This is brilliant argument. I loved the way it started with two way to react, by shooting or burning down the house, then followed by a great third scenario that sharply contrasted and offered a peaceful but difficult solution. The profound moral question then emerges, Do you value vengeance over justice? I had not considered this Human Shield argument and ethical dilemma before thought it was a very jarring and cogent presentation. Very crisp and well done, what should be standard reading for any high school and college ethics class or civics class.
Then again, I come from a country that invented firebombing and conducted the biggest and deadliest air raids in human history that destroyed not just a few blocks but entire cities. The Tokyo air bombing in March 1945, known as Operation Meetinghouse (ironically the name Quakers who are pacifists call their churches), was the deadliest and most destructive human shield military operation in history. Around 2,000 American POWs were consumed in flames as the city of Tokyo turned in a fireball, sucking all the oxygen out of the air, and out of people’s lungs, leaving a city far bigger in size than Gaza burned to ashes, along with littering the landscape with piles of charred bodies over a 16 square mile area, leaving no home unburned.
When I was a ten eager I remember watching an episode on World War II and the Flying Fortress where they said the number dead at 250,000. I still believe that number, which has since been rounded down and repeated as 100,000 dead (and now in parentheses one million people homeless of displaced— but where did those million go, were they ever found, or incinerated? — this is the great white historical rounding down that occurred at Tulsa and in Dresden American firebombings on innocent civilians). Most people might find it surprising that the debate even back then between US military commanders was to conduct more precision bombings over the alternative of complete carpet bombing that incinerated everything and everyone, child, woman, man, elderly—and American POWs, were like the captured daughter in your scenario.
What won out was what always wins out in American thinking: pour the gasoline and burn the house down, then shoot anyone running out. As a child I heard the saying that stuck with me, “Nuke ‘em til they glow, then shot ‘em in the dark.” That mentality is what we see Gaza. Destroy everything than constantly round down the human numbers of the dead over the course of history, saying the unaccounted for, the human shields, are “missing and displaced”, never to accounted for again.
Excellent excellent piece.