Intention Vs Behavior and the Middle East Conflict

Politics and religion
1

The idea for this thread arose from themes in the Israel/Palestine thread but I believe the topic is generally applicable to many issues in the Middle East.

My view is that there is a fundamental philosophical disconnect, largely inspired by religious themes, between The West and The Middle East in terms of a focus on intention vs. behavior.

Folks often argue about the killing of civilians in these conflicts and here in the West we are deeply horrified by “intentional targeting” of civilians, especially non-combatants and children. My view is that this flows from the Christian/Protestant/Calvinist focus on faith over works (despite what it says in the Bible). The focus on intention permeates our criminal law, our discrimination law and so on. And it permeates our view of warfare as well.

But in the Middle East, arising from Islamic theological/philosophical origins, things are quite different. “Islam” roughly translates to “obedience to the will of Allah” and they don’t mean, obedience in belief; they mean obedience in BEHAVIOR. This is why there is such an emphasis on things like beards, head coverings and the many other aspect of Islamic practice. And from a Middle Eastern POV, the issue of intent is less important than the behavior. The conduct, what actually happens, is more important.

When we look at the Israel/Palestinian conflict (and this is also true of the long US war in Afghanistan) there is a massive disconnect between Western and Middle Eastern views on “collateral damage”. We view this as “well, we didn’t INTEND to target those folks; they just got in the way, so it’s not that bad…” Whereas from a Middle Eastern POV, the actual death toll is what matters. In the Israel/Palestine conflict, the fact that about 20 Palestinians have died for every Israeli over the 50 years of the occupation is the dominant reality. Intention can go fuck itself; those people are still dead.

My own view, despite a Western upbringing, has been slowly swinging over to the “hey conduct is reality while intention is subjective and dead is still dead” view over the last couple of decades. I can at least now, understand the fundamentally different POV of the Palestinians. This is no way justifies the horrible conduct of Hamas, but it does in my view, help to explain it. (Explanation and justification are NOT the same thing even folks often conflate them.)

Anyway, I view this disconnect as a fundamental barrier between the sides.

Discuss, if you want.

2

I think you’re wrong, and there’s an element of cultural essentialism here which I think is misguided. Supporters of both sides largely do so because their cultural context supports those sides, not because of different moral perspectives on the actions of those involved. Moral evaluation of the situation makes a difference at the margin, but things like the media environment are probably way more influential. The emphasis on different framings of events is not the cause of different nations general views on the conflict but rather the converse is true.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

My interest in discussing this on QT3 beyond generalities is pretty minimal, for reasons I think I’ve made pretty clear. But thanks for the thoughtful post.

3

I think I am more in @Sharpe’s camp, though @Aceris’ point about context being important are worth noting. I think that context though is indeed at least in part rooted in the broader philosophical (and in this region, that means theological) framing.

Jews also emphasize behavior, rather than faith. The 613 mitzvot are a good example, as is the practice of atonement (literally going around and making good the harm you’ve done that year) at Yom Kippur. The discussions of law in Torah generally revolve around what happened, and not what someone wanted to happen or intended.

It was exactly this focus on actions rather than belief that prompted, I think, the early Christians to double down so hard on the concept of faith. Even before the Protestants took things to another level, the Church was emphasizing the need to truly believe and internalize faith. Even if your actions were good, if you were adjudged to be unfaithful or lacking in belief, you were often not considered in compliance as it were. This helped set the Church apart from at first the Jews (and the rest of the faiths in the Eastern Med region), and then most importantly Islam after the 6th century.

4

I heard it said, I don’t remember where, that we tend to judge ourselves by our intentions, and others by their actions. It struck me as deeply true on an individual level and I think it holds true at the societal scale, as well.

5

I had mentioned this is the other discussion this sprung from, but I’ll repeat it here.

If a soldier kills a civilian accidentally, while in the pursuit of a military objective, we can fault him for his execution, but his goal and plan is legitimate.

If a soldier intentionally murders a civilian, what is his objective? It’s not some other military goal. It’s not collateral damage. His actual objective was to kill the civilian.

I think that’s what makes such things war crimes, not merely among the many tragedies of war.

Killing the civilian is not a legitimate military objective.

Certainly some people may not agree with such a judgement, but I believe the entire world, not just the West, agrees with such laws of war. There are certainly war criminals, but I don’t think it’s legitimate for someone to see civilians as legitimate military targets, and that’s what you are doing if you internally kill a civilian.

So, in both cases, we have a tragic incident with a dead civilian. But only one is a war crime. And I think the Geneva conventions go beyond just Western, Christian society.

6

But I think you can understand why to the family of the collateral damage, that might seem like a distinction without a difference, right?

7

I can understand the tragedy of a child dying will impact you either way, but if we were to take another similar example.

Imagine someone hit you child with a car, and killed them. Not drunk, not reckless, just a pure accident.

Would you feel the same way about that person as about someone who actually intentionally murdered your child? And then intentionally desecrated their corpse?

I feel like a normal person, while heartbroken in both cases, would regard the killers differently.

8

I would say a better comparison would be someone hitting and killing your child with a car because they wanted to kill your child, or because they mistook your child for another kid they wanted to kill.

