Israel war: There is a difference between treating civilians as targets and treating them as collateral damage
Timothy P. Carney
Video Embed
In the war between Hamas and Israel, innocent civilians, including women and children, are dying on both sides of the Israel-Gaza border. But no fair person should draw a moral equivalence between Hamas’s actions and Israel’s.
Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza is brutal and devastating, and some very large X, formerly Twitter, accounts are saying that hundreds of Palestinian children have been killed. This is awful, and if true, it’s tempting to lump Israel’s killing of Palestinian women and children into the same category of evil as Hamas’s killing of Israeli women and children on Saturday. But that would be a grave moral error.
ISRAEL WAR: BIDEN’S $6 BILLION IRAN PRISONER SWAP DEAL UNDER HARSH SPOTLIGHT
At the same time, some of Israel’s defenders make a different moral error. They point to the depravity and evil of Hamas’s terrorist attacks and the wanton murder and rape of Israeli innocents and suggest that Israel is justified to use any means it wants to eliminate Hamas or at least its ability to kill Israeli Jews. This view ignores crucial moral distinctions.
The first moral distinction is about intention. Hamas planned its invasion and terrorists so as to kill as many defenseless Israeli civilians as possible. They stormed a music festival to kill everyone there and sent death squads into kibbutzim. This was the deliberate murder of innocents, including children, which is evil beyond words. Hamas’s slaughter of Jewish children is made more evil by the ethnic animus behind it and their presumed intention to spark a broader war in the Middle East.
To the extent that the Israeli bombing of Gaza kills Palestinian children, it’s a different sort of evil, and very likely a defensible, necessary evil. (I’m writing in generalities because we don’t have many confirmed reports on Israel’s tactics and strategies.) If you bomb the location of a terrorist cell or rocket depot, but your bombs also kill civilians, that is not deliberate targeting of civilians, it is collateral damage — a regrettable, anticipated, but unintended consequence of necessary military actions.
Israel does not have a duty to avoid all collateral damage. It would be impossible to reduce Gaza civilian deaths to zero, given that Hamas is known to put military resources in schools and hospitals.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Israel does, however, have a moral obligation to minimize collateral damage. This involves warning the population about where bombs will drop. It might involve choosing targets based not solely on military value but also on the likelihood and magnitude of civilian casualties.
The horror and evil of Hamas’s attack doesn’t mean Israel can respond in any way it wants. But Hamas has started a war, and war is nothing but death and destruction. The people of Gaza will suffer immensely from Israel’s necessary response.