In 2005, he, together with Major General Amos Yadlin, coauthored an article entitled “Military Ethics of Fighting Terror.” Their aim was to revise, from top to bottom, the established principles underlying the ethics and law of armed conflicts. The most radical of their attacks concerned the principle of noncombatant immunity: “According to the ordinary conception underlying the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, the former have a lighter package of state duties than the latter. Consequently, the duty to minimize casualties among combatants during combat is last on the list of priorities. . . . We reject such conceptions because we consider them to be immoral. A combatant is a citizen in uniform. . . . His blood is as red and thick as that of citizens who are not in uniform. His life is as precious as the life of anyone else.” From this, one was supposed to conclude that the preservation of the lives of the subjects of the nation-state is the supreme duty, which must in all cases and at whatever cost be placed above the duty to minimize the losses of noncombatants in the enemy camp. This meant that in a war situation, minimizing risks for an Israeli soldier took precedence over the duty to minimize “collateral risks” for a child in Gaza. The life of the former, armed to the teeth though he was, was ruled to matter more than the life of the latter. This was established in the style of cold violence peculiar to this kind of “ethical” discourse, which mimes the formal rigor of analytical philosophy.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 439