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August 8, 2014

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Why bombing Palestinian civilians?

EVEN if we accept that Israel has a legitimate reason to shut down tunnels that are used to infiltrate Palestinian commandos into Israel, this does not explain why it is necessary to bomb schools, power plants, hospitals, mosques, and densely packed civilian areas.

The official explanation is that Palestinian missiles are hidden in civilian areas. This may well be true. But Israeli leaders also appear to believe that by smashing Gaza and its people with bombs, Palestinians’ morale can be destroyed.

This is what used to be called “strategic bombing,” or sometimes “terror bombing,” a method of warfare designed to break the will of a people by destroying its “vital centers.” The British first used this tactic in the mid-1920s in Mesopotamia, where they tried to break the will of Iraqi and Kurdish anti-colonial rebels by wiping out entire villages from the air, sometimes with bombs filled with mustard gas. The bloody high point came in August 1945, when the United States used atomic bombs to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki — which is what Lieberman may well have had in mind.

Strategic bombing is an application of the concept of “total war,” in which all civilians are considered to be combatants and thus legitimate targets. The problem with strategic bombing is that it never seems to have worked, with the possible exception of Rotterdam (but by then Holland had already been defeated). Confronted by a common deadly threat, civilians rally around the only leaders who can do anything to protect them, even if those leaders are widely disliked. So why do governments persist in using this cruel but ineffective strategy?

Violent passion and the desire to wreak vengeance cannot be the only, or perhaps even the main, reason. A more plausible explanation is that strategic bombing is indeed about morale, but not that of the enemy. It is the morale of the home front that must be boosted, when other methods appear to fail.

The other advantage of bombing campaigns, avidly promoted during World War II by men who were haunted by memories of the endless bloodshed of World War I, was that attacking the enemy did not require losing many of your own troops. Many British bomber pilots died, of course, but many more soldiers would have died in a ground invasion. Indeed, with supremacy in the air, as in Mesopotamia in the 1920s or Japan in 1945, mass killing can be carried out at virtually no cost at all.

There is another explanation, which also stems from the 1920s. Bombing was a way, as Churchill put it, to police an empire “on the cheap.” Rebellions could be stopped by killing enough people from a great height. US President Barack Obama’s use of drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen derives from the same principle.

But these are always Pyrrhic victories, because every murder of civilians creates new rebels, who will rise again in time.

Ian Buruma is Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College, and author of “Year Zero: A History of 1945.” Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2014.www.project-syndicate.org. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.




 

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