(Continued from yesterday)

Learning to apply the same standards of judgment to actions, whether done by ‘them’ or ‘us’, is important if we are to get beyond tribal ways of thinking.

Take the actions of Hezbollah. Since they are part of the ‘them’ group, their rocket attacks into Israel are portrayed as deliberate attempts to kill Israeli civilians. If this was indeed their goal, it has been a massive failure. After all, we are told that they have been firing rockets at a rate of over one hundred per day, which means that about three to four thousand have been fired so far. But National Public Radio reported on August 6, 2006 that the number of Israelis killed as of that date was 94, of whom 58 were soldiers and 36 were civilians. If the goal of Hezbollah is to kill Israeli civilians, then on a purely callous and cynical cost-benefit analysis, this is an extraordinarily ineffective way of doing so, since it works out to about a hundred missiles for each civilian death.

Lobbing low precision munitions into cities is not the best way of inflicting large numbers of civilian casualties because most of the time they will land in empty places causing property damage and perhaps fires but few deaths. It is more likely that the goal of this barrage is to terrorize the civilian population by showing them that the Israeli military cannot protect them. Of course, when some Israeli civilians inevitably die due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, some Hezbollah supporters will rejoice, just as some of ‘us’ do when Arabs and Muslims are killed.

But what if a Hezbollah spokesperson were to say that they regretted the death of civilians, that it was an accident, that they were not targeting them but were merely trying to show that they had missiles that could reach these towns? Such an explanation would be rejected summarily, as it should be, because when you lob bombs into cities, you are displaying a callous disregard for civilian life. But why it is that we uncritically accept that same rationale when offered by US or Israeli government spokespersons?

Joseph Palermo makes as similar point, commenting on the fact that Fox News commentators like Michelle Malkin were saying that the Qana bombing was not such a big deal and the world-wide outrage over it was being deliberately manufactured by those seeking to discredit Israel:

What would be the response if Hezbollah fired a rocket into a shelter killing fifty-six Israeli civilians ranging in age from a ten-month-old baby to a 95-year-old woman as happened in Qana? What if Hezbollah apologized, saying it was a “mistake,” but had made a similar “mistake” ten years earlier in the same Israeli village, killing 106 civilians? Would Ms. Malkin and others like her be on the public airwaves spewing forth such brutish views of the innocent dead?

In modern warfare, the majority of casualties are civilians. While this is perhaps not deliberate, it is also not an accident. This pervasive callous disregard for civilian lives has, I suspect, arisen as a result of the advent of air power and long-range missiles which enables governments to rain destruction on enemy populations with minimal risk to themselves.

There are ways in which civilian casualties can be minimized and that is by having ground troops engage in close-range combat, where you can actually see the person you are fighting against and are less likely to kill children and other innocents. Police forces, for example, are trained to never to fire their weapons until they are sure that the target is who they think it is, in order to minimize the risk to noncombatants.

But this approach has a cost. It puts your own soldiers in harm’s way and runs the risk of having them being killed and injured. This might make the public less supportive of wars, which is what governments really fear the most. What government and other non-governmental warring agents have determined is that civilian casualties of the ‘other’ side are much preferable as a policy option to the deaths of ‘our’ soldiers, and so using air power and long-range missiles have become the preferred mode of warfare. A cynical calculation has been made that ‘we’ can live with casualties, as long as they are not ‘ours’.

In order to do this and still retain a sense of ‘our’ own nobility, ‘they’ have to be dehumanized, made to look as if ‘they’ do not share the same noble values as ‘we’ do and thus either deserved to die or that their lives are somehow worth less than ‘our’ lives. And we see this happening over and over again. I remember General William Westmoreland, commander of the US forces in Vietnam where about 500,000 Vietnamese civilians were killed. He downplayed these deaths and casually ‘explained’ in front of cameras why this was not so bad. He said, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.” Once again, we see the ‘we/they’ formulation of tribalism, used to justify our actions but condemn the identical actions of the opponents.

