<I think you have to consider the aim of military actions. And should differentiate between those aimed at a military target which injure civilians incidentally and those which aim at nothing other than civilians.>
Armies fighting guerrillas, almost always start out with "rules of engagement", that carefully try to selectively target only guerrillas, sparing civilians. Most armies, today, including the U.S. Army, understand that random violence is counterproductive.
The problem is that, in practice, those rules are impossible to enforce. The soldiers in the street, can't tell the difference between civilians and guerrillas and sympathizers. Even when they can, it's impossible to separate the combatants from non-combatants. Guerrillas blend in. It's a Darwinian process, and the surviving guerrillas know how to make it impossible for their opponents to use violence selectively.
So, the only way to win against guerrillas, is to separate them from their civilian base of support. And that means dealing with the reason the guerrillas have support in that population. Which neither the Israelis nor the U.S. are doing. Quite the opposite, in fact; we are continuously giving them new reasons to hate us. A policy of 100% Stick, and 0% Carrot, is a consistently failing strategy, unless you are prepared to escalate Force to the point of ethnic cleansing.
When we choose 100% Force, as our response to terror, we are deliberately choosing to kill lots of non-combatants. We know, ahead of time, that will be the result. Further, the anti-guerrilla forces, because they have so much more fire-power, always end up killing a lot more civilians, than the guerrillas do. Again, this is a choice, and we make that choice with open eyes. There are alternatives, which we have rejected.
In the Vietnam War, what was the ratio between American civilians killed by Vietcong, and Vietnamese civilians killed by our soldiers? 10,000 to one? 100,000 to one? Yet, we were constantly demonizing the Vietcong for their "uncivilized" methods.
Same thing with the Israelis. They made the choice to colonize the West Bank. They made the choice to place Jewish colonists (and often these are fundamentalist violence-prone Orthodox Jews, heavily armed) on Arab land. These colonies are between, and adjacent to, and surrounding, and sometimes in the middle of, Arab populations. This choice inevitably leads to conflict. It is predictable and inevitable. To say that it is accidental, or incidental, or exceptional, is to become an apologist for a policy of systematic mass violence. |
