Since Hermit made such an unreasonable stink about this article, I
decided to post it in its entirety and let the listmembers read it and judge
for themselves.
http://www.meforum.org/article/175/
Has Israel Used Indiscriminate Force?
by Alexander A. Weinreb and Avi Weinreb
Since the outbreak of the current violence, Israeli military tactics
have been the subject of much criticism. Israel, it is claimed,
engages in the "unnecessary use of lethal force,"1 including
(American-made) warplanes and helicopter gunships, "even
against packed refugee camps."2 Its actions, jointly with those of
the Palestinian Authority (PA), are said to signal a "descent into
uncontrolled savagery."3
This depiction of Israeli military tactics, in particular the
equivalence drawn between Israeli and Palestinian tactics, in turn
provides cover for the embrace of revisionist interpretations of
current Israeli security policy. Thus, insofar as Israel's current goal
is allegedly "to dominate, expel, starve, and humiliate an entire
people,"4 current Israeli policy does one of two things: it
systematically targets noncombatants in an effort to terrorize the
Palestinians into submission; or, in a scarcely less egregious
version, it makes an insufficient effort to avoid the systematic and
indiscriminate targeting of noncombatants. In either case, the
results, it is claimed, are the same: the killing of "huge numbers of
children, women, and elderly."5
Is this true? What does an analysis of mortality data show? It
shows that the allegedly huge numbers of noncombatant casualties
are in fact fictional. Israeli military strikes, it turns out, have been
remarkably discriminate, in marked contrast to those of
Palestinians.
The Case against Israel
Two types of evidence have been used to indict Israel. The first
refers to specific deaths and instances of human rights abuse. This
is the case-study approach to analysis. It draws its strength from
highly charged descriptive or visual anecdotes, which are both
easy grist for journalistic mills and also highly effective public
relations tools. The televised death of 11-year-old Muhammad ad-
Dura, caught with his father in the crossfire of a sudden gun battle
in the early stages of the violence, is a prime example of the
power of this approach. Highly emotive, it was a catalyst for
demonstrations throughout the Arab world. More general visual
stimuli of this sort include footage of Israeli tanks arrayed against
Palestinian stone-throwers, lines of Palestinian cars at Israeli
checkpoints, etc. These purport to give an accurate flavor of life
under occupation. Finally, this category also includes reports by
human rights groups that profess to have identified several cases
in which the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have used excessive
force.6
The second piece of evidence is the total number of deaths in the
conflict. The recitation of simple aggregates - x Palestinians and y
Israelis have died - is now a formulaic part of media coverage of
this conflict. Thus far, roughly three times as many Palestinians
have died as Israelis. This implicitly provides a basis for
extrapolating from the case studies noted above, suggesting that
more Palestinian deaths are directly equivalent to more
Palestinian noncombatant deaths.
Damning Deficiencies
While rhetorically potent, these arguments are not in the least
sufficient to establish that Israel systematically and
indiscriminately targets noncombatants. Making that leap on the
basis of these arguments disregards the most basic inferential
rules in social science.
The key problem with the case-study approach is that it provides
no reliable basis for generalization, which in turn means that it is
unclear how accurately either selected poster children or alleged
instances of human rights abuse summarize the parameters of the
conflict. On what basis can or should one generalize from the
(contested) case of Muhammad ad-Dura? (Especially since some
evidence suggests he was killed by Palestinian fire.) Or from tanks
parked outside a Palestinian town? Or from the alleged human
rights abuses, whose easy investigation (and concentrated
journalistic coverage) is a direct product of Israeli democratic
freedoms? A single taste, to carry the metaphor a little further,
may not represent the overall flavor.
But it does drive the battle over image. In typical Palestinian
accounts, the "Israeli war machine" has perpetrated "all forms of
atrocities" against the Palestinian people, including the
indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas, the shooting of civilians,
the assassination of legitimate political or resistance leaders, and
the mining of routes followed by school children. These are the
tactics allegedly responsible for the supposedly huge numbers of
children, women, and elderly casualties.
