Oh but, shucks Shatz is a social democratic schmuck I hear.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-oe-shatz1aug01,1,4712071.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california 'Oops, Sorry' Doesn't Let Israel Off the Hook Israel claims Hezbollah tactics are responsible for civilian deaths in Lebanon. We should expect better. By Adam Shatz, ADAM SHATZ is literary editor of the Nation. August 1, 2006
>...NOTHER ARGUMENT made by Israel's defenders is that it cannot be
held responsible for killing civilians in militant strongholds.
Michael Walzer, the influential Princeton moral philosopher and author of "Just and Unjust Wars," recently opined in the New Republic that when Arab guerrillas "launch rocket attacks from civilian areas, they are themselves responsible — and no one else is — for the civilian deaths caused by Israeli counterfire." One expects this rationalization of collective punishment from a defense minister; coming from a "just war" theorist it is most odd. (By this criterion, the French Resistance would have been "responsible" if the Nazis had destroyed a village sheltering anti-Fascist partisans.)
In fact, Walzer's logic is explicitly repudiated by human rights groups. They weren't persuaded by this argument in 1996; in its damning report on the first Qana attack, Human Rights Watch concluded that the use in Qana of "deadly anti-personnel shells designed to maximize injuries on the ground — and the sustained firing of such shells, without warning, in close proximity to a large concentration of civilians — violated a key principle of international humanitarian law." And Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, has rejected it again this time: The most recent strike on Qana "suggests that the Israeli military is treating southern Lebanon as a free-fire zone."