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>> 147 6 Casualty Sensitivity Breeds High Lethality Right after Operation Cast Lead, in which Israel attacked the Hamas ministate in Gaza in December 2008-January 2009, Israel was globally criticized for excessive use of lethal force, leading to the deaths of about 1,400 Palestinians , about half of them noncombatants, while Israel sacrificed only a few soldiers (B’Tselem 2009). When the offensive ended, it became clear that the high lethality was intended to reduce IDF casualties, on the assumption that the Israeli public would be reluctant to accept heavy losses (Harel 2009d). It follows that Israel mirrors a global phenomenon that can be termed the force-casualty tradeoff (hereinafter FCT): the increasingly insistent domestic demand that casualties be limited, leading democracies to use excessive force that reduces the risk to which their own soldiers are exposed. While the use of excessive force often increases the opponent’s noncombatant fatalities, democracies tend to favor their soldiers’ lives over those of enemy civilians. This, however, may contradict other democratic imperatives that demand respect for noncombatant immunity; hence the need to legitimize the deviation from the proscribed liberal norm. 148 > 149 civilian population. No other Western army is in this situation; for example , the United States has twice fought wars in Iraq, but the goals of the two wars were completely different. Furthermore, it is safe to assume that Israel has consistently improved the accuracy of its weapons, so the rise in enemy casualties cannot be traced to changes in weapons systems. Changes in other variables, however, are reflected in the interplay between the two sets of legitimacies, as explained later. Second, data on Israeli soldiers and civilians were collected from B’Tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories ) and from the internet sites of the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Defense. “Casualties” refers to Israeli soldiers, and “fatalities” refers to enemy noncombatants. B’Tselem and other human rights organizations and the IDF disagreed on the numbers of noncombatant fatalities in Operation Cast Lead. I have chosen here to use B’Tselem’s number, which lies between the IDF’s figures and those published by Palestinian organizations (see also United Nations 2009, 106–109), especially as B’Tselem is less biased than the IDF or the Palestinian bodies. Yet, even reliance on the IDF’s relatively lower numbers (about 450 noncombatants) would temper but not change the overall direction presented here.1 In this chapter, I first offer the theoretical framework of FCT, followed by a detailed analysis of Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip at four major junctions between 1987 and 2009.2 6.1 The Essence of the Force-Casualty Tradeoff Sensitivity to military losses has increased in democratic societies since the 1970s and today plays a key role in limiting the state’s freedom to deploy its armed forces in military missions. This pattern has gradually diffused into Israeli society. Inasmuch as casualty shyness reflects the underlying imbalance between rights, Western democracies, as part of their balancing effort, have redistributed the military burden (balancing strategy #4), aiming to balance the propensity to use military force to protect what is deemed the national interest vis-à-vis the domestic limitations imposed by the low level of legitimacy to sacrifice. Sacrifice reduction has been put into practice by several measures, central to which is the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). RMA responded to the need for waging swift campaigns with minimal casualties by reducing the risk to soldiers, largely by expanding the use of advanced technology, mainly precision weapons (Erdmann 2002, 49–54; 150 > 151 requires more from their armed forces, and on the other it requires less. This is a conundrum that is difficult to resolve. At the very least, justifying deviation from the proscribed liberal norm is crucial. The FCT reflects the interplay between the social legitimacy to sacrifice and the political legitimacy to use force. Legitimacy is not a circumstantial view but reflects deeper values. It encompasses normative, legal, and cultural values that determine society’s acceptance of regimes and institutions, as Weber (1947) suggested long ago. Political legitimacy is indicated by the support or opposition shown by the public and the elite regarding the necessity of deploying the armed forces, the choice of targets, and the costs of the action. The level of this legitimacy can be determined by monitoring public opinion and political debates. Public and elite opinion and rhetoric can be more deeply analyzed as a multilayered...

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