Is there a single set of standards that we apply to the behavior of all actors in the Middle East? I would certainly hope so, since the concept of a single set of standards is a cornerstone of the two important principles of (1) human equality and (2) the rule of law.
In the west, a loud chorus of voices has criticized Hizbullah for having undertaken Wednesday’s operation to capture (presumably) as many Israeli soldiers as possible. I completely agree that that operation constituted (1) something of an infraction of international law, and also (2), in the circumstances, an act of escalation.
In the operation, the Hizbullah leadership did the following:
— It sent a squad of its paramilitaries across an international armistice line (presumptively, an international border– though the two states have never made peace and only a 57-year-old armistice agreement governs relations between them.)
— The Hizbullah squad attacked a squad of serving Israeli soldiers, killing three and taking two captive. This was an act of war– and as PM Olmert correctly pointed out, not an act of terrorism (since the victims were not civilians.) This act did not, however, initiate a state of war between the two sides. Rather, it was an infraction of the longstanding armistice agreement between them. The armistice agreement has, of course, been subject to numerous infractions over the past 57 years. The vast majority of these have been perpetrated by Israel, including numerous incursions of longer or shorter duration, and repeated assaults by land, sea, and air, resulting in extremely heavy casualties among (primarily) civilians in Lebanon.
As I noted here yesterday, the government of Israel had numerous options available regarding how it chose to respond to Hizbullah’s infraction. One of those, as stipulated in Art. VII-7 of the 1949 armistice agreement between them, was to submit a formal complaint to the UN’s armistice monitoring commission. (I believe the functions of ILMAC were subsequently taken over by the equally longstanding UN Truce Supervision Organization, which still, I think, has a post along the armistice line, at Naqqura.) Or, Israel could have taken a strong complaint to the UN Security Council.
It chose not to respond in such a de-escalatory, problem-solving way. Instead, it responded in a way that was (1) itself a huge infraction of many aspects of international law and also (2) massively escalatory.
Israel’s response broke international law at both the jus ad bellum level and the jus in bello level. Like Hizbullah, it also ordered its forces to transgress the armistice line and the ceasefire undertakings ensconced in the armistice; and it did so, as we saw, in a very large-scale way. In addition, it did not– as Hizbullah had done up till then– limit its attacks to targets of clearly military status. Rather, as so often in the past, Israeli forces massively targeted civilian infrastructure in an explicit attempt to try to turn the political climate inside Lebanon against Hizbullah. And along the way, of course many tens of Lebanese civilians have lost their lives.
In its follow-up actions, Hizbullah has also launched attacks that have killed Israeli civilians.
In neither of these cases were the civilians in question being directly targeted. But in both cases, the parties have not taken due care to protect the lives of noncombatants. In both cases, too, the parties have targeted civilian infrastructure. (Though “targeting” is a generous term for what most of the Hizbullah rocketeers are actually capable of doing.)
Since the means of attack at Israel’s disposal are– thanks in good part to the aid of my own government– so many times more lethally powerful than those at Hizbullah’s disposal, and since Israel has shown little if any compunction about restricting its use of these weapons to military targets, the number of civilians actually harmed by Israel’s actions has been many times the number actually harmed by Hizbullah.
So indeed, does the world have a single standard by which it judges the actions of these two parties?
A subsidiary question might well arise over the question of “who started it”. We could say that Hizbullah started this particular round. But we should also be aware that Israel has been adamantly refusing to respond to Lebanese demands that it release the three Lebanese nationals whom it has been holding for many years. One of these is Samir Qantar. This Y-net article tells you a little about him.
The article also reminds us that,
In 2004, Hizbullah and Israel exchanged the bodies of three Israeli soldiers kidnapped in 2000 and an abducted Israeli businessman for the release of 400 Palestinian and 23 Lebanese and Arab prisoners in a German-negotiated deal.
That hostage/bodies exchange was, of course, agreed to by then-PM Ariel Sharon, who was Olmert’s mentor at the time. But now, Olmert says he’s adamantly opposed to any such exchange. (Though there have been many unconfirmed reports of Israeli agents being engaged in indirect negotiations over a possible release.)
