Mitch Prothero in Salon (via Juan Cole):
Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths — the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far — on “terrorists” who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection.
But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters — as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers — avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators — as so many Palestinian militants have been.
For their part, the Israelis seem to think that if they keep pounding civilians, they’ll get some fighters, too.
The fact that the sentence I bolded is being utilized as a line of argument and justification for the targeting of civilians is rather ludicrous. For instance, if the US started constantly shelling Sunni civilians with reckless abandon in Iraq there would be immense backlash — it would be simply unthinkable and counterproductive for US policy. For that reason, the US attempts to be extremely careful in how it targets Sunni areas, Fallujah and some other areas in Anbar province notwithstanding, and it is because the public backlash from overkill would harm American attempts at achieving peace. Yet Israel has utilized this line of thought in its Lebanese strategy, when in fact all it does is ween the moderates away from sanity and toward the radical end of the ideological spectrum. Don’t mistake me, an offensive against Hizbollah’s military positions and arsenal is more than deserved, but attempting to remove Hizbollah from Lebanese society itself via missiles alone is like a brain surgeon attempting to remove a tumor with a baseball bat.
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on August 8th, 2006 at 11:43 am
The idea behind bombing the areas close to the Lebanese-Israeli border is not just to kill fighters. The Israelis are also trying to clear a buffer zone between themselves and Hezbollah, so as to make it more dangerous for Hezbollah fighters to get close enough to fire missiles into Israel.
Israel has been warning civilians to leave for more than two weeks prior to the bombings. If the civilians stay there, that’s like the Floridians who don’t leave even though there’s a hurricane coming– they knew, they made their choice, they’re sleeping in the bed they made.
I’m not saying it’s okay to bomb civilians, but I am saying that civilians who disregard warnings to the effect of “We are going to bomb this area. Leave pls.” aren’t necessarily free of guilt in this matter.
on August 8th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
I understand a buffer zone is required, but bombing was not the best way to go about it. The entire issue is not just that civilians are being killed. Their infastructure and economic capability have been shattered by not-so-precision guided missiles and mortars. Instead of pushing Hizbollah back via targeted ground-based maneuvers and holding buffer zone territory, Israel has only locked in conditions conducive to Hizbollah’s continued existence once the conflict ends by destroying towns and villages in the south. Hizbollah is the most efficient instutitional force in southern Lebanon, and will become essential in rebuilding efforts there. Besides the ideological pull Hizbollah exerts upon the Shi’a in the south, its political arm is well respected due to the services it provides the poor and disenfranchised. By destroying the infastructure in the south Israel has guaranteed continued poverty there and dependence on Hizbollah for basic services, including education and healthcare. Had Israel approached the conflict differently backlash againist Hizbollah may have been such that a majority of Lebanese would have turned against the group. However, after such a massive and ill-planned air campaign that has targeted Christians, Sunnis, and Druze along with Shi’a, it’s looking more and more like Hizbollah has been strengthened as the vanguard of Lebanese autonomy instead of weakened.