I don't want to answer whether or "it will even be effective in this instance," because, like I imagine you do, I have my own qualms about that.

And while it is not right, in basic human nature, for humans to value certain human lives over other human lives, I think a state's nature is entirely different. A state is formed to protect the members of that state, among potential other purposes, and that job, by its virtue, gives its members more value than other people.

Now, that could all just mean that the system of states in themselves is not right. But that's the system most of the world runs on, currently.

For me the Joseph Levine link doesn't work. Below another link just in case someone else has the same problem: Joseph Levine on The Magnus Zionist

If Hamas were hiding out in Tel Aviv, Israel would not react in the same way, that is true. But there are few big reasons for that, and most of them have nothing to with differences in lives are valued.

1) The Israeli police force would have the authority to take action against these Hamas fighters.

2) The local police force actually WOULD take action against these Hamas fighters.

3) Civilians in the area would point out the the Hamas fighters, or signs of the Hamas fighters to the local police force (i.e. the Israeli police force).

4) The local police force would not be treated as an invading army/occupying army by the local populace.

If these four things were true in Gaza, do you or Mr. Levine think that Israel would react as it has?

**************************

Another point, one that I've made in another comment on this site, is that we already know that every country/every people values the lives of its own members more than the lives of others. This is rather tragic, much of the time, but it is no surprise. Aaron Sorkin remarked on this in an episode of The West Wing. Charlie, when asked by the President, responded that it didn't know why, but he knew that it was true.

Much of the time, this ok. This means that local governments generally stay focused on helping their own people, so local people tend to governments to help them. Local governments help work on local issues, the one they are positioned to understand.

Of course this becomes a problem when local governments do not work for the good of their people, or the situations they face are worse than they actually handle. Then, local people need the help/support of foreign governments, governments who are less inclined to help them than they are their own people.

Some -- even I -- would argue that the Hamas government is Gaza is not working in the interest of its own people. I believe that Israel is trying to get the Gaza government to view stopping the Hamas rocket attacks as being in the interest of the people of Gaza. They are trying to align incentives. At the end of the day, I think that this is foolish because I do not think that Hamas is interested in the interests of the the Palestinian people are they are in the eradication of the state of Israel. I hope that I am wrong on that, though.

So I guess now we're supposed to be struck by the shocking realization that a nation treats its own citizens as more important than non-citizens? SHOCKING! I'm sure the journals are all jumping to publish that incredible contribution to international relations scholarship.

Professor Walt:

I am a fan.

You should have included the paranthetical section from the original Levine article. It makes a lot more sense that way.

I am posting the whole Levine section here. Alas you did injustice to his argument, not substantively, but in terms of presentation, and no surprise then, that the commenters aren't following your point. This will be exacerbated across the blogosphere.

I know you are a new blogger but you're going to need a fast learning curve.

The singular most important rule in blogging is: do NOT trust your reader or other bloggers to go through an article and READ. bloggers and commenters don't do that. they rely on the blogger to BLOCK QUOTE EXACTLY AND EVEN HIGHLIGHT the relevant section of a work. Especially given the sensitivity of your subject matter you are going to have to be even more precise in your linking and quoting.

Anyway here is the WHOLE Levine section. Hopefully the idiotic commenters from above can understand that the issue is de-humanization of Arabs.

Levine:

"To see why I say this it is only necessary to engage in a simple thought experiment. Suppose Hamas terrorists were hiding out in Tel Aviv (or Los Angeles, or London, for that matter -- the exercise is equally illuminating applied to the U.S. and or any other "civilized" Western state). Would an assault of the sort we have seen against Gaza even be contemplated? Would Israeli officials grimly but dispassionately calculate the cost-benefit ratio concerning a massive aerial assault on Jewish neighborhoods? Would American and European officials condone such an attack? Would the pundits express their sympathy with Israel's terrible dilemma? Of course not! The very idea of such an action would be recognized immediately as morally outrageous, and anyone who proposed it would be treated with contempt. You can hear the voices: What, are we just like Hamas and Al Qaeda?"

ps - tell Foreign Policy to get a better comment editor. MANUAL comment editing? Are they insane. I'm sure Drupal has a plug-in. 21st century blogging.

I'd say Walt's post says the subject of my post quite well.

I'd add Barak's comment that if he were born Palestinian, he would have become a Palestinian fighter.

Here is a thought experiment, Prof. Walt:

Imagine the Israeli Jews had 22 countries in the Middle East and North Africa out of a total of 57 Jewish states worldwide, containing huge amounts of land, much of the world's oil wealth and more than a 1.5 billion people.

Would you really support a 60-year non-stop Jewish effort to destroy the Arabs' only country through war, terrorism, economic boycott and propaganda? Would you defend the Jews if they kept their own people as political pawns in refugee camps, especially if they ended up there as a result of a war the Jews started with the explicit goal of destroying the Arab state and driving its people into the sea? Would you turn a deaf ear to constant anti-Arab propaganda, including daily television programs and religious sermons that encourage religious sanctioned murder of Arabs?

Would you continually cry about the supposed moral misdeeds of the Arabs if their state treated its Israeli Jewish minorities far better than Israeli Jews treated its various minority populations? Would excuse the Jews if they never made any distinction between civilian and military targets--celebrating the killing of women and children, while the Arabs made great efforts to avoid harming Jewish non-combatants?

Suppose the Arabs for nearly two-thousand years were exiled from their one and only homeland. Imagine in white, Christian Europe, the Arabs were persecuted and expelled from one country after another, culminating in a genocide in which 6 million of their people were gassed for no reason other than their race. Imagine if in Jewish lands, Arabs lived as a subject population who faced varying levels of humiliating discrimination from outright massacres to an enforced second class status under Jewish law.

