This article explores normative questions about what legal rights settled immigrants should have in liberal democratic states. It argues that liberal democratic justice, properly understood, greatly constrains the distinctions that can be made between citizens and residents. The longer people stay in a society, the stronger their moral claims become, and after a while they pass a threshold that entitles them to virtually the same legal status as citizens and eventually easy access to citizenship itself.

Against the celebratory view of globalization comes the charge that globalization represents a kind of empire. But this charge requires a framework in which we can identify the power at work in apparently voluntary processes, such as learning English or joining the World Trade Organization. I advance a concept of “network power” to explain the dynamic that drives many key aspects of globalization. A network is united via a standard, which is the shared norm or convention that enables coordination among its users, such as a language that allows communication among its speakers. A widely used standard is more valuable than a less used one, simply because it governs access to a larger network of people. The idea of network power generalizes this fact to describe globalization as the rise to global dominance of standards that have achieved critical mass in language, high technology, trade, law, and many other areas. It also characterizes the rise to dominance of a successful standard as involving a form of power. While these new standards allow for global coordination, they also eclipse local standards, rendering them unviable to the extent that they prove incompatible with dominant ones. Therefore many of the choices driving globalization are only formally free and, in fact, are constrained because the network power of a dominant standard makes it the only effectively available option. It is this dynamic that generates much of the resentment against globalization and the criticism that it reflects a new imperialism.

Since the beginning of the second intifada in the fall of 2000, Israel has pursued a policy in which alleged Palestinian terrorists have been hunted down and killed by government order. The policy is not one of assassination and is consistent with international law because Israel is engaged in armed conflict with terrorists, those targeted are usually killed by conventional military means, not through deception, and the targets of the attacks are not civilians but combatants or are part of a military chain of command. Targeted killing has also been affirmed by Israel's High Court.

Although targeted killing has been pursued by Israel throughout its history, the scale of the present effort and the use of sophisticated military assets such as helicopter gunships and jet fighters set it apart from earlier practices. The effectiveness of the policy is called into doubt because it has not prevented–and may have contributed to–record numbers of Israeli civilians being killed. The policy has also resulted in informers being revealed, intelligence resources diverted, potential negotiating partners eliminated. It has also produced murderous retaliation and international condemnation of Israel. Benefits of the policy include impeding the effectiveness of terrorist operations, keeping terrorists on the run, and deterring some attacks. In addition, it affords the Israeli public a sense of revenge and retribution.

Because it targets the actual perpetrators of terrorism, targeted killing provides a proportionate and discriminate response to the threat Israel faces. Improving the policy will require better civilian oversight, greater care to eliminate harm to innocent bystanders, and refraining from killing political leaders. Despite its many shortcomings, Israel is justified in pursuing this policy so long as it faces a terrorist threat that the Palestinian Authority will not or cannot control.

“… Sontag not only challenges the compassion fatigue thesis; she questions the notion of the CNN effect. With regard to inaction in Bosnia despite the steady stream of images of ethnic cleansing that made their way out of Sarajevo, Sontag argues that people didn't turn off because they were either overwhelmed by their quantity or anaesthetized by their quality. Rather, they switched off because American and European leaders proclaimed it was an intractable and irresolvable situation. The political context into which the pictures were being inserted was already set, with military intervention not an option, and no amount of horrific photographs was going to change that….

… In the Iraq war of 2003 imagery was central to the conflict and often the subject of conflict itself. In this context, the Pentagon's strategy of “embedding” reporters and their camera crews with fighting units, and having them operate at the behest of that unit, continues the long-running tradition of a close relationship between the media and the military…. Given this, Sontag is perhaps surprisingly sanguine about the genuineness of war photography in the contemporary period. While recognizing that many of the now iconic combat images of the pre-Vietnam period were staged, she sees Vietnam as a watershed such that “the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures, staging them for the camera, seems on its way to becoming a lost art.” Insofar as Sontag is referring to the likelihood of individual photographers seeking to deceive, she may be right. There was, however, at least one notable instance in Iraq of digital manipulation. This resulted in the Los Angeles Times sacking award-winning staff photographer Brian Walski, whose altered image of a British soldier in Basra (he had combined two photos into one to improve marginally composition) was used on the paper's front page….

