Matt Yglesias

IDF Rabbis Urge Ethnic Cleansing

At last night’s press conference, Barack Obama made some news by conceding that the rise of a Netanyahu-Lieberman administration in Israel was not making the prospects for peace any better. That’s true enough, but it’s worth recalling that it’s not as if the previous Kadima-Labor government was really going the extra mile to show its commitment to a just resolution of the problem. The rise of the far-right in electoral politics reflects a general—and quite ugly—rightward turn in Israel more generally. Take this story, for example:

In testimony reported by Israeli news media and in interviews with The Times, Gaza veterans said rabbis advised army units to show the enemy no mercy and called for resettlement of the Palestinian enclave by Jews.

“The rabbis were all over, in every unit,” said Yehuda Shaul, a retired army officer whose human rights group, Breaking the Silence, has taken testimony from dozens of Gaza veterans. “It was quite well organized.”

The army, which conscripts almost every Israeli Jew at 18, has been dominated for most of its history by secular officers. But over the last 15 years, as secular Israelis have soured on the occupation of Palestinian territory, religious nationalists have taken over senior positions in elite combat brigades.

With them have come hundreds of volunteer rabbis, who teach at pre-military academies for religious youths and serve side by side with the troops.

Needless to say, the parallel growth in strength of the religious nationalists of Hamas doesn’t help matters either. Indeed, these two groups have been in a mutually beneficial embrace, both rising to power in their respective societies as both sink further into the mire. My hope would be that we can turn this trend around, but it may not be possible and the United States might have to ask itself what kind of relationship it can have with a country where this sort of doctrine is put forward in official settings.

Israeli Soldiers Describe Atrocities in Gaza

Via Jonathan Zasloff, some accusations of serious war crimes from within IDF ranks:

When asked why that elderly woman was killed, a squad commander was quoted as saying: “What’s great about Gaza — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I looked. The order was to take down the person, this woman, the minute you see her. There are always warnings, there is always the saying, ‘Maybe he’s a terrorist.’ What I felt was, there was a lot of thirst for blood.” [...]

Amir Marmor, a 33-year-old history graduate student in Jerusalem and a military reservist, said in an interview with The New York Times that he was stunned to discover the way civilian casualties were discussed in training discussions before his tank unit entered Gaza in January. “Shoot and don’t worry about the consequences,” was the message from the top commanders, he said. Speaking of a lieutenant colonel who briefed the troops, Mr. Marmor said, “His whole demeanor was extremely gung ho. This is very, very different from my usual experience. I have been doing reserve duty for 12 years, and it was always an issue how to avoid causing civilian injuries. He said in this operation we are not taking any chances. Morality aside, we have to do our job. We will cry about it later.”

One doesn’t know the extent of these things, but both of the people speaking here are describing orders that were given to groups of people, not just individual instances of bad conduct. Needless to say, there are atrocities and war crimes associated with every war, so there’s no indication that this was any worse than any other military’s conduct. But by the same token, there are atrocities and war crimes associated with every war. A lot of the stateside supporters of this Israeli action seemed completely blind to that reality, as they imagined the IDF somehow stepping pristinely through the most densely populated place on earth and perfectly plucking out Hamas villains rather than, say, gunning down old ladies. That, however, is not the way of the world. And the result is a military operation that’s responsible for orders of magnitude more civilians deaths than were the rocket attacks it was supposedly going to put a stop to.

Next up, we’ll see if the new Netanyahu/Lieberman era of Israeli politics leads to any serious inquiries into these allegations with accountability for the culpable. I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic about that, but it could happen.

United States No Longer Conditioning Foreign Aid on ICC Non-Participation

Mark Goldberg brings us some very welcome news from the recently signed omnibus appropriations bill, the odious Nethercutt Amendment policy has been reversed. What’s the Nethercut Amendment? Well of course as is well known the Bush administration didn’t much care for the International Criminal Court. It wasn’t initially obvious, however, exactly how opposed to it they were. But not only did they refuse to participate in the ICC, they backed an amendment by Rep George Nethercutt that made it so that a country could only get foreign aid if it agreed to sign an agreement immunizing Americans against ICC prosecution. This was back in 2004, before it was clear that the key policymakers were so committed to this because they were actually in the midst of committing war crimes.

At any rate, this put a lot of countries in a tough spot. As Mark says:

A number of America’s allies declined to enter into these side agreements because they believed their obligations to the ICC prevented them from doing so. They were punished accordingly. Meanwhile, the administration, too, had chose between its opposition to the court and other — arguably more important — diplomatic and foreign policy priorities.

And now the policy is dead. And I, for one, won’t be missing it.

Law of the Sea Opponents Are Letting Rival Powers Rewrite International Law in their Interests

Commander James Kraska from the U.S. Navy writes in Foreign Policy about the damage to American interests being done by conservative opponents of the Law of the Sea Treaty. Specifically, with the United States not involved in the process, other countries are able to write rules that we don’t like but have no ability to stop.

This is, of course, a broader problem with the modern right’s blanket hostility to international law. The train still moves forward without us, but it does so less effectively and in a way that we’re not able to influence. As the world’s dominant power, we can kinda sorta get away with this kind of behavior, but it works less-and-less well with every passing year and only accelerates our relative decline.

Gaza in Context

I’ve been thinking back on some of the online disputes I’ve been having about Israel’s attack on Gaza, and it occurred to me that what’s missing from a lot of this is context. Not further context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but further context on the use of force in general. The main folks I’ve been arguing with — Jon Chait, Martin Peretz, Michael Goldfarb — are all guys who, I believe, think even in retrospect that support for the invasion of Iraq is nothing worth regretting. And certainly Peretz and Goldfarb were cheerleaders for the 2006 Israeli action in Lebanon, though I don’t remember what Chait thought.

