The 'Dead Baby Strategy' of Islamists

At Capitalism Magazine is an article by Alan Dershowitz about Yahya Sinwar's deliberate use of civilian casualties to sway public opinion in the West about Israel's war against Hamas.

I give Dershowitz a mixed review.

On the one hand, it's about time someone called out news media for its negligent or complicit reliance on the casualty figures Hamas has been putting out during the war:

As a patron of organizations like Hamas, this adult male is responsible for every single death caused or necessitated by the actions of his proxies. (Image by khamenei.ir, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)

Without the support of the media, this strategy would not succeed. It requires that the media report Hamas-generated civilian casualty figures uncritically and without investigating the underlying components of the reported figures.

So the media report approximately 43,000 dead Palestinians. Although they could easily distinguish between combatant and non-combatant deaths, Hamas refuses to do so. Instead, they distinguish between male adults, women and those who they describe as "children." They fail to acknowledge that many of these so-called children were also combatants. Hamas lists anyone under 19 as a child, regardless of whether they are 15, 16, 17 or 18-year-old terrorists who have been recruited and trained by Hamas to murder Israelis. They do the same with women, conveying the impression that only men are terrorists.

Moreover, they fail to distinguish friendly-fire casualties that resulted from rockets fired by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups whose rockets have a high failure rate, with many landing in Gaza.

They suggest that all non-Hamas members are innocent civilians. But many non-Hamas "civilians" were directly involved in the massacres, rapes and kidnappings of October 7, 2023. Others cheered on these barbarians as they returned to Gaza with their live and dead hostages. Still others allowed their homes to be used to imprison hostages. Many contributed to Hamas financially and in other ways. Then there are the human shields -- some voluntary, some coerced -- who died as a result of deliberately being placed in harm's way pursuant to the Sinwar strategy of maximizing civilian deaths.

Dershowitz goes on to estimate that, of the 40,000 casualties claimed by Hamas, perhaps 10,000 were actually civilians.

That may be true, and there is some value in debunking the way Hamas has been reporting casualties, but the discussion about civilian deaths will never move to the level it needs to without asking the question: Why is Israel being condemned at all for civilian deaths?

The way to answer this question follows from the thinking of the late John David Lewis, as he lays out in his seminal work, Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History:

Moral ideas as they relate to war must not be conflated with the rules associated with deontological just-war theory -- for instance, of proportionality and absolute prohibitions against attacks on civilians. Such rules divorce ends from means, and are often considered by their advocates to be absolute strictures apart from context and consequences. In this moral framework, the goals of each nation are granted no import in evaluating the conduct of the war, and those fighting to maintain a system of slavery become morally equal to those fighting for freedom. That such rules can become weapons in the hands of an enemy who is fighting for conquest, loot, or slavery is said to be irrelevant to the categorical commandment that each side follow those rules regardless of result. But surely we should question moral rules that exempt a belligerent from attack because he hides behind civilians whom he intends to enslave. The moral purpose of a war -- the goal for which a population is fighting -- sets the basic context for evaluating a conflict and determines the basic moral status of the belligerents. Those who wage war to enslave a continent -- or to impose their dictatorship over a neighboring state -- are seeking an end that is deeply immoral and must not be judged morally equal to those defending against such attacks. It is vital to evaluate the purposes of a war when evaluating both the means by which that purpose is being pursued, and the social support for those directing the war. [footnotes omitted, bold added]

As you can see, the whole idea that a nation defending itself -- like Israel -- should be condemned for any civilian deaths is questionable to start with.

Not only that, as Lewis notes elsewhere in the book, part of the successful prosecution of a war of self-defense entails breaking the will of a belligerent population to continue fighting.

This raises the issue of popular support for the war among the civilian population of Gaza: To the degree that they support what Hamas is doing, they both deserve and need to suffer the consequences of what they are trying to bring to Israel.

In short, not only is Israel not to blame for civilian casualties, civilians are owed no quarter whatsoever, much less the coddling and aid they have been getting in this war. (Tragically, this means that some truly innocent civilians must suffer and die. But that is on Hamas, its Iranian puppetmasters, and its other supporters and sympathizers.)

As laudable as it is to name Sinwar's despicable strategy -- shared worldwide in the name of "compassion" by Islamists -- it is not enough. We have to take the next difficult step of admitting that civilian deaths are, tragically, a necessity of self-defense for good societies.

Until the West admits that innocents will die if it defends itself, and realizes that it is not to blame, it will remain paralyzed in the face of the Islamist barbarians it should have defeated decades ago.

-- CAV