… What is most striking about the embedded journalists' coverage of the Iraq war is the way in which the images of the conflict produced by the allies' media was so relatively clean, being largely devoid of the dead bodies that mark a major conflict. In this outcome, the media is a willing accomplice….”

“What responsibility do ordinary people bear for atrocities committed in their names? According to modern democratic sensibilities, responsibility is an individual affair. The idea, as in Exodus (20:5), that the sins of the fathers could be delivered unto the third and fourth generations goes against the grain. It seems to be part of the collectivistic thinking that characterizes modernity off its rails, a pre-modern remain that produces outbursts of racism, nationalism, and genocide. That is not to say that we are not interested in accountability for political crimes. International human rights entrepreneurs have pressed for holding dictators accountable and have supported efforts to obtain reparations and other forms of redress. But we are very careful to avoid charges of “collective guilt,” which often sound more like the problem than the solution. We don't want to start a culture war or clash of civilizations!

…In contrast to the Mitscherlichs, Sebald is thus very much a man of his times, free of the older orthodoxies of the West German memory wars. For decades, the politics of memory in West Germany was divided between those who feared “too much” memory and those, like Jung and the Mitscherlichs, who believed Germans needed to work through their (collective) guilt if they were to overcome the symptoms of repression. Sebald does indeed pose a strong ethical and political-cultural imperative to remember, but his lecture was controversial because the lost memory it laments is that of German suffering, which heretofore has been the rallying cry of the extreme right. In this regard, Sebald is only one example of a surprising recent interest in the memory of German suffering from the left…. How legitimate is this new interest in German suffering, previously associated with nationalist revanchism and discreditable positions? The answer depends on the purpose…”

Since November 2000, Israel has been implementing an assassination policy in the occupied territories. The Israeli policy is both illegal and immoral. The legal questions are much more complicated than would appear from David's argument. Although individual killings may be lawful in specific cases, this debate concerns a policy providing systematic justification for such acts. Neither international nor Israeli law ensures any backing for this policy. Armed Palestinians are not combatants according to any known legal definition. They are civilians–which is the only legal alternative–and can only be attacked for as long as they actively participate in hostilities.

The argument that this policy affords the public a sense of revenge and retribution could serve to justify acts both illegal and immoral. Clearly, lawbreakers ought to be punished. Yet, no matter how horrific their deeds, as the targeting of Israeli civilians indeed is, they should be punished according to the law. David's arguments could, in principle, justify the abolition of formal legal systems altogether.

The Israeli government has not endorsed the minor changes of policy that David suggests, and for a reason. Israel's initial refusal to acknowledge the very existence of this policy and even its later hesitant admission suggest it is aware of the problems the policy entails and of the difficulties of dismissing them. Assassinations have been part of Israel's security policy for many years, and Israel is currently the only democratic country that regards such measures as legitimate. The Palestinian violations of international law, however, cannot be used to grant legal and/or moral legitimation to these violations when perpetrated by others.

Stein and I see targeted killing in fundamentally different ways. Stein sees the Palestinian terrorists as civilian noncombatants who are not engaged in war or even armed conflict with Israel. As such, there is no legal or moral right to target them. I see targeted killing as an appropriate response to an intolerable threat. Israel has the right and obligation to defend itself against armed Palestinians who seek to kill as many innocent Israeli civilians as possible. So long as the Palestinian Authority is incapable or unwilling to halt terrorist attacks, most interpretations of international law, Israeli law, and just war tradition support Israel's efforts to stop these murderous attacks before they can be carried out.