Professor Mike GROSS is the Chair Director of Politicised and Social Issues Our Collective Life in Haifa in Israel.
And I think many of you perhaps have come across back in 2006 his work on bioethics and our
conference being a sort of purpose that makes people sit up and take notice of things.
And then subsequently, I know others here because he would have mentioned the moral dilemmas of modern war,
which are not just the time to issue of torture, of assassination, what you might call high value targets there.
And that's what's been incredibly influential.
Study is also written on the ethics of activism and more passive, if you like, less violent fold of of insurgent activity, you might say.
But his most recent conflict, I think his most recent is the ethics insurgency, which we obviously a bit more about you if you don't know on his work.
I think it's really been really helpful for us to have a framework,
an ethical framework for understanding the differential or indeed the similarity between the ethics of global conflict,
which are normally framed around a state and instead looking at non-state actors.
If you work, if you're not familiar with the sort of nice place to go, this is what's going on here.
Lost time. Thank you so much for coming all this way and come and speak to us for saying how we can say okay, thank you.
It's a great pleasure to be here. I'm going to talk today a little bit.
Let me let me let's not sorry. Let me get the. Yep.
Okay. I'm going to hear you go. Yeah. Well, we've got a coming events as well.
Yeah, you got it. Okay. I'm going to look at the next project we've been working on in the book, Ethics and the Ethics of Insurgency.
What I wound up learning one of the things I learned from that book was it was a wide array of tactics that unarmed groups,
that armed groups, that guerrilla groups, insurgent groups employ that range from what originally I called kinetic tactics were hard tactics,
assassination, IEDs, prisoners, prisoner taking and so forth.
But in addition to those who were a number of what later became what we call soft tactics,
and these were things like cyber cyber warfare, public diplomacy, economic warfare.
So it was a the book when I originally wrote it, split halfway between hard tactics of war and soft tactics of war.
And when Robb contacted me, he asked me to speak a little bit more about some of the issues that we learned about the soft tactics of war,
some of the moral, legal and logistical challenges.
And what you see here below this is kind of become our mantra taken from one of the US Army counterinsurgency workbooks.
Some of the best weapons for insurgents do not shoot in. Some of the best weapons for counter insurgents do not shoot.
So there's a whole array of things out there that are non-kinetic.
Are we use the term unarmed conflict, which was appropriate?
I think because they're not covered by the law of armed conflict.
And there is no law, we know, no singular body of law for the law of an armed conflict.
These are in a way outside of an armed conflict. Outside of armed conflict.
And I want to talk about two specific aspects of soft war or on armed conflict,
and that is the effects it has on the principle of proportionality and the effects that it has on the principal distinction.
Because what we find is that proportionality changes.
We're going to see how it moves from a kind of an in below concept of proportionality,
which goes very offers very wide latitude to belligerents, to a much narrower concept of proportionality that leaves less leeway.
And also how discrimination is changed because in soft war, as I'll show you in a moment,
some of the major targets are, in fact, civilians and non-combatants.
So when I presented here, I've done another another kind of distinction here between the primary targets of soft war,
and I divided them between software tactics,
where the enemy is the target and soft war tactics, where compatriots, in other words,
those who are fighting, put themselves at risk or put themselves in the firing line.
So what you see in red are the two specific subjects I'm going to talk about.
But if we think about cyber warfare, economic warfare, which are sanctions, boycotts,
blockade, sieges, etc., we think about public diplomacy, propaganda or media warfare.
Those are generally directed towards the enemy.
The enemy may be enemy belligerents, they may be an enemy civilians.
Whereas if we think about non-violent resistance,
which is a very potent form and I'll talk about that a little bit later, very potent form of non-kinetic warfare.
We talk about the use of human shields and we talk about hunger striking, for example.
These are very powerful, very effective tactics that non-state actors often use that are directed or used themselves.
They put themselves at risk, so put themselves in the firing line in order to achieve some tactical or strategic benefit.
Now, one of the things I want to clarify before I go on is when I was asked to speak about the subject,
I was I was told that your the group is also studying soft power.
We're interested in some of the soft power issues. So I want to just take a quick look here and show you how soft war is distinct from soft power.
And soft war is also distinct from what Michael Walzer and others call use of them, the use of force short of war.
