Two

An Exception to the Rules *

When is the resort to violence justified in international affairs? What acts are legitimate in the conduct of war? These questions raise difficult problems of ethical judgment and historical analysis. Michael Walzer insists, quite correctly, that beyond merely “describ[ing] the judgments and justifications that people commonly put forward, [we] can analyze these moral claims, seek out their coherence, lay bare the principles that they exemplify.” His aim is to develop a certain conception of our “moral world,” and to draw from it both specific judgments on historical events and operative criteria for resolving future dilemmas.

There are certain beliefs on these matters that are so widely held as to deserve to be called “standard.” With regard to the question of resorting to violence, the standard doctrine holds that it is justified in self-defense or as a response to imminent armed attack, often construed in the words of Daniel Webster in the Caroline case, which Walzer quotes: “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” This part of the standard doctrine Walzer calls “the legalist paradigm.” With regard to the exercise of force, another part of the standard doctrine constitutes what Walzer calls “the war convention,” consisting of such principles as, for instance, that prisoners should not be massacred and civilians should not be the direct objects of attack.

The standard doctrine, which is codified in various international conventions, holds that both the resort to war and the means employed in warfare fall within the realm of moral discourse. There has been extensive discussion of these issues in the context of the Vietnam War, the conflict that prompted Walzer’s concern. While the standard doctrine is regularly violated, it remains a worthwhile endeavor to evaluate and refine it.

Walzer argues that the legalist paradigm is too restrictive in certain respects. In other respects, however, he interprets its strictly, as he does the war convention. Walzer takes the anti-Axis effort in Europe in World War II to be “the paradigm . . . of a justified struggle”; Nazism, he believes, “lies at the outer limits of exigency, at a point where we are likely to find ourselves united in fear and abhorrence.” Nevertheless, he condemns as illegitimate under the legalist paradigm Churchill’s decision to mine the territorial waters of neutral Norway in order to prevent ore shipments to Nazi Germany, and he considers the terror bombing of German cities to be a serious violation of the war convention. As these examples illustrate, he construes the standard doctrine strictly, even in the extreme case of the struggle against Nazism.

Walzer points out that it is impossible within the confines of his study to present an elaborate historical argument, but to me, at least, the above conclusions seem reasonable. Furthermore, Walzer is right to challenge widely accepted views, for example with regard to terror bombing. It is enough to recall the fundamental moral flaw of the Nuremberg tribunal, graphically revealed by Telford Taylor’s observation, in Nuremberg and Vietnam, that “there was no basis for criminal charges against German or Japanese” leaders for aerial bombardment because “both sides had played the terrible game of urban destruction—the Allies far more successfully.” As it turns out, the operational definition of a “crime of war” is a criminal activity of which the defeated enemies, but not the victors, are guilty. The consequences of this moral stance were soon to be seen in Korea and Vietnam. It would be naive to suppose that a serious moral critique would have prevented further criminal acts of the sort condoned (or ignored) under the Nuremberg principles. Nevertheless, the example illustrates the seriousness of the enterprise in which Walzer is engaged.

Even the most profound justification of the standard doctrine would be of limited import, since it is in any case widely accepted in principle, if not in practice. Hence the major interest of Walzer’s study lies in the modifications and refinements he proposes, as in his restrictive interpretation of the war convention. Since the burden of justification rests on those who employ force, the still more significant part of his study lies in those departures from the standard doctrine that advocate its relaxation. These relate to the legalist paradigm of the justified use of force.

Walzer suggests four modifications that extend the legalist paradigm. Three of these revisions “have this form: States can be invaded and wars justly begun to assist secessionist movements (once they have demonstrated their representative character), to balance the prior interventions of other powers, and to rescue peoples threatened with massacre.” These extensions are discussed under the heading of “humanitarian intervention.” Walzer states that “clear examples of what is called ‘humanitarian intervention’ are very rare. Indeed, I have not found any, but only mixed cases where the humanitarian motive is one among several.” He cites the Indian invasion of Bangladesh as a possible example (the only one cited), since “it was a rescue, strictly and narrowly defined,” and the Indian troops “were in and out of the country . . . quickly.”

