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Moral Standards Under Pressure: The Israeli Army and the Intifada

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Max Singer
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Abstract

“The PLO practice of hiding behind civilians has produced severe tests for the IDF [Israeli Defense Force].” Have Israeli soldiers abandoned their moral obligations in war during the time of Intifada? The moral code of the “purity” of arms (tohar haneshek) has served as an absolute standard for the Israeli Army since the creation of Israel. The author emphasizes that although televised beatings of Palestinian women and children have caused an outcry, it would be unrealistic to hold Israeli soldiers to the same moral standards given the political situation; hence the IDF cannot be criticized for having committed some immoral acts under the unique circumstances of the intifada. The Israeli Defense Force has not abandoned its tohar haneshek and has maintained its commitment to moral values in national and international behavior.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 4 , March 1990 , pp. 135 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1990

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References

1 When a soldier kills an enemy soldier in combat he is not acting less morally than when he peacefully goes about his business at home. Morality's command to him has changed. At home morality says, “Do not kill”; in combat morality commands him to “kill.” (But the command of morality in combat is not only to kill enemy soldiers; it is also to spare enemy noncombatants.) Circumstances may require morality to drop some rules temporarily, but morality never says, “Anything goes.” This distinction—between the specific rule and the general obligation—is the basic foundation for understanding the moral limits on the use of force. It underlies all considerations of morality in combat. The moral limits on the use of force depend on circumstances. But there are no circumstances under which Israeli soldiers are exempt from the obligation that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) calls tohar haneshek or “purity of arms,” even though the specifics commanded by that doctrine depend on the situation.Google Scholar

2 Guerrillas are soldiers who use guerrilla tactics in fighting an enemy army and government (i.e., no fixed front or lines of communication, light arms, hit-and-run tactics, etc.). Terrorists are those who attack innocent people in order to frighten or pressure someone else. The definitions are instrumental and have nothing to do with politics or the goals for which the force is fighting. The definitions apply both to states and to other kinds of organizations. (There is no need to accept that “one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.”).Google Scholar

3 In his autobiography, Warrior, Ariel Sharon, Israeli defense minister during the Lebanon war in 1982, describes a long meeting of Israeli officers in the middle of the night after the second day of that war, “in which moral issues, not tactical or strategic ones, dominated the discussion.” The advance of the Israeli forces had been dangerously delayed that day, with a number of casualties, because of PLO fighters hidden in houses and using civilians as hostages and as cover. Sharon reports, “There was one obvious solution we could use our air force to destroy whatever buildings were in the way…. that would open the road and save us considerable casualties, but it would also cause a heavy toll among the civilian population…. Every single officer present …recommended that we not use the air force …[and] that was the decision I took.”Google Scholar

4 Some will say that the soldier—or at least the higher officer—has an obligation to refuse to go into combat if the cause is manifestly unjust; but here we are only discussing the morality that should guide soldiers who are in action.Google Scholar

5 This principle does not forbid the use of the army to execute the order of a military court, after some appropriate procedure, to blow up the house of a terrorist's family.Google Scholar

6 In judging individuals there are two different kinds of defense for actions that are normally wrong—justification and extenuation. If an act is justified it means that if the same situation happens again, law and morality tell the person that he should do again exactly what he did before. Extenuation, on the other hand, means that although the person did something wrong, he should not be held to be guilty of a crime because special circumstances made it so hard to avoid his wrongful action. A person who is found not guilty because of extenuating circumstances is told, “You are not being condemned, but do not do it again.”

Extenuation includes circumstances where it would not be abnormal for a soldier to be so excited, or frightened, that he makes a mistake and does something that he should not do-such as shooting into a crowd-or when he loses control of his emotions because of extreme provocation. In such cases one does not hold the soldier criminally responsible even though he did something he should not have done that ordinarily would be a crime.

A similar distinction exists for the army as a whole. Some very rough treatment of civilians that normally would be completely unacceptable may be justified by the circumstances; that is, it may be the morally required policy of the army. But armies, too, make mistakes in extenuating circumstances. Saying that an army has a good moral record does not mean justifying everything it does. It means some of its normally forbidden actions werejustified, and there were extenuating circumstances for much or all of what it did that was wrong.

7 There are some different criticisms that have been made against the morality of the IDF that have a good deal of merit: 1. By failing to act more promptly and strongly to put down the uprising, the IDF and the Israeli government probably increased the direct and indirect casualties, damaged the prospects for peace, and increased the difficulty of governing the territories in the future. (“More strongly” does not necessarily mean more killing or more beating. It means an earlier acceptance of the need to convince the Arab population that the uprising would be painful and costly to them and that it had no chance of success. It also means more cleverness in finding legitimate ways of hurting the Arabs—by their values—and of dividing them, as well as more decisive action by deportation and other means against the leaders and organizers.) 2. In a significant number of cases the IDF used too much restraint on, or wrongfully disciplined, officers. It is hard to know whether mistakes in this direction were greater or smaller than mistakes in the other direction. Inappropriate restraint can be as harmful to moral values as too little restraint.Google Scholar