1115.org

Here’s WaPo from last week, writing about Israel’s use of what they called targeted killings:

… Since the beginning of 2006, Israel has targeted and killed 18 Palestinian fighters, according to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. Fifteen civilians were also killed, the group said.

“We face a tragic dilemma,” said Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, chief of military intelligence. “A terrorist is going to enter a restaurant and blow up 20 people. But if we blow up his car, three innocent people in the car will die. How do we explain it to ourselves?”

I think the dilemma Gen. Yadlin faced was to tell the truth about targeted killings or to make up a Hollywood scenario in which a targeted killing means taking out someone on his way to blowing up twenty people. Sadly, for someone who seems to be so much into ethical behavior, Gen. Yadlin went with the Hollywood scenario. Oh well, sometimes you tell a little lie in the pursuit of a truth. Maybe even a big fat lie if you’re pursuing a great truth.

One morning in 2002, Yadlin recalled, he “woke up horrified” to learn that 15 Palestinian civilians had been killed in an operation. That afternoon, Yadlin called Asa Kasher, a philosophy professor, and began working on ethical guidelines for fighting terrorism. They also asked a mathematician to write a formula to determine acceptable civilian casualties per dead terrorist.

“Professor, how many deaths will it take till we know that too many civilians have died?” How can such mathematics possibly be ethical? I know what I’m reminded of, but I won’t say it. Because comparisons between the behavior of World War 2 Nazis and the behavior of 21st century Israelis always distracts attention from the real issues.

Maybe the mathematicians should first have asked a philosophy professor for ethical guidelines for applying mathematics to justify civilian killings.

(Reading the WaPo story, one cannot help being struck by the fact that erasing suspected terrorists is described as “killings” but erasing innocent civilians is described as “casualties”. Did some professor of ethical linguistics help them out there?)

But leave all that to one side. What I’m intrigued by is how the calculus of killing seems to work so differently for Hamas and Palestinian civilians as opposed to Hizbollah and Lebanese civilians. Israel seems to be working to very different formulae in the two cases. Maybe that’s why we have the term differential calculus?