Now let us imagine that the Arabs started returning to a small slice of land where their ancient homeland had been, where they already had a plurality in Jerusalem, to hopefully build a national home where they would be free of persecution. Let us continue to image that the lands where they settled were scarcely populated, ruled by Jews from afar, and a backwater of a Jewish empire that would soon no longer exist. Imagine that the Arabs legally purchased abandoned land from the Jews at exorbitant prices, drained the malarial swamps and turned the desert green. Then imagine that Jews from all over the Jewish world had migrated to the region because of the jobs and quality of life resulting from the developments the Arabs built. Would you then justify those same Jews, with all the land they already possess, going to war to slaughter the Arabs, take what they had built and render the survivors once again stateless? Would you support the Jews spending billion in oil wealth funding terrorism, spreading anti-Arab propaganda and building religious-political institutions throughout the world, while demanding the rest of the world pay for and support their less fortunate?

In 1844, several decades prior to the initial wave of Zionist immigration to Palestine, the Ottoman Empire conducted its first census of Jerusalem. The city had a grand total of 16, 270 inhabitants. According to the Muslim Ottomans, there were 7,120 Jews, 5760 Muslims and 3,390 Christians. That's it.

Prior to the arrival of the Zionists and after many centuries of Muslim rule, Jerusalem was so unimportant to Muslims that they didn't even have a majority in the city and never made Jerusalem the capital of anything. Even after the city was occupied by Jordan, from 1948-1967, no foreign Arab head of state came to visit the city.

Only once the Jews came to rule Jerusalem following the 1967 war did it start being referred to by Muslims as "the eternal capital of the Palestinian people" and by Westerners as an "Arab city."

Israel is hardly unique in placing a higher value on its own citizens' lives than it places on the lives of others

No, it isn't--in fact it's hard to think of any policy pursued by any state that doesn't implicitly place a higher value on the lives of that state's citizens than on those of others. That's why domestic spending dwarfs foreign aid in any first world country--because the citizens of those countries care more about their fellow citizens' welfare than about the welfare of people in poorer countries where the money would do more good. If you think a state should look out for its own interests, then what can that mean other than "placing a higher value on its own citizens' lives than it places on the lives of others"? If you think its wrong for states to do this, you'll be joined by the far left and some internationalist libertarians like Will Wilkinson, and not many others. Sometimes there are limits to the level of callousness that people are willing to accept from a state's behavior, especially if its someone else's state; nobody would defend Israel if it nuked Gaza (other than Marty Peretz probably). That's why so much of the debate around conflicts like this centers on proportionality, international law, etc.--its how people try to decide how much its OK for states to privilege their citizens' lives. But you aren't really trying to take part in that debate in this post, you're staking out a moral high ground that as you acknowledge is pretty much illusory, although its good for people to people to be reminded that states are amoral I guess.

I just wanted to make a couple of short points.

1) Yitzhak Shamir was a leader of the Lehi (or the Stern Group/Gang), who was even worse than the Irgun when it came to terrorist tactics; they targeted populations and often engaged in assassinations, where the Irgun focused more on military targets. It actually makes the point better, I just wanted to make sure those two groups didn't get mixed.

2) And for anyone to say that Jews would never use terrorist tactics needs to examine history between 1940-1948 where a lot of terrorist tactics were used, especially by the Stern Group against the British Mandate authorities.

These YouTube videos speak for themselves:

The Beauty Of Hamas And The Ugliness Of Israel, Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9_LatFA_hA

The Beauty Of Hamas And The Ugliness Of Israel, Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM8Sa_oFc9o

From Commentary magazine's "Contentions" Weblog:

Stephen Walt’s (Selectively) Realist Perspective

Stephen M. Walt, co-author of The Israel Lobby, opened his new blog on Foreign Policy’s website promising to bring a realist perspective to the blogosphere. In his first post, published earlier this week, he defines the realist perspective as follows:

"Realists believe that foreign policy should deal with the world as it really is, instead of being based on wishful thinking or ideological pipedreams (see under “Clinton administration”). Realists know that international politics can be a brutal business and states cannot afford to be too trusting, but we also know that states get into serious trouble by exaggerating threats or engaging in foolish foreign adventures (see under “Bush Doctrine”). Realists respect the power of nationalism and understand that other societies will resist outside interference and defend their own interests vigorously."

Well, not surprisingly, there’s one country that Walt systematically excludes from the realist perspective–i.e., one state that isn’t allowed to “deal with the world as it really is.” Check out Walt’s latest “thought experiment” on the war in Gaza:

"…what if Hamas was hiding out among the civilian population of Tel Aviv, and attacking Israel from within? Would the IDF be using massive force to eradicate them? Unless you think that Palestinian and Israeli civilian lives are not equal, what justifies the current policy?"

"Israel is hardly unique in placing a higher value on its own citizens’ lives than it places on the lives of others, and we should not forget that U.S. forces have caused plenty of civilian casualties in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” But that doesn’t make it right, and there are good reasons to question whether it will even be effective in this instance."

So, in other words, Israel shouldn’t operate in reality — rather, it should consider the morality of its actions against a series of fantastical hypothetical scenarios. Naturally, all of Walt’s proposed scenarios end with the same conclusion: Israel acts immorally — both in reality and in the fictitious dimension that Walt has constructed for it. Indeed, Walt has yet to find a single instance in which Israel is justified — or merely acting in its self-interest — in protecting its citizens against terrorist groups through force.

The most interesting aspect of Walt’s work, however, is that he actually believes that these “thought experiments” are expressions of his own objectivity. In turn, Walt is a truly unique realist — one who operates within his own alternative universe.

--Eric Trager

--posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 4:05 PM

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/trager/49892