Deshowitz rams his head up his ass: Thomas Hobbes laughs
Writing in the LA Times, Harvard Law Prof Alan Deshowitz demonstrates why he should stick to criminal and constitutional law.
There is a vast difference — both moral and legal — between a 2-year-old who is killed by an enemy rocket and a 30-year-old civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store Katyusha rockets. Both are technically civilians, but the former is far more innocent than the latter. There is also a difference between a civilian who merely favors or even votes for a terrorist group and one who provides financial or other material support for terrorism.
la times
The problem here is that while this appears to be a distinction it is one which can turn an entire nation into combatants. A position which is often taken by the Islamic militants when they target the innocent as a commentor at Crooked Timber points out.
There is no degree of “civilianality” in Deshowitz’s ponderous phrase. Either a person is a combatant and therefore fair game or a civilian entitled to be left alone. Unfortunately that means that most Palestinians, many Shi’ite Lebanese and many Israelis are in the invideous position of being legitimately in the line of fire. However, it gets worse: if we look at real wars the entire notion of “non-combatant” is radically contested (as my pomo friends might put it). Dresden, the fire bombing of Toyko, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Battle of Britain: all took the entire enemy nation as combatants.
Total war is an ugly but well recognized concept. Sorting the innocent from the guilty, the pacifists from the terrorists, is hairsplitting which implies a limit to the war. While the pretence of following the Geneva Conventions is certainly an admirable goal, when it comes to a question of national survival it is also a fantasy.
For the moment the Israelis seem to at least attempt to seperate the proverbial sheep from the goats. Hamas and Hezbollah have no such compunction. How long Israel is going to maintain this morally admirable - if difficult in practice - position will depend largely on how threatened it feels by the combination of Hezbollah, Hamas and a world largely hostile to its continued existence.
If that sense of threat increases there is every chance that Israel will follow the lead of the United States, Englamd, Russian, China, Germany and a host of other nations and seek to destroy the threat as a matter of self preservation.
Deshowitz should stop trying to make implausible arguments to defend the tragic fact that nation states can and do destroy people and groups which threaten them. This is not moral. It is Hobbesian. In the end Hobbes trumps Locke and Rousseau and the Catholic tradition of “just war”. Not because Hobbes is moral; rather because he alone understands that a soverignty threatened is capable of anything. Hobbes speaks power to “truth”.
Hezbollah translates to “The Party of God”. They are committed to the destruction of the sovereign nation of Israel. Hamas’ charter commits it to the destruction of Israel. Deshowitz would have been on firmer ground had henoted these fact and noted that the vast majority of Shi’ite Lebonese and the voters in the Palestinian authority have elected these terrorists to office. The Israelis have elected parties to office who vow not to give into terror. We are now in Hobbes’ world. Splitting hairs as to the degree of “civilianality” of person “a” or “b” would have made Hobbes puke.
Hobbes understood that the only way men could free themselves from the state of nature, a world without law, a world in which life is “nasty, brutish and shot” is to recognize just how bloody awful such a world actually is. Only then will men accept the need to create and embrace an authority which can stop the killing and the mayhem.
The Israelis understand this and have, over the past decade, worked very hard to create the conditions in which a two state solution could be viable. They have no stake in an endless war. They have every reason to devoutly wish for peace.
Hamas and Hezbollah (and, arguably, Fatah) are creatures of resistance and aggression. For these organizations to make peace is largely impossible. It is not what they were created for: just like the Stern Gang or Irgun were not set up to make peace with the British or the Arabs.
Peace comes when men are tired of war. Apparently Hezbollah and Hamas are not tired enough. So a lot more innocents are going to die. Most of them Muslim. Many of them barely supporters of the terrorists.
Hamas and Hezbollah are terrified of only one thing: the awful possibility that the Prisoners’ Document (imperfect as it is) might actually be adopted as a way forward. The gunmen, the thugs, the Islamofascists, the Iranians, the Muslim wideboys can’t let that happen.
So they are now going to be beaten, badly, by people who would much prefer to simply be left alone. Tragically, their beating is going to kill a lot of two year olds. Which would not have surprised Hobbes a bit.
Written by jay on July 23rd, 2006 with
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