That makes what is going on in Israel a debatable case. Is it a war or a police action? On the one hand there is no actual Palestinian state, only a notional one with divided leadership; Israel is said to be occupying parts of, well, Israel, parts that notionally belong to a proposed Palestine but that are actually within Israeli borders. The action in Gaza is similar to a counter-insurrection action over a part of the territory where sovereignty is being contested by a hostile army (and an irregular one, also, guerrilla and without uniforms or other distinguishing marks that attend to regular military forces).
On the other hand, there is a substantial amount of diplomacy across decades that has treated Palestine as an entity that exists at least potentially, and that they were trying to create actually. It has a notional territory even if it has not actually been agreed to by anyone yet, and a notional government even if it is divided and mutually internally hostile, and people who claim to belong to it as citizens. It is treated as if it were a nation for diplomatic purposes, even though it has never had full control over any territory; the United Nations deems it a "non-member observer state," emphasis added, since 2012.
If so, it might demand to be treated according to the laws of war; that would make things like this Israeli raid on the Ibn Sina* hospital an act of perfidy that would be prosecutable. Police can put on disguises and conduct such raids, but soldiers can't -- not if they are fighting other soldiers in a lawful war.
Of course, in order to demand such things Palestine would have to start adhering to the laws of war itself. That would be a tremendous step forward and not one anyone actually expects to see: Hamas' raid was intended to violate the laws of war, and the humanity of its victims, as much as it was possible to do. They aren't about to abandon acts of perfidy, hiding among civilian populations, and the like. That makes the issue somewhat moot according to the basic law of (human) nature: "Turnabout is fair play."
* Ibn Sina, better known in the West as Avicenna, is a titanically important philosopher. Though Muslim, his metaphysical account of the universe ended up being largely incorpoated into Catholic theology by, inter alia, Thomas Aquinas.
How did that hapapen? Avicenna was a genuine expert on Aristotle, and -- the story goes -- was mystified when he received a book entitled The Theology of Aristotle (that was actually a collection of works of Plotinus, founder of the Neoplatonic school). He had his doubts about it because he'd read and understood the Metaphysics, which doesn't sound anything like anything Plotinus ever wrote. After thinking about it for a long time, though, he came up with a way of making the two approaches compatible, which turns out to be his own novel metaphysical view.
When his view and other Islamic philosophy came into the hands of the Catholic Church via the reconquest of Spain, it answered a big problem that Aquinas and his contemporaries were facing. They wanted to incorporate the thinking of Aristotle into their world, as it had been lost and was much stronger than anything they had to go against it. However, many early Christians had been at one point Neoplatonists -- including Augustine -- and therefore Aristotle's basic view of the universe was not compatible with the one they had inherited from earlier saints. Not being saints themselves yet, they could hardly go against those who already were.
Yet here comes Avicenna with an answer to that problem: he had made the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian views compatible! All that they needed to do was work in his explanations, which they did -- chiefly without mentioning him, as it would be embarrassing to admit that they were borrowing large parts of their theology from a Muslim. Aquinas does mention another Muslim philosopher often, Averrores, but only as 'the Commentator,' i.e., one who commented on 'the Philosopher,' i.e. Aristotle. Avicenna only gets one mention from him that I'm aware of, but if you've worked through the two thinkers' metaphysics the influence is obvious.
Plagarism wasn't looked down on as much in the medieval university, I guess. Well, even today the standards are only enforced under duress. This footnote is now longer than the original blog post, but Ibn Sina merits extended attention. I should note that he thought of himself chiefly as a physician rather than a philosopher; his metaphysics is contained in the thirteenth book of a larger work called Healing (usually translated as 'The Healing,' but Arabic like Romance languages just likes to stick articles in front of everything: thus, as La France is just 'France' in English al-Shifā is properly just Healing). It therefore makes perfect sense that a hospital is named for him.
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Plagarism wasn't looked down on as much in the medieval university, I guess.
I read a short article on the history of the idea of plagiarism some years back, and apparently no one cared about copying or paraphrasing without attribution until something like the 17th century. As I recall, it had to do with literacy being so limited prior to the printing press that it was just assumed anyone who could read your work would have also read your sources and recognize them without attribution. There was also some economic aspect to the change, like commoners who were for the first time able to make a living writing or something like that (so it mattered for their income), but I forget exactly what that connection was. It may not have been that exactly. Anyway, just what I've read.
Regarding your main point, a lot of our definitions seem mainly relevant to a world order dominated by nation states, but I think we've been sliding out of that world order into one where some non-state actors are just as important as states, and in some cases more important. The drug cartels in Mexico, for example, are quite powerful. Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, and some other terrorist and / or criminal organizations, all exist outside the normal nation state system, but all can and sometimes do use military force. Maybe our definitions should change to reflect that reality?
Should they? Do you propose to change the systems to recognize that actors like the Mexican cartels or Hamas are more legitimate, because they are often more powerful than the nation states around them? Or do you propose to address the issue by making the nation states less bound to the standards, so that they can better compete with these kinds of actors -- at the cost of even more government-backed war crime?
