>From: "Luke Weiger" <lweiger at umich.edu>
>
> > Oh, I see. If the occupied territories were part of Israel proper, the
> > conflict could neutrally be termed a "civil war" and there wouldn't be
> > anything more to say about the matter. Silly me for thinking otherwise.
>
>What am I missing? When two groups within a country fight each other,
>that's
>called a civil war. When one country invades another country, that's
>something else. Am I being unfair or legalistic here?
I don't take a position here, although I think the analogy between Kosovo and the Occupied Territories is not very good, but the general point is that when one people wishes to secede or not be part of a country, it is an open question whether an armed conflict is a civil war. Our own civil war only became one retrospectively, because the secessionists lost. If they had won, it would have been The War of Independence for the South, the War of the Secession (or some such) for the North. In Virginia, where I grew up, it is still called "The WAr Between the States." I guess it's still not a settled issue in Kosovo. In Israel, a substantial minority of the population still rejects the idea that the Occupied Territories aren't properly part of a greater Israel. Unfortunately, that is unsettled too.
I also don't think that whether a war is called "civil" settles very much about what what leftists wgo are not part of either group should do. We support self-determination and oppose national oppressioon and chauvinism, but that doesn't tell us whether we ought to support secession in a concrete circumstances. If the question is whether intervention in the conflicts of other countries is justified, labeling the war as civil doesn't tell us anything even if it is accurate. I think we still have little to improve on just war theory to tell us whether we should, but even then the question may be open in the extreme case. I think the US or just about anyone else would have been justified in stopping the Rwandian genocide, but maybe that wasn't a war. I guess it wasn't. Does that make a difference? Maybe. I rather suspect that many people here would not be upset if, hypothetically, the US or NATO or the UN were to intervene to stop the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Of course they won't, none of them, but think about Spain. Shouldn't the US have backed the Republic against Franco?
jks
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