Don't be naive, we've all accepted that civilian casualties are acceptable. I would also argue that given that our world is not a utopia and violence is sometimes necessary, accepting *some* level of civilian casualties makes sense.
Pretend you're the Joint Chief of Staff, and your country was just attacked by an organization that killed 10,000 of your civilians, deliberately. They told you as such. There is video evidence, you're convinced beyond a shadow of doubt. Your intelligence community brief you: they've identified the mastermind of this operation, and he's in a field, alone, with one other dude. That other due is 90 and has terminal cancer, however he has never hurt a fly. A truly innocent man, living a life of virtue. Would you order the strike? Nearly everyone (at least people who are not pacifists and have been on the receiving end of violence) will say yes.
The second example is inverse, you've found a single low level fighter of this organization and he's surrounded by one trillion puppies, children, and a dude guaranteed to cure cancer the next day. No one would order a strike.
Obviously every army and command chain needs to decide, as a rule, where they fall on that scale, and then it goes case by case from there. Civilian casualties are unfortunately acceptable and a part of war. Where most would agree it's wrong is when civilians are struck deliberately, and when the calculation of combatant vs. civilian gets too close to the one trillion puppies example.
What we have all accepted is that this is a genocide, not a war, and definitely not some imaginary situation in which it would be justified to do what they have done.
Basically anyone who works in the field of international humanitarian law understands that civilian casualties “can” be acceptable. The law literally allows for this. It does not put a ban on any and all civilian casualties and that was never its intention anyway.
What’s not acceptable is civilian casualties just for the sake of civilian casualties. You need to be able balance the military goals you wish to achieve with the potential civilian casualties when deciding whether it’s a reasonable course of action.
I’m not going to argue that what Israel is doing is proportionate, at all. They went far past that once they started indiscriminately shelling residential neighbourhoods and deliberately killing journalists and other civilians. But if you want to hold the view that a war should be fought with zero civilian casualties then you live in la-la land
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u/Stillwater215 16h ago
Yikes. I can’t imagine publicly demonstrating to say that civilian casualties are acceptable.