Fisk on Democracy Now

Less than two days after the massacre at Qana, as Israel prepares to expand their military offensive into Lebanon, now calling fifteen-thousand additional reserves into active duty, we would do well to consider the moral calculations of war. In an interview by Amy Goodman over at Democracy Now, Robert Fisk considers one of the many facets of the question of proportionality. As Fisk notes, though the Israeli government has apologized for the civilian casualties, they persist in defending the actual attack, justifying the targeting of the houses on the basis of their being within a three-hundred meter range of a purported site of Hizbollah rocket launches, and a possible storage area for Hizbollah munitions. They've gone so far as to suggest that the collapse of the house was caused by munitions inside, rather than, say, the 2,000-pound guided bombs dropped from above. And, of course, they had told civilians to leave the area beforehand. For every act, a rationale. This, as the ratio of civilian casualties in Lebanon to civilian casualties in Israel climbs to around 16 to 1.