Two of the most famous of the Lebanese hostages whom Israel released in that 2004 swap were religious leader Sheikh `Abd al-Karim Obeid and militia leader Mustafa al-Dirani. They had both been gratuitously captured from their homes in Lebanon by the Israeli forces back in the 1980s, in a blatant act of international hostage-taking– and for use simply as “bargaining chips.”
Obeid, we should note, was by no means a combatant. I don’t know if he received anything like the ill-treatment meted out to Dirani. Here is Human Rights Watch’s translation of the complaint Dirani’s lawyers submitted to the Tel Aviv District Court concerning his treatment while in detention. Here are some excerpts from his affidavit:
4. In addition to being shaken, humiliations, beatings, sleep deprivation and being tied in a crouching position for many hours to the point of his limbs becoming paralyzed – a cruel rape and an act of sodomy were perpetrated against the Plaintiff by a soldier whom the interrogators brought especially for this purpose.
5. In addition, several days after the Plaintiff was raped by a soldier, the interrogator who was responsible for the rape once again committed a horrifying act of sodomy against the Plaintiff, by inserting a wooden club into the Plaintiff’s anus, causing hemorrhages in his buttocks. The pseudonym of that interrogator was “George”…
7. In order to humiliate the Plaintiff, the interrogators caused him to remain completely naked for almost the entire duration of the interrogations that they conducted. In order to compound the humiliation of the Plaintiff and to the delight of his interrogators – they also photographed him in this humiliating situation.
8. At a later stage of the interrogation the Plaintiff was forced to drink large amounts of water and paraffin oil. At that point a diaper was placed around the Plaintiff’s loins in which his bodily wastes collected for several days. There was no response to the pleas of the Plaintiff, who was covered with his discharges, to be allowed to clean himself, and only when the interrogators themselves could no longer stand the stench, only then was the Plaintiff allowed to change the diaper.
(American readers: does this account of how Dirani was reportedly treated back in the 1980s remind you of anything?)
Anyway, my main point here is to note that the Lebanon-Israel cross-border hostage-taking question is by no means a “new” issue that Hizbullah suddenly dreamed up, in order to justify an otherwise unjustifiable cross-border raid. It was part of a very longstanding and still “live” concern in Lebanon.
Would Hizbullah, too, have done better to take this concern to the “proper channels” and tried to get Qantar and his two fellow prisoners released through Security Council action or the force of world public opinion? Absolutely, yes.
But the bigger question here, in my mind, is that all these conflicts have now gone on so long, and have so many very tangled sub-themes and potential triggers for escalation by either side, that surely it is time to get the whole darned conflict between Israel and neighbors finally resolved. That means the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Syrian-Israeli conflict, and the Lebanese-Israeli conflict.
This is indeed do-able. If it is done, basically, on the basis of international law, then nearly all the parties to the conflict know what this is and are ready to go ahead and do such a deal. On the Arab side, all the Arab governments have signed onto the Beirut Declaration of 2002– and the most recent Hamas-Fateh agreement then endorsed all its main points.
The only party that is not basically ready to resolve the conflict on the basis of international law– that is, with Israel withdrawing from just about all of the land it captured in the 1967 war– is that portion of the Israeli public that still clings to the chauvinistic dream of a Jewish Greater Jerusalem that stretches from the Old City just about right down to the Jordan River… an outcome that would be unacceptable to the Palestinians in two major ways: it denies any meaningful Palestinian role or presence in Jerusalem, and it slices a huge wedge out of the West Bank, dividing what remains potentially for use by a Palestinian state into two.
How big is the portion of the Jewish-Israeli public that’s prepared to see their country (and its region) locked forever into cycles of war and violence– simply to indulge the holders of that Jewish Greater Jerusalem dream? I don’t know.
What I do know is that the international community as a whole also has a huge stake in all this. We have a stake in seeing a fair and sustainable outcome to all the remaining dimensions of the Israeli-Arab dispute. But we also have a stake in seeing the principles of international law implemented and strengthened at all levels. That includes in the content of the eventual comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace, which should certainly uphold rather than transgress international law.
It also includes in the application of a single standard of judgment to all the acts of violence unleashed in the continuing storm(s) between Israel and its neighbors.
There is another very simple and very important principle at stake here, too. Every single life snuffed out by the violence is equally dear, equally sacred. The lives of civilians, in particular, should all equally receive the concern of the international community