Jay Donde

Some more perspective from my days in the IDF: In the weeks ahead, you'll struggle to reconcile your anger at Hamas with awful images of civilian casualties in Gaza. To help you arrive at your own conclusions, here's a primer on the IDF's moral framework for urban combat. 1/x

It's worth noting that most of what I'm about to cover applies to all western militaries, not just the IDF. 2/x

It's also worth noting that I think the reason that many folks struggle with this stuff is because the moral vocabulary of war is ugly, and people would rather not become conversant in it. 3/x

Unfortunately, if you don't learn that vocabulary, you'll end up either unable to resolve your conflicting moral intuitions, or at the mercy of propagandists. 4/x

Americans, especially, are vulnerable to this, because they're fundamentally good people and love rooting for the underdog. 5/x

But the real world is not Braveheart. It's not always the case that the side with more dead, or the side that's not wearing fatigues, is the side of the morally superior freedom fighter. Again, what's needed is a moral vocabulary not derived from Hollywood blockbusters. 6/x

So, let's start with some sociological context about the Israeli military. The vast majority of combat operations in the Occupied Territories are conducted by IDF regular army units, whose personnel are drafted from a broad cross section of Israeli society. 7/x

Another major component of the Israeli security apparatus, particularly in and around Jerusalem, is the MAGAV, the Border Police, whose personnel primarily come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. 8/x

Finally, you have the elite special forces units (many of which can be identified by having the term "Sayeret" (reconnaissance) in their name) and the air force. 9/x

What surprises many people about that last group is that most of its personnel come from the upper echelons of Israeli society, in particular communities like Kibbutzim that have traditionally been identified with the Left. 10/x

There’s a ton of social cachet in having served in one of these units. Having Sayeret Matkal or Shayetet 13 on your resume in Israel is like having Harvard or Yale on your resume in the US. 11/x

So, unlike the dynamic in the US, the Israeli left (again, particularly the Kibbutz community) considers itself the intellectual, social, and spiritual vanguard of Zionism and there's a sort of noblesse oblige around serving in elite combat roles. 12/x

This has changed a bit in the last couple decades, with many sayeret recruits now coming from the religious nationalist and Russian immigrant communities, but it still largely holds true amongst the pilot and officer corps. 13/x

Why am I mentioned all this? Because the moral calculus the IDF makes when considering whether to undertake operations that put civilian lives at risk isn't solely based on legal or philosophical treatises. It also has to consider what soldiers are actually willing to do. 14/x

In multiple instances just in the last 20 years, the strange dynamic of the most educated and cosmopolitan members of Israeli society also being those serving in the most high-speed combat units has led to some strange outcomes. 15/x

For example, there have been multiple protests -- some internal and some made public -- by both active duty and reservist soldiers in IAF and sayeret units against what they saw as illegal or immoral Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. 16/x

This is why I always find claims of "Israeli commando death squads" and the like so laughable. The people making those claims have based their entire conceptualization of special forces soldiers around John J. Rambo. Sorry to disappoint y'all. First Blood was just a movie. 17/x

I don't blame folks for falling for these claims, of course. Liberal Americans' heads would probably explode if they opened the NYT website one morning to the headline "Delta Force operators refuse to deploy in protest of administration policy towards Iraqi civilians." 18/x

What can I say? Israel is a strange country. 19/x

OK, but what about the actual framework under which operational decisions are made in light of risk to civilians? Pretty much every explanation of this you'll hear -- whether in regards to the IDF or another western military -- will focus on necessity and proportionality. 20/x

These are bedrock concepts in international humanitarian law that dictate that a combat action must be necessary to achieve a legitimate military aim, and that the benefit derived from that action must be proportional to the risk to civilians. 21/x

For example, let's say Israel identifies a tunnel under an apartment building in Gaza used to smuggle weapons. 22/x

It could collapse the tunnel by bombing the apartment building, or it could do so by bombing an air vent for the tunnel in an unpopulated area. Let's also say that the tunnel is used to smuggle in heavy artillery, and the apartment is empty save for 10 civilians. 23/x

Arguably, bombing the apartment building would be proportional. Considerably more lives would be saved by preventing heavy artillery to be used against Israeli towns than would be lost by bombing the building. But it wouldn't be necessary! The IDF could've bombed the vent. 24/x

Conversely, let's say the tunnel was used to smuggle in small arms only, that there was no air vent to bomb, and the apartment building is full of 2,000 people (there are skyscrapers in this version of Gaza). Necessary? Maybe. Proportional? Ehhh, probably not. 25/x

The point is, you need to satisfy both prongs.

But this works both ways... 26/x

If there's no air vent to bomb, the apartment building is full of 2,000 civilians, and the tunnel is being used to smuggle in large numbers of missiles to be fitted with chemical warheads? Bombing the apartment is almost certainly valid under international law. 27/x

This is what I meant when I said earlier that the moral vocabulary of war is ugly. It's also why "vocabulary" is precisely the key concept. If the IDF did bomb that building, you'd hear a lot of people, many of whom should know better, talk about "disproportionate response." 28/x

But proportionality in war isn't, NOR SHOULD IT BE, a simplistic concept of tallying up deaths on one side and tallying up deaths on another side, comparing the two numbers, and saying that one number is too big or too small. 29/x

I think it's worth expanding on this, because it's so fundamental to why discussions of wars in the Middle East, or anywhere, are so rife with misunderstanding and dishonesty. 30/x

You can take issue with how the IDF makes these types of decisions. And you can certainly take issue with how, after the decisions are made, the IDF ensures orders are followed and violations are punished. 31/x

But if you want to argue that what Israel did in X operation is wrong, you have to do better than just "too many civilians died." 32/x

You need to explain whether you think the operation was conducted in violation of the IDF's moral framework, and why; or you need to explain why you think that framework is flawed, and what alternative framework you suggest. 33/x

You don't need to know all the operational details, and you don't need to have a PhD in philosophy. Reasonable laypeople can make reasonable objections. 34/x

But you do have to do better than circulate context-free charts on Twitter comparing Palestinian deaths to Israeli deaths and claiming that, ipso facto, Israel is in the wrong. 35/x

Exercising a modicum of seriousness about this topic should be table stakes. Those who don't take it seriously by making specific objections or bothering to formulate alternative frameworks (and explaining why they're better) are doing a grave disservice. 36/x

Lack of seriousness on this topic in the public discourse leads on the one hand to such a hands off approach that terrorists have free rein to murder thousands of civilians, or on the other hand to illegal collective punishment of entire populations. 37/x

This is already getting long, so let me just tease part 2, which I'll try to post tomorrow. In practice, a number of other considerations come into play beyond necessity and proportionality, because those concepts are simply to broad to serve as the sole criteria. 38/x

So, stay tuned and I'll explain what those other considerations are, and how they played out in different ways when Israel was wrestling with the legitimacy of two effective tactics the IDF developed in the early 2000s: wall tunneling and neighbor protocol. 39/39

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