Most of these tactics you have all of these tactics as well for our non-kinetic and as non-kinetic tactics,
they're going to be distinct from use them. You saw them are kinetic and non-kinetic tactics short of war.
But you saw them also includes includes no fly zones.
It includes targeted killings which don't fall under this rubric here.
And soft power, as it is traditionally used, refers to persuasive acts rather than coercive acts.
And the emphasis is usually on public diplomacy and public works.
These are acts today. Usually a state actor takes in order to induce a local population, enemy population, say,
in Iraq or in Afghanistan, to come over to the other side or to increase support for local.
Government at the expense of, say, the Taliban or other insurgents.
So it's a persuasive kind of operation, whereas most of these tactics are coercive.
They're able to force an enemy to do something, to comply, to withdraw,
to enact certain policy and whatever the other aims of armed conflict are in a very coercive sense by threatening or by actually causing harm.
And they often, often function as an adjunct to armed force.
So you can have a war which includes what we call hard tactics, hard kinetic tactics, and also an array of various software tactics.
So what I want to do is look at these two oh and look at cyber warfare,
not in technical detail, but in some of the more legal and legal aspects of implementation.
But speak to the question of the theoretical question of proportionality and distinction,
and also look at non-violent resistance and also raise some of these same issues and show how
these are also a very important component of software in a very effective component of software.
Let me jump to cyber warfare in general, what we know about cyber warfare today,
and we don't know everything about cyber warfare because much of it is kept secret.
But from what we do know, no one has been harmed in or has been killed harmed by being physically harmed.
There had been stolen. Systems have been corrupted, personal data has been compromised.
But it's not the kind of tactics that has caused death or physical injury or even extreme psychological injury.
We really haven't seen it. It may. And of course, there's a great deal of worry on the part of cyber warfare researchers and practitioners
and defence officials that it may lead to to physical harm and loss of life.
But so far it hasn't. So the question then is, is how do states respond to cyber attacks?
How should states respond to counter cyber attacks? And the paradigm that is developing is something called countermeasures.
I'm going to give you two examples that speak to countermeasures and then try to provide a little bit more detail.
This is taken from Tallinn Manual 1.0.
And in the middle of the column manual, there's a section on cyber war and countermeasures within this example of State V,
who launches a cyber attack against the electrical generating facility at a dam in state aid
to coerce state aid into increasing the flow of water into a river running between states.
So here is a coercive use of cyber warfare to force one state to do something else for the benefit of another state.
So the launches of How Can They Do This in response to the framers of the Tallinn Manual evoke invoke countermeasures,
they may lawfully respond with proportionate countermeasures, such as cyber operations against State B's irrigation control system.
Now, what's odd about this statement or intriguing about the statement is, first of all, the use of the word proportionate.
It's not proportionality as we traditionally on proportionate understand proportionality in armed conflict.
It's not the kind of proportionality where you weigh civilian casualties against some anticipated military advantage that we all know,
or at least it's my opinion, is very difficult to do. You're weighing incommensurable items, civilian lives against military advantage here.
The use of countermeasure and I'll explain this a little bit more clearly is what we call equivalency.
It's [INAUDIBLE] for tat state aid state, because a certain amount of harm to state,
a state has the right to cause the same amount of harm, usually measured in money, usually measured in dollars and cents against state.
B The other interesting aspect of this is that, look, we state A is targeting was targeting State B's irrigation control system.
What does that have to do with the dam other than the fact that they both use water?
In other words, the target here is not necessarily the target that was liable for the initial harm.
It's some other agent in state B might be the the farmers who use this irrigation control system.
It might be farmers located far from the dam of Congress, located near the dam.
There's no necessary connection.
And this is based on the understanding of countermeasures as it's used today in international trade law, mostly where if one country,
for example, imposes unlawful tariffs against the coffee in another country, then that country can respond by throwing a tariff on sugar.
And the only connection between sugar and coffee is that, you know, people use sugar in their coffee,
but the people who are suffering and the people who are benefiting are two entirely different populations.
And neither of them is enough. Necessarily involved, but at least those who are harmed are liable for the initial offence.
And again, the proportionality here is one of equivalency.
So proportionality that allows one wronged state to exact an equivalent dollar amount against the state that caused the initial harm against this.