For my part, I think having supported the Iraq invasion is very much worth regretting and over the past five years I’ve changed a lot of my thinking about national security policy and war and peace in general. I was skeptical of the merits of Israel’s attack on Lebanon, skeptical about Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia, skeptical about Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia, and skeptical about Russia’s furious counter-attack on Georgia. Long story short, I’m strongly inclined to believe that political actors are much too eager to believe that the aggressive use of military force will accomplish their objectives, and also inclined to believe that political actors are much too eager to believe that bloodshed is morally justifiable.

But put in a different, more hawkish context, I’d say what Israel is doing in Gaza is certainly better-justified than what the United States did in Iraq. The threat of Hamas rocket fire wasn’t just a made-up pretext. And the operation seems a lot better-conceived than the one in Lebanon. So given our different prior commitments, I’m not sure I’m having any particularly seriously disagreements with those folks about the particulars of this armed clash or even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict writ large. Or, rather, I’m not sure that such disagreements are really the key drivers of disagreement about this specific thing.

Relatedly, something I’ve heard from fans of this attack is rhetorical questions along the lines of “what would the United States do if we were being attacked by rockets from Mexico or Canada?” Of course with such hypotheticals, it’s always hard to specify the issue correctly. I assume if someone shot a rocket across the Canadian border in the general direction of Seattle that the Canadian government would arrest the guy. But you actually don’t need to get very hypothetical to ask what the United States would do if people felt themselves threatened by foreign killers — we’d do exactly what we did in 2002-2003, namely engage in a panicky, counterproductive, and immoral overreaction driven more by emotion, ego, and politics than by sound thinking about the situation. So I don’t really find it surprising that Israel is reacting in this way.

By somewhat the same token, I do read in the comments section what I would regard as a disproportionate level of shock and appalledness from some quarters about Israeli activities as if this action is some kind of unprecedented outrage in human history. The real outrage is how common and banal, how unsurprising and thoroughly precedented it is.

Human Rights Watch on Gaza

This is a few days old and, frankly, a bit obvious but for the record I think I should link to and quote from Human Rights Watch’s most recent statement on Gaza:

Israel and Hamas both must respect the prohibition under the laws of war against deliberate and indiscriminate attacks on civilians, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch expressed grave concern about Israeli bombings in Gaza that caused civilian deaths and Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli civilian areas in violation of international law.

Rocket attacks on Israeli towns by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups that do not discriminate between civilians and military targets violate the laws of war, while a rising number of the hundreds of Israeli bombings in Gaza since December 27, 2008, appear to be unlawful attacks causing civilian casualties. Additionally, Israel’s severe limitations on the movement of non-military goods and people into and out of Gaza, including fuel and medical supplies, constitutes collective punishment, also in violation of the laws of war.

Neither the Israeli government nor Hamas is the first outfit to flaunt the laws of war and they obviously won’t be the last. But I think it’s still important to call these things out, and I think it’s a real problem that the fraught nature of these issues seems to have persuaded a lot of bloggers to basically say nothing about the fighting. At a minimum, duly noting that there are human rights abuses being committed by both sides and that human rights abuses are bad isn’t so hard.

What to do With War Criminals

One issue that the incoming administration has on its plate is what to do with the various war criminals now kicking around as a result of the Bush-Cheney torture and detention policies. On the merits, I’d like to see forgiveness for implementers who were following what they were (falsely) assured were lawful orders and harsh measures for people on the policy level. In practice, it’s pretty clear that Don Rumsfeld isn’t going to wind up in jail. Michael Isikoff reports on the Obama campaign’s thinking:

Despite the hopes of many human-rights advocates, the new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration. But one idea that has currency among some top Obama advisers is setting up a 9/11-style commission that would investigate counterterrorism policies and make public as many details as possible.

….”If there was any effort to have war-crimes prosecutions of the Bush administration, you’d instantly destroy whatever hopes you have of bipartisanship,” said Robert Litt, a former Justice criminal division chief during the Clinton administration. A new commission, on the other hand, could emulate the bipartisan tone set by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton in investigating the 9/11 attacks.

I think the model being reached for here is something like the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But as Kevin Drum says, on this plan “we’ll get the truth, but not the reconciliation, since I doubt that any of the perpetrators of this stuff are inclined to show the slightest remorse for what they did. I suppose that here in the real world this might be the most we can expect, but I don’t have to like it. And I don’t.”

I’m half inclined to say there should be neither truth nor reconciliation. Instead, George W. Bush should be kidnapped, drugged, flown to Spain in an unmarked plane, and wake up on the streets of Madrid tied up with a bunch of files and evidence pinned to his chest so Judge Garzón can sort the whole thing out. If anyone asks how that happened, deny knowledge and mention “executive privilege.” I dunno.

On a more serious note, I think it’s important to draw a distinction between simply declining to engage in war crimes prosecutions as a matter of prosecutorial discretion, and actually taking prosecution off the table. The latter should be done, if at all, only in exchange for confessions, expressions of remorse, and cooperation with investigations. The former may is probably the better part of wisdom for now, but many of the perpetrators can be expected to live for decades and absent something like a real Truth and Reconciliation Commission the door should be left open to doing something down the road if circumstances change. I don’t think it’s even remotely acceptable to just give a full retrospective stamp of approval on everything that was done during the Bush years merely because that might be the most convenient way to build legislative support for Obama’s domestic agenda.