In Princeton, Michael Walzer views war through a moral prism. Photo by Marilyn Silverstein
April 08, 2008
Media coverage of the actual, unbearable carnage of conflicts around the globe has brought the brutality of war into brutally clear focus, observed political theorist Michael Walzer.
“It is because of the terrible cost in innocent life that war is abhorrent,” Walzer said at The Jewish Center in Princeton on the evening of March 9. Such exposure to war’s horrors has taught people “to be skeptical about military glory.”
Walzer, professor emeritus at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and author of Just and Unjust Wars, was at The Jewish Center to view the brutality of war through a moral prism — in particular, the 2006 Second Lebanon War and the grim fact of civilian casualties in the wake of Israel’s response to Hizbullah’s assault.
At the end of the first week of the war, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan “made a curious and revealing statement to the UN’s Security Council,” Walzer told the gathering of more than 130 people. “He said that Israel had a right to defend itself, so it was fighting a just war, but that Israel’s response was disproportionate and excessive, so it wasn’t fighting justly.”
But in war, such judgments about proportionality are trumped by questions about responsibility, said Walzer, coeditor of the left-wing quarterly Dissent. Annan’s statement, he said, failed to address the fact that Hizbullah was firing rockets into Israel from positions on city streets, in the midst of civilian populations.
“In our judgments of justice in warfare, responsibility comes before proportionality,” he said. “The city street location was deliberately chosen by Hizbullah to make any response to their attacks morally difficult and to make sure that the response would be condemned around the world. These civilians were not literally human shields, but they were being used in a similar way. The first responsibility for their deaths falls on the heads of the Hizbullah militants who were using them.”
The Israelis, nonetheless, did have a responsibility toward the Lebanese civilians, according to Walzer. In such an operation, “they must do everything they can, including putting their own soldiers at risk, to hit the rocket launchers and their operatives and not the nearby apartment buildings,” he said.
Even with such care, however, the number of likely civilian deaths will always be disproportionate to the military value of destroying rocket launchers, Walzer said.
In that view, arguing from the perspective of proportionality, “in the Lebanon case, Israel would not respond at all,” he said. But that would have put Israel in an impossible position — under attack, but morally unable to respond.
“The responsibility for civilian deaths falls only on Hizbullah,” Walzer said. “It’s a central tenet of a just war that the self-defense of a country cannot be made morally impossible.
“We need to insist that the responsibility argument always comes first,” he stressed. “Who put these civilians at risk? People get killed in wars. Soldiers get killed, and civilians, too, and we need to figure out who is responsible for their deaths. If we do that, our judgments will have political consequences, and we will have done as much as we can to hold down the number of dead civilians.”
Driving home his point during the question-and-answer period after his remarks, Walzer spoke about the Kassam rockets Hamas has been systematically launching against civilian targets in Israel. “There is a tremendous difference between trying to kill civilians and trying not to kill civilians,” he said. “That is a difference, it seems to me, we should cling to.”
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