For reasons that I fear about, this example disappears from Tallinn 1.0.
But in Thailand, 2.0, which is the more recent telling me ago from February, we have a different kind of example where organs of a responsible state,
they are conducting cyber operations without resulting in loss of functionality of a private cyber infrastructure in the state beat.
I guess they were thinking of Sony or some like or or some like business that is suffering at the hands of Chinese Koreans.
Russians fill in the blank and then say, be, here's an option of responding in kind against state aid.
Well, what does that mean to respond in kind?
It means to respond in a cyberattack against presumably a private a private cyber infrastructure in the offending state,
then absolutely nothing to do with the initial offence. So this is the way the countermeasures work.
And it introduces, as I mentioned earlier,
two kinds of or two important changes in the way we understand both proportionality and discrimination in armed conflict.
So I wanted to focus on those for just a moment.
Question is which proportionality principle now do we use in hybrid warfare?
Because there's many different ways to understand the term hybrid warfare.
But in my opinion, hybrid warfare is hybrid because it combines elements of kinetic hardware and non-kinetic software.
So you've got all these elements jumbled together, very often running at the same time.
And we're going to ask which principle of proportionality is relevant here, and what do we do about the principle?
Distinction, because we just saw that in cyber operations.
It's not uncommon as it is in other forms of countermeasures to target those
who are who are by international law of armed conflict and by just war theory.
Innocent, but not liable to any sort of defensive harming.
So here you see what I what I mentioned earlier, you have two different definitions of I framed it here as disproportionality, right?
You have the in below definition of proportionality,
which relates injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects that would be excessive in relationship to the concrete,
indirect military advantage anticipated. This is a huge can of worms that has defied any sort of logical in my opinion,
logical exegesis, because it's very difficult to apply this in practice.
Some people have responded by saying, well, what we might weigh are injuries to civilian oh,
there's our civilians against anticipated injuries to enemy civilians kind of way death
and injury to civilians against death and injury to our civilians and their civilians.
That's not usually what what's done.
What's usually done is to try to measure or articulate what might be the military advantage that a operation or army is after,
and then weigh that against the number of people who are going to be injured or killed.
And as I say, it's an extremely elastic concept.
On the other hand, the definition of countermeasure proportionality is framed clearly in terms of equivalent economic harm.
[INAUDIBLE] for tat, you cost $1 billion and this is the way the World Trade Organisation often frames it.
In their arbitration cases, Country X caused $1 billion or $100 Billion against Country Y.
Why now has the right to exact it now?
It's important also to understand that these countermeasures function differently than do the invalid definition,
because countermeasures are a self-help measure in the international community.
They're designed to allow states to respond by using measures short of force in
order to restore the balance of law abiding behaviour between in this case,
between nations. So that it's one way to look at countermeasures are a kind of unarmed reprisal.
So if we go back to the, the, the depictions of belligerent reprisal,
where one country would harm one country, another country, civilians or prisoners of war,
and in response, the other country would harm a similar number of prisoners of war or civilians
in order to prevent or to deter the offending country from doing it again.
These are like reprisals in the sense they're [INAUDIBLE] for tat, in the sense of a response to unlawful behaviour,
in the sense that they're hoping to deter and prevent future behaviour and in the sense that a countermeasure
is designed to prevent an offending nation or offending group from benefiting from their unlawful behaviour.
And this is much different than in bell proportionality,
where the military advantage here is generally framed in terms of incapacitating an enemy to one degree or another.
And so it's much more expansive, much broader. So what you would do to achieve a military advantage if you defined that military advantages,
victory or incapacitating significant numbers of of enemy military capabilities
and your much wider latitude to inflict harm among civilians than you do here.
In here, civilians will suffer insofar as the harm is proportionate here.
They're the direct targets of the harm. They're not collateral harm.
In this case, civilians are collateral. They're not the intended victim or target.
Here they are the intended victim or target. So how do we think about that and how do we justify it?
And I'll come back to that in a minute. But it's a feature of war now that that software is going to introduce.
Second thing I want to look at here is the question of liability and who is liable to defensive harming.
And in conventional war, what you see here on the left, this is a graph, a graphic that was taken from my book on moral dilemmas of modern war.
You see, the conventional war is fairly dichotomous in the sense that we've got fairly straightforward categories of combatants and non-combatants.