Typical Israeli accounts are, of course, very different. Its attacks
on Palestinian Authority (PA) targets, Israel asserts, have been
measured, proportionate, solely in self-defense and have made
every reasonable effort to limit casualties among noncombatants.
In fact, the only way to verify any of these claims is to explore the
distribution of all deaths across age groups and sex (i.e., what
demographers refer to as a disaggregation of mortality). It is a
simple analytic approach that, in this case, allows for the
identification of sectors of the population that are indisputably
noncombatant.
The Mortality Data
We have compiled lists of all Israeli and Palestinian deaths caused
directly by violence in the 16 months between September 29,
2000, and January 31, 2002, from several sources. The variation
in total number killed between the various lists is primarily caused
by different editorial strategies with respect to who should be
included in the list. Associated Press's list, for example, includes
suicide bombers and alleged Palestinian collaborators with Israel
who were killed by Palestinians, while Reuters figures do not.7
With the exception of the Israeli government, however, the only
source that contains anything other than a simple aggregate (that
is, any descriptive data about each casualty) is B'Tselem, the
Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied
Territories.
As its subtitle suggests, B'Tselem is primarily concerned with
violations of rights in the West Bank and Gaza (henceforth
referred to as the territories). Since the beginning of the current
round of violence in September 2000, it has noted deaths of all
Palestinians and Israelis killed both in the territories and inside
the Green Line, that is, within Israel's pre-1967 international
borders. (It also has data on all Palestinian deaths going back to
1993.) The database is updated monthly.
Database information about each of the deceased includes name,
age, place of death/event, and cause of death (e.g., killed by
gunshot, explosion, missile, knife, etc.). Gender is not explicitly
given in the English version of the site but is easily inferred from
the parallel Hebrew site since each entry is descriptive rather than
numeric, and Hebrew differentiates between gender, thus allowing
us to identify gender through linguistic form, cross-checking it
with the apparent gender of the name (Hebrew and Arabic names,
other than nicknames, also differentiate clearly between gender).
B'Tselem's data on Israeli deaths correspond to data made
available by the Israeli foreign ministry, so we assume that they
are fully accurate.8 The Palestinian data may be slightly less so,
but we assume that any inaccuracies are too marginal to affect our
estimates.9This assumption is based on three things. First, the
wide media coverage of events within the Green Line and in the
territories means that it is unlikely that any deaths go unreported,
making it relatively easy for B'Tselem to collect these data.
Second, B'Tselem claims to expend considerable effort in
verifying each of those deaths through the careful cross-checking
of its own agents' fieldwork with relevant documents, official
government sources, and information from other sources, among
them Israeli, Palestinian, and other human rights organizations.10
Finally, B'Tselem's self-referential claims are essentially
trustworthy because B'Tselem cares about its international
reputation. It is a past winner of the Carter-Menil Award for
Human Rights and has received financial support from numerous
foreign governments and international non-governmental
organizations (NGOs). Its reports have frequently been cited by
other leading international human rights organizations, such as
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Derechos.
Similarly, both its publications and data are also referred to in
official Palestinian Authority reports and in reports by Palestinian
NGOs such as the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human
Rights and the Environment (PSPHRE) and the Palestinian
Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG).11 In short, if there
are any errors in the B'Tselem data on Palestinian mortality, they
are more likely to overestimate than underestimate the number of
deaths.
Late Spring 2002, marked by waves of Palestinian suicide attacks
and a subsequent Israeli offensive, saw heightened mortality on
both sides. Although B'Tselem data are not yet available for the
whole of this period, currently available data through the end of
March show almost identical age- and sex-specific patterns as
presented below in relation to the first 16 months. These data are
available from the authors.
The coming months will reveal whether or not these patterns were
maintained throughout the Israeli offensive. If the Jenin
experience is indicative - Human Rights Watch declared that no
massacre or systematic killing of Palestinian civilians by Israeli
forces occurred during heavy house-to-house fighting,
notwithstanding Palestinian claims and heavy international
criticism of Israel - then it can reasonably be assumed that the
pattern is more or less fixed.
