McFreedom

The reason my brother Evan noticed that my email didn't work was because he took issue with my statement in Morality of Suicide Bombing that "Palestinians have killed a lot more Israeli civilians than vice versa."

He was trying to email me a link to a story which rebuts this claim, which he described as being from a "conservative" web page and trying to accurately count noncombatants (not classifying the suicide bombers themselves as "civilian casualties," for example).

I believe I've found it, and it's interesting reading. The bottom line is that there were 579 Palestinian "noncombatants" killed by Israel and 433 Israeli "noncombatants" killed by Palestinians through June, 2002.

Of course, the "bottom line" really hinges on who is a noncombatant. The study does correct a lot of past work on this issue by deciding that, "[N]on-uniformed Palestinians who fire at Israeli soldiers or civilians are classified as combatants."

I think the more general issue to consider is one of moral responsibility for one's own death. If a soldier kills an enemy in war, that soldier is not considered to be morally responsible for the death he caused, as he would be if he murdered the same individual in a different context. Enemy combatants - even ineffectual ones - are fair and valid targets on the battlefield.

Thus, I think the study doesn't go far enough on this issue: "Children throwing stones at tanks are not considered combatants[.]" They further discuss the overall uncertainty about casualties on the Palestinian side, in general: "[Palestinian] sources generally disagree on many significant details, including the name, age, and circumstances of death of victims," and claim to have erred on the Palestinian side when they weren't sure. Without looking at the study, of course, I can't verify this, but it's worth noting that they agree that they probably still have a lot of people in the "noncombatant" category that would be classified as "combatants" by their own measures if they had more data.

If a 12-year-old boy is throwing rocks at a tank and gets caught in the crossfire, I don't think he's a noncombatant. There has to be some presumption in warfare that targets on the battlefield who are engaging you are valid targets. Even if the Israeli soldiers are trying to shoot around these kids, occasionally one of them is going to get hit, and I don't think the Israeli soldiers have much of a moral responsibility to take risks themselves to prevent those types of casualties.

All that said, without seeming to weasel too much, I'm willing to accept that perhaps more Palestinian civilians have been killed than Israeli. I think the more important point was the next sentence, however, "[T]he vast majority of the Israeli civilians killed were directly targeted, while the vast majority of Palestinian civilians killed were accidentally targeted." I still stand by that. Furthermore, it's instructive to look at the percentages - 67% of the Palestinians killed were "combatants" by the definitions of the study. 26% of the Israelis were.