There is a grey area there, I admit, and everybody who studies this knows it, but it's a very small grey area.
It might be civilians who work in arms factories and that sort of that sort of thing.
So campaigns are liable to harm non-combatants are not liable to the principle of non-combat nearly covers non-combatants,
while compounds, of course, are liable to defensive harm in asymmetric war.
We see something that is more like a sliding scale in the sense that we see different levels of involvement in the hostilities going from none,
which are traditional non-combatants to direct involvement,
which are traditional commands to a whole array of people who are sitting around in the
middle who are indirect participants or indirect contributors to war in asymmetric war.
If we're talking about a guerrilla organisation, most often this involves all the people who are working for the political wing,
people who are in their cyber units, diplomatic units, financial media, communications and so forth.
What do we do with those people? By the law of armed conflict, these people are protected civilians.
But what plays out in practice, if we look at a number of asymmetric wars, particularly in the Middle East,
is that it's very difficult to defeat a non-state armed group only by removing their direct participants.
One reason is because the numbers are generally relatively small. There aren't huge guerrilla armies neither.
They're not. If you look at Hamas and Hezbollah, we look at the Taliban.
These were generally armies that had numbered between ten and 25 or 30,000 people.
Well, their support group was significantly larger.
So if you look at Israel's actions in the 2006 Lebanon war that lasted some 35 or 36 days, the big the direct targets was exhausted very early on.
Then what do you do? The war is not over. So the idea began and these armies began to implement.
It would be to go after in some way the political wing of a guerrilla organisation or the those who provided economic support.
The United States would go after cyber operators.
The United States would go after those who provided economic and diplomatic support
so that the question then became to what level of force are these people liable?
And the idea of participatory liability, in contrast to the way the United States and Israel acted in their respective asymmetric wars,
is to also introduce a sliding scale relative to harm so that those people who here who are in the middle and providing
indirect harm are those people who need to be subdued in some way but are not necessarily liable to lethal harm.
In other words, they are targetable. We're changing here in a very significant way.
I think the principal distinction. These are no longer a protected population.
They're no longer protected because they contribute to the threat in a very
significant and measurable way by providing or by taking part in software tactics,
whether it's cyber war, whether it's whether it's economic, economic measures, fundraising, communications, propaganda, public diplomacy and so forth.
So one response then that needs to that requires a great deal of thought.
I won't get into it today or what a response, what or state responses to those who are placed here in the middle.
And one answer is, as you saw from the cyber example, is they may be legitimate targets of cyber attacks.
Another example that I won't discuss this afternoon that I've written about are various forms of non-lethal warfare and arrest and incarceration.
So idea of developing a sliding scale, both of liability and harm, I think is very important in the context of asymmetric hybrid war,
especially when the soft tactics that these groups employ are so significant.
Cyber War. We're just beginning to understand where cyberwar is going.
Economic measures, public diplomacy, propaganda.
When non-state groups manipulate the media and we see how effective that can be in terms of international public relations.
In terms of international public opinion, states then have to ask themselves, what do they do with these kinds of situations?
As a matter of fact, it was an interesting this was an interesting headline in New York Times about six months,
about eight months ago, one by one ICES Social media experts are killed as a result of FBI probe.
Well, why would social media experts be anything even closely resembling, you know, a combatant?
Well, you get into issues here of propaganda. You get issues in issues of incitement.
And these are questions that we have not really considered deeply enough in in terms of how the law of armed conflict should work,
because clearly these media experts are some kind of contributing factor in the success that ISIS had at the time.
On the other hand, are they liable to defensive killing? The answer is probably no, unless they're out there inciting genocide,
which some of them might be doing, but others might just be recruiting members on social media.
And no different than army recruiters or civilian recruiters or civilian organisations that promote and encourage people to enlist in the Army.
So these are questions that we are just beginning to wrestle with.
And there's two brief issues I'd like to discuss before moving on to the second example.
I discussed already how indirect libel participants might be open to defensive harming.
Those are the people who work for the political wing of a of a non-state or even state organisation.
And there we see how they may be liable to certain levels of force, although not lethal force.
But then the question is, what about everybody else?
When we see that cyber in the cyber examples, the people targeted are not liable participants, they're just doing their work.
