Fruit Trees

Michael Walzer (TNR, July 31) argues, “Selected infrastructural targets are easy enough to justify: bridges over which supplies are carried to the army in the field provide an obvious example. But power and water . . . are very much like food: they are necessary to the survival and everyday activity of soldiers, but they are equally necessary to everyone else. An attack here is an attack on civilian society . . . .[I]t is the military effects, if any, that are ‘collateral.’”

Food, power, and water and the delivery systems, in short, qualify as “fruit trees” in the sense of Deuteronomy 20:19: For is the power plant a man, that it should be besieged by you?