Definitions
We use 12 of the 15 categories used by B'Tselem, all of which
refer to deaths of Israeli and Palestinian civilians, soldiers, and
other security or paramilitary forces in the 16-month period
ending January 31, 2002. All three of the 15 B'Tselem categories
that are not used refer to deaths of foreigners, that is, 12
individuals not normally resident in Israel or the PA, four of
whom were killed by Israeli security forces, three by Palestinian
civilians in the territories, and the remaining four by Palestinian
civilians within the Green Line. The data also do not include:
* 47 suicide bombers who died in the 16-month period,
since these people cannot reasonably be considered
victims of the violence;12
* 29 Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel, all
of whom are male;
* 13 Palestinian citizens of Israel, all of whom are male;13
* 22 Palestinians (11 of whom are female) who, it has been
claimed, have died from medical complications after too
long a delay at Israeli checkpoints (though we include
these in some tangential estimations in order to show that
their exclusion does not substantively change any of the
estimates);
* An unspecified number of Israelis killed in the increased
number of road-traffic accidents. The number of fatal road
accidents in Israel increased 14 percent between 1999 and
2001, leading to 61 more deaths.14This increase is
considered to be a direct product of the violence, since
repeated ambushes of Israeli civilian drivers have both
increased the speed at which people drive and led to a
reduced police enforcement of speed restrictions in certain
areas.
Our key differentiation is between Israelis and Palestinians, which
we broadly refer to as nationality. Israeli includes Jews, as well as
Arabs and Druze killed while serving in the Israeli armed forces.
Identifying Noncombatants
As implied above, the key analytic aim is to explore mortality
among groups who, we can reasonably be assured, are
noncombatants. Ideally, we would adopt B'Tselem's own
categories since their lists claim to differentiate between deaths of
civilians and security forces. Unfortunately, B'Tselem's definitions
of each of these two are dangerously misleading.
The key problem is that they largely disregard the nature of the
conflict and the context of given attacks. The sole determinant of
a person's civilian status in the B'Tselem lists is whether they
belong to a uniformed military or paramilitary group that
officially represents either Israel or the PA. However reasonable
this may sound in the abstract (presumably it is intended to
establish unambiguous criteria), it ignores a fundamental
difference between Israeli and Palestinian civilian categories. In
fact, there are thousands of non-uniformed Palestinian combatants
who are not members of the official PA security forces but act in
the name of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Tanzim, and so on. The largest
category in B'Tselem's lists, for example, "Civilian Palestinian
Casualties in the Territories," is therefore an absurd amalgam of
women, children, the elderly, and young men killed, for example,
while activating an explosive device against a passing bus
(Muhammad ˜Imad and Mazin Badawi, killed January 31, 2002,
in an attack for which Hamas subsequently claimed
responsibility).15 Indeed, Palestinian attackers have been listed as
civilians even when they have been killed while wearing Israeli
uniforms (e.g., attacks of October 2 and 26, 2001). Israeli security
forces are, of course, all members of a conventional armed force
and so, by definition, are classed as combatants - even if they
were not killed in combat.
Because B'Tselem makes no distinction between combatant and
noncombatant civilians, there is a fundamental mismatch between
the structure of the B'Tselem data and the structural
characteristics of the conflict. The lists engage in a statistical
deceit of the highest order since they structure the data in a way
that prevents true comparison of Israeli and Palestinian civilian
deaths. This, in turn, instantly inflates the number of Palestinian
civilians killed, directly implicating Israeli policy.
Rather than adopt these specious categories, we therefore
substitute a more inductive approach that first identifies sectors of
the population that are highly unlikely to include combatants, and
then explores mortality in those groups.