People subject to propaganda are not necessarily people who are taking part in the hostilities.
And here the question becomes a little bit more involved.
And I was surprised to see that the Talon Manual actually tried to address this by saying that there might be a necessity argument here.
In other words, it might be feasible to think about targeting civilians with non-lethal harm by using a lesser evil kind of argumentation that yes,
it is wrong to target civilians. But the outcome or the alternative outcome of using lethal force even against liable targets,
might be more destructive than using non-lethal force against civilians.
Of course, as you see, it opens up a whole can of worms here because once we put civilians on the firing line
and these theoretical constraints that we're thinking about now may not be played out,
they may not be something that people are going to necessarily follow, but we can certainly enumerate certain certain principles,
one being a lesser evil argument, another being the effectiveness of harming civilians.
Another one would be a kind of and this battalion manual mentions in a little bit more detail a kind of proof of human rights.
In other words, there's a certain human rights protection to civilians are entitled to something maybe similar to Common Article three,
where harming civilians cannot exceed a certain level of harm that violates their human rights.
It can't it sort of can't exceed a certain level of even non-lethal harm where the long term effects might be irreversible.
One of the interesting things about this is that a colleague of mine, Valerie Malkovich's, who is at Colgate,
who writes about traditional and just war theory, wrote me that this isn't such a strange idea among the classical just war theorists.
And for them she writes that inflicting non-lethal, harming non-combatants is acceptable when necessary and proportionate.
And the reasoning is, is that property destruction is so less severe than loss of life or severe injury,
that in that it forms an entirely different category of harm, reliability becomes irrelevant.
That's going to cause us to think because we never want to think that liability is irrelevant.
But if there indeed is a category of harm that is sufficiently removed from physical harm and extensive property harm that we can consider,
it is something reliability is not entirely irrelevant.
I wouldn't say it's entirely irrelevant, but it is something that can be pursued under certain conditions,
the kind of conditions that I mentioned earlier. Then there might be room to think about how software software tactics allow those
who use software tactics to be liable to some measure of defensive harming,
even though on the face of it, it violates the principle of non-combatant immunity.
So the two points I tried to make here with regard to cyber warfare is that it introduces a, on one hand,
a more constrained principle of proportionality, but a more relaxed principle of distinction.
The second topic I wanted to talk about is self-inflicted risk and violence.
And this is another aspect of software that's extremely effective, possibly even more effective than cyber warfare.
Although cyber warfare, of course, we don't know where the boundaries lie yet.
Non-Violent resistance, of course, has been around for a long time.
And the idea behind non-violent resistance is, well, there's two goals that I want to mention.
One is the tactical goal and one is the strategic goal. The tactical goal.
One of the tactical goals of non-violent resistance is what is called backfire backfires, provocation, backfires,
provocation in the sense that the activists hope to and maybe even intend to draw a disproportionate response that as sharp rates increases,
the resistance sows problems in the opponent's own camp and mobilises third parties in favour of non-violent resistance.
Very often this backfire has lethal consequences.
People are killed with the people who are killed are the demonstrators, are the activists are those are those civilians, again,
who are pursuing maybe in conjunction with maybe independently of a non-state actor who might be
vying for national self-determination or waging a civil war or a war of national liberation.
I'll bring a couple of examples in a minute. But if the tactical goal is backfire, the strategic goal is some element of transformation.
And transformation in the best sense is total victory.
In other words, the disintegration of the opposite side there rarely happens.
So there are several stages along the way in terms of transition, in terms of transformation that can be understood in terms of accommodation.
It can be understood in terms of capitulation depending on the measures or the reaction of the state that's targeted by non-violent resistance,
depending on how and to what extent they meet the demands of the activists and of the demonstrators.
So it can be it can range from symbolic victories, right.
They just want to show up in and make a point and want to thumb their nose at the head
of state government all the way to attempts to really bring down the government.
And if it becomes a a operation that forces compliance forces of a large degree of accommodation,
then it becomes what's known as a transformative event. And I want to show you a clip here that probably many have seen.
We're going to go back to 1931 to Gandhi's March on the Time somersault, where this is taken from the movie Gandhi.
Although there are some interesting clips in YouTube back from the thirties,
Hollywood is much more effective for my purposes and I'll play part of it,
the beginning part of it at the end, and I want you to pay attention at the end.
