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Who is a target?
By Matthew Gutman
The almost cliched images of the burning Twin Towers during September 11 cruelly ushered in a new trend of warfare in which civilians not soldiers, were thrust into hitherto unnoticed terrorists' sights. As Israel and the US quickly learned, striking back at terrorists, whether lurking in cramped Gaza alleyways, or dank Afghan caves, is a bloody business in itself, often exacting a miserable toll on innocent civilians.
As it turned out, the September 11 attacks and the suicide bombers' war waged on Israel have loomed ominously as a landmark in the history of warfare, possibly heralding an era in which defenseless civilians are not unintended casualties, or even fair-but-rare game, but the chosen, preferred, and eagerly assaulted targets.
Consequently, the democratic conventional wisdom of leaving civilians out of the game has come into question, first abstractly, then in America's attacks in Afghanistan, and now in a series of Israeli attacks that inadvertently took within weeks the lives of several dozen innocent Palestinians.
Israel's increasing number of cases of mistaken identity and bungled assassination attempts reads like a bloody laundry list:
- July 22: 15 civilians are killed when the air force drops a one-ton bomb on a Gaza apartment building in an effort to kill master-terrorist Salah Shehadeh.
- August 30: Four Palestinian family members are killed outside the Gaza Strip community of Netzarim, when a tank commander mistakes crawling figures for terrorists.
- August 31: Two adults and two children die in a botched assassination attempt on an Al Aksa Brigades leader.
- September 1: Four Palestinian men are shot to death when they are mistaken for terrorists trying to infiltrate a Jewish settlement near Hebron.
And this list is only a partial one.
ON SUNDAY, after local Palestinians accused a force of Israeli soldiers of executing in cold blood the four suspected terrorists in the Hebron area, a reeling Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer ordered Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe "Boogie" Ya'alon to launch an immediate investigation into the deaths of Palestinian civilians. The investigating team must be headed by a major-general. It must also be wrapped up before the start of Rosh Hashana, added the Defense Minister in a stern meeting with the chief of staff. By Tuesday morning, Maj.-Gen. Yitzhak Harel, head of a Northern Command corps, was wading knee deep in the investigation in Gaza.
But Prime Minister Ariel Sharon prefers not to place undue weight on such incidents. Too much emphasis on Israel's mistakes, he scolded Monday night, "could weaken the army."
The consequent spat between Sharon and Ben-Eliezer is emblematic of Israel's painful dichotomy. On the one hand it is a state that often risks its own soldiers to spare the innocent - as evidenced in its choice of a surgical removal of militants from the Jenin refugee sector with ground forces in lieu of dispatching either bombers or Apache helicopters for the task. On the other hand, the increasing requirement to produce results in the war against terror has resulted in some ghastly misfirings and a negative portrayal of the IDF by the foreign media.
In response to the mounting Palestinian body count, generals and jurists alike have begun to wonder how much is too much. Is the incidental killing of civilians - better known as "collateral damage" - in such a conflict permissible, and if so, to what extent? In the wake of terrorist attacks that have killed more than 600 Israelis in the past two years, is the military more willing to accept a higher number of Palestinian casualties than before?
For its part, the army flatly denies such speculation.
"There is no policy whatsoever to purposely harm innocent Palestinian civilians. And whenever possible we try to arrest and not to eliminate wanted men."
Ben-Eliezer's knee-jerk reaction to Harel's preliminary report on Tuesday was that the killings were a result of "bad luck." But a fear that Israel could slip into a similar bloody modus operandi as it did in its 18 years in Lebanon, lingers like a dark cloud over the IDF's increasingly aggressive pursuit of terrorists, bomb-makers and their operators in the territories.
"There are certain areas in the West Bank and Gaza - often ones from which a sniping or an infiltration took place - that have essentially become dead zones," says one officer who serves in the West Bank. "There is an unwritten rule that most local Palestinians now know, as most Lebanese knew: If you approach this place, you will be shot at. This appears to be what happened near Bani Naim (the suspected Hebron-area quarry workers) over the weekend and also in Gaza on Friday."