There then remains to be considered one serious proposal for relaxing the restrictions of the standard doctrine; and thus much of the significance of Walzer’s study lies in this crucial case. It is the case of “preemptive strikes.” Walzer accepts “the moral necessity of rejecting any attack that is merely preventive in character, that does not wait upon and respond to the willful acts of an adversary” (hence this condemnation of the mining of Norwegian waters). But he feels that the Caroline doctrine is too narrow. Preemptive strikes are justified, he proposes, when there is “a manifest intent to injure, a degree of active preparation that makes that intent a positive danger, and a general situation in which waiting, or doing anything other than fighting, greatly magnifies the risk.”

A single example is offered: the Israeli preemptive strike of June 5, 1967. This, Walzer holds, is “a clear case of legitimate anticipation,” the only one cited—in this review of 2,500 years of history—to illustrate the point that states may use military force even prior to the direct use of military force against them. Israel was “the victim of aggression” in 1967, Walzer claims, even though no military action had been taken against it. What is more, we can have “no doubts” about this case, as Walzer states in the following extraordinary passage:

Often enough, despite the cunning agents, the theory is readily applied. It is worth setting down some of the cases about which we have, I think, no doubts: the German attack on Belgium in 1914, the Tilanian conquest of Ethiopia, the Japanese attack on China, the German and Italian interventions in Spain, the Russian invasion of Finland, the Nazi conquests of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, and Holland, the Russian invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Egyptian challenge to Israel in 1967.

The Egyptian “challenge” to Israel is thus a clear case of “aggression,” on a par with the direct use of armed force in each of the other cases cited. The legalist paradigm fails, according to Walzer, because, given the Caroline doctrine, it does not condone Israel’s response to this “aggression.”

Note the crucial nature of this case for Walzer’s argument. In a review covering 2,500 years, Egypt’s 1967 challenge is the single example cited of “aggression” involving no direct resort to force; nevertheless, it is not an ambiguous example, but one that raises “no doubts.” Israel’s preemptive strike is the one historical example adduced to illustrate the need to modify the legalist paradigm to permit “anticipations.” Furthermore, this is the only modification covering supposedly unambiguous historical examples that involves a relaxation of the standard doctrine. What Walzer is proposing here, as he notes, is a “major revision of the legalist paradigm. For it means that aggression can be made out not only in the absence of a military attack or invasion but in the (probable) absence of any immediate intention to launch such an attack or invasion.” Given the burden carried by this example, a serious inquiry into the historical facts would certainly appear to be in order, but Walzer undertakes no such inquiry. He merely asserts that Israeli anxiety “seems an almost classical example of ‘just fear’—first, because Israel really was in danger . . . and second, because [Nasser’s] military moves served no other, more limited goal.”

Israeli generals take a rather different view. The commander of the air force at the time, General Ezer Weizman, stated that he would

accept the claim that there was no threat of destruction against the existence of the State of Israel. This does not mean, however, that one could have refrained from attacking the Egyptians, the Jordanians and the Syrians. Had we not done that, the State of Israel would have ceased to exist according to the scale, spirit and quality she now embodies. . . . We entered the Six-Day War in order to secure a position in which we can manage our lives here according to our wishes without external pressures.

The Israeli correspondent of Le Monde, Amnon Kapeliouk, citing corroboratory statements by General Mattityahu Peled and former Chief of Staff Haim Bar-Lev, wrote that “no serious argument has been advanced to refute the thesis of the three generals.” This assessment is confirmed by American intelligence sources, who found no evidence that Egypt was planning an attack and estimated that Israel would easily win no matter who struck the first blow. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported to the President on May 26 that Israel could remain mobilized for two months without serious trouble. “In a military sense, then, time did not seem to be running out.”1

General Weizman’s justification for the preemptive strike bears comparison to the argument advanced by Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Chancellor, after the attack on Belgium in 1914: “France stood ready for an invasion. France could wait, we could not. A French attack on our flank on the lower Rhine might have been disastrous. Thus we were forced to ignore the rightful protests of the Government of Belgium. . . . He who is menaced as we are and is fighting for his highest possession can only consider how he is to hack his way through.”

