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Wrapping up my prior thread on my time in the IDF and how operational decisions are made when civilian lives are at risk. Again, feel free to share if you find helpful. Going to break this into two parts and identify where you can take an intermission or just skip the rest. 1/x
First, I want to respond to a couple good questions I’ve received over the last few days, starting with: Is the order to evacuate northern Gaza legal? 2/x
Yes. And if you care about sparing civilian lives, you should be applauding it. If, after reading my prior thread, you don’t understand why, then I didn’t do a very good job. Sorry! Let me try to walk you through the reasoning in a (hopefully) clearer manner. 3/x
For more than a decade, Hamas has launched thousands and thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians. One big reason there isn’t massive devastation in Israeli as a result of these attacks is Iron Dome, an air defense intercept system Israel developed and deployed in 2011. 4/x
The other big reason is that there are air raid sirens all over Israel, and when they go off, Israelis run downstairs to the network of bomb shelters distributed throughout the country. 5/x
This is all good news for both Israelis and Palestinians. Iron Dome and bomb shelters reduced Israeli casualties and tip the balance of necessity/proportionality considerations I discussed in my prior thread away from requiring a massive, civilian-endangering IDF response. 6/x
That's in most cases, but not all. 7/x
Development of Iron Dome cost billions of dollars. Each battery costs tens of millions to stand up. And each single interception of a Hamas rocket costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. 8/x
At the same time, you have millions of people hiding in bomb shelters for hours throughout the day. Workers aren’t working. Children aren’t in school. Sick people aren’t recuperating. Airports, groceries, and medical clinics are closed. Civil society is entirely interrupted. 9/x
On top of that, elderly and handicapped people often can’t make it down to their local bomb shelter in time, or at all, and just have to roll the dice. And, of course, oftentimes the rockets get through, and people die. 10/x
It probably helps, then, to think about the legal moral considerations here as a line-drawing problem. 11/x
We have a spectrum, at one end of which you have a limited number of rockets falling in Israel every few years causing few, if any, civilian casualties and almost no interruption to Israeli civil society. 12/x
At the other end of the spectrum you have a sustained rocket barrage that basically forces, for weeks on end, an entire country to grind to a halt, it’s population to live underground indefinitely, and... 13/x
to spend a huge portion of its GDP on a missile intercept system instead of on, I don’t know, schools or hospitals or public transit or whatever. 14/x
As you move from one end of that spectrum to the other, the scales of proportionality gradually tip towards permitting under international law more and more forceful military responses by the IDF that implicate a higher number of civilian casualties. 15/x
Where do you reach the moral and legal tipping point on that spectrum for each type of operation? Reasonable people can disagree. 16/x
What reasonable people cannot do is simply say, “It doesn’t matter if terrorists turn an entire population into an impoverished, PTSD-addled, subterranean-dwelling rabble. It’s unjustifiable to risk even a single civilian life to prevent this." 17/x
This is the position of unwell minds in the DSA/SJP — who have revealed themselves in the last week as people you should not trust in the future to babysit your cat, much less entrust with any political positions of meaningful responsibility over human lives. 18/x
So, what kinds of military operations could actually prevent the launching of rockets at Israel from Gaza. In other words, what’s *necessary* to achieve that legitimate military aim? 19/x
Realistically, you can either (a) bomb the launchers, or (b) launch a massive ground offensive into Gaza and occupy/control broad swaths of territory to prevent the launchers from being set up in the first place. 20/x
Between the two, the first option is less likely to endanger civilians. House-to-house fighting to capture a densely populated urban area will, history shows, result in mass civilian casualties. 21/x
It’s just unavoidable, for reasons that should be obvious to you unless you’re one of those “Why didn’t the cop just shoot the gun out of the perp’s hand?” types. 22/x
And then we have takes like I saw earlier today along the lines of "Why don't they just assassinate the Hamas leaders in Qatar?," which make me want to start smoking again. Please read a book on military tactics. 23/x
Anyway, executing limited ground incursions to chase down launch crews is not feasible. They’ll be long gone by the time your troops fight to the crew’s last known position. It’s bombing or mass incursion. 24/x
"But, Jay, look at these photos of entire neighborhoods in Gaza reduced to rubble! Surely bombing can’t be the more humanitarian option." 25/x
That brings me to the the second question I’ve been getting, and to answer it we’re unfortunately going to have to do another round of “Sorry, sweet summer child, war in the Middle East is really, really, really different than anything you’ve ever imagined war could be.” 26/x