The officer believes that while the Harel investigation could spark an intra-IDF debate among the mid-ranking officers on soldiers' attitudes toward Palestinian civilians, as far as he is concerned the bottom line is that we are at war.
"Israel, the chief of staff tells us, is at war with an enemy that has no qualms about killing our children. That is why we shoot first and ask questions later. This is about the Palestinians paying the price for their war."
A source close to Harel believes the general's investigation will likely focus on two specific areas. First of all it will have to re-examine the rules of engagement, then the choice of targets.
The rules of when to open fire will be applicable for soldiers and tank commanders serving in the field. The aim is to glean lessons for future operations so that mishaps such as the Bani Naim incident and the firing of tank shells at suspicious figures near the Gaza settlement of Netzarim, can be averted in the future.
Complicating matters for combat soldiers is that distinguishing "suspicious Palestinians" from frightened ones has become increasingly tricky. Many Palestinian non-combatants have adopted guerrilla-like techniques to avoid being shot at. Rather suspicious looking-maneuvers, such as crawling on the ground and crouching behind bushes, boulders, or stone walls has become standard procedure for Palestinian civilians when in the presence of IDF forces.
Nevertheless, officers argue that instituting a failsafe method for verifying that "four crawling individuals" are indeed quarry workers, and not terrorists, before they are summarily shot dead, is necessary. The same goes for the members of the same family killed in Gaza by an overzealous tank commander, who, with different instructions might have been able to prevent deaths.
The new code should ultimately crystallize a chain of command that is used each time weapons as powerful as tank guns are fired, said the source close to Harel. "It could be that numbness from two years of this conflict has slightly loosened our trigger fingers," he adds.
MOST analysts and soldiers agree that increased American support for Israel's fight against its own terrorists following the September 11 attacks, contributes to its greater freedom of operation in the territories.
"Relative to America's bombing of Afghanistan, we feel like the Red Cross," quips the West Bank officer, an ironic smile creeping across his typically stolid face.
The other sphere that Harel might investigate is the selection and timing of targets for assassination, though this is a far more complex endeavor involving a tangled web of government, Shin Bet and military officials. Twenty Palestinian civilians were killed in two aerial targeted attacks, barely a month apart, only one of which - the Shehadeh assassination - actually killed its intended target.
Fifteen civilian deaths is a high price for such a success, says the officer, but "because such terrorists are ready to do everything to kill Israelis - even using their own people, villages and cities as shields whenever and wherever they are - the army will not hesitate to go and kill him whenever there is concrete intelligence information. There is no question of that."
Changing soldiers' attitude towards Palestinians civilians, or their rules of engagement is not so simple.
"In this conflict," says Col. Shimshon Arbel of the office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, "in the easing of a single restriction on Palestinians, the IDF must make a cost-benefit analysis. Every Palestinian who is allowed in the country, or past a certain checkpoint is a potential terrorist. It then boils down to how much risk the IDF is willing to take. Sometimes that risk is unattractive."
However, concurrent to the recent spate of IDF killings, the army has granted 12,000 work permits enabling Palestinians to work in settlements, joint Palestinian-Israeli industrial zones, and also in Israel proper.
"I would say that this has had a revolutionary effect, especially in poverty-stricken Gaza."
Nevertheless, the sensitivity to individual Palestinians has not been absorbed among most conscripts, says the West Bank officer.
"They know they will be judged not on how courteous they are, but if they completed their mission and stopped terror."
BACK in the 19th century, the great military theoretician, Carl von Clausewitz, wrote of war that it is "not merely an act of policy, but a true political instrument." This conflict is no exception. Sharon's media adviser, Ra'anan Gissin, accuses the Palestinians of "exploiting the body count by manufacturing more and more Palestinian casualties in order to gain an upper hand in the media," actually putting people on the front lines, knowing they might be killed. While he concedes the IDF should launch an informal inquiry into the deaths, he says it should not be a specialized one, which would only bring undue criticism to the IDF.
