Nine months of slaughter: my analysis of Gaza and just war principles

Jul 8, 2024
Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023.

Reflecting on some relevant aspects of just war thinking that I mentioned in my recent contribution to Pearls and Irritations on “Why Israel’s war violates just war principles” I decided it would be worth addressing some of those issues further and also broaching some important ones that I then did not discuss. I do so partly in response to comments I’ve since received from a number of people about my earlier presentation.

In my prior P&I contribution I said that Israeli leaders in defence of their invasion invoke the right of self-defence which appeals to only one of the conditions required by just war theory for justifying resort to war and ignored several others. The one appealed to was just cause which is part of the jus ad bellum (or as I more pithily shall refer to it, the JAB) and the other important conditions of the JAB ignored were the requirements of last resort, reasonable prospect of success, right intention, and proportionality. They also of course need to satisfy the conditions of the jus in bello (or JIB) regarding permissible conduct during war especially that of the principle of discrimination (or of distinction as it is called in international law) requiring the immunity of non-combatants. I spent most of my essay criticising on that score the Israeli conduct of the war and their defences of it by focusing on the background and reality of the way their attacks in Gaza have intentionally or recklessly produced an extraordinary amount of death, injury and privation of Gazan civilians. On that “extraordinary amount”, it is worth revisiting the comparison of the civilian bombings by Israel with the Allied city bombings of Germany in World War II that I discussed in my earlier piece in order to show that Israeli leaders making that analogy in defence of their approach were inadvertently invoking war crimes rather than legitimate attacks. I will revisit that issue further below.

I want to begin however by going beyond noting the ignoring of those conditions of the JAB and instead commenting on what attending to them would have shown about Israels’ right to begin a war on that scale. We need to consider those conditions precisely because having “just cause” is an essential but only thin justification for going to war since the other conditions must also be satisfied. First then, last resort. That condition requires that all reasonable alternatives to war as a response to a serious injustice must be carefully considered before resort to a military action can be morally justified. This connects directly with another condition of the JAB mentioned in my earlier essay, namely, the proportionality of the proposed military attack. Last resort would require exploring many other options besides war, and even if a military response was needed in order realistically to achieve more security against such terrorist attacks as October 7, the JAB proportionality criterion is relevant and would surely have counted against such a huge and devastating response as occurred. Other options that should have been explored might include defensive measures such as better Israeli security on their home borders but should also involve eliminating legitimate Palestinian grievances that help motivate Hamas violence. Such alternatives would include removal of the settlers in the West Bank, eliminating draconian policies in the occupied territories leading to more peaceful conditions for ordinary Gaza citizens. Another option suggested to me might include exploring stern legal measures against at least the leaders of the perpetrators of October 7, though difficulties of identifying and capturing them with minimum violence raise problems.

As for the condition of reasonable prospect of success, the constantly stated object of the invasion, which is entirely to eliminate Hamas or, what seems to amount to the same thing, its military and political capacity, palpably defies that prospect, given that the condition of proportionality rules out the massive slaughter involved in the current plan. In any case, any estimate of “success” must have addressed not only the prospect of eliminating all Hamas militants but the general effect on the reputation of Israel and on the prospects of creating new Hamas volunteers and other militants along with the risks of drawing other states such as Lebanon into the military mess. In the outcome, the “required” devastating slaughter of huge numbers of Palestinian civilians and the effects on their livelihood have almost isolated Israel in world opinion well beyond the naïve expectations of the crude ideologists who currently rule the country.

Besides the immorality of such a scale of violence, the overall impetus for the killing, rendering homeless, blocking of food supplies, and destroying of essential institutional social fabrics seems clearly to be the destruction of the Gazan people living conditions on a long-term basis. That then violates the JAB requirement of right intention, and also gives rise to a plausible allegation of genocide, the legal aspects of which are now being seriously considered by the International Court of Justice.

In my earlier essay, I pointed to the irony in Israeli leaders deploying in their defence an analogy of their city bombing with Allied bombing of German cities in World War II, given that much of that bombing was palpably a violation of the JIB principle of discrimination that sought to protect civilian immunity from attack. It’s worth pointing out in respect of relative disproportionality the further grim irony that the highly controversial British bombing of Dresden which, as I mentioned, even Churchill disowned after the event, involved dropping 3,900 tonnage of bombs, whereas the current Israeli onslaught from the beginning of its response to the October 7 attacks by Hamas until April 24 has accounted for over 70, 000 tonnes and counting. It has been estimated indeed that the mass bombings of Dresden, Hamburg and London (the latter by the Germans, of course) involved altogether a “mere” 30,700 tons. [Estimates from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor as cited by Muhammed Enes Calli in the journal AA.]

One correspondent noted that I hadn’t considered the Israeli defence of their bombing that claimed that the “regrettable” bombing of civilian targets was required by the fact that legitimate Hamas targets were being hidden in areas or institutions packed with civilians. In the midst of war propaganda created by both Hamas and Israel around the war it is difficult to verify this claim, but even if it is true that there are Hamas targets shielding behind the extraordinary number of homes, hospitals, universities, refugee camps, and other institutions bombarded by the IDF, the cost to civilian lives in terms of deaths, injuries, homelessness, and lack of vital basic resources now, and many of them extending well into the future, is grossly disproportionate.

A recent correspondent suggested that I had ignored the mitigating facts of Israeli defence forces giving Palestinian civilians warnings to leave before attacks were launched upon their homes and central institutions. Such warnings can in certain contexts morally legitimate an attack, but there are aspects of the Gaza assaults that go far beyond such contexts. First of all, it is debatable how often such warnings have been given but let us leave that aside for now. An important feature of the Israeli invasion is that they have told the Palestinians to go from their homes in one part of Gaza to another safer one and then later attacked that other part. A most recent such distortion has been the initial designation of Rafah as a “safe zone” for the displaced to flee to but accompanied later by subjection to full scale attