In 1949, Europeans spearheaded an international move to outlaw collective punishment. This came after two world wars in which they had witnessed whole towns and villages razed and civilians executed, conscripted for slave labour or deliberately made homeless. To break with this past, the Fourth Geneva Convention outlawed collective punishment and reprisals against non-combatants. How far away this all seems today. First in Gaza and now in southern Lebanon, the Israeli army has abandoned Geneva's restraints, retaliating against the kidnapping of its soldiers byblowing up power plants, oil refineries, airports and roads.

As water and electricity supplies run low, humanitarian disaster beckons. Of course, the 1949 Geneva conference, remarkable though it was, certainly did not make collective punishment disappear, in either peace or war. In Stalin's heyday, entire ethnic groups were deported from their homes in eastern Europe. In their colonies - from Malaya to Kenya - European powers still drew on collective punishment laws to face down armed nationalist insurgencies. In the 19th century, colonial policemen had relied on such decrees to combat cattle thieves and brigands. But there was a military application, too. Among "civilised" states, the laws of war ruled out collective punishment, or strictly limited it on the grounds of proportionality. Applied to small wars against racial "inferiors" in Africa and Asia, however, military men highlighted the need for "harsh, exemplary deterrence" among "savages" whose fanaticism would otherwise blind them to the superior force of their foe.