Last update - 00:00 28/07/2006
Moral muddle
By Meron Rapoport
In the end I didn't show him the pictures, although they were what had brought me to the room of the commander of the Israel Air Force base in Hatzor. A few days earlier I had received them by e-mail from an unknown sender. A series of about 20 stomach-churning pictures: an 8-year-old girl who was completely burned; the body of a child, of indeterminate age and sex, cut in two; a series of bodies of distorted-looking children in the back compartment of an improvised refrigerated truck. All victims of IAF attacks in Lebanon. The pictures were accompanied by claims of Lebanese doctors that the killing was a result of unfamiliar, strange Israeli weapons.
Dr. Chen Kugel, the pathologist to whom I showed the pictures, says that there is nothing strange about these injuries. They are typical of someone who was near the center of a very strong explosion. Very similar to the injuries suffered by the many Israeli citizens whom Kugel treated after suicide attacks in buses.
In the end, the meeting with the people who drop these bombs on Lebanon took place on Wednesday evening, after the sad results of the battle in Bint Jbail had already been made public. The base in Hatzor looked very peaceful, a little bit like an old-time kibbutz before it became privatized, and very proud. On the wall hang the photos of the former commanders of the base, from Amos Lapidot to Dan Halutz. "Anyone who wants to be an IAF commander gets there from here," they said in the office. Most of the time it was quiet, but toward sunset deafening sounds of landings and take-offs were heard, on the way to Lebanon or Gaza. The fact that nobody is talking about Gaza - as the base commander explained to us - does not mean that they are not operating there. On that same Wednesday, 23 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip, among them six civilians. The IAF bombed there, too.
I came to speak to the base commander and to the commander of the F-16 squadron about morality rather than about war. But the war came up, of course, and it sounded far less optimistic than it did two weeks or a week ago. The IAF, say its officers, expressing themselves in different ways, simply cannot prevent the launching of Katyushas at Israel, and if someone promised the public anything else, that was not serious. "I would be very happy if we were to reach a point where we could stop having to deal with the injured," says the base commander, Colonel A.
Did you think that after two weeks we would still be getting hit by Katyushas at a rate of 100 a day?
Col. A.: "My personal assessment is that if you want to have no launchings, in a war against a terror organization that has tens of thousands of launchers, you have to decide to occupy all of Lebanon and then go from house to house.
"I believed that it would be impossible to prevent the latest launchings militarily. Some of the launchers are a pipe concealed in some orchard with a Katyusha and a timer inside, without even a human being to operate it. In order to destroy it, you have to destroy the entire orchard and another orchard and another orchard and another forest and another forest."
And did the leaders, the prime minister, know that?
"In my opinion, they did."
And on your heads, they made some promise to end the whole thing by air.
"I don't recall that they promised you, bring me a quote by someone who promised you."
Colonel A. is already preparing for criticism from -journalists, commentators and politicians - over the fact that the Israel Defense Forces did not "flatten" Bint Jbail. He thinks that such an act is morally unacceptable, although if he were told that only terrorists remain in the town, he would bomb it.
In any case, if there are doubts in the IDF regarding the necessity of the war, they are not being harbored by the base commander or the squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel K. Hezbollah wants to throw us into the sea, they say, Hezbollah fires from places where there are civilians, and the IDF that is fighting it is "the most moral army in the world." It's as simple as that.
Every case of civilian deaths - "the uninvolved" is the preferred label today in the IDF - has an explanation. Civilians who were killed in the bomb shelter of their home were attacked because their home was found to be a "terror target," civilians who were killed on the highway while fleeing the villages near the border with Israel were killed because their car was "incriminated" for some reason or other. And besides, sometimes there are mistakes. As in the case of Marwahin.
Marwahin is an important case. Twenty-three civilians were killed there, including about 18 children, when they fled from the village near Israel's border, after leaflets calling on the residents to leave their homes were dropped there. Colonel A. says that in that case it was simply a mistake. The pilot was told to hit a certain target, and he made a mistake.
Foreign journalists have reported many cases in which entire families were killed while trying to flee after receiving IDF warnings. A Western official who visited Lebanon recently says that the phenomenon of aerial attacks on the highways is very common. Only UN or Red Cross vehicles can move on the highways in relative security, and even that only after coordination with the IDF at least 12 hours in advance.
