Francisco Gil-White:Why Hezbollah is Responsible for Civilian Casualties

Francisco Gil-White makes a logical case with this analogy:

The argument that the Israeli response is ‘too harsh’ says that some Lebanese civilians are dying as a result of Israeli firepower, and this means that Israel is guilty for their deaths and hence ‘too harsh’ in its response.

To see whether this is a valid argument, let us conduct another thought experiment.

Suppose that a criminal is shooting at you and your family. You shoot back in self-defense, to protect your spouse and children -- your life. Accidentally, you shoot dead a bystander. Question: Who is morally responsible for the death of the bystander? Morally responsible. You were not aiming for the bystander, and you would not have used your gun if this criminal had not been shooting at your family in the first place. And you do have an obligation to defend your family; you cannot simply turn your family over to anybody who is prepared to use violence. Therefore, the moral responsibility for the death of that bystander belongs to the man who decided to shoot at your family and in so doing forced you to perform your moral duty and defend it. If the bullet that killed the bystander came out of the barrel of your gun, that does not absolve the man who attacked your family, and neither does it convict you.

Now, consider the situation of Israel.

Hezbollah means to kill every last living Jew. Hezbollah is growing fast inside the Lebanese state across the border. And Hezbollah attacked Israeli civilians. When the Israeli government retaliated against Hezbollah, this was its moral obligation, because the Israeli government must protect Israeli citizens. Hezbollah must be destroyed because the purpose of Hezbollah is to kill all the Jews. No such organization can be allowed to exist, and recruit, and arm itself to the teeth. If we tolerate such organizations, we tolerate genocide. Therefore, Hezbollah must be destroyed. This is the morally correct thing to do.

In the effort to reduce Hezbollah, the Israeli government has not been able to keep casualties of Lebanese civilians to zero, this is true. It is a terrible thing when anybody dies, but we are not discussing whether this is good or bad -- we agree that the deaths of civilians are a terrible thing, and the same goes for the deaths of soldiers. What we are trying to do is decide whose fault this is.

Hezbollah’s core doctrine is to seek the total destruction of the civilian Jewish population, and it deliberately targets Jewish civilians. The Israeli government, by contrast, is not trying to kill Lebanese civilians: it is dropping leaflets to warn civilians before it strikes a place. And the Israeli government would not be shooting at all if Hezbollah had not attacked Israeli civilians in the first place. In attacking Hezbollah, the Israeli government is discharging its moral obligation to Israeli citizens, precisely in the manner that you protected your family in the above thought experiment. Israel is not guilty for the deaths of the bystanders. It is to Hezbollah that you should account these deaths, because Hezbollah forced the Israeli government to attack Hezbollah, and the Hezbollah ‘soldiers,’ like the cowards they are, hide among Lebanese civilians, thus endangering them.