“an Israeli missile incinerated a car and a small truck full of families leaving their Lebanese border village of Marwaheen near Tyre after the Israeli army used loudhailers to tell residents they had just hours to go. Pictures showed charred bodies of children strewn across the road.”Another is the Israeli targeting of clearly-marked ambulances:
And that was before Israel's announcement that they will deliberately attack UN-affiliated engineers who attempt to repair bridges in Lebanon.
And before Qana.
Rhetoric surrounding the war
Israel and its supporters are also waging an interesting rhetorical battle, in parallel with the military one. One Arab analyst has this take on it:
“Israel is staking a claim to the exclusive use of force as an instrument of policy and punishment, and is seeking to deny any opposing state or non-state actor a similar right. It is also largely succeeding in portraying its own “right to self-defence” as beyond question, while denying anyone else the same.”
A particularly interesting development on the rhetorical front is Alan Dershowitz's innovative suggestion that the civilians being killed in Lebanon may not really be civilians in the full sense of the word. After all, some of them may sympathize with or actually support Hizballah. He suggests that in general, being civilian vs. combatant is a continuum, not a clean discrete distinction - and that this continuousness has moral consequences: the innocence of a person should be assessed on the basis of where they fall along this continuum.
Now I find this argument interesting for several reasons - quite apart from its conceptual cuteness. The main thing I find striking is how badly it backfires against Israel. Military service in Israel is compulsory for most Jewish and Druze citizens - followed by decades-long reserve duty in which a civilian may be called on for military service. And Israeli support for their armed forces is currently extremely high. By Dershowitz's logic, this means that many Israelis who would appear to be innocent civilians are not, in the full sense of the word - instead, they occupy some intermediate position on his continuum, either because of their potential military status as members of the reserve, or because of their sympathies - and again by his logic, this fact presumably has moral consequences that should be kept in mind when we hear about attacks that harm such individuals. My suspicion is that if one could actually do the numbers (a big if), Dershowitz's argument works against Israel more than it works for it. In any event, it's amusing to see something like this coming from a man who recently published a book with the subtitle “A Knife that Cuts Both Ways.”
There's a conceptual link between Dershowitz's continuum of “civilianality” (his term - don't blame me) and the other element of the rhetorical war alluded to above - the claim that Israel has an exclusive right to the legitimate use of violence. The fact that Dershowitz chose to make an argument that is so easy to turn around against Israel suggests that either he didn't think of that possibility, or he thought others wouldn't. But why? There's nothing unusual about turning it around - it should occur right off the bat to anybody with a sense for the universal applicability of principles. Yet I suspect it doesn't occur to many. And I suspect the reason it doesn't is that we in the U.S. are regularly urged to think of the Israeli use of violence as legitimate - remember, “Israel has the right to defend itself”. On this view, who cares - morally - if many Israeli civilians are combatants to some degree? It's irrelevant, if the Israeli use of deadly force is itself a moral and legitimate undertaking. I consider this line of argument to be dangerous gibberish - but I do think it may explain why Dershowitz's eminently reversible argument made it out the gate.
More on rhetoric
Israel's supporters tirelessly argue that there's no moral equivalence between Israel and Hizballah, since Hizballah targets civilians, while Israel targets Hizballah fighters and only kills civilians inadvertently, and with great sadness. This argument flies in the face of the evidence. If Israel is targeting Hizballah, how come the vast majority of the Lebanese they've killed are civilians (87%)? And if Hizballah are primarily targeting Israeli civilians, how come the majority of the Israelis they've killed are soldiers (75%)? I suppose it's possible that both the Israelis and Hizballah are so staggeringly incompetent that they both invert, not just miss, their aims. But I doubt it. Moreover, the Israeli military has verbally made it perfectly clear that the assault is in fact not limited to Hizballah.
One last thing for now on the rhetorical front. AIPAC, America's Israel lobby, recently issued what I consider a remarkable memo titled “Beirut largely unscathed as Israel targets Hizballah strongholds.” They point out, correctly, that most of Lebanon's capital city does not (yet) look like Stalingrad, although of course parts of it do. The thing is, Haifa is even more “unscathed” - as is northern Israel generally - but I suspect such a statement would seem horribly impertinent and callous to most Israelis, particularly those who have lost loved ones to Hizballah's rocket attacks. By exactly the same token, only much more strongly given the degree of devastation, the assertion that most of Beirut has not been destroyed is outrageously irrelevant.
Dark humor and absurdity
And finally, we come to the role of America in this mess. An appreciation of the absurd has always been a necessary survival skill for living in Lebanon - and I find myself falling back on it a lot these days, when considering America's awkward lurching about on this issue. You either laugh or go nuts - so laugh when you can. And it just so happens that the gems of darkest humor in this ugliness seem to involve America - I'm not sure why.
There are three points of particular absurdity. The first is America's offer of humanitarian assistance to Lebanon - including plastic sheeting you'll be relieved to hear - at a time when the U.S. is working hard to prevent a ceasefire - i.e. working hard to ensure that more people will be killed, injured, or displaced. Moreover, it's currently unclear how humanitarian aid will reach those who need it most desperately - unless there's a ceasefire - which there won't be soon - because of Uncle Sam. (But it's really good sheeting, I hear.)
The second little jewel of hilarity is that the U.S. was happy to fund the Israeli attack on Lebanon (U.S. yearly military aid to Israel is around 2.1 billion USD) - but it was not willing to fund the rescue of its own citizens from that attack. Here's the website of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, on plans to evacuate Americans from Lebanon: “[T]he U.S. government does not provide no-cost transportation ... Americans will be asked to sign a promissory note and will be billed at a later date.” (Text copied July 18 2006.) In contrast, Britain did not charge its citizens for the evacuation - nor, I understand, did other countries. Eventually, even the U.S. relented.
Finally, there is a certain amount of dark chuckle-value in watching America fawn all over so-called “Islamofascist” Saudi Arabia, for its indirect support of Israel in this war.