Enemy civilians are never worth nearly as much as one’s own immaculately innocent civilians. So we behold recent TV clips of jubilant Israeli civilians celebrating the deaths and mutilations of entire Gazan families.

The mitigating pity is that due to tightly controlled Israeli media they imagine that every single Gaza casualty is a highly-trained Hamas fanatic. Meanwhile, the biggest factor generating Palestinian resistance is instead the systematic maltreatment Palestinians experience daily, even when not under bombardment.

Yet everywhere we look the distinction between soldier and civilian, combatant and non-combatant, grows ever more porous, arbitrary, irrelevant. Protection of civilians in war always has been piously insisted upon and at the same time carelessly violated by powerful and often democratic states. The appalling term ‘enemy non-combatant’ entered the growing Orwellian vocabulary after 9/11 at the ruthless behest of Bush’s obliging legal counsel.

The distinction between soldier and civilian grows more arbitrary

No surprise there. Elites, especially in a war-like climate, reckon they can do anything they want and lie about it. After all, where are the penalties for doing so?

Camouflage terms such as ‘collateral damage’ were conjured up to conceal crimes that increasingly refined technological weapons inevitably inflict. If we actually look at their effects, and not their public relations brochures, the real purpose of ‘precision-guided’ devices, from missiles to lasers to aerial drones, is to enable civilian killings under the guise of selective targeting.

Furthermore, armed conflict since the Second World War has shifted from inter-state wars towards civil wars and counter-insurgency campaigns where civilians are entirely fair game. The field manual has not been invented that can help, let alone compel, soldiers to distinguish civilians from guerrillas.

For settler-colonial societies in their early phases, like the US, Australia, and Israel, civilians were anything but innocent because rubbing out the native populations was precisely the point of conquest.

Frankly, the only realistic reason not to play hell with civilians is when it happens to be a waste of resources compared to other vicious uses. Superpowers always want to reserve the right to decide who is a civilian, before or after they arrest or attack them abroad and, as displayed in Ferguson, Missouri, increasingly at home.

These travesties do overturn small but important legal efforts to corral murderous mentalities. In the Second World War more than half of the casualties were civilians; most were deliberately targeted. So suddenly there was no better way to demoralise the enemy than slaughter his family on the home front — except it never works. Kill or maim our loved ones and do you really think we will seek peace with you? Not even many military leaders believe that childish nonsense. But plenty of well-paid pundits do.

Incinerate Dresden even if it is not a military asset; obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki even if the Japanese signal surrender; make the “rubble bounce” in Korea in the 1950s; Fallujah must fall. Over 70pc of deaths in Iraq since 2003 are civilian and the percentage in Afghanistan may be higher.

All this violence is disastrously counterproductive if the aim of occupying forces really was to win support and bring peace. The only reliable military goal is domination.

Gaza spurred accusations that Israel was engaged in “Hitler-like fascism”, as the Turkish prime minister said. Palestinian spokespersons decried Holocaust-like behaviour, to which an indignant letter by some 400 Israel policy supporters last month retorted:

“The Holocaust was the deliberate, systematic mass murder of six million innocent Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. By contrast, Israel is acting in legitimate self-defence against Hamas terrorism. Israel has no interest in harming innocent civilians, and indeed has done its utmost to avoid civilian casualties, whereas Hamas deliberately targets Israeli civilians. Any comparison between Israel and the Nazis outrageously distorts Israel’s actions and trivialises the enormity and nature of the Holocaust.”

It’s always a clue to watch certain people dismiss five million other deaths in the Nazi mass murder campaign. What trivialises the Holocaust is invoking it to excuse Israeli state injustice.

Elites count on ‘empathy fatigue’ to set in, though it really is fatigue with evident powerlessness to stop heinous acts. The trouble is that it isn’t hard to stoke outrage against civilian deaths, against heedless authorities, against environmental crimes, against bankers and speculators who loot vastly more than every mugger in the world can dream of. The elites are the ones doing the stoking. Today, if you don’t follow their orders you are the enemy.

So we are all potentially enemy non-combatants. None of us are innocent. Be very aware of it, but don’t get used to it.

The writers are the authors of Parables of Permanent War and No Clean Hands.

Published in Dawn, August 24th, 2014