This was an opinion piece written in January 2008 in response to an article on the Palestinian-Israeli war.

Dear Editors,

“Civilians First” presents a poignant and understandable reminder of the justification of armed forces: to defend civilians from aggression. But one has to ask what kind of service is assumed to be required to defend people? From a libertarian perspective, the state and its standing armies are not likely to give a good service, for they are an integral part of the endemic warfare of the modern world.

Clarity begins with first principles, for subtle philosophical divisions concerning the status of citizens and their relationship to the state can produce very distinct and opposing policies and so have repercussions for the justification of violence and its enactment. What is the status of the civilian for whom states allegedly wage war? Does the individual exist as a distinct moral entity or as an indistinct element whose status is governed by a collective? In other words, when you look in the mirror, do you see an irreplaceable individual or a replaceable part of a group? Is there an “I” or is there merely a reflection of an “Us”? A reply may be that “I am both” – I am I, and I am Jewish or Israeli. But were you born that way, or did you learn to associate your self with a group? Arguably, the latter: children are born a-political and a-religious. We learn from our parents, peers, friends, and teachers to what group we are said to belong, and, usually, to what group we thusly owe our identity, our culture, and our life. But as humanist and libertarian thinkers have recognised for centuries, our associations and hence whatever sense of belonging that they form in us are multifarious and overlapping, and so, inevitably, we return to the “I” – the individual.

Compared to collectivism, individualism develops a very different political ethos. Collectivists demand sacrifices – it’s their essence. Alternatively, the individual is assumed to possess rights which no other can take away – the freedom to pursue life, happiness, property. When another does aggress against the individual, he or she has a right to self-defence and to exact compensation from the aggressors, and it is because of this that people form specialised protective agencies: to deal with aggression justly and decisively. These need not be states and can and have worked separately from states (the early Israelites were stateless yet not lawless); states are monopolistic creatures that seek to monopolise protection services, and being monopolies they quickly become far removed from serving their clients as it were. Monopolies form their own agendas and offer a low quality product at a high cost. The protection of the individual (and by extension family) is easily lost once the state usurps “defence,” and other agenda – collectivist in nature – come to the fore, particularly the shift from defence to aggression to secure greater territory to control (and exploit wider tax bases to pay for further aggrandisement).

Monopolies also act to protect their own members – from medical associations to the military it is unsurprising to discover self-seeking behaviour. Would human nature have it any other way, cynics may ask? Probably not, but it helps to explain why the IDF (Israel Defence Force) is unwilling to lose men and to present an extraordinary price of each soldier relative to its enemies (“less work, more pay” motives abound in monopolies).  Indubitably, the relatively high price of Israeli soldiers’ lives puts a high bounty on their heads (an average of 440:1 from the article’s examples), which the editors rightly believe to be absurd.

But look too at the implication of putting such a low value on Palestinian lives: 1/440th of an Israelite. What does that imply of their status? There may be no perception of equality between Israeli soldier and civilian, but this can entail that the civilians are tiring of funding the IDF with money and their blood; more critically, there is also no perception of Israeli-Palestinian equality. Emphatically, when the enemy is valued so low, they are easy to dehumanise – to spurn, reject, ignore, despise, hate, pillage, evict, kill, murder. If they are not human, they are not worth talking to – and so the cycle of violence and the despair generated will continue until either both sides lie prostrate in mutual exhaustion or one side annihilates the other. What does Israel want? Do its politicians wish to cling to the myths, legends, and traditions of this “unique” people struggling to survive against all odds, sometimes having the fights imposed on them, sometimes picking the fights? In which case, the IDF should be unleashed en masse against Hezbollah and Hamas, against all of its enemies in caricature Hobbesian style with no concern of just warfare or of world opinion. But should genocide not be palatable to the peoples of Israel, the apparent alternative is continued war and mutual terrorism.

Unless the nature of the game is thoroughly changed.

This is why libertarians prefer to dismantle conscription and standing armies. Remove the monopoly and a surer service will follow and much of the incentive for war on all sides may disappear. Hamas, say, wants a territorial monopoly; so does the IDF. Morally, you may retort, they are different – one’s “ours”, the others “theirs”. So we retreat to an “us versus them” game in which both of us engage in violence to secure hegemony and we’re back to the “warre of all against all.” So be it. Yet one gets the strong impression from the article that the people of Israel and its neighbours are tiring of war – peace is cheaper, mutually beneficial, reasonable; peace brings peoples together in unexpected and wonderful webs of trust, learning, and progress. Peace begins with rehumanising the enemy, open talks, recognition of mutual interests, and emphatically the dismantling of collective identities and institutional impediments to individual and voluntaristic exchanges and efforts (sanctions, permits, licences, controls).

Meanwhile, the IDF should be protecting civilians, but all creeds, races, and political persuasions equally – but one gets the impression that it is not quite up to that job.

Dr Alexander Moseley
United Kingdom