The moral economy of violence: Israel's first Lebanon War, 1982

Abstract

The article uses Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 as a case study in the historical and cultural construction of the legitimacy of armed force. The discussion develops the concept of a ‘moral economy of violence’ which suggests that the legitimacy that state leaders and their publics take for granted in the use of military force is dependent on a variety of historically and culturally contingent beliefs and assumptions. In the case of the first Lebanon War, the key components of the Israeli moral economy of violence included faith in the technologically superior means by which the Israeli army conducted itself, a belief in the efficiency of military combat, and a widely held notion of Lebanon as an Oriental version of the lawless Wild West.

Keywords:

• Israel
• Palestine
• terrorism
• morality
• Lebanon War

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for the feedback and to Associate Professor Joan Wardrop from the School of Social Sciences at Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia for her many suggestions.

Notes

1. The public majority approval in the United States for the invasion of Iraq and the more readily condemned Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal illustrates this point. A CBS news poll showed that 77% of the US public believed that the treatment of Iraqi prisoners was ‘unjustified’ (Anon 2004). While public approval ratings for the war in Iraq have begun to decline below the 50% since around mid-2005, in the first year of the war in 2003, 62% of people believed that the US invasion contributed to US security (Milbank and Deane 2005).

2. For the over 100,000 estimated Iraqi military fatalities, the coalition forces experienced 150 military casualties (Childers 1992).

3. Ben Gad served as an Israeli consul general to the American Mid-West until 1992. He is an American trained political scientist who specialises in Middle Eastern affairs and has lectured in Israel, as well as serving as deputy mayor in Netanya.

4. More recently, we can read the infamous interview with the historian Benny Morris in which he stated that Islam is fundamentally corrupt because ‘it's a world whose values are different. A world in which human life doesn't have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien… Revenge is also important here. Revenge plays a central part in the Arab tribal culture. Therefore, the people we are fighting and the society that sends them have no moral inhibitions’ (Morris and Shavit 2004).