Walzer properly dismisses this justification, pointing out that nonmilitary options had not all been foreclosed and deriding the reference to Germany’s “highest possession,” which he takes to mean “honor and glory” (compare Weizman’s “scale, spirit and quality”). “The mere augmentation of power,” Walzer insists, “cannot be a warrant for war or even the beginning of warrant.” No doubt one can find differences, possibly even decisive ones, between the Israeli and German attacks, or between the Israeli strike and the Russian invasion of Finland—another clear case of aggression, even though, as Walzer concedes, the defense of Leningrad from possible future German attack was at stake and Russia’s invasion after Finnish refusal of territorial exchange may have saved Leningrad from encirclement when the Nazis did attack. But two points deserve mention. First, Walzer does not seriously address the relevant historical background. This is a remarkable oversight given the crucial role of the Israeli strike in his argument, and given also his insistence that the Israeli attack on the one hand, and the German and Russian attacks on the other, are all “clear cases,” falling on opposite sides of the moral divide. Second, a serious analysis of the 1967 case would quickly reveal that there are indeed doubts and ambiguities, contrary to Walzer’s claim.

Walzer presents only the Israeli version of events leading to the 1967 war. He ignores not only the Arab version but also the well-known analyses of commentators committed to neither side. He does not mention the Israeli attack on the Jordanian village of Es-Samu in November 1966, leaving eighteen dead: a “reprisal” after terrorist attacks allegedly originating in Syria (censured by the UN, including the United States). Nor does he discuss the exchange of fire on April 7, 1967, which “gave rise to intervention first by Israeli and then by Syrian aircraft, [then to] the appearance of Israeli planes over the outskirts of Damascus and to the shooting down of six Syrian planes” with no Israeli losses.2

Walzer’s unqualified assertion that Nasser’s moves served no more limited goal than to endanger Israel is sharply at variance with the judgment of many other observers. Yost, for instance, notes various inflammatory Israeli statements that “may well have been the spark that ignited the long accumulating tinder” and discusses the problem that Nasser faced “for his failure to stir at the time of the Es-Samu and April 7 affairs.” Walzer mentions that Egypt expelled the UN Emergency Force from the Sinai and Gaza and closed the Strait of Titan to Israeli shipping. He fails to mention that Israel had never permitted UN forces on its side of the border and refused the request of the UN secretary-general to allow them to be stationed there after Egypt ordered partial evacuation of the UN forces from its territory. (Egypt did not order the UN forces out of Sharm el Sheikh.) As for the closing of the Strait of Tiran, if we apply the reasoning that Walzer feels is appropriate in the case of the German attack on Belgium, we see that there remained unexploited possibilities for peaceful settlement. For example, the matter might have been referred to the International Court of Justice, as Egypt had been requesting since 1957. This proposal was always rejected by Israel, possibly because it agreed with John Foster Dulles that “there is a certain amount of plausibility from the standpoint of international law, perhaps, to [the Arab] claims” (though the United States disagreed with this conclusion.)

It also seems that Nasser may have had some legitimate cause for concern when he heard Levi Eshkol, the Israeli Prime Minister, declare that “we shall hit when, where, and how we choose,” or when he learned that the Israeli chief of intelligence, General Yariv, had informed the international press that “I think that the only sure and safe answer to the problem is a military operation of great size and strength” against Syria. Nasser alluded to these statements in his May 23 speech, in which he noted various Israeli threats against Syria. And his concern may have been augmented—quite understandably—by the memory of the surprise Israeli attack of 1956, at a time when Egypt was making serious efforts to quiet the border.

My remarks here only scratch the surface of the issue. The point is that the historical record is far more complex and ambiguous than Walzer makes it out to be. His statement that Egypt’s “challenge” is a simple and indubitable case of aggression,” on par with the Nazi conquests in Europe, can hardly be taken seriously. Furthermore, he ignores the aftermath of the Israeli attack. Quite unlike the case of Bangladesh, the Israeli army did not leave. Rather, it prepared for a continuing occupation, with a clearly stated policy aimed at the eventual annexation of some areas, the actual annexation of eastern Jerusalem, and a program of settlement and integration of the occupied territories—a program that continues in the face of nearly unanimous international condemnation.

