What they mean when they call for ‘restraint’
The Promising Land #1: Israel’s critics want it to stop trying to defend its citizens from terrorists.
The Promising Land is a recurring column about Israel, the opportunities and threats it faces, and its place in a changing Middle East.
There is a rhetorical pose being tried out by Israel’s enemies, those who oppose its operation in Gaza, and others who don’t fall into either of these categories but are incapable of resisting the current talking point.
It goes something like this: Of course Israel has a right to defend itself by targeting Hamas, but it must show more restraint, particularly around civilian populations and infrastructure. This sounds plausible. It sounds reasonable. It is neither. By ‘restraint’, these people do not mean restraint as a soldier or military strategist would understand it: deploying sufficient force to achieve mission goals in a manner that avoids unnecessary loss of life and property and is in keeping with rules of engagement and national and international law. From the reporting so far on the Gaza operation, Israel seems to be meeting this definition of restraint.
Restraint is not something the world needs to lecture the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) on. Restraint is hardwired into the organisation. One of the forerunners to the IDF was the Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary group founded in 1920 to protect the Jews of the British Mandate of Palestine/Land of Israel from attacks by Arabs. The Haganah came to practise a policy of havlagah (‘restraint’) under which they limited themselves to defending Jewish communities against Arab onslaughts and swore off reprisals and pre-emptive operations. The Haganah’s commitment to havlagah was such that it eventually led to a split, with opponents of restraint forming the more militant Irgun, led by Menachem Begin.
Although Israel’s strategic priorities and the threats it faces have changed since the pre-state days, the ethos of havlagah lives on in Ruach Tzahal, or ‘Spirit of the IDF’, the code of ethics which binds all members of Israel’s armed forces. The code contains a concept, tohar haneshek, or ‘purity of arms’, which draws on Jewish religious and moral teachings and places the exercise of force within an ethical framework that emphasises the value and dignity of human life. In Ruach Tzahal, Israel’s purity of arms doctrine reads:
The IDF serviceman will use force of arms only for the purpose of subduing the enemy to the necessary extent and will limit his use of force so as to prevent unnecessary harm to human life and limb, dignity and property.
The IDF servicemen's purity of arms is their self-control in use of armed force. They will use their arms only for the purpose of achieving their mission, without inflicting unnecessary injury to human life or limb; dignity or property, of both soldiers and civilians, with special consideration for the defenseless, whether in wartime, or during routine security operations, or in the absence of combat, or times of peace.
The IDF does not always live up to these values. No army in the world lives up to its values all the time. But in striving for purity of arms, the IDF places restraint at the heart of its approach to warfare.
The definition its critics and others are using is very different. By ‘restraint’, they mean deploying no force that results in civilian deaths or property destruction. This is a standard to which no nation has ever been held in wartime and which no nation could realistically meet. It is a standard pressed in the name of international law, which does not require it, and is better understood as a facet of international lawishness, a fuzzy and highly politicised rendering in which international law conforms to the preferred outcomes and ideological biases of the person or organisation speaking.
‘Restraint’ is being urged in particular after Israel’s strikes on Jabalia refugee camp. There is an even bigger market for restraint when refugee camps are concerned. Most people know of Gaza only as a far-off strip of land where terrible things happen. To these people, the concept of a refugee camp being used as a terrorist base is unfathomable. Lord preserve them in their innocence.
Israel’s operations against Jabalia do not appear to be unrestrained. They were a limited and highly precise series of strikes targeted at killing Hamas commanders Ibrahim Biari, one of the masterminds of October 7, and Muhammad A'sar, head of the terror group’s anti-tank missile unit. After the first operation, which took out Biari, Hamas claimed the death toll was 400, a figure dutifully reported by the international media. The figure has since been revised down to 50, though that is still Hamas’s number and does not specify whether the 50 were terrorists or civilians.
Any civilian loss of life is to be regretted, but the blame lies with Hamas. It is the aggressor party in this conflict and it is also the party which is using civilians as human shields. Hamas is embedded throughout civilian areas in Gaza for two reasons: self-protection and optics. Basing its terrorist command and control centres within or near hospitals, schools, mosques and refugee camps is intended to a) deter Israeli strikes on its personnel, hardware and infrastructure and b) ensure that when Israel does strike, it causes maximum casualties among the civilian Palestinian population.
If there is anything you must know about Hamas, it is that they’re not some two-bit street gang. This is a highly sophisticated organisation whose leaders have made their life’s work the study of Western politics, news media, and public attitudes. They know us better than we know ourselves. They know that everything they do to maximise Palestinian casualties will be blamed on Israel, for that’s how the broad sweep of Western politicians, policymakers, journalists and academics think.
Hamas’s strategy is not just to kill Israeli civilians but to make it impossible for Israel to defend those civilians without also causing the deaths of Palestinian civilians. Those images of dust-caked Gazan children wailing amid the rubble? They may make your heart bleed but they make Hamas’s hearts sing. Every dead Palestinian weakens Western support for Israel, making it harder for Israel to defeat Hamas, which in turn will make it easier for Hamas to repeat its October 7 massacre, what it proudly refers to as Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to what Hamas itself says. Spokesman Ghazi Hamad told Lebanon’s LBC TV on October 24:
Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country, because it constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation, and must be finished. We are not ashamed to say this, with full force.
[…]
We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.
[…]
The existence of Israel is illogical. The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears. It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000 — everything we do is justified.
This is why Israel fights and why it must fight. Not content with carrying out the worst single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, Palestinian terrorists are threatening to do it all over again. There is no third option here. Either Israel breaks Hamas, aware that doing so will bring civilian casualties, or it accepts that its own citizens will forever live under the threat of another October 7. Many of those urging ‘restraint’ understand this. They know that, under their definition of restraint, there is almost nothing Israel could do to defend itself or dismantle the Hamas organisation. The proponents of ‘restraint’ want Israel weakened, humbled, and compliant — unable to fight and unable to win. ‘Restraint’ is ‘ceasefire’ by other means.
Thank you for this measured assessment of the current situation in Gaza. An oasis of calm, straight forward reporting in a desert of emotive narratives by MSM.
About 587 million people of more or less the same ethnicity as Israel's victims populate the Middle East and North Africa. Moreover, they have spectacular demographics. There are not even 10 million Israelis. Given that NATO is incapable of providing logistics to an extent needed to win even a small war, as evidenced by the past 18+ months in Ukraine, it would be wise of Israel to seek a peaceful solution rather than risk embroiling itself in a conflict without supply lines or fuel against a cultural sphere that has virtually unlimited human and energy resources.