TORTURE: ASIAN AND GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES | JUNE-AUG 2013
massacre. That to me is a remarkably simple and straightforward description of what happened. It was a protracted massacre over 22 days, but a massacre nonetheless. As one Israeli soldier put it, when he was asked what it was like to be fighting in Gaza, he said it was like a child with a magnifying glass, burning up ants. Well, that doesn’t sound to me like a very complex moral question. EB: No it doesn’t, but that does bring up an issue that every major power seems to have faced since the 1980s in that whenever an advanced military power like the United States, Russia, or Israel go to war, it is against a foe that is so technologically inferior that the conflict seems to inevitably have extremely lopsided casualties, whether it be in regard to combatants or civilians. Do you think that having a more powerful military or having access to superior military technology creates a greater burden of responsibility on one party over another to protect civilians? FN: Well, there are two separate issues. One issue is the pretext for going to war. I have to again exercise a degree of linguistic caution. There was no war in Gaza. There was a massacre in Gaza. Remember, a child with a magnifying glass burning up ants is not, to me, a description of a war. So first of all, was there any justification for Israel to attack Gaza? The answer is no, there was none. They had no pretext, no grounds, no alibi. It was a pure, unadulterated, unmitigated act of aggression against the people of Gaza. But that still leaves the second question. How do you assess the morality of bringing to bear a massive arsenal of high-tech weaponry against an armed force which is basically lobbing fire crackers at you? That is basically all the Hamas rockets amount to. Here, in my opinion, the Laws of War are absolutely ridiculous. They use standards of proportionality and precision, which effectively make every weapon used by the
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lesser power illegal. So what does that mean concretely? There is a term in International Humanitarian Law called “indiscriminateness”. That is, if you use an indiscriminate weapon, (a weapon that can’t discriminate between civilians and combatants) its mere use means you have committed a war crime, even if it hits a military target, because the weapon itself is indiscriminate. Well, what does it mean to say a weapon is indiscriminate? How do you judge whether a weapon is discriminate or indiscriminate? The answer is very simple: they use the standard of the most sophisticated technology. So let’s say I have a piece of technology that is able to hit its target with 100% accuracy, just for argument’s sake. That then becomes the standard for discriminateness. In that case, if you have weapons that only have a 60% rate of accuracy, it becomes, by law, indiscriminate, and you’re committing a war crime even if you hit a military target. So what happens is that the International Humanitarian Law immediately makes illegal any kind of resistance to a technologically superior power. That’s crazy! If you don’t have enough money or American aid to purchase the most sophisticated technology, you can’t resist at all. EB: That would certainly put any resistance group in a bind. FN: That’s correct! When Human Rights Watch put that question in one of its reports (I think it was the report on the 2006 War because they said that all of Hezbollah’s missiles were indiscriminate) they said that the militants can go to the border and fire with their rifles. Oh that’s really fair! EB: I also want to get your insight on some of these issues from the perspective of your study of Gandhi. It’s interesting to contrast
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