.
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