The villagers, of course, do not have this option. "The villagers who want to leave their homes are completely defenseless," says the official. "They are in danger of an attack on the highway. Nothing helps. Not a white flag, nothing. That's why many stay behind. They're afraid to stay but even more afraid to travel."
Colonel A. is not familiar with the problem. "The only vehicles that are attacked are vehicles that open fire. I am not familiar with refugee vehicles being targeted."
The only vehicles that are attacked are those that open fire?
Lieutenant Colonel K: "The army does not attack vehicles that we know are civilian vehicles. On the other hand, every vehicle that is attacked undergoes a process of incrimination. Sometimes there is circumstantial evidence that incriminates the vehicle, certain criteria that this vehicle meets and that cause the person making decisions to decide that this vehicle is an incriminated vehicle."
The decision as to what to attack and what not to attack, say the officers, is made in the end by the person they call "the controller," the IAF commander himself or someone else who sits in the IAF "pit" and keeps track of events. He is the one who gives the order to bomb an "incriminated vehicle" or any other target. The problem, says Colonel A., is with the enemy, with Hezbollah. It does not behave like an army, it hides among the houses, it doesn't even wear a uniform, it blurs the line between civilians and fighters.
But international law states that it is forbidden to harm someone who is uninvolved.
Lieutenant Colonel K.: "The law is much more complex. According to it, anything that has a military connection becomes a legitimate military target, with some exceptions. I'll give you an example from this morning. We see a vehicle that launched a rocket and entered a house. A civilian house that was not defined as a terror target, a three-story house. What is this house? A civilian building? A terrorist building? The answer is unequivocal: The building is a terror building, period.
"That was an easy decision, because there was a hostile terrorist attack there and because the entire surrounding area long ago received warnings that the IAF is operating in it and they are requested to evacuate in order to prevent an attack on the uninvolved. It was very easy for the pilots to drop munitions on that house, although it had not been defined as a terror target. In other cases, we set out with targets defined as terror targets. We know who's there and we attack."
Do you really know?
Colonel A.: "Not the pilot. But there is someone who knows. But in the end you, as a pilot, have the ability to decide."
To decide not to bomb?
Colonel A.: "If you arrive at the area and see new information, for example, that there is a gathering of people, there have been instances when the pilot said: Guys, I can't drop munitions here. We send the pilots a message that they are expected to stop the attack if something doesn't feel right to them when it comes to vehicles, a house that does not appear in the aerial photos, even if the controller - and it can be the IAF commander - tells them that they have to carry out the mission. Most bombs can be diverted, if, for example, a vehicle enters an uncontrolled area (which disappears from the line of sight). We talk about it in the preflight briefing, and it has happened several times."
With all these briefings, how does it happen that 400 civilians have been killed in Lebanon?
Colonel A.: "There are 400 fatalities."
You don't accept the definition that they are civilians?
Colonel A.: "Our soldiers who are killed in Bint Jbail are also civilians."
I can show you the pictures. This baby does not look like a soldier. Do you feel moral with 400 dead, of whom half are children, according to UN data?
Colonel A.: "The answer is yes. We are not the only country that fights. I see how other countries fight, how the Americans fight, and I have no doubt that we are the most moral army in the world.
"It hurts me every time we kill a child, every time we kill an innocent person. It hurts me very much. I look at these pictures and think about my own children."
Do pilots see these pictures?
Colonel A.: "Not only do they see, they talk about it. The discussions the squadron commanders and I conduct with the fighters are about these issues. People confront me with tough questions like yours. But in the end our people carry out the mission, because they believe that it is a moral and just mission. Human life is the supreme value. But the lives of the citizens of the State of Israel and the lives of IDF soldiers come first."
Colonel A. has not heard about civilian targets that were attacked. All the targets are "terror targets." For example, the Dahiya neighborhood in southern Beirut that was almost totally destroyed is a military base for all intents and purposes, he says, with a fence surrounding it and a guard at the gate, and all those inside it are Hezbollah members and their families. "And besides, the neighborhood is deserted."
But that same Western official who visited Dahiya this week returned with a different impression. "I saw school notebooks there, family photos, a shopping basket with goods inside it," he says. There is no question that civilians lived there as well. The Guardian correspondent met a survivor in Dahiya from a family that took refuge in a bomb shelter. A bomb dropped by the IDF went through 10 stories and hit the family and killed most of them. He had gone up to a higher floor because they told him that Nasrallah was speaking on television. Watching the speech saved him.
