A sense of proportion

12 August 2006

The Israeli Defence Forces’ ethical standards are different from, and in some ways higher than, the British army’s, says Paul Robinson, but in the end the question is not whether IDF actions are moral, but whether they are wise

In practice, this results in aerial tactics which are in no major way different from those used by Nato against Yugoslavia in 1999. In Lebanon, the IDF’s aim (to coerce a foreign power by inflicting intolerable damage on its national infrastructure), the targets (roads, bridges, TV stations, and so forth), and the consequences (roughly similar numbers of innocent deaths given the comparable length of the combat), are very similar. Those who oppose Israel today but supported Nato in 1999 perhaps need to reconsider either their current opposition or their previous support.

Not all aspects of the second proposition are controversial. A state’s primary duty is indeed to its own citizens. After all, most people would surely save their own children first from a burning building. Most people also believe, however, that all human life is equally valuable. This doesn’t mean that the state’s actions are necessarily immoral, but it does mean that there is a clash of moral systems, between ‘role morality’ and ‘ordinary morality’, between what is expected of the state in its role as a state and what is expected in terms of the general morality which values all life.

This has important practical consequences. The state may be acting morally in its own terms, but outsiders will not see it in that way, and will resent a situation in which they are deemed inferior. Consequently, those outsiders will consider that the state’s actions are immoral, and hence legitimise their struggle. The result of putting this ethic into practice may thus be increased opposition to the state. Perhaps, therefore, the question we should be asking of Israeli actions is not so much whether they are moral as whether they are wise.

Paul Robinson is the author of numerous works on international security, military history and military ethics, including most recently Military Honour and the Conduct of War: From Ancient Greece to Iraq (Routledge, 2006).