Some 200,000 West Bank Arabs fled during the Israeli attack in 1967, and about the same number fled or were forcibly expelled after the cease-fire. For many months afterward, UN Chief of Staff General Odd Bull reports, “The Israelis encouraged their departure by various means, just as they had in 1948.” As late as the following November, he adds, “There can certainly be no doubt that many thousands of Arabs at this time fled across the Jordan to the East Bank, even though there may be no precise evidence of the methods that were employed to ensure their departure.” Thus the land was “liberated”—freed of a large part of its population. The Israelis instituted a military regime in the conquered areas that differs from others of the same type primarily in the favorable press that it has enjoyed in the United States. All of these subsequent developments seem relevant to an evaluation of the Israeli attack, as Walzer would surely see the relevance of similar developments in other cases he discusses.

I focus on this particular example because of its crucial role in the structure of Walzer’s presentations of his “moral world.” With this case removed, Walzer is left with no historical example of any substance to indicate that his recommended departures from the legalist paradigm are more than academic—that is, that they cover actual historical events. This is not to say that the discussion is worthless; even a purely abstract discussion of these issues is of some interest. But we no longer have “a moral argument with historical illustrations,” as the book’s subtitle states, at least in the crucial case of relaxing the restrictions of the standard doctrine. Rather, what we have is a mere moral assertion lacking any connection to clear historical cases.

Walzer’s analysis of “peacetime reprisals” might also be taken to imply a relaxation of the standard doctrine. He argues that “reprisals are clearly sanctioned by the practice of nations, and the (moral) reason behind the practice seems as strong as ever.” The moral argument he presents seems weak; it barely goes beyond assertion. His single example of a “legitimate reprisal” again involves Israel: this time, the 1968 Israeli raid on the Beirut airport in which thirteen civilian planes were destroyed in retaliation for an attack on an Israeli plane by two terrorists in Athens. In fact, the reprisal was hardly efficacious: it “aroused considerable sympathy for the Palestinians in Lebanon and brought their activities more into the open,”3 as could have been anticipated. Walzer might have strengthened his point by drawing some of the natural conclusions of his position: for example, that it would be quite proper for Cuban commandos to destroy commercial aircraft at Washington National Airport in reprisal for the acts of terrorists organized in the United States.

Walzer also gives an example of an illegitimate Israeli reprisal, namely, the commando attack in which more than forty villagers were killed in the Jordanian village of Qibya in 1953, in response to a terrorist murder in Israel that had no known connection to this village. Walzer concludes that in this case “the killings were criminal,” but the strongest judgment he allows himself is that “particular Israeli responses have indeed been questionable, for it is a hard matter to know what to do in such cases.” Walzer never explains why his condemnation of terrorist acts against Israel is not similarly nuanced. For example, in March 1954, eleven Israelis were murdered on a bus in the Negev; it was the most serious Arab terrorist activity since the establishment of the state. In response, the Israeli army attacked the Jordanian village of Nahaleen (which was in no way involved), killing nine villagers. Walzer regards the Israeli retaliation as merely “questionable.” But then why was not the original Arab attack also just “questionable”? Or why not also describe the Israeli commandos as “thugs and fanatics,” Walzer’s term for Arab terrorists (in the New Republic article from which this account of terrorism is drawn)? The actual perpetrators of the ambush-massacre of the people on the bus were, as was known at the time, from a Bedouin tribe that had been driven into the desert by Israeli troops. More than 7,000 of these Bedouins were expelled from 1949 to 1954, as Israel encroached on the demilitarized zones. Surely Walzer should grant that it is also a “hard matter to know what to do” when people are driven from their homes and their traditional grazing and watering grounds, and left destitute in the desert—as it is a “hard matter to know what to do” when thousands of peasants are expelled from their bulldozed villages in the same region in the past few years—actions that continue as I write, though the American press is silent.