Gissin hints that the primary reason Ben-Eliezer installed a major-general at the helm of the investigation was for public relations concerns and not due to the severity of the mishaps.
"The greater the number of clashes, the higher the probability that something will go wrong - there is nothing new in that," he says.
That's not necessarily true, says Professor Yaron Ezrahi, senior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute and author of "Rubber Bullets, Power and Conscience in Modern Israel." According to Ezrahi, the IDF, under the implicit direction of the Prime Minister's Office, has crossed traditional Israeli moral sensitivities, and the mythos of the upstanding citizen-soldier.
"The problem is that we are not fighting another state with an army, but terrorists surrounded by civilians. This phenomenon of shooting from the hip, reflects the mood in the country," he says. The problem, he says, is the methods and the military ethos are not applicable in this conflict, where everything is in shades, and hues, and little is presented in stark black or white. Consequently, the IDF and chief of General Staff are suffering the worst media pummeling in a generation.
IDF officers - including Ya'alon, who says that in the wake of the Shehadeh debacle he felt "something very heavy come down on my head" - have long maintained that relative to other democracies Israel's track-record vis-a-vis the killing of civilians is excellent.
In keeping with that tradition, one of Ya'alon's first acts as chief of General Staff was reading to his subordinates "For This," a renowned poem about war crimes during Israel's War of Independence.
NOTWITHSTANDING the famously controversial cases of the 1950s retaliatory operations - which Sharon's Unit 101 led - and the 1948 Deir Yasin battle where scores of Palestinian villagers were killed, the IDF claims that it has historically taken every precaution not to harm civilians. But while the IDF steadily issues a flood of "regret letters," apologizing for the loss of life, it continues to hold Palestinian militants responsible for the safety of their own people.
"This is a person who is responsible for the killing of hundreds of people. He systematically clung to the civilian population because he understood our sensitivities," Ya'alon said of Shehadeh in Ha'aretz in his first media interview as chief of General Staff.
Israel accuses the Palestinians of indirect responsibility for the death of civilians, and the Palestinians in turn accuse Israel of war crimes. Beyond these, jurists worldwide have yet to "find a proper answer to the terrorism dilemma," says international law expert Yehuda Blum, who served as Israel's ambassador to the UN from 1978-1984.
At a time when most of the world's conflicts consist of a state actor fighting a non-state actor vying either for territorial independence (the Palestinians, or the Kurds) or world-wide religious hegemony (al-Qaida), Blum finds it problematic that there are no laws specifically addressing rules of war against a hostile - predominately civilian - population that uses terror as its chief means of combat.
While no such codes have ever been formulated, in times of war democracies show that they can be almost as ruthless as the worst authoritarian regimes.
"Americans invented the term 'collateral damage,' which I personally hate. It was, after all, the US that dropped the first and only atomic bombs, knowing full well that tens of thousands of civilians would be killed."
Blum says it was also the US that fire-bombed Tokyo and (with Britain's lead) Dresden, killing tens of thousands of non-combatants in order "to terrorize civilians into quicker submission."
American and British bombers started pounding German cities after Germany targeted British civilians in the London Blitz during 1940-1941. In that sense, when Israel goes after legitimate military targets, "knowing full well that civilians will be killed, well that is not illegitimate," says Blum. At the same time, Blum says, Israel is not the US, and this is not World War II.
"Israel is looked upon with a double standard," says the former ambassador.
Ezrahi agrees. The allied carpet-bombing of Dresden, or the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki dwarf in numbers, scale and context Israel's accidental killing of Palestinian civilians, and Israel is not mired in a world war. The IDF's operations, he says, are conducted on a much smaller scale, in a relatively small area, with generally much more sophisticated weaponry, all under the exponentially more prying eyes of the media.
Ultimately, Blum and Ezrahi fear that fighting terror will make warfare even more barbarous than it was in its already rich past, and will leave the societies it affects - like Israel's and the Palestinians' - less civilized.
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