Israel’s strategy in Lebanon, the extensive use of aerial bombing, has proven both ineffective and immoral when compared to the alternatives. It inevitably requires the endangerment of civilians and the disproportionate and unwieldly use of force against innocent people. Peter Hitchens writes:

I hate to agree with the liberals and the creepy foes of Israel who say that this war is ‘disproportionate’, but the fact that these people are what they are, doesn’t mean they are wrong. I was against the bombing of Belgrade, and the bombing of Baghdad (unlike Jack Straw, who managed to stay in the government drawing a cabinet salary while these things were going on, and whose objections to Israeli bombing are therefore worthless whining).

I was against them because I have in recent years found out what aerial bombing actually does. I grew up in a Britain which cheerfully accepted that it was right to bomb Germany to rubble, because they had started it. I entirely agreed with this view for many years. Then I began to read the full details of what happened when our bombs fell. I was particularly struck by the repeated accounts of the mad women, made insane by the loss of their homes and families, who roamed about Germany carrying their dead babies in suitcases; also by the reports of adult human figures, baked in airless cellars for so long during the Dresden firestorm that they were shrunk to the size of children; and of the great clouds of bluebottles gathered over the ruins of Hamburg after an RAF raid, so devastating that there was nobody to clear the wreckage or bury the huge numbers of civilian dead beneath the rubble. We may not have known then. We certainly know now. This is not a form of warfare that a Christian country can use. By the way this does not even slightly reduce my admiration for the courage of the bomber crews, who were not responsible for the policy of area bombing, or aware of its true effects, and who faced (as most modern bomber pilots don’t) serious opposition.

Our ancestors, my grandfather’s generation, who grew up before 1914, would have regarded this sort of thing as barbaric and unthinkable. Genuine, terrible shock ran through the country when German warships bombarded Scarborough and Hartlepool, and when German airships and planes dropped bombs in British civilians. Quite right too. We should, in 1918, have banned aerial bombing of civilian areas by treaty and declared it a war crime. Instead, we began to do it ourselves notably in Iraq, because it was cheaper and easier than sending soldiers.

So if Israel wishes to go after targets in Lebanon, it must use soldiers to do so – something it is increasingly doing but which I don’t think Mr Benn will support. Yes, this will lead to painful casualties among those soldiers, but – if you must have war – it is better that soldiers die than that women or children do. I might add that such operations will also be far more effective and accurate than the lazy and (these days) rather cowardly method of dropping high-explosive from the sky, while sitting in a near-invulnerable aeroplane.

Hitchens’ humanity stands in stark contrast to the syllogistic reasoning of the neoconservatives and neoimperialists in both parties who are so cavalier and indifferent to civlian suffering in wars that are anything but wars where national existence is genuinely threatened. The use of this tactic is simply not the way a Christian society behaves. And this is not the type of behavior that a Christian society should countenance in its allies–Christian, Jewish, or otherwise.

Lest I be accused by some ghoul of anti-semitism, I wrote something very similar regarding the Western Allies’ strategic bombing of Germany during World War II: “There is no need to adopt a consequentialist morality that says for any good goal, any means may be pursued. The distinction between civilians and combatants is an essential Western concept. It’s the basis for our condemnation of terrorism. It’s regrettable that the strategic bombing of WWII did much to erase that distinction in our own behavior.”

In short, in the course of its operations against the worthless Hezbollah organization, Israel must accept risk to its combatants to protect the lives of Lebanese noncombatants. These people are innocent. It does not matter tha they’re Muslims, that they don’t like Israel, or that they have voted for Hezbollah political candidates. So long as they are bona fide noncombatants, their lives must be spared and their suffering alleviated. Israel chose to follow the popular, but entirely cynical and unmanly use of aerial bombardment as the US did in Kosovo. In both cases, the terrible results for civilians were entirely forseeable and indefensible.