The description of a vehicle that launches rockets and returns and hides inside a civilian building is constantly repeated. Colonel A. says that he himself saw "at least 15" such instances in the films of the attacks, and he makes sure to see all the films of the squadrons on his base. Are 15 instances a lot or a few, out of the hundreds of sorties carried out by the planes on his base? It's hard to say, considering the fact that the IAF has flown more than 2,000 sorties into Lebanon in the past 15 days.
Yonatan Shapira, one of those who signed the letter of the refusenik pilots in 2002, says that it is "very naive" to believe that all the identifications by Military Intelligence and the IAF were accurate. Shapira also reminds us of the role of Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, who was the IAF commander at the time, in the genesis of the refuseniks' letter. His statement about the slight blow to the wing, says Shapira, helped people decide to refuse. (Asked how he feels when he releases a bomb from his plane, Halutz replied, "I feel a slight blow to the wing as a result of the release of the bomb. After a second, it passes. And that's it. That's what I feel.") If Halutz keeps talking, says Shapira, maybe new refuseniks will be born.
Not at the moment, at least judging by the atmosphere during our conversation. Colonel A. says that he is not familiar with the order attributed to Halutz to destroy 10 houses in Beirut for every missile launched at Haifa. Halutz's statement about the slight blow to the wing was also misunderstood. Nor did he hear with his own ears the statement attributed to the chief of staff about turning Lebanon's clock "back 20 years." "I heard Halutz speaking here with pilots, and the messages were the opposite of what you are saying," he says.
After each bombing sortie an investigation is conducted in which they watch the films of the attack. He says that if there is a mistake, as in the case of Marwahin, they tell the pilot that he made a mistake. In Marwahin they even dismissed the pilot. But that happened at another base, and that is the only mistake he knows of in the IAF during the present attacks. In his base he has not found a single case of someone who mistakenly dropped munitions on an undeserving target. There have been operational mistakes. But not mistakes of that kind.
But maybe it depends on what is defined as a mistake today in the IAF. Clearly the definition has been broadened, even if Colonel A. has difficulty admitting it. The fact that there are civilians in a house does not protect it from attack. In Nablus, at least so we are told, even if a wanted man is hiding in one of the houses, the IDF makes every effort to hit only him and not the civilians who live in the same house. In Lebanon, the rules have changed.
"You must understand," says Colonel A., "a house in which there are weapons that in the end hit Haifa and kill eight people who came to work in the morning - that house, even if a family is living in it, has to be attacked, because those eight people who were killed are more important to me than the family that lives there (in Lebanon - M.R.). This family allowed them to bring weapons into the house, and thus it joined those who are fighting us.
"Hezbollah does not operate in a vacuum, it operates within a sovereign state. The government is responsible here for what happens in their country, and the citizens are responsible for what happens in their country. There can be no argument about that."
It's not certain that there is no argument. After all, in ordinary life, if a serial murderer enters your home, the police are not allowed to kill all the members of the family.
Colonel A.: "If the serial murderer has a submachine gun and fires on all the surrounding houses and kills two here and two there, and there are four people inside the house - at some point the police will demolish that house, because there is value to the life of the people in the vicinity."
I'm not certain. We are living in a world of personal responsibility, and our law and morality is based on it.
"I think that with that argument you are pulling the ground out from under our existence as a state. If you say that we, as a country under attack, do not have the right to defend ourselves. That we have to come with a knife after that same driver who is driving the vehicle and to take care of him only."
You are saying that the intention is what counts here. The fact is that we do not have the intention of killing civilians and Hezbollah does have such an intention. But we learned from Ehud Barak that what counts is the test of results.
Colonel A.: "The ethical test is the test of intent. If you are convinced that in a certain house there is only a terrorist, and that terrorist is responsible for developing missiles, and you hit that house and afterward realize that your information was mistaken and there were civilians in it as well, that's very bad, but morally I don't think that it represents a permissive slide of the army in the direction of attacking civilians."
Broad areas of Lebanon have been destroyed, many countries in the world may consider that a war crime. There is an International Criminal Court today in The Hague. Are you afraid of it?
"That court is not recognized by a large percentage of countries in the world, including the United States. I don't think I have anything to fear from the court in The Hague, there is nothing for which I can be judged."
And don't you think that a Lebanese child, not necessarily a Shiite, but a Christian or a Druze, will look at this destruction and grow up to be a new enemy of Israel?
"That's possible. But I first have to protect the citizens of the State of Israel."