Writing about the recent conflict in Gaza, Martin Shaw says that,

In military terms it more resembles the pulverising of the cities of Germany and Japan in the Second World War that was intended to shatter the morale of the civilian population and destroy the political basis of the regime. But the lesson of the period is that such violence - utterly immoral and outside the laws of war - “works” in political terms only when it is used without limit and with a view to unconditional surrender. These circumstances cannot be made to apply in Gaza.

This is in part because Israel today is subject to extensive global surveillance - by other large powers, international organisations and global media - in a way impossible in earlier eras. Israel cannot turn Gaza into a smoking ruin away from the eyes of the world. Israel is expert in conducting short, brutal campaigns…

This is an absurd comparison. The bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan’s cities are known to have failed to seriously damage the morale of the civilian population and - excepting the views of a few passionate advocates of the miraculous qualities of air power - were never intended to bring about the unconditional surround of the Axis powers on their own. Unconditional surrender was always going to be brought about by conquest and occupation.

Furthermore, the Allied air campaigns against the cities of Japan and Germany were launched in a context of military adversity in which few other options for taking the war to the enemy were available. Britain and the United States started to bomb cities in the first place because they discovered that they couldn’t hit military targets within them with the remotest degree of accuracy; they later went on to develop reasons and justifications for doing so on a massive scale.

Given the scale of its resources, if Israel had really applied itself to “targeting civilians” - to use the currently fashionable phrase - in Gaza, and had done so with the same vigor that the United States and Britain attacked those in German and Japanese cities during the Second World War, the casualty count in the recently concluded fighting would have been on a vastly greater scale.

Finally, Shaw is right to say that Israel is subject to extensive global surveillance and that this places practical limits on the way it uses its military power. I’m glad that this is the case and I’d be equally glad if a similar degree of surveillance was applied to how other states use their military power. I’m not going to hold my breath while I wait for that to happen though.