PA chairman Yasir Arafat himself, in a speech in Doha, identified
the three subgroups whose deaths are emotive: children, women,
and the elderly. This provides us with our starting point. Women
and the elderly, we assume, can safely be considered
noncombatants during the period under survey, since there were
no reports that members of these groups had been involved in
fighting. (Only on January 29, 2002 - two days before the end of
the period under survey - did the first female suicide bomber
detonate herself.)
Children are more problematic, however, since there is
considerable evidence that children of various ages have been
heavily involved in the violence. It is crucial to review that
evidence.
A standard Israeli position since September 2000 has been that (a)
young Palestinian teens and children actively participate in violent
activities, especially in the throwing of Molotov cocktails and
stones; and (b) Palestinian gunmen have frequently fired at Israeli
positions from among these young demonstrators, inviting Israeli
return fire.16 Journalists, non-partisan international observers, and
human rights monitors have tended to agree with these claims. In
August 2000, before the outbreak of the violence, The New York
Times reported the existence of summer camps in which 27,000
Palestinian children had participated the past summer, learning
guerrilla tactics, how to operate firearms, practicing kidnapping,
etc.17 In October 2000, the United Nation's Children's Fund
(UNICEF) urged the PA to take energetic measures to discourage
those under 18 years of age from participating in any violent
action because such action places them at risk.18 In an early
B'Tselem report, for example, a foreign journalist reports filming
confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli security forces in
El-Bireh in October 2000:
Suddenly a blue commercial vehicle appeared and stopped
around 20 meters away from us, some 30 meters from
young Palestinians who were at the front of the
demonstration. Three Palestinians, 20 to 30-years-old,
were inside. They called to the children, gave orders, and
distributed Molotov cocktails. I asked my photographer to
film it. One of the children noticed, shouted out a warning,
and within 15 seconds we were surrounded. The vehicle
drove ahead 20 meters and stopped. The three men inside
ran to the back and snatched the camera from the
photographer. One of them shouted, "Kill, kill."19
Indeed, wide media coverage of the PA's use of children even
generated some debate in Arabic-language newspapers about the
ethics and religious legality of either allowing or encouraging
children to attack Israelis and prompted subsequent demands that
the PA limit the participation of children and close down the
special training camps.20
In response, Yasir ˜Abd Rabbu, the PA's information minister,
asserted that, as of October 2000, Palestinian political parties and
forces decided to prevent children and youngsters under 16 from
participating and agreed to establish field committees (which will
be present at the locations) to implement the decision.21 Follow-up
fieldwork by B'Tselem, however, drawing both on testimonies of
children participating in demonstrations and direct observation of
those demonstrations, found no evidence to indicate that these
official guidelines were being followed. PA officials at these
locations, the authors asserted, made no serious effort to prevent
children from reaching the site of demonstrations or from
participating in them. And they made no attempt to move children
away so that they would not be injured in Israeli return fire.22 This
situation appears to have continued through 2001,23prompting a
reiterated call in November 2001 by UNICEF's special
representative to the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem for the PA
to expand measures to discourage those under 18 from
participating in any violent action.24
In short, Palestinian children have participated in this round of
violence from its earliest stages. While it is impossible to
generalize about the frequency of their participation (these, too,
are case-studies, and so share the flaws listed above), children as a
group cannot be considered noncombatants. Or at least this is true
for older children. Only younger children, we can reasonably
assume, have not been actors in the violence.
In summary, a conservative definition of groups that we can safely
assume to be noncombatant would include, women, the elderly,
meaning those past fighting age, arbitrarily set at 55 and over, and
all children aged less than 10. Together, these groups account for
69.9 percent of the Palestinian population, and 68.1 percent of the
Israel population.25
Mortality Distributions
Net of these exclusions, the B'Tselem lists include 1,004 deaths
between September 29, 2000, and January 31, 2002. Of these, 755
(75.2 percent) were Palestinian and 249 were Israeli.
