By Keith Pavlischek
When, in the mid-1960s Methodist theologian and Princeton Professor Paul Ramsey took up the question “How shall counter-insurgency war be conducted justly,” he was concerned with asking how a counter-insurgent military force could abide by the principle of discrimination (or distinction) which is not shared by an insurgent force. Ramsey was particularly concerned with asking whether a counter-insurgency was even possible when insurgents used the civilian population as a hostage shield.
The basic problem was that insurgents, by deliberately integrating themselves with the civilian population (“as fish in the sea,” as Mao Tse Tung put it) would force counter-insurgent forces to inflict high levels of civilian casualties, even though such casualties were unintended. And then, to boot, the counter-insurgents would employ those civilian casualties as a propaganda tool. If this problem sounds similar, at least with regard to the relevant moral and ethical issues at stake, to the conflict between the Israelis and Hamas in Gaza, (and other contemporary counter-terrorist issues) that’s because it is.
Read more here.
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