Anyone who read Chait's reply on Gaza can probably predict where and how I'd disagree (accusations of "moral equivalence?" That's so charmingly retro!), so I'll leave the rejoinder as an exercise to the reader. But Chait voices one common assumption that's worth some examination. "Israel," he says, "is trying to minimize civilian casualties while Hamas is trying to maximize them." There's little doubt that Hamas does indeed seek to maximize civilian casualties. But there's very little evidence that Israel tries to minimize civilian casualties. For instance: Israel chose to begin the assault on Gaza with air strikes. Gaza is a densely crowded urban area. Air strikes, even given the targeting capability of modern technologies, do not distinguish between uniformed flesh and civilian flesh. There is no doubt, whatsoever, that air strikes in a territory as crowded as Gaza will entail significant civilian casualties. And indeed, the strikes have killed 111 children as of their morning, to say nothing of civilian adults. It was not Israel's desire to kill those children. But there is no credible argument that they were not fully aware that many children would die as a result of their policy decision. The way to "minimize" civilian casualties would have been to choose not to conduct air strikes. Or if you were going to conduct air strikes, choose to conduct very few of them. Or if you were going to conduct air strikes and you meant to do so in great numbers, to launch the attacks at night rather than during the day. But Israel chose the opposite path. They did launch air strikes, which were guaranteed to kill civilians, and they launched many of them, and they did so during the day. That was consistent with Israel's military objectives: Kill Hamas's personnel, destroy their infrastructure, inflict punishment for their rocketry. It wasn't consistent with an effort to "minimize civilian casualties." Civilian casualties weren't an accident. They were expected. A more accurate construction of the difference between Israel and Hamas on this matter may be that Israel regrets civilian casualties, while Hamas does not. Or that for Israel, civilian casualties are not the point of the attacks. But so long as Israel chooses the terms of its military engagements, and chooses tactics that assure heavy civilian death tolls relative to tactics that would not kill as many civilians (say, assassinations of Hamas's leadership), it's hard to argue that they are minimizing civilian casualties. They are choosing a retaliation that will kill many civilians, and that retaliation exists in a universe of other possible retaliations that would kill fewer civilians. They are not minimizing -- and nor are they maximizing -- civilian casualties. Update: This post does not account for the conservative argument that Israel is specifically targeting civilians and that this is a really smart thing for them to be doing.
