Jus in bello

 The recent death of Lindsey Graham prompted me to recall that ugly episode from the early weeks after the October 7 massacre, when he appeared to justify the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza in retaliation. 

In one interview, Graham was asked: "Is there a threshold for you, and do you think there should be one for the United States government in which the U.S. would say let’s hold off for a second in terms of civilian casualties?" 

He responded: "No. Somebody asked us after World War II, 'Is there a limit to what you would do to make sure that Japan and Germany don’t conquer the world? Is there any limit to what Israel should do to the people who are trying to slaughter the Jews?' The answer is no, there is no limit."

The logic of this position appears to be something like: we were engaged in a justified defensive fight with Germany and Japan. In a just war, any means are legitimate. Israel is fighting in self-defense. Therefore, there is 'no limit' on what it can do to fight Hamas." 

The argument completely elides—in a way that is glaring and obvious to anyone who cares about international humanitarian law or merely basic morality—the distinction between jus in bello and jus ad bellum, between means and ends—between murder and self-defense. 

Moral and legal teachers across centuries, after all, have had no trouble pointing out that even if a nation has a legitimate defensive reason to go to war, that does not in fact mean that there is "no limit" to the crimes and excesses they can legitimately commit in pursuit of it. 

But it seems to me that Lindsey Graham was able to smuggle in this basic moral confusion—and give it some apparent force of reasoning—because our nation never really has grappled fully with the fact that we behaved unjustly to German and Japanese civilians during World War II. 

In other words, we really did fight a just war by unjust means—in just the way that Graham now wishes to hold up as a model to other nations, including to our military allies whose wars our government funds and supports. 

Was Israel at any point fighting a "just war" in Gaza? I think most people who haven't been totally polarized on this issue would agree that any country would have the right to take some action to defend its citizens after the massacre on October 7. 

One could say, though, that as a quasi-occupying power in Gaza at the time—which still retained effective control (with Egypt) over the enclave's borders—Israel should have treated this as a police action—not a war against a subject area that was almost a part of its territory. 

I recall Gore Vidal's point in an interview after 9/11, about how the United States ought to respond to such terrorist attacks without resort to war: 

Every nation knows how—if it has the means and will—to protect itself from thugs of the sort that brought us 9/11 ... You put a price on their heads and hunt them down. In recent years, Italy has been doing that with the Sicilian Mafia; and no-one has suggested bombing Palermo.

I find it hard to argue that such an approach would not have been far better than the twenty-year war we ended up fighting in Afghanistan. And it would certainly  have been a lot better than the Israeli retaliation in Gaza that left the entire enclave in ruins to this day. 

But even if one granted that Israel's war in Gaza was "just" to the same extent as the Allied resistance to Hitler and Japan during World War II—my point here is that this does not resolve at all the question of what means are legitimate to deploy in such a war. 

It was in fact perfectly possible to be for the war against Hitler but against firebombing Dresden. Just as it was possible to be for self-defense after Pearl Harbor but not for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Dwight Macdonald during World War II didn't make this distinction between means and ends. In fact, he was guilty of Graham's confusion, except in the opposite direction. He argued that the means the Allies were using to prosecute the war were unjustified, therefore the war as a whole was unjustified. 

Macdonald later on came to repent of this stance. During the Cold War, he repeatedly insisted that he would fight for the West if forced to pick sides, and he came to see his pacifism during World War II as an error. It was, however—he insisted—a "creative" error. And it remains so for us today. 

Macdonald's error was creative because it led him to formulate more clearly than anyone else at the time the moral teaching that a nation—no matter how justified it thinks its struggle—never has the right to attack, punish, humiliate, and murder a civilian population. 

Macdonald saw clearly—as so few of his contemporaries did—that there was no excuse for the collective punishment of Japanese Americans. 

How many other writers at the time would have been capable of such an honest condemnation of the atrocity of internment (from a footnote in The Root is Man): "the 'resettlement' — i.e., forced deportation to camps in the interior — of the entire Japanese-American population of the West Coast"?

Macdonald knew as well that there was no possible rationale that could justify "our own saturation bombing of German citizens and the 'atomization' of the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki"—"horrors," as he called these acts, "which could hardly have been improved on by Attila." 

In another footnote, reprinting an essay of his from 1945, Macdonald describes an American columnist who approached a group of displaced German civilians who were hiding in a cellar. "Are You Guilty?" he asked them. "He records no reply from the baby," Macdonald acidly observes. 

We need hardly be reminded now how many babies and children were treated as collectively "guilty" in the same manner in Gaza; how many are still be treated as such in that enclave today; how many are being bombed and buried in rubble in Lebanon—with our own tax dollars and government's support for the deed. 

Macdonald's "error" was "creative" because he helps us see this collective punishment for the "horror" that it is. 

He helps us understand all over again the truth of Stephen Spender's line—which is perhaps the last and only word one needs about the ethics of warfare: "No cause is just unless it guards the innocent/ As sacred trust: no truth but that/ Which reckons this child’s tears an argument."