Walzer does discuss terrorism, but his account is deeply flawed. He makes the important point that the tendency to restrict the term “terrorism” to “revolutionary violence” is “a small victory for the champions of order, among whom the uses of terror are by no means unknown.” It is indeed remarkable to see how the term has been restricted in recent years so as to exclude state-organized terrorism. Walzer asserts that “contemporary terrorist campaigns are most often focused on people whose national existence has been radically devalued: the Protestants of Northern Ireland, the Jews of Israel, and so on.” He then develops the following “precise historical point: that terrorism in the strict sense, the random murder of innocent people, emerged as a strategy of revolutionary struggle only in the period after World War II.”

His “precise historical point,” however, is precisely false, as a look at his favored example suffices to show. In just three weeks in July 1938, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, dedicated to the ideals of Menahem Begin’s mentor Ze’ev Jabotinsky and later headed by Begin himself, killed seventy-six Arabs in terrorist attacks on Arab markets and other public places. There were many similar pre–World War II examples: bombs placed in Arab movie theaters, sniping at Arab quarters and trains carrying Arabs, and so on. The propagandists of the Jewish terrorist groups gloried in these triumphs. On evidence of the heroes of the Herut, the party of the current prime minister of Israel, is a man hanged by the British for firing on an Arab bus.

(And while the main paramilitary force of the Jewish community in Palestine did not systematically resort to random terror, it did not disdain it entirely. To cite one case, the same page of the official history that describes the Haganah assassination of the orthodox Jewish poet Dr. Israel Jacob de Haan in 1924 does go on to describe how the Haganah destroyed the house of an Arab near the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem in retaliation for harassment of Jewish worshippers by Arab youths; the bomb caused no injuries “because by chance the inhabitants of the house were away.”4)

Contrary to Walzer’s claim, random murder of innocent people is no postwar invention of the Provisional IRA and the PLO. His point about “people whose national existence has been radically devalued” is very well taken—but it applies to Palestinian Arabs no less than to “the Jews of Israel.”

The special place of Israel in Walzer’s “moral world” is also revealed in his discussion of the war convention—the set of principles that apply once war is under way. He contrasts orders given at My Lai with those issued to Israeli troops entering Nablus during the June 1967 war, citing a book of conversations among Israeli soldiers. It is perhaps less obvious that he assumes that this is the most objective source of evidence concerning the humane practices of the Israeli army. But putting that question aside, he might have selected other examples from the same book, examples concerning, say, the village of Latrun, destroyed by Israeli troops, whose inhabitants were driven into exile. He might have even taken a further step and quoted the eyewitness account by the Israeli journalist Amos Kenan, describing the bulldozing of Latrun and neighboring villages under the command of officers who told their troops, “Why worry about them, they’re only Arabs.” He might have even quoted Kenan’s prophetic conclusion: “The fields were turned to desolation before our eyes, and the children who dragged themselves along the road that day, weeping bitterly, will be the fedayeen of 19 years hence.”

In another section of the book, Walzer comments briefly on the pacifist critique of the standard doctrine in an afterword, making the familiar point that nonviolent measures appeal to “the essential humanity of the enemy,” in A.J. Muste’s phrase, and are therefore of doubtful relevance when the appeal will not be heeded. Much pacifist theory relies on a dual psychological doctrine: nonviolence will strike a responsive chord, and violent resistance will so shape the character of those who choose it that the distinction between aggressor and resister will be erased. As Muste put it, “kindness provokes kindness” and “the problem after a war [even a just war] is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?” Walzer does not directly address these basic premises of the theory of nonviolent resistance. To me it seems that they cannot be easily dismissed, though ultimately they cannot be sustained. I’ve written about this elsewhere (American Power and the New Mandarins) and will not pursue the question any further here.

Many other difficult and important questions are raised in Walzer’s study, and much of the discussion is literate and richly textured. The examples I have focused on, however, reveal a crucial moral and intellectual flaw, which undermines much of the argument. No doubt Walzer expresses a broad consensus in American society when he assigns a special status to Israel and reconstructs the “moral world” accordingly, but this simply reflects the pathology of the times. Comparable judgments on the exceptional status of Soviet Russia would not have been unusual in an earlier period. Consensus is no criterion of truth or justice.

 

 

* From “An Exception to the Rules,” Inquiry, April 17, 1978. Review of Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977).