As I’ve noted in other comments, Hamas’ military infrastructure is deeply embedded throughout the civilian population in Gaza. 27/x
I don’t just mean they have an armory in the middle of a residential neighborhood. I mean that in a 10-floor apartment building, there’s an apartment on each floor with a rocket launcher or snipers’ nest. 28/x
And 30/xen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_…
Hamas operational HQs are located inside of hospitals and schools. This is not an ad hoc tactic. It’s a strategic principle that guides Hamas’ overall deployment of troops and resources. 31/x
Some people refer to this as human shield tactics. That’s actually a misunderstanding — these are actually human sacrifice tactics. Hamas doesn’t use civilians to prevent the IDF from attacking its positions. 32/x
They *want* the IDF to attack their positions and “martyr” those civilians because that plays better on the BBC. 33/x
Let me put it in stark terms. If Hamas could velcro a dozen babies to the sides of a tank, then roll it down Madison Avenue shooting incendiary shells into buildings and setting them on fire, it would not hesitate to do that. That’s a tactic they’d enthusiastically adopt. 34/x
I think that, until last week, if I tried to explain that to people, they’d be incredulous. I would tell them about having personally witnessed children impressed into combat by Palestinian terrorists -- kids holding rifles almost as tall as themselves. 35/x
Or about the use of children and mentally handicapped people for suicide bombings or to transport hazardous materials, because they wouldn’t know what they’re carrying, get scared, and run away. 36/x
Surely, no one could be that evil, right? Well, if you’re still that incredulous at this point, you either haven’t been paying attention, or are smoking some serious copium. 37/x
And, folks, I have to tell you that even with the beheaded babies, the mass rapes, the abduction of infants and children, you’re only seeing 25 percent of it. 38/x
If you look at Israeli and Arabic social media, you’ll see that it gets much, much worse. If you do decide to do this, I sincerely recommend you give yourself some time to emotionally process what you’ll see. Even the Nazis were not this inhuman. 39/x
Yes, there are some ministers trying to look tough on TV, and a quote from an Israeli general that the air strikes are not surgical (intentionally clipped -- the full quote says that the strikes are targeted, just not "surgical" in the sense of being a limited operation). 40/x
The point is that the devastation you're seeing is because Hamas has intentionally made it impossible to fight against it, even with utmost care, without collateral damage. It's not because Israel is exacting "collective punishment." 41/x
I could be wrong, but IME none of the actual decisionmakers in the IDF would order a collective punishment operation, and none of the pilots who'd be tasked with carrying it out would obey that order. 42/x
So, we’re at a point now where the combination of Hamas’ rocket barrages with its willingness to conduct operations like Al-Aqsa Flood make the decapitation and destruction of that organization a military and humanitarian necessity. 43/x
And Hamas’ intentional deployment throughout civilian areas will cause the loss of innocent lives. 44/x
Aerial bombing is not sustainable, and will not advance the objective of killing Hamas’ leadership and completely destroying its tactical infrastructure, the latter of which at this point is a nonnegotiable outcome for the Israeli security establishment. 45/x
The only option left on the table is a massive ground incursion. I’m still hoping that, as I noted in an earlier thread, Israel doesn’t have to launch a full invasion/long-term occupation of Gaza, but some sort of large boots-on-the-ground operation is inevitable. 46/x
In that context, ordering the evacuation of northern Gaza is not only permissible, it’s above and beyond what would normally be required under humanitarian law. 47/x
To put a fine point on this: A ground invasion of Gaza, even one that resulted in significant Palestinian civilian casualties, would likely be permissible legally given the seriousness of the threat that Hamas poses to Israeli civilians. 48/x
Allowing civilians to evacuate the battlefield is thus Israeli accepting a tactical disadvantage in the interest of saving Palestinian lives. 49/x
It’s almost certainly the case that large numbers of Hamas fighters will move south, blending in with the civilian population. 50/x
As the saying goes:
לא רוצה? לא צריך
לא רוצה? לא צריך
Those who remain in the north will fight to defend Hamas physical military infrastructure, which they would also prefer to move south if it were possible to do so before the Israeli incursion. 52/x
That’s why Israel is “only” giving Gazans 24 hours to evacuate south (which, I reiterate, Israel is *not* required to do, at all). Every minute that goes by allows Hamas to move more fighters, more armaments, and more vehicles away from a direct confrontation with the IDF. 53/x