I think the reason that there has been only limited success at doing what you're talking about is that core difficulty. The diplomats began trying to figure out how to alter the Geneva Conventions in the 1970s, to account for actors like the Hamas-predecessor organization the PLO or the Viet Cong. The Additional Protocol of 1977 tries to figure out how to bring guerillas into the framework of the laws of war. It attempted to extend legal protections to what were otherwise unlawful combatants (and thus subject to no protectioins in war, up to and including summary execution). The hope was that guerrillas would respond by acting more like lawful combatants, but that hope has proven entirely unrealized.
It should also be noted that major governments including ours (and Israel's) refused to ratify these additions, so we aren't bound by them. But I'm not sure what good it would have been: We ended up extending something very close to POW protections to unlawful combatants taken in the Iraq War, which is how ISIS came to be: we brought all these disparate groups together in a safe place, protected them, and then re-released them into the wild at the close of major combat operations. They would have killed each other if we hadn't guaranteed their safety, but in POW camp they learned to get along and make common cause.
If anything, I think the 'recognition of reality' we need lies less along trying to decide if nation-states and non-state-actors should be treated as equals, and more along being honest about what kinds of actions we are now treating as war crimes that may be necessary to bringing a war to its conclusion.
I don't know that we should license perfidy, but it doesn't make much sense to allow police to engage in it but not soldiers. It makes even less sense when governments can simply transfer operational control (OPCON) to the police, so that the soldiers 'are police for ten minutes' while they conduct the operation, and thus are covered by a legal fig leaf for what would otherwise be a war crime. We also do this with the CIA, transferring special operators into the control of the agency for the duration of illegal operations. Why not be honest about what we really think is necessary?
Likewise the distinction between genocide and ethnic cleansing. Genocide is always wrong; ethnic cleansing is always ugly, but sometimes it is also the only road to peace in the future. Sometimes two groups cannot live together, and have to be separated if there is ever to be an end to the killing. Every government extant today has engaged in this practice (and for a long time: consider the Trail of Tears in the early US), but since WWII we have let our horror of it keep us from admitting that it is sometimes necessary. Yet the Balkan war effectively turned out to be a war of ethnic cleansing, and the fault lines that continue there are largely where such cleansing was incomplete (e.g. Serbians living in Kosovo, which claims to be an independent state but which is claimed by a rogue territory by Serbia).
It's also a kind of accident-vs-essence issue, as whether or not there is an ethnic difference is really accidental: when the very same behavior occurs in Syria, where Arabs are driving out Arabs, it's not 'ethnic cleansing' just because nobody recognizes the tribal differences as ethnic differences. When Egypt does it to Egyptians, nobody recognizes it. When Israelis do such things to Palestinians, however, even less severe behaviors end up being treated as a more serious crime.
All of that said, I don't think there exists a body today that could treat the matter seriously, let alone honestly. It certainly isn't Congress, and it certainly isn't the cadre of international diplomats who keep trying to bring about 'the two-state solution.'
parts that notionally belong to a proposed Palestine but that are actually within Israeli borders
There are those who say that Israel was plopped into Palestine in the year 1948. So whose borders are whose?
The British government controlled what they called their Mandate of Palestine, but only because they had conquered the region from the Ottoman Turks in WWI. (That’s the whole ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ story, with the British general walking into Jerusalem rather than riding in out of deference to Jesus’ having ridden in on Palm Sunday). The Ottomans got it sort of accidentally as a byproduct of bringing the other Turks into line (and with it the title of Caliph of Islam, which had been conquered from the Arabs). Before that were Arabs, Kurds, Crusaders, more Arabs, Byzantines…
The fact that all of this ultimately comes down to Right of Conquest is another truth that nobody in the elite want to admit our loud. They all know it, but they desperately want it not to be true. For now it’s Israel’s, because they have kicked everyone’s behind who has tried to take it from them. Some of them claim they have been successful because God is on their side, according to the ancient covenant; if so, they have little to fear.
Really good questions & comments, Grim. Brief answers:
Do you propose to change the systems to recognize that actors like the Mexican cartels or Hamas are more legitimate, because they are often more powerful than the nation states around them?
Not only no but heck no.
Or do you propose to address the issue by making the nation states less bound to the standards, so that they can better compete with these kinds of actors -- at the cost of even more government-backed war crime?
Not exactly this, but you suggest my thoughts next.
If anything, I think the 'recognition of reality' we need lies less along trying to decide if nation-states and non-state-actors should be treated as equals, and more along being honest about what kinds of actions we are now treating as war crimes that may be necessary to bringing a war to its conclusion.
Yes, I agree. In a way, my solution is more old school in that it would treat these organizations as outside the law. With traditional pirates, that's not terribly hard, but with, e.g., the drug cartels, I think there needs to be a fairly narrow way to decide when an organization has crossed the line into being outside the law. Once that decision has been made, though, just like we use the Navy to take out pirates, we should be able to use military forces to take out cartels and terrorists.
I do think declaring a group to be outside the law should be similar to a declaration of war and there should be a fairly narrow set of circumstances that could justify it. I don't want the military crossing over into normal law enforcement. The way the Navy handles pirates is a good model, maybe, but maybe the way the Navy handled pirates in the 18th and 19th century would be a better model.
Yes, I think the laws of warfare should be changed to accommodate this way of handling things.
All that said, I suspect there will be a lot of problems in working out the details, and I haven't thought through all that.
"according to the ancient covenant; if so, they have little to fear."
If I read the details correctly, their possession was conditional. Restorable too...
The proper understanding of the terms isn’t, as it were, my business. That judgment like many others belongs to another.
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