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I read Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars in a Philosophy course when I was at Tufts University in the late 70’s and have often picked it off my bookshelf since. His moral clarity and reasoning is sound, clear, and easy to follow.

So I was pleased to find an article in the New Jersey Jewish News about a speech he recently gave regarding Israel’s execution of the Second Lebanon War. Here are some excerpts which I think sum up the argument. Of course, I recommend you not only read the original article: Scholar weighs moral dilemmas in Lebanon war, but get his book as well.

At the end of the first week of the war, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan “made a curious and revealing statement to the UN’s Security Council,” Walzer told the gathering of more than 130 people. “He said that Israel had a right to defend itself, so it was fighting a just war, but that Israel’s response was disproportionate and excessive, so it wasn’t fighting justly.”

“In our judgments of justice in warfare, responsibility comes before proportionality,” he said. “The city street location was deliberately chosen by Hizbullah to make any response to their attacks morally difficult and to make sure that the response would be condemned around the world. These civilians were not literally human shields, but they were being used in a similar way. The first responsibility for their deaths falls on the heads of the Hizbullah militants who were using them.”

Even with such care, however, the number of likely civilian deaths will always be disproportionate to the military value of destroying rocket launchers, Walzer said.

In that view, arguing from the perspective of proportionality, “in the Lebanon case, Israel would not respond at all,” he said. But that would have put Israel in an impossible position — under attack, but morally unable to respond.

“The responsibility for civilian deaths falls only on Hizbullah,” Walzer said. “It’s a central tenet of a just war that the self-defense of a country cannot be made morally impossible.

I’ve editied out some of the reasoning, but even so, how much clearer can you get?

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