The reporter, I think his name was Vance Walker,
the depicted actor here concludes by saying that whatever moral ascendancy the West had was lost here today.
So historically, what you're going to see here became a transformative event.
And what's important to see is that it relies significantly on backfire.
It disappeared in The New York Times back in the early thirties and was, in fact,
was considered by students the history of the Indian Revolutionary Independence Movement to be a transformative event.
And what makes it a transformative event. Again, if we go back to Sharp, Sharp was a prominent or is a prominent non-violent resistance theorist,
is that it both mobilises support within and mobilises support in public opinion without.
Now there's a lot of interesting ethical issues surrounding non-violent resistance, because in this case, the violence is self-inflicted.
To the extent that you have to ask yourself, what right do the activists have to enlist their own people and put them at risk in this way?
And there's there's several ways of looking at that. It introduces another dimension of this aspect of soft war,
because we ask what moral principles should bind or should guide those who are who
are organising something that seems as morally clear cut as non-violent resistance.
But if we look at the Indian example, one of the things we would look for is some element of just cause, right?
And we can get into what just course means in any. National Liberation movement, an element of necessity that there are no other ways available.
Normally, this is considered not the last resort.
It's considered the kind of penultimate resort that we demand from non states
to undertake before they resort to non before they resort to armed conflict.
I think there also has to be some questions about mitigating the harm, in other words, both mitigating the harm and gaining consent.
And this is something that I've just begun to look at with varying degrees of success,
because it's sometimes difficult to get into the minds of organisers and how people think and how they should think.
But people should know what they're getting into. Now, in the case of Gandhi, we know that these people were trained ahead of time at least,
to take this as well as they might have been trained to anticipate this kind of violence and not fight back.
Now, it's important to note that in the Gandhi example,
in contrast to some of the others I'm just going to mention, is there are two kinds of non-violent resistance.
One is principled, non-violent resistance where the resisters will not fight back, and the other is strategic,
non-violent resistance where resisters may fight back if it serves their
purposes and certainly have done nothing to give up the right of self-defence.
So sometimes there are situations where a peaceful march turns violent.
Sometimes it's because the resisters of the marches are trying to defend themselves.
And there's really nothing in non-violent resistance theory that demands someone forfeit their own right to
self-defence unless they choose to give it up themselves for either ideological reasons or strategic reasons.
So there is this element of consent that I think has to be obtained.
There is an element of effectiveness that has to be pursued with activists need to understand and define what their goal is.
Is the goal symbolic? Is the goal a search for accommodation?
In this case? Ostensibly, the goal was to open up the factory and reduce the tax that the Indians were paid paying on salt.
Although in retrospect we know the goal was much larger. But certainly the British could have come halfway and said, okay,
we're going to make that concession and give up the tax on salt and let you take over your own production of salt,
which they didn't do for all kinds of reasons,
and which then made or escalated the both the effectiveness and the effect on the effectiveness and the,
I think the anticipated goals of the activists to something much greater, ultimately capitulation and ultimately disintegration,
which is ultimately where the situation went in India as the Indians gained their independence and the British left.
So non-violent resistance is an aspect of soft war that raises other kinds of issues,
both about proportionality and about and about the rights and the protections that are do civilians.
I conclude in a moment and try to answer those questions about what kind of proportionality and where their rights lie.
I just want to briefly mentioned a couple of other examples.
Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor 1991 was a demonstration that began a peaceful demonstration that began against the Indonesian forces.
It escalated out of control for all kinds of reasons.
There was a Western photojournalist there who managed to take a videotape back in the days when there were big video cassettes,
managed to hide it, managed to retrieve it, managed to get it out.
And just in 1991, we were beginning to see the beginnings of the Internet.
And East Timor is sometimes regarded as one of the first countries born of the Internet age.
Internet, in the primitive, relatively primitive sense we have today, will be primitive 20 years from now.
But this video was publicised and it slowly turned world opinion against the Indonesians,
led the United Nations to approve a referendum for independence in East Timor and eventually led to intervention forces under the auspices of the U.N.
In that sense, it became a transformative event because it turned out turned out in the sense of repudiating Indonesian rule,
turned them out of eventually turned them out of East Timor.
