Restraint is the key

While Israel seethes over the Goldstone report's accusations of war crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, in the United States tensions are running high over the future of the war in Afghanistan, following the leak of a report by the commander of the U.S.-led coalition forces there. Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in the report that a key element of the American strategy should be winning the support of the Afghani population. To do so, he said, the forces must avoid harming civilians as much as possible. Consequently his field commanders have been ordered to carefully weigh the effect of their operations on non-combatants at every stage. This entails a very cautious policy in terms of the use of fire, including air power, to the point of disengagement from the enemy if necessary.

To avoid causing harm to civilians, McChrystal determined that the danger to which his own troops are exposed had to be increased. This is a departure from the accepted approach in Western armies since the 1980s, which dictated that prevention of casualties to their own forces was preferable, even if it entailed the deaths of more civilians in the combat zone.

There is something to be learned from the McChrystal document that can be applied to the Goldstone report - mainly about what the UN report does not contain, and what is absent from the public discourse about it. The Israel Defense Forces, which shed much of its own blood on Lebanese soil, in the 1990s gradually began adopting the approach of its Western counterparts, of trying to wage a risk-free war. Since the first intifada - in which Israeli troops were exposed to a relatively high degree of risk because of their close contact with the Palestinian civilian population and the restrictions on using their firearms - the danger to which soldiers have been exposed has gradually diminished, due to the adoption of a policy which has increased the volume of Palestinian civilian casualties.

In Gaza, according to figures supplied by the Israeli civil rights organization B'Tselem, the ratio of Palestinian non-combatants killed to Israeli military fatalities grew from 6:1 in the first intifada to 86:1 in Operation Cast Lead. The policy that led to this state of affairs was based on the need to cater to the increasing sensitivity of Israeli society to IDF casualties, a sensitivity that could strike a serious blow to the ability of forces to carry out their missions successfully.

Under these circumstances, the orders handed down by the IDF command were a far cry from McChrystal's. His considerations - to minimize the risk of alienating the local population - did not hold water among those who planned Cast Lead. The commanders of the Western forces in Afghanistan and Iraq understand that a policy of endangering civilians in order to protect their own troops actually endangers their very ability to carry out their military mission, because it boosts the population's support for an enemy the West wants to crush. This insight plays no part in Israeli military thinking, despite the fact that the Israelis will have to live alongside the Palestinians, whereas the coalition forces will ultimately go back home, far from Afghanistan.

Instead of focusing on the Goldstone report, Israelis should be discussing this issue. The degree to which international law has been broken is not a technical matter, and certainly not a question of whether the law should be changed. It is a question of the need to adapt Israel's policies to the strategic goal of living in peace with its neighbors. This aim dictates putting an end to rule over the Palestinian population and to minimizing the use of force, if the political leadership believes that force must be used.

The writer is on the faculty of the Open University.