Does Israel Target Civilians?

Tackling a very old question anew

Does Israel target civilians? This question has circulated once again after Israel dropped American-made GBU-39 warheads on an area of a DP camp in Rafah that had been designated safe for civilians. Beyond the initial blast, a resulting fire tore quickly through the tents. At least 45 people were killed, including two Hamas militants, in what eyewitnesses describe as a truly horrific and gruesome conflagration. In the wake of widespread international outrage, the Netanyahu government issued a rare statement about the “tragic accident” and promised an investigation (the integrity of which can be doubted in advance given Israel’s track record of investigations that absolve its military and political leaders).

Today, I want to look at the question of targeting civilians in some detail and historic context. But I ultimately I think that all the time spent debating this question is distracting and not very meaningful. The prime moral question is not one of intent but of indifference. Outside of the Kantian universe, what you intended is far less important than the consequences of your actions, and on this front Israel’s disregard for Palestinian lives is criminal in addition to being strategically self-defeating.

People in the West often express surprise that “the world’s most moral army” could possibly do what armies across time and place have been known to do. So let’s start by returning to an interview that the Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, General Gur, did with the Hebrew newspaper, Al-Hamishmar, on May 10, 1978:

General Mordechai Gur

Q: Is it true that [during the March 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon] that you bombarded agglomerations [of people] without distinction?

A: I am not one of those people who have a selective memory. Do you think that I pretend not to know what we have done all these years? What we did to the entire length of the Suez Canal? A million and a half refugees! Really: where do you live?… We bombarded Ismailia, Suez, Port Said, and Port Fuad. A million and a half refugee…Since when has the population of South Lebanon become so sacred? They knew perfectly well what the terrorists were doing. After the massacre at Avivim, I had four villages in South Lebanon bombed without authorization.

Q: Without making distinctions between civilians and noncivilians?

A: What distinction? What had the inhabitants of Irbid [a large town in northern Jordan] done to deserve bombing by us?

Q: But military communiques always spoke of returning fire and of counterstrikes against terrorist objectives.

A: Please be serious. Did you not know that the entire valley of the Jordan had been emptied of its inhabitants as a result of the war of attrition?

Q: Then you claim that the population ought to be punished?

A: Of course, and I have never had any doubt about that. When I authorized Yanouch [commander of the northern front attacking Lebanon] to use aviation, artillery and tanks, I knew exactly what I was doing. It has now been thirty years, from the time of our Independence War until now, that we have been fighting against the civilian population which inhabited the villages and towns, and every time we do it, the same question gets asked: should we or should we not strike at civilians?

This interview was included in Edward Said’s 1979 book, The Question of Palestine, though Said noted even then that it was not carried by a single U.S. paper. None of this should be remotely surprising if you remember that in 1979, Israel had recently elected Menachem Begin as Prime Minister, the man whose Irgun forces massacred over 100 civilians in Deir Yassin in April 1948, about two-thirds of whom were women, children, and elderly men.¹

Far from regarding Deir Yassin as something extraordinary or contrary to the ethics of a Jewish army, Begin wrote to his commanders: “Tell the soldiers: you have made history in Israel with your attack and your conquest. Continue thus until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest.”² Only years later would Begin began to claim that there were militiamen present in the village—none were ever mentioned in his writings from the time—leading historians to believe he fabricated them after the fact to justify the civilian massacre.³ Deir Yassin was not an outlier. Historians debate just how many massacres occurred in 1948, but the figures we are talking about start in the low double digits and extend up to seventy. Historian Benny Morris has detailed about a dozen massacres of civilians in Operation Hiram in the fall of 1948 alone, and he notes that no Israeli solider ever faced charges for these atrocities.

I offer these historical tidbits because they are the proper context through which to approach the question of targeting civilians. Acts of violence against the civilian population was part of the Zionist strategy in 1948, explicitly meant to terrorize Palestinians into fleeing the land earmarked for the Jewish state. Morris has written extensively about these civilian massacres and how ethnic cleansing was the logical conclusion the demographic difficulties that faced the state of Israel in its infancy (here’s a refresher if this history is a bit fuzzy).

While it is true that distinguishing civilians from combatants is difficult when dealing with insurgencies or other non-state actors, this IR talk is subsequent to the main point: various Zionist leaders across the political spectrum have for decades viewed any sizable Palestinian majority on they land they hope to control as an existential threat. If your state is built on the preservation of a Jewish super-majority because you cannot conceive of any other path to Jewish security, the civilian/combatant distinction becomes irrelevant. As David Ben-Gurion said in a 1949 speech before the Knesset, “I choose to be under the rule of bad Jews rather than under the good rule of refined non-Jews in a popular democracy or another kind of democracy.” Within this ethnically-framed view of security and enmity, all Palestinians are an existential threat, and we should not be surprised that a country built upon such logic slides easily into ethnic cleansing. To riff on General Gur, we must face this history without flinching. We must be serious.

However, warfare has evolved dramatically since 1948 or ‘78. Today Israel claims to deploy precision targeting techniques that allow it to go after Hamas operatives and other militants while minimizing civilian casualties. So, how should we answer our question in light of the current war? Predictably, Israel and her allies have claimed the Gaza campaign represents a “gold standard” for urban warfare, while there are of course many other takes that argue the opposite. But the real answer, in my eyes, is that the question of targeting civilians vs. combatants has turned into a difference without distinction due to the way that the IDF operates. We need to reframe it: not whether Israel targets civilians, but what level of civilian death does it deem acceptable?

