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Israeli, US intellectuals chart new rules of war for insurgencies
Last summer, at the height of the Second Lebanon War, two intellectuals specializing in security affairs met for a conversation. For the Israeli of the pair, the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya's Boaz Ganor, it was an opportunity to vent his frustration. "We talked about the frustration we had over how the world was relating to the war, mainly the claim that Israel wasn't responding with 'proportionality,'" Ganor told The Jerusalem Post this week. "I was saying that, in fact, the whole concept of asymmetrical warfare was reversed," he continued. "In Lebanon you had an organization with very great military power, thousands of Katyusha missiles, anti-tank and anti-aircraft capabilities, the direct assistance of at least two states, and able to fight without any norms, and using Israel's limitations in harming civilians as a multiplier of their capabilities." How did the West misunderstand what Hizbullah represented in terms of the rules of war? For Ganor, the problem is that the rules of war - whether the Hague Convention of 1907 that regulates the conduct of battle or the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 that protects civilians caught in a war situation - were not crafted to deal with present-day insurgents who endanger civilians as a pillar of their strategy. Posted by: gromgoru 2007-04-27 |
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