Leading A People To A Catastrophe
Philip Collins with an interesting article in The Times on what constitutes a 'just war' while noting the prospects for peace in the region seem as distant as ever.
"The proposed settlement included a demilitarised Palestinian state in 92 per cent of the West Bank and 100 per cent of the Gaza strip. Most Israeli settlements would be dismantled. East Jerusalem would be the capital of the Palestinian state, and sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem would be split in half. Refugees would have the right to return to the Palestinian state and a vast international programme would facilitate their rehabilitation. Arafat said no, and a furious Clinton told him: 'You are leading your people and the region to a catastrophe'."
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/is-this-a-just-war-lets-apply-some-tests-30rrcfp2q
Is this a just war? Let’s apply some tests
To be morally legitimate, military action requires a righteous cause — but also a fair chance of achieving its objectives
By Philip Collins -The Times
An airstrike on Gaza last night illuminates the view from the Israeli border town of Sderot
MOSTAFA ALKHAROUF/ANADOLU/GETTY IMAGES
Three days before he left the office of chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat called President Clinton to say goodbye. “You are a great man”, said Arafat. “The hell I am,” replied Clinton. “I’m a colossal failure and you made me one.”
Clinton’s memoir, My Life, is one of those books that columnists endure so that readers don’t have to. Jon Stewart, the American comedian, once said: “I haven’t finished it yet ... I’m on page 12,000.”
One passage that is vivid and tragic is Clinton’s account of the Camp David summit in July 2000. Clinton relates how, to avoid any misunderstanding, he read “slowly” to Arafat the text of a document that had been endorsed in advance by Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister.
The proposed settlement included a demilitarised Palestinian state in 92 per cent of the West Bank and 100 per cent of the Gaza strip. Most Israeli settlements would be dismantled. East Jerusalem would be the capital of the Palestinian state, and sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem would be split in half. Refugees would have the right to return to the Palestinian state and a vast international programme would facilitate their rehabilitation. Arafat said no, and a furious Clinton told him: “You are leading your people and the region to a catastrophe.”
It is important to remember, as we try to decipher the codes in which this debate is now being conducted, that there has only ever been one partner too few to the prospect of peace. This is what makes calls for a ceasefire — even when it comes from well-intentioned people such as Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham — less serious than they sound.
Sadly, not every contribution is motivated by humanitarian concern alone. It has been depressing — and, if you are Jewish, frightening — to witness the performative sanctimony of the debate, especially the parade of nasty thought-clichés on Twitter, or X as it is now called, perhaps because that is the rating that many posts on this topic should now carry.
The context is telling; the debate is noxious. So, rather than linger on the angry banality, let’s step back and consider Israeli action in the light of a serious account of what makes any given war just. The philosophical tradition of the just war has two early authorities: the 13th-century Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas and a 1625 work by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius called On the Law of War and Peace.
The idea of the just war has three parts: it must be fought to put right a clear wrong; it must be conducted in accord with justice; and the aftermath must respect the motivating reason for war.
Aquinas provided a list of just causes that could have been written today: avenging wrongs, punishing a miscreant nation, restoring what has been unjustly seized. Grotius broadly concurs, but the two authorities diverge in a way that matters. Aquinas states that a war can be just if it is the expression of a rightful intention to promote good and forestall evil.
Grotius, though, places his emphasis more squarely on whether there is any prudential likelihood that the objective can be achieved and that a better tomorrow will therefore follow. Or, as Tony Blair put the point in Chicago in April 1999, military action can be justified when “we have clear objectives and when we are going to succeed”.
There are two prudential worries about this conflict that derive from this insight. Israel has the perfect right to retaliate, and it has defined a clear military objective: to eradicate Hamas, whose presence in Gaza obviously makes peaceful living, let alone a return to Camp David, quite impossible.
Yet this is where we friends of Israel need to invoke Grotius. The American secretary of state Antony Blinken, sundry Israeli generals and the Saudis are all urging a degree of restraint on the Israeli incursion into Gaza, not on the grounds that it is wrong in intent but that it cannot hope to succeed. Prudence on this point is not just a problem after the fact. It is part of the moral case for the intervention itself. If an action has no feasible hope of success, the moral case for war is damaged.
It is easy to see how the Israelis get into Gaza, but there is a fog shrouding how they get out. What plausible regime can Israel leave behind? To depart after a ground invasion with no functioning state would be disastrous. The Palestinian Authority is in no fit state. The United Nations is hobbled by Russia and China, even if its secretary-general had not incurred the wrath of the Israelis with some foolishly chosen words last week. It is possible to imagine, just about, a convocation of Arab states that will draw up a viable interim government for Gaza, coupled with a modern Marshall Plan, though this distant prospect is hardly part of the current conflict.
It is not obvious either that the eradication of Hamas passes the prudential test. If I could conjure Hamas out of existence in an instant, I would do so. These people are terrorists so intoxicated with victimhood and unhistorical self-pity that they are prepared to sacrifice their own population for it. Yet that does not mean they can be that readily taken out.
On his visit to Israel, President Biden asked the Israelis not to repeat the mistakes that America made in the wake of 9/11. Sadly, it appears that friendly counsel is being ignored. One lesson of the past two decades is, surely, that terrorism cannot be defeated by military means. The Americans had some success in identifying, and assassinating, senior Taliban personnel. The Taliban are at this moment in power in Afghanistan. The enduring effect is marginal, as the Israelis know. Kill one general and another appears. Blow one tunnel up and they will dig another. It’s the attempt to drive tanks through an idea. I want it to work but I don’t believe it can.