Mortality data for both the Palestinian and Israeli populations are
presented in Table 1. Out of the 755 Palestinian deaths, only 19
were females aged 10-54, 10 were elderly (males or female older
than 55), and eight were young children aged less than 10. The
distribution is, therefore, completely dominated by deaths among
Palestinian prime-age and adolescent males. They account for 718
deaths, or 95.1 percent of all Palestinian deaths. Non-combatant
groups of females, elderly, and young children together account
for only 4.9 percent of the total number of deaths, even though
they represent more than two-thirds of the population. These
mortality patterns, therefore, clearly do not support the Palestinian
claim that there have been huge numbers of children, female, and
elderly casualties.
Table 1. Mortality among noncombatant groups as percentage of
total of national mortality, by demographic group and nationality.
More random mortality patterns with respect to sex and age can
be seen among Israelis. Of the 249 Israeli deaths, for example,
there were 67 deaths to females aged 10-54, 33 to the elderly, and
five to young children. Deaths of Israeli males aged 10-54
therefore accounted for only a small majority (57.8 percent) of all
deaths, leaving 105 deaths (42.2 percent) in the noncombatant
categories.
These data also suggest that there is a complete inversion of the
combatant versus non-combatant distribution. This is shown
explicitly in Figure 1, which presents the distribution of deaths
among adult males, females, and the elderly. It shows that while
83.3 percent of all deaths among males aged 10-54 have been
Palestinian, 77.9 and 76.7 percent, respectively, of all female and
elderly deaths in the 16-month period have been Israeli. This is a
highly significant crossover in the distribution.
Figure 1: Distribution of mortality among men, women, and the
elderly, by nationality.
Nor do the data support another frequent argument: that
Palestinian noncombatant deaths inevitably result from Israeli
missile attacks on, or shelling of military targets in, civilian areas.
Of the 37 Palestinian noncombatant deaths, only five (two
women, one older person, and two children) were caused by a
shell, missile, or some other type of explosion. All others were
caused by gunshot.
Conclusion
Palestinian claims, journalistic summaries, Kofi Annan's
comments, and instances of excessive force to the contrary, the
mortality data show no sign of systematic targeting of Palestinian
civilians by Israeli forces. Nor do they show any signs that the
Israeli forces are systematically failing to avoid targeting
Palestinian civilians. On the contrary, the fact that less than 5
percent of Palestinian casualties are either women, elderly, or
young children, in comparison to more than 40 percent of Israeli
casualties, supports the key Israeli claim: that the higher number
of Palestinian deaths reflects the high number of Palestinian
attacks on Israeli targets, not the reverse. This is the reason for the
huge bulge in male mortality from late childhood through middle
age among the Palestinians.
The data also suggest that Israeli and Palestinian military tactics
in this conflict are completely dissimilar. Israel appears to have
systematically targeted Palestinian combatants, while the latter
have been more concerned with targeting any Israeli, combatant
or civilian. If Kofi Annan, the editors of The New York Times,
Time, and others are interested in retailing more than Palestinian
rhetoric, they should acknowledge this point and cease drawing
invalid parallels between Israeli and Palestinian tactics. They also
need to rethink the simplistic assumption that firing upon
combatants in civilian areas is necessarily indiscriminate and
causes high numbers of noncombatant casualties. Even in built-up
areas, it is possible to wage discriminating warfare.
More generally, the differences in Israeli and Palestinian mortality
highlighted in this paper suggest that opinion-makers, leaders, and
commentators in particular, need to extrapolate more warily from
various instances of excessive or indiscriminate use of force and
also cast a more critical eye over single aggregates. Put another
way, responsible commentators must use data responsibly. At a
minimum, this means asking about the legitimacy of given types
of generalization and highlighting heterogeneity in statistical
distributions. In this case, we think, the heterogeneous mortality
patterns signal a fundamental difference between Israeli and
Palestinian military cultures. One side appears to draw a careful
distinction between combatants and others. The other does not.
Alexander A. Weinreb is National Institutes of Child
Health and Human Development (NICHD) Postdoctoral
Fellow at the Population Research Center & NORC,
University of Chicago. Avi Weinreb is financial journalist
at Globes,Israel's business newspaper.
