Smoke rises after an airstrike by Israeli forces in the south of Gaza City on July 9, 2014. (EPA/Mohammed Saber)
How democratic governments balance risk in urban war situations has serious implications. Israel’s wars in Gaza are a case in point. As the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza Conflict indicated, “the protection of Israeli soldiers significantly influenced the conduct of the Israel Defense Forces in these operations, at times overriding any concern for minimizing civilian casualties … [and] disregarded basic principles on the conduct of hostilities.”
The Gaza Strip has been under Israel’s control since 1967. In 2001, local militias began firing high trajectory weapons at Israeli civilian settlements near the Israel-Gaza border. This firing has intensified since 2005, when Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Palestinian Authority-ruled Gaza Strip but maintained indirect control by overseeing its border crossings and obstructing the construction of both its seaport and airport. Hostilities renewed in 2007 when the Islamist movement Hamas took over the Gaza Strip after factional fighting with Fatah militias. A separate Hamas-governed mini-state was then created. To end what it perceived as Israel’s siege of Gaza, Hamas intensified its shelling of Israel’s civilian population and increased the distance of its rockets until about a million Israelis were within range. Attempting to suppress the firing of rockets, Israel has launched three broad scale operations since 2008.
As echoed by the U.N. report, an examination of its mode of fighting in these operations shows that Israel has followed the same pattern of many Western armies engaged in urban warfare in which a growing social sensitivity to casualties domestically encourages the transfer of risk from soldiers to enemy civilians. As Martin Shaw explained, this risk transfer typifies the new Western way of war in the post-Vietnam era. Similarly, to safeguard the lives of its soldiers, the Israeli military used excessive lethality with relatively limited discrimination between combatants and noncombatants. Exercising greater caution to avoid civilian casualties may increase the soldiers’ risk.
Israel denies this argument and insists that it respects the principle of proportionality, namely, limiting the injury suffered by the civilian population relative to the military advantage anticipated from the mission. Nevertheless, to support this argument about the shifting of risk, I compare Operation Cast Lead (2008-9) and Protective Edge (2014). In both operations Israel undertook a ground incursion into the urban areas of the Gaza Strip. (Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, but it was carried out without a ground invasion so is excluded from this study).
To reduce controversy over the facts, I draw only on the data that the Israeli military provided about the number of Gazan civilians killed in these operations, although these numbers are significantly lower than those provided by the U.N. commissions of inquiry that investigated Cast Lead and Protective Edge operations. Methodologically speaking, Israel’s data best reflect its intentions concerning the permissible level of risk to which it might expose Gazan civilians. For example, these numbers represent Israel’s perceptions about who is a civilian and therefore protected against a direct and intentional attack. As for Israeli casualties, I refer only to those directly killed in ground operations to isolate the impact of shifting risk.
In Operation Cast Lead, overwhelming power, including airstrikes and, later, a massive ground thrust, reduced the soldiers’ exposure to risk, shifting it to the Gazan noncombatants. A kind of rolling fire-induced smokescreen preceded the advancing ground units to protect them. Consequently, the fatality ratio of Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians stood at approximately 1:33 (9 Israeli soldiers to 295 Palestinians), as opposed to lower ratios in previous rounds of hostilities. The fatality ratio is an effective tool to test the tradeoff between force-produced fatalities and self-casualties and monitor its variations. The ratio indicates the extent to which soldiers are exposed to risk in their activities among the enemy civilian population. Therefore, an increased ratio may indicate a decline in the military’s willingness to sacrifice its soldiers by shifting the risk to enemy civilians.
In Operation Protective Edge, this ratio declined to 1:17 (44 Israeli soldiers to 761 Gazan civilians). Apparently, Israel reduced the level of risk transferred from soldiers to civilians, but this ratio does not tell the whole story. In Cast Lead, the government set the minimalist goal of achieving a long-term ceasefire by reinforcing Israel’s deterrence. A flexible plan evolved from this goal that allowed a limited ground offensive and minimal direct and close confrontations with Hamas forces, without going deeper into the urban areas and incurring the casualties that this might involve. In sharp contrast, during Protective Edge, after 10 days of aerial assaults during which Hamas made several attempts to enter Israeli territory through tunnels, the government set a new goal: to destroy the tunnels by launching a ground thrust. As these tunnels were deeply embedded in densely populated areas ruled by Hamas forces, Israeli troops were engaged in direct frontal assaults on Hamas forces, unavoidably increasing the risk to Israeli soldiers and claiming the lives of more Israeli soldiers than in Cast Lead. Because the tunnels were portrayed as a genuine security threat to the Israeli villages and towns in proximity to the Israel-Gaza border and the tunnel-destroying operation was perceived as successful, Israeli society tolerated the death of 44 soldiers killed directly in the ground operation on Gazan soil. As has been illustrated in the the United States as well, casualty tolerance increases with public expectations that the military operation will be a success.
Indeed, the fatality ratio between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian combatants declined from 1:79 in Cast Lead (9 Israeli soldiers to 709 Palestinian combatants) to 1:21 in Protective Edge (44 to 936). However, the number of Israeli fatalities could have been higher had Israel not increased the risk of Gazan civilians. Evidently, for every Gazan combatant killed in Cast Lead, Israeli troops killed 0.4 Gazan civilians (295 civilians to 709 combatants), while this ratio doubled in Protective Edge to 0.8 Gazan civilians for every Gazan combatant (761 to 936).
These numbers reflect the descriptions provided by Israeli civil rights organization and the U.N. about Israel’s fire policies in Protective Edge. For example, the troops used explosive weapons with wide-area effects in densely populated areas to better protect the soldiers. In other cases, the military created a “sterile combat zone” by warning civilians to leave their neighborhoods. As one soldier testified to the organization Breaking the Silence, the military eased the rules of engagement to protect the soldiers by saying that when in these zones anyone “you see in the neighborhoods you’re in, anything within a reasonable distance, say between zero and 200 meters – is dead on the spot… [Because] he isn’t supposed to be there.” In other cases, artillery was fired at very close range to civilians to support rescue operations for soldiers.
Judged by its own numbers, the Israeli military increasingly shifted the level of risk from its own soldiers to Gazan civilians. Even if the extent of this shift could be debated when it comes to Cast Lead, the figures clearly show that this level increased from Cast Lead to Protective Edge. Even if Israel was willing to sacrifice more soldiers to destroy the perceived threat of Hamas tunnels, it still reduced the risk to which its soldiers were exposed by transferring part of that risk to Gazan civilians.
This shift in risk will have long-term implications. Israel is constrained by conflicting requirements: casualty sensitivity to keep Israeli soldier deaths low from the domestic front and pressure to respect the immunity of noncombatants from the international community. Ongoing U.N. investigations and the prospect of war crimes charges in the International Court of Justice increase these pressures. Israel is thus left with fewer military options to deal with Gaza. Acknowledging its own restrictions, the military was the first to press politicians to change policies and ease the strict closure of Gaza, thereby reducing the potential for a new round of hostilities. Casualty sensitivity breeds aggressiveness but may also breed restraint.
Yagil Levy is a professor of public policy and political science at the Open University of Israel. His most recent book is “Israel’s Death Hierarchy: Casualty Aversion in a Militarized Democracy” (New York University Press, 2012).