(If you ever get the chance, see the Oscar winning 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds where the Westmoreland clip can be seen. I saw it decades ago and that chilling scene of casual racism still reverberates within me, especially since immediately afterwards the film cut away to a scene of a Vietnamese village woman sobbing uncontrollably over the death of a loved one.)

This is why I am skeptical of the regretful apologies that are made by ‘our’ leaders whenever ‘their’ civilians are killed, the pieties that ‘we’ do not target civilians, and the aggrieved attitude that is adopted if anyone should think otherwise. ‘We’ may not have targeted the particular individual civilians who happened to die as a result of ‘our’ actions, but the decision to wage long-range warfare by planes or missiles ensured that large numbers of civilians would die just as surely as deliberately lining them up and shooting them.

The idea that by dropping leaflets from the air urging civilians to leave an area (as Israel has sometimes done) one has absolved oneself from guilt for their subsequent deaths from bombing attacks is another argument that has no merit. For one thing, as the events of Hurricane Katrina showed, telling people they should leave their homes does not mean they can leave even if they want to. There are whole host of reasons why people, especially the poor, very old, very young, or infirm, do not leave, even if you accept the dubious morality that it is acceptable to order people to abandon their homes so that they can be bombed later. As Juan Cole points out:

The Israelis don’t say, however, how desperately poor hardscrabble farmers including the aged and infirm and children are supposed to travel to Beirut over the roads and bridges that the Israelis have bombed out, and on what they are supposed to live when they get there.

Turning the argument around, what if Hezbollah said that all Israelis must leave Haifa and other cities in northern Israel because they are targeting the city with their missiles. Does that mean the deaths of Israeli civilians due to subsequent rocket attacks is justified? What if Hezbollah claims that since it is obvious by now that the northern towns of Israeli are targets of their rockets, that all civilians should leave those areas and that they are not responsible for the deaths of any civilians still remaining? Would we accept that? The answer to these questions is obviously no. Telling people who are living in their own homes, in their own communities, minding their own business, that they must leave or risk being killed is wrong, irrespective of who does it to whom.

The power of tribal allegiances is so strong that those who are determined to see their own side only in a virtuous light will not agree with me. Those with a tribal allegiance to Israel will find a way to justify the killing and displacement of Lebanese civilians, while similarly those with a tribal allegiance to Hezbollah will justify the killing and displacement of Israeli civilians.

I forget who it was that said that the hardest thing for any one of us to accept is that we are just like other people. This is not to deny that there exists diversity or certain distinguishing characteristics for individuals and even groups. But it is hard for many people to accept that no single individual or group has a monopoly on either the virtues or the vices. And yet, the sense of tribal allegiance is so strong that people desperately want to find some way to believe that their own tribe is morally superior to other tribes. It is as if they feel that their own sense of self-worth is inextricably linked with that of their tribe. They can feel good about themselves only if their tribe is also seen as good.

As examples, we find people who say that some things make them ‘proud to be American’ or ‘proud to be an Arab’ or ‘proud to be an Israeli.’ Statements such as these seem to me to be exceedingly meaningless. I am an ethnic Tamil and the nationality of my birth is Sri Lankan. Am I proud to be either? No. Conversely, am I ashamed to be either? No. Attaching those emotions to such labels is absurd, and is as meaningless as saying that I am proud to be brown-eyed. One’s ethnicity, nationality, and religion are accidents of birth, and I could just as easily have been born a Tibetan or an Inuit or a Swede. These labels provide a shorthand description of one’s history and all they indicate is which cultures one has grown up and is familiar with. There is no deeper significance, however much we may wish there was.

There is no particular virtue to be acquired because of the tribe one belongs to. It is what one does with one’s life, how one treats others, what kind of steward one is for the Earth, that determines one’s worth and value.

To be continued. . .