9

Another way to look at this issue is from a standpoint of foreseeability. If you have enough info to know that ordering a certain military campaign is highly likely to produce X number of civilian casualties, and you do it anyway, don’t you have at least SOME responsibility for X deaths, even if your intent was for X to be 0? If the evidence shows that US/Israeli airstrikes and other heavy armament strikes tend to produce civilian casualties at such and such a rate (and my understanding is the statistics show that these strikes DO on average produce non-trivial civilian death rates) then isn’t there some responsibility with going ahead with the strikes regardless of the intentions?

Or, in the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, if you have literally 50 years of evidence showing that your military tactics kill substantial numbers of civilians, don’t you have some responsibility to deal with that reality? I mean, intentions are great, but they are not magic. When airstrikes, heavy artillery, or armored formations are sent into areas with many civilians, some civilians are going to die, full stop. It is entirely predictable.

I understand the issue of balancing military necessity with the considerations I just outlined. But I feel like Israel (and Hamas too of course, even more so) has been out of balance for a long time.

And again, I don’t feel that one side’s atrocities justify the other side’s atrocities.

I think Israel’s goals need to be realistic. It is not possible to kill every active Hamas member without also killing tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of non-Hamas Gazans. And this is true even if Israel has every intention of ONLY killing Hamas.

I suspect what Israel will ultimately do is invade Gaza, reestablish the occupation and then attempt to render Hamas toothless by depriving Gaza of an industrial base and the means to buy, build or otherwise acquire significant weaponry. This will entail massive suffering by the Gazan population, but I suspect this is what will happen. This will be horrible but it has a lower risk of causing Israel to be considered a pariah nation, so that is likely what Israel will do. Of the many evil options, this might be the least evil. There are no good options.

On the other hand, if Israel truly tries to “completely destroy” Hamas by direct violence, they are going to kill extremely large numbers of Gazans, including many thousands who do not actively support Hamas.

And again, intention is irrelevant to what I just outlined. It is entirely predictable that a massive effort to kill every Hamas member will inevitably kill many many many Gazans. I do think that level of foreseeability overshadows the intent issue.

10

If it was foreseeable, then yes I WOULD blame the driver. Drunk driving, driving while texting, speeding, etc. If the foreseeability got to the level of complete disregard for human life, then it would be murder, or at least manslaughter.

11

But not to the same degree, right?

I think your class about foreseeability make total sense, and certainly a military is responsible for collateral damage.

But I also see that responsibility as being less than that which is incurred by intentionally targeting civilians.

In the case of collateral damage in Gaza, I would go so far as to say that Hamas themselves share responsibility, as they intentional use the civilian population as human shields. They largely do this because they know that Israel doesn’t really want to kill civilians for no reason.

Israel doesn’t do that. Why not? Because Israel doesn’t seek to put its civilian population in danger in the same way that Hamas does, and it wouldn’t really work anyway, because Hamas actually wants to kill civilians.

There is some importance to what constitutes a legitimate military target, and what doesn’t, right? Or are we to just disregard things like the Geneva conventions?

12

Negligence is a thing as well, and can raise something to the standard of a war crime.

I think Israel often is negligent when it comes to minimizing civilians casualties.

13

Why not? You fire the rocket, the child dies? What difference does it make? How is that not intentionally targeting civilians? The minimization of collateral damage is a horrific, cowardly way that the West tries to explain away its actions in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. In some ways it’s almost worse - refusing to own up to the deliberate decision to endanger innocent or civilian lives - the choice to perform the airstrike, knowing that it will result in the murder of innocents.

The other thing is that by being seen as more acceptable, it’s also thus engaged in more easily and more often, with less consideration.

14

Especially since a lot of it was bullshit, many many civilian deaths caused by “signature” strikes, with very little thought or analysis about whether they were hitting an actual grouping of Taliban or just like, you know, a wedding. Or expending a hellfire missile to kill the son of a farmer walking home with a bag.

15

It’s not targeting civilians by virtue of the definition of the word target.

In war, you will always have civilian deaths. It is unavoidable. But the civilized world (and not just the West) agrees that things like intentionally targeting civilians are off limits, which is why we’ve codified such rules in the Geneva conventions.

16

😳

typo I know, but made me wonder are hey cannibals, or crushing the person.

17

Alien.

18

If I fire a rocket at a non-combatant civilian intending to kill them and terrorise their peers, and if I shoot at a terrorist, near certain that civilians will die, then I am in both cases targeting civilians, and to think otherwise is sophistry. It’s just that in one case I’ve determined that it’s a necessary or acceptable part of attacking the primary target, and chosen to target them as a secondary consideration.

Hell, if I perform the latter act (killing terrorist with collateral damage) with the intent that other civilians will be frightened by this into no longer supporting the terrorist organisation - that’s barely a hair’s breadth away from terrorism itself.

Sure it’s better than straight up terrorism. But barely.

19

Intent (as oposed to behavious or more exactly the result of actions) is the only thing that matters.
If a serial killer shoots at a person, but misses and insteads shoots dead a bear that was just about to maul that person, we don’t praise them. We put them in jail where they belong, because intent informs us about their fututre actions.

20

But behavior shows us what the intent is?

I dunno, I think this is more an American thing than a West thing. As you say, the evangelical emphasis on faith vs works, an emphasis that for instance Catholicism doesn’t share.

I can exploit my workers, but it’s ok, because I accept Jesus in my heart. I can support a career criminal, whoremonger and rapist that’s the antithesis of Christian ethics, because I know what’s in his heart.

That wouldn’t fly in the same way over in Europe.