So those of you who might be familiar with the mama, the Mother Marmara, was a ship launched by Palestinians in 2010 out of Turkey.
This was a very large ship. There was a whole flotilla. The ship was commandeered by Israeli commandos in the ensuing fight.
Nine later, ten Turkish civilians died. This was a huge strategic victory for Hamas.
It was transformative in every sense of the word. Israel was compelled to relax its land, brought its land blockade.
The Egyptians opened up guns in the south, Israel opened up Gaza. In the north was international condemnation from wall to wall for for international.
Committees of inquiry. Relations, diplomatic relations with Turkey were ruptured again.
It began as a non-violent protest turned violent for all kinds of reasons, provoked a disproportionate reaction from the military.
The result was backfire in the classic sense. This is not a national struggle.
But this is Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, where children were put on the front line.
This became a really interesting philosophical issue for the civil rights movement.
This is taken from an article that Cheney Ryan, who is here at Oxford, wrote for a book we did on Soft War.
And he's researched what became known as the Children's Crusade. What are the ethics of putting children on the front line?
We started from the 16th Street Church. I was in jail seven days.
We called ourselves Freedom Fighters. When I told my mother that I wanted to go, she said, okay.
I was in the third grade.
What they faced in the national press was this national international media carried images of police clubbing black children and firemen,
causing them jets, the water powerful enough to strip the bark off a tree at 100 feet.
Birmingham was a transformative event in the American civil rights movement.
Later, of course, the church in Birmingham was bombed, poor children were killed.
That gave further impetus again. Loss of life or harm that comes to the demonstrators or the participants themselves is an extremely powerful weapon.
But it raises all kinds of moral issues. Anybody recognise this?
Where are we? Anybody under 40.
Let's start with that. Under 50. Anybody want to guess my Vietnam?
Well, the the demonstrations were against Chicago.
We said Chicago. Chicago. Chicago, 1968.
The what began as a peaceful demonstration against the war in Vietnam during the national convention of the Democratic Party.
This became, again, a seminal, transformative Avenger's, people who see the problems in the Democratic Party today.
They trace them back to Chicago in 1968 because of the way that this Liberal Party became associated with suppression of speech.
Street violence, provocation, backfire. So these issues are issues that continue to resonate.
They provide a very, very powerful tool for non-state actors.
Proportionality here is something even narrower, I think, than the proportionality that I mentioned in the framework of cyber warfare.
What we're seeing here is a very, very low bar for disproportionality.
In other words, it takes very little for a state to be accused of disproportionality when they enter the fray and harm,
harm peaceful demonstrators in terms of self inflicted violence as a whole.
I think moral domain there, that requires a lot of investigation about what ethical rules apply to groups
and individuals who want to inflict or prepare to inflict harm upon themselves.
At the beginning, I talk about human shields. Human shields. When they work, that's fine.
But when they don't work, people die. Hunger striking to the death. This is self inflicted violence that can be very, very effective.
We've seen hunger strikes in you, United States, in Israel and Turkey.
And when the goals are modest, the tactical victories are are relatively easy to come by.
We see how human shielding works when the regime, a group is fighting against this law compliant.
But all these put locals at risk. So here too,
we see how proportionality and the immunity of combatants changes in how the immunity of combatants is either changed
because of the ready or not lethality of the weapon or because of the exigencies that motivate and drive non-state groups.
I conclude with just one other slide, because this issue, of course, he hasn't left the news that I discussed.
And this is Catalonia. The question is, when you look at all these pictures, what's the state supposed to do?
The answer is nothing. In most cases, nothing. In other words,
aren't any of these cases that would have come including the case with Gandhi that would have
had the implications they had had states backed off and taken relatively innocuous steps.
Why they can't do that, why they feel compelled to to take action that will result and they may even know results and backfire.
I mean, the Spanish government had to know what was going to happen here,
that it was only going to inflame and make things we don't make and find things through.
Whether this is going to be a transformative avenger now, we don't know.
But this was on the BBC just a couple of days ago from Madrid.
This is about upholding the rule of law, protecting the constitution and disciplining what it sees as an unruly, disobedient, devolved government.
Right. However, the central government wants to minimise the risk of large scale demonstrations.
Civil servants and government lawyers have thought long and hard about what measures to adopt and when and how they should be implemented.
Well, we'll see. Thank you.