There is a clear wrong at issue here. If the unprovoked slaughter of October 7 is not a clear wrong, then our moral language has been emptied of all meaning. The conduct of war can be just. It is not a war crime to send bombs into a populated area as long as the attacker can plausibly cite self-defence.
Israel can, and must, choose to maintain the supply of water and electricity to Gaza and continue to issue warnings about forthcoming bombardment. All of this can pass the test of justice. The troubling clause is the practical one, which is another way of saying that, until the politics change, the war changes nothing.
An airstrike on Gaza last night illuminates the view from the Israeli border town of Sderot
MOSTAFA ALKHAROUF/ANADOLU/GETTY IMAGES
Three days before he left the office of chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat called President Clinton to say goodbye. “You are a great man”, said Arafat. “The hell I am,” replied Clinton. “I’m a colossal failure and you made me one.”
Clinton’s memoir, My Life, is one of those books that columnists endure so that readers don’t have to. Jon Stewart, the American comedian, once said: “I haven’t finished it yet ... I’m on page 12,000.”
One passage that is vivid and tragic is Clinton’s account of the Camp David summit in July 2000. Clinton relates how, to avoid any misunderstanding, he read “slowly” to Arafat the text of a document that had been endorsed in advance by Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister.
The proposed settlement included a demilitarised Palestinian state in 92 per cent of the West Bank and 100 per cent of the Gaza strip. Most Israeli settlements would be dismantled. East Jerusalem would be the capital of the Palestinian state, and sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem would be split in half. Refugees would have the right to return to the Palestinian state and a vast international programme would facilitate their rehabilitation. Arafat said no, and a furious Clinton told him: “You are leading your people and the region to a catastrophe.”
It is important to remember, as we try to decipher the codes in which this debate is now being conducted, that there has only ever been one partner too few to the prospect of peace. This is what makes calls for a ceasefire — even when it comes from well-intentioned people such as Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham — less serious than they sound.
Sadly, not every contribution is motivated by humanitarian concern alone. It has been depressing — and, if you are Jewish, frightening — to witness the performative sanctimony of the debate, especially the parade of nasty thought-clichés on Twitter, or X as it is now called, perhaps because that is the rating that many posts on this topic should now carry.
The context is telling; the debate is noxious. So, rather than linger on the angry banality, let’s step back and consider Israeli action in the light of a serious account of what makes any given war just. The philosophical tradition of the just war has two early authorities: the 13th-century Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas and a 1625 work by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius called On the Law of War and Peace.
The idea of the just war has three parts: it must be fought to put right a clear wrong; it must be conducted in accord with justice; and the aftermath must respect the motivating reason for war.
Aquinas provided a list of just causes that could have been written today: avenging wrongs, punishing a miscreant nation, restoring what has been unjustly seized. Grotius broadly concurs, but the two authorities diverge in a way that matters. Aquinas states that a war can be just if it is the expression of a rightful intention to promote good and forestall evil.
Grotius, though, places his emphasis more squarely on whether there is any prudential likelihood that the objective can be achieved and that a better tomorrow will therefore follow. Or, as Tony Blair put the point in Chicago in April 1999, military action can be justified when “we have clear objectives and when we are going to succeed”.
There are two prudential worries about this conflict that derive from this insight. Israel has the perfect right to retaliate, and it has defined a clear military objective: to eradicate Hamas, whose presence in Gaza obviously makes peaceful living, let alone a return to Camp David, quite impossible.
Yet this is where we friends of Israel need to invoke Grotius. The American secretary of state Antony Blinken, sundry Israeli generals and the Saudis are all urging a degree of restraint on the Israeli incursion into Gaza, not on the grounds that it is wrong in intent but that it cannot hope to succeed. Prudence on this point is not just a problem after the fact. It is part of the moral case for the intervention itself. If an action has no feasible hope of success, the moral case for war is damaged.
It is easy to see how the Israelis get into Gaza, but there is a fog shrouding how they get out. What plausible regime can Israel leave behind? To depart after a ground invasion with no functioning state would be disastrous. The Palestinian Authority is in no fit state. The United Nations is hobbled by Russia and China, even if its secretary-general had not incurred the wrath of the Israelis with some foolishly chosen words last week. It is possible to imagine, just about, a convocation of Arab states that will draw up a viable interim government for Gaza, coupled with a modern Marshall Plan, though this distant prospect is hardly part of the current conflict.
It is not obvious either that the eradication of Hamas passes the prudential test. If I could conjure Hamas out of existence in an instant, I would do so. These people are terrorists so intoxicated with victimhood and unhistorical self-pity that they are prepared to sacrifice their own population for it. Yet that does not mean they can be that readily taken out.
On his visit to Israel, President Biden asked the Israelis not to repeat the mistakes that America made in the wake of 9/11. Sadly, it appears that friendly counsel is being ignored. One lesson of the past two decades is, surely, that terrorism cannot be defeated by military means. The Americans had some success in identifying, and assassinating, senior Taliban personnel. The Taliban are at this moment in power in Afghanistan. The enduring effect is marginal, as the Israelis know. Kill one general and another appears. Blow one tunnel up and they will dig another. It’s the attempt to drive tanks through an idea. I want it to work but I don’t believe it can.
There is a clear wrong at issue here. If the unprovoked slaughter of October 7 is not a clear wrong, then our moral language has been emptied of all meaning. The conduct of war can be just. It is not a war crime to send bombs into a populated area as long as the attacker can plausibly cite self-defence.
Israel can, and must, choose to maintain the supply of water and electricity to Gaza and continue to issue warnings about forthcoming bombardment. All of this can pass the test of justice. The troubling clause is the practical one, which is another way of saying that, until the politics change, the war changes nothing.