1 Kofi Annan, United Nations Security Council, Mar. 11, 2002,
SG/SM8159, SC/7325.
2 The New York Times, Mar. 12, 2002.
3 Time, Mar. 12, 2002.
4 "Courage to Refuse, Combatant's Letter," at
http://www.seruv.org.il.
5 Yasir Arafat, 2001, speech to the meeting of the ministers of
foreign affairs of the Organization of Islamic Conference, Doha,
Qatar, May 26, 2001, at http://www.palestine-
pmc.com/statments/26_5_2001_arafat_speech.html.
6 B'Tselem press release, "29.7.01: In Broad Daylight: Abuse of
Palestinians by IDF Soldiers on July 23, 2001," at
http://www.btselem.org/English/Press_Releases/2001/010729.asp;
and Excessive Force: Human Rights Violations during IDF
Actions in Area A (Jerusalem: B'Tselem, 2001), at
http://www.btselem.org/Download/Excessive_Force_Eng.doc.
7 Associate Press, personal communication, Mar. 5 2002.
8 Data at the Israeli foreign ministry at http://www.israel-
mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ia50.
9 It is normal for data sets to include some error, but it has to be
significant in scale or biased in its distribution to affect results in
the type of simple bivariate analysis that we conduct here. These
issues are discussed extensively by Richard A. Zeller and Edward
G. Carmines, Measurement in the Social Sciences: The Link
between Theory and Data (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1980).
10 "About B'Tselem," at
http://www.btselem.org/English/About_BTselem/index.asp.
11 See PA reports, at http://www.pna.net, and Palestinian NGO
reports, at
http://www.lawsociety.org/Intifada2000/articles/btselem.htm and
http://www.phrmg.org/monitor2001/feb2001.htm.
12 Of these 47, there was one woman and one bomber aged more
than 40, so their exclusion has no effect on the overall age-and
sex-specific mortality patterns described below.
13 The totals in these last three categories are from "Summary of
Palestinian Fatalities, 29/09/2000 to 02/03/2002," Palestinian
Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG), at
http://www.phrmg.org/#Summary%20of%20Palestinian%20fatalit
ies, as accessed on Mar. 5, 2002.
14 "Road Accidents with Casualties, and Casualties by Severity,"
Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2002, at
http://www.cbs.gov.il/hodaot2002/21_02_17t1.htm.
15 Hamas communiqué, at
http://65.165.234.54/hamas/communiques/comm_text/2002/31jan
02.htm.
16 "A Year of Violence: Overview of the Violence in the
Territories, September 2000-September 2001," Israel Defense
Forces, 2001, at http://www.idf.il/geut/english/main.html.
17The New York Times, Aug. 3, 2000.
18 Statement by Carol Bellamy, UNICEF executive director, to the
Special Session of the Commission on Human Rights, at
http://www.unicef.org/newsline/00prmideast.htm.
19 Illusions of Restraint: Human Rights Violations during the
Events in the Occupied Territories, 29 September-2 December
2000 (Jerusalem: B'Tselem, 2000), at
http://www.btselem.org/Download/Illusions_of_Restraint_Eng.zip
, p. 42.
20 Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, Oct. 27, 2000, at
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP
14700;Al-Hayat,Apr. 16, 2001, at
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP
20601.
21 Illusions of Restraint, p. 19.
22 Ibid.,p. 14.
23 Dougherty, Jon E. and David Kupelian, "Children of the Jihad:
Palestinian Kids Raised for War Taught to Hate, Kill Jews
through ˜Sesame Street'-Type TV Show," WorldNet Daily, Nov. 3,
2000, at
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=17
707.
24 UNICEF press release, Nov. 15, 2001, at
http://www.unicef.org/newsline/01pr87.htm.
25 These proportions are based on data from the Palestinian
Bureau of Statistics, covering population in the territories (i.e.,
combined West Bank and Gaza) in the 1997 Palestinian census,
and from the Israeli Census Bureau, covering Israel's population in
2000.
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