The Juice Is Out Of The Box, Flowing Into The Streets

There’s a fight going on, over Israel, Hamas, Gladstone report and Bernstein’s op-ed.

Matthew Yglesias:

The argument in the second graf I quote is, huffing and puffing aside, all there is to Bernstein’s argument. He thinks that Hamas and Hezbollah “started it” and Israel is acting in self-defense, and that countries acting in self-defense should generally be exempted from international humanitarian law and human rights norms. This is a thesis a lot of people seem eager to embrace in the specific case of Israel, but few people seem prepared to defend as a general proposition or to apply as a general matter. People don’t defend it as a general proposition because it’s not defensible. For one thing, this just isn’t what international humanitarian law says. Just war theory has always recognized specific ethical obligations of combatants that are unrelated to the justice of their cause, and international humanitarian law does the same. After all, subjectivizing the obligations of combatants in the way Bernstein proposes would drain the standards of all force. All participants in all wars think that they’re the good guys and the enemy is the bad guys.

It’s the existence of independent standards that lets us say that it’s wrong and illegal of Hamas to lob rockets at Israeli towns, and to try to build a consensus around that point that’s independent of people’s views on all the different twists and turns of the Israeli-Arab conflict. But by the very same token Israel’s obligation to minimize civilians’ exposure to harm also exists independently of people’s views on all the different twists and turns of the Israeli-Arab conflict. To relativize combatants obligations to the merits of their underlying position would just reduce human rights and humanitarian law to politics, with everyone saying all their conduct was justified by the justice of their cause.

If people want to say that the whole quest to articulate objective human rights standards and international humanitarian law is inherently futile or misguided, then fine. But an awful lot of people who claim not to believe that seem to want to turn around and reject the underlying premises of the endeavor when it turns out that Israel—like its adversaries—sometimes violates those standards.

Andrew Sullivan made the last paragraph the one of his quotes of the day of the day.

Noah Pollak at Commentary:

It turns out that Hamas and Hezbollah sometimes violate human rights standards? The self-declared purpose of these groups is to destroy Israel and murder Jews everywhere through the use of terrorism. They sometimes violate human rights standards? Every moment of their existence is a violation of human rights standards.

This is where the Juiceboxers and their new playground chaperone repudiate one of the most important tenets of international legal and humanitarian traditions: the concept of jus ad bellum, which asks the question of whether instigating hostilities is legitimate. To put it simply, this is the moral distinction between killing an intruder who seeks to murder your family and being the intruder himself. In the former case, you have a right to open fire. In the latter case, you have no right to expect not to be on the receiving end of open fire.

Yet Yglesias and Sullivan do not acknowledge any such distinction. To them, there appears to be little or no moral difference between the al-Qassam Brigades and the Israeli army, because the intentions of these two fighting forces count for nothing. On one side, there is the desire to terrorize, murder, and hopefully commit genocide against the Jews (or, as Yglesias puts it, Hamas and Hezbollah are “mean”); and on the other, there is the desire to prevent the perpetration of those things and defend a liberal, democratic way of life. Sullivan is quite clear about his indifference to all this, writing: “The only salient question is: did Israel commit war crimes in Gaza?”

I think the only salient questions are: Who keeps starting wars with Israel? Why do they start them, and what are they trying to accomplish? And who bears responsibility for the ensuing destruction? And no, for the record, Israel did not commit war crimes in Gaza. Watch Richard Kemp’s remarkable UN testimony if you disagree. You won’t see his presentation debated on Sullivan’s blog because it does not provide an opportunity for obnoxious and empty moral posturing.

Matthew Yglesias responds:

I really have to say that it makes me extremely angry when I need to read this kind of bullshit written in which wild and implausible views are attributed to me. What I’m saying—and I don’t think this should be controversial—is that whatever you think about Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel still has obligations under international humanitarian law and many credible investigators have reached the conclusion that Israel violated those obligations.

This isn’t the only important issue in the world. It’s not the only important issue in the region. It’s not even the only important issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it’s an important issue. And there’s a set of people in the United States who are determined to avoid talking about this issue and to instead engage in a lot of imputation of bad faith to the people trying to raise it.

But a liberal democracy can’t just say “we’re a liberal democracy!” and thereby evade questions about actual human rights practices. Part of being a liberal democracy is to, in practice, attempt to avoid human rights violations and attempt to investigate allegations that they’ve taken place.

Noah Pollak responds:

The link in his post is to the Israeli human-rights group B’tselem, which, like the UN Human Rights Council that Yglesias refuses to question, has a long record of hostility to the IDF. And B’tselem, like Goldstone, has been called out repeatedly and credibly on its own biases and errors.

But never mind that for now. The link to B’tselem is meant as a rebuttal to those of us who criticize the Goldstone Report and its sponsor, the UN Human Rights Council. But because Yglesias doesn’t know much about these matters, he doesn’t realize that B’tselem joined the ranks of the Goldstone and UN critics:

““There’s no question that the HRC, which mandated the Goldstone [fact-finding mission into the Gaza fighting], has an inappropriate, disproportionate fixation with Israel,” [Jessica Montell, executive director of B'tselem] said, adding that the Council was “a political body made up of diplomats, not human rights experts, which means that the powerful states are never going to come under scrutiny the way the powerless will. So China, Russia and the US will never have commission of inquiry, regardless of how their crimes rank relative to Israeli crimes.”

Furthermore, the Goldstone Report itself, which was presented in its final version to the Human Rights Council on Tuesday, is “disagreeable” and mistaken in some of its gravest accusations against Israel, she believes. These include the claim that Israel intentionally targeted the civilian population rather than Hamas, and the “weak, hesitant way that the report mentions Hamas’s strategy of using civilians [in combat].””

The executive director of B’tselem made the very same criticisms of Goldstone that we evil apologists for Israeli militarism have been making, yet Yglesias points to B’tselem as Exhibit A in his defense of Goldstone. Whoops.

Matthew Yglesias responds:

Pollack “responds” to my post with the observation that B’Tselem is critical of the UN Human Rights Council and also has some disagreements with the Goldstone report. But so what? I never mentioned the UNHRC. I’ll add that Richard Goldstone himself has criticized the UN Human Rights Council’s handling of his report. We can all agree—me, Pollack, Goldstone, B’Tselem, etc.—that the UNHRC’s record on Israel is not a good one*.

That said, I’ll circle back around to the point: Israel has obligations under international humanitarian law and human rights norms, obligations that it appears to have violated, and these obligations stand regardless of crimes on the part of Hamas. This observation has prompted a lot of ad hominem attacks, and a lot of smokescreens and huffy rhetoric, but basically nothing in the way of substantive defense.

I note that the argument has nothing in particular to do with Israel. When it comes to the United States of America, liberals generally think the US has human rights obligations and obligations under international humanitarian law. We think that part of being “the good guys” on the world stage is that we are obliged to do the right thing even if our adversaries don’t. Conservatives disagree with this—they think starting wars and brutalizing detainees, for example, are good ideas—and see human rights as basically a concept that should be opportunistically deployed for geopolitical advantage, and then cast aside the first time you want to start copying Chinese torture manuals. But American liberals who think the US should abide by human rights norms aren’t “anti-American.” Nor are American Jews who think Israel should abide by human rights norms “anti-Israel.”

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