I should also note that, while recognizing that there will be some for whom the evacuation is a challenge, we’re talking about moving 8 miles in 24 hours. UN diplomats framing this as “moving halfway across the country” are intentionally eliding important details. 54/x
Okay, you can stop here if you want to take a break, or aren’t interested in the rest. Below, I’ll go through an illustration how IDF units on the ground make decisions regarding tactics in urban combat. 55/x
As I mentioned, two of the bedrock principles of international humanitarian law are necessity and proportionality. They’re not the only ones, but they often play the most significant role in actual decisions making around operations that could endanger civilians. 56/x
But that’s mostly at the command level. Do we launch this offensive? Do we bomb this residential complex? Are these types of munitions deployable? 57/x
At the individual engagement level, I think most people intuitively grasp that soldiers are not cracking open law books in the middle of firefights. 58/x
Instead, at least in the IDF, they’re typically guided by two things: the rules of engagement and what’s loosely translated as “black flag” doctrine. 59/x
The former are context specific, but typically boil down to “don’t shoot at anything that’s not shooting at you.” 60/x
The latter is something I’m not sure exists outside of the IDF in its precise formulation, but the gist — which has been expanded upon by the Israeli judiciary — is that soldiers are obligated to refuse any orders so manifestly immoral a “black flag” flies above them. 61/x
What exactly does that mean in practice? That’s a longer discussion for another day. But you'll see how it plays out below. 62/x
The more interesting question, which I want to expand on now, is how tactical decisions are made at the unit level, from the battalion down, by young lt colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants. This is less about how such decisions should be made than how they actually are. 63/x
When I served, the vast majority of offensive combat operations in the West Bank involved arrest raids on terrorists. Typically, these would be conducted at the behest of the Shin Bet, with an IDF unit drafted to execute the raid itself. 64/x
There are a few different options for executing an arrest raid in an urban environment. The worst option, particularly if the target of the raid was a really bad dude, was to treat the thing like a police operation and knock on the front door. 65/x
Do that, and you’re in for a firefight, a situation where the guy takes his own family hostage, or a prolonged siege (which often ended with bulldozers knocking the guy’s house down on top of him). 66/x
The next best option, which is actually pretty effective, is to rely on the violence of action and break into the house immediately. 67/x
Most folks who’ve never served find this counterintuitive, but confronting a terrorist with overwhelming force while he’s still blinking himself awake and hustling him out of the house before he even understands what’s happening is actually the best way to avoid violence. 68/x
A third option, which became increasingly popular among IDF units during the Second Intifada, was "Neighbor Protocol." 69/x
Basically, you get the terrorist’s neighbor, or a family friend, or someone else the Shin Bet tells you he knows and trusts, to knock on the front door and try to convince the terrorist to come out. 70/x
In 2005, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled this practice was illegal. You can look up the decision. It discusses some of the concepts I noted earlier, as well as, importantly, the requirement under humanitarian law to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. 71/x
But even before 2005, many units refused to employ it, because the leadership of those units independently concluded that Neighbor Protocol was immoral. I certainly thought it was. 72/x
Although the “neighbor” was given a choice re whether to participate, I’m skeptical he felt at perfect liberty to refuse. Given that, it’s simply not okay, no matter how you slice it, to impress non-combatants into operational roles. 73/x
How did front line officers and NCOs actually talk about these issues? Yes, there was familiarity with concepts of necessity and proportionality and distinction, but I’d summarize the discussions as revolving around a few considerations: 74/x
First, how real was the likelihood that if the terrorist was not arrested because a less effective tactic was used, they’d go on to kill innocent Israelis? Second, how heightened was the danger posed to soldiers in the unit by employing another tactic? 75/x
And, third, was the “neighbor” in question another terrorist, or even the commander of the local terrorist cell, or just some Joe from the block? 76/x
In most cases, it was this third consideration that was determinative. 77/x
The reason I highlight this is because, in truth, Neighbor Protocol probably saved a lot of lives by preventing firefights from erupting that would have endangered civilians in the vicinity. 78/x
Nevertheless, for many soldiers, it was the type of order that had a black flag flying above it. 79/x
Okay, hopefully all that was informative. Happy to answer any sincere questions. But otherwise, my mind and my heart need a break from these threads for a while. Take care of yourselves, everyone. 80/80
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