Reports have circulated since last fall that Israel’s tolerance for civilian casualties in the present war is far greater than was the case in other recent conflicts. Running an analysis for Just Security in March, Larry Lewis (using the IDF’s numbers, which he notes probably over-estimate the number of Hamas militants killed) determined that the IDF has killed an average of 54 civilians killed per 100 attacks. To put this in context, the 2017 attack on ISIS in Raqqa—another densely populated urban warfare environment—killed an average of 1.7 civilian deaths per 100 attacks. As Lewis writes, “This number for Raqqa was not considered to be good—never mind a gold standard.” It was in fact considered so high that the Department of Defense launched a new investigation by Airwars that produced an even worse, though more likely figure, of 7.0 civilian deaths per 100 attacks. As he continues:

Despite the alarm over the high rate of civilian deaths in Raqqa, one finds the minimum equivalent in Gaza—54 civilians killed in 100 attacks—is eight times greater than the Airwars-based estimate and 32 times greater than the DOD estimate. And recall that 54 is a lower bound for the Gaza ratio; it is likely far higher than this.

Understanding the mass death of civilians in Gaza requires understanding three things about the current IDF. First, its use of an AI-powered targeting system; second, the choice of where to target operatives; and perhaps most importantly, the extremely high level of civilian casualties that the IDF finds acceptable.

The Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham deserves a Pulitzer for the investigative reporting he has done on two AI powered targeting systems for 972 Magazine: The Gospel, and Lavender. The Gospel was used to ‘solve’ a problem that the IDF faced in earlier rounds of lawn mowing, namely that they quickly ran of out suitable targets. The Gospel solved this problem by generating a much longer list of targets based on the expansive criteria that the IDF fed it: namely, that any residence that has ever been associated with a member of Hamas is fair game. “According to the sources, the increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora [The Gospel] allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives.”

The IDF has also attacked an unprededented number of what are called “power targets”—public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks—which accounted for approximately half the 2,687 targets bombed during the first five days of the war. In the words of a former intelligence officer, “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza; there is no building that does not have something of Hamas in it, so if you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so.” This quote underscores why the question of targeting civilians is the wrong one. If Hamas is everywhere, you can bomb anything and still claim to not be targeting civilians but also reap the ‘rewards’ of doing so. As Abraham’s report continues:

Indeed, according to sources who were involved in the compiling of power targets in previous wars, although the target file usually contains some kind of alleged association with Hamas or other militant groups, striking the target functions primarily as a “means that allows damage to civil society.” The sources understood, some explicitly and some implicitly, that damage to civilians is the real purpose of these attacks.

The next piece of the puzzle is where Hamas fighters are targeted. As Abraham has reported more recently in the case of Lavender, there has been a priority for attacking operatives at times where other family members are almost assuredly going to be killed:

Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

The final piece of the very destructive puzzle is this: an extremely high tolerance for collateral damage. Israeli officials have repeatedly clashed with members of the US government over this outsized allowance for civilian casualties, which again, is an outlier compared to recent conflicts. Here’s Abraham again:

In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.

With targeting criteria this expansive—built on wholesale dehumanization of Palestinians that began well before Hamas’s attacks—questions of intentionally targeting civilians become absurd. We need rather to interrogate the logic—military, political, ethical—that makes Palestinian life so cheap. It may well be indifference, rather than intent, that is killing Palestinian civilians en masse, but that distinction has long ceased to matter.

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In other news, I have a new essay out in Dissent Magazine’s special edition on the Global Right. It argues that Israel’s illiberal democratic model—which is built upon the legal right to discriminate—has become a global template for other right-wing governments. It also addresses what I find to be one of the more fascinating aspects of contemporary nationalists: “they are the new internationalists, far outpacing the left in terms of political coordination across borders.”

Finally, my course on Risk Society is coming up in July! Here are the details:

Risk Society: Crisis, Power, and Neoliberalism

By the mid-1980s, modernity appeared to have reached a new and dangerous precipice: nuclear standoff characterized the political domain, while the Chernobyl disaster focused global attention on the toxic effects of even ordinary, non-nuclear industrial production. Humanity’s celebrated technical progress had, it seemed, generated novel, potentially catastrophic, risks at the global level. Not only did these new conditions create new challenges for governance and public policy, but they deeply affected the psychic and cultural states of individuals and societies no longer able to blithely count upon an ever brighter future. “Risk society is a catastrophic society,” wrote the late sociologist Ulrich Beck in 1986, one in which “the exceptional condition threatens to become the norm.” What does it mean to view the world through the lens of risk, with one eye always fixed on the horizon of possible disaster?

This class offers an introduction to the idea of a risk society and its material, political, and affective consequences. Delving into foundational works by Beck and his contemporary Anthony Giddens, as well as their critics, we will ask: What are the main attributes of the risk society, and to what extent are they truly novel? How should we understand the production and uneven distribution of risks in contemporary life, and to what extent is the idea of a risk society compatible with older critiques of capitalism and the state? What role does ‘individuation’ or ‘responsibilisation’—where individuals are tasked with responsibility to navigate increasingly complex social and economic worlds—play within the risk society? How should we think about risks that are both universal and unequally distributed along lines of race, class, and gender? What coping mechanisms are offered for the management of risk by individuals, institutions? Alongside Beck and Giddens, readings will include works by Michel Foucault, Mary Douglas, Deborah Lupton, Gerd Gigerenzer, and others.

Course Schedule

Sunday, 2:00-5:00pm ET
July 07 — July 28, 2024
4 weeks

Enrolling now!

1. Matthew Hogan (2001). "The 1948 Massacre at Deir Yassin Revisited". The Historian. 63 (2): 309–333.

2. As cited in Lawrence Wright, Thirteen Days in September.

3. Benny Morris (2005). "The Historiography of Deir Yassin". The Journal of Israeli History. 24 (1): 79–107