Historians have long debated whether Churchill was aware of but refused to warn the residents of Coventry to get out of the way of the Luftwaffe bombing that caused 507 civilian deaths, because such a warning would have disclosed to the Germans that the British had cracked Germany’s Enigma code. This disclosure would have caused the deaths of many British soldiers who were relying on intelligence secured from Enigma, which would have dried up if the Germans knew it was compromised.

Of course, every civilian death in Coventry was entirely the fault of the Nazis, legally, morally and politically, just as every death to an Israeli hostage used as a human shield would be the fault of Hamas, regardless of who actually fired the fatal shot. But this doesn’t solve the problem for Israeli policymakers, generals or soldiers of how much risk to their own civilian hostages should they be willing to take to achieve their legitimate military goals.

To paraphrase Yitzhak Rabin: Israel should try to negotiate the freedom of hostages as if there were no ground war, and should pursue the ground war as if there were no hostages. The latter is a lot more difficult to accomplish than the former because Hamas’ unlawful use of Israeli civilian hostages imposes logistical restrictions on the military options available on the ground.

[I think we should first ask the question as to why international leaders aren’t demanding that Hamas release the civilians they kidnapped more than they’re demanding Israel avoid civilian casualties in legit war operations. The reason Hamas kidnaps hostages is because it works — the West plays along and Israel provides outrageously advantageous payments for them. The only way to stop that as a tactic is to end the market incentives that drive it, which means to stop playing. As Dersh notes, that puts the current hostages’ lives in peril, but it might save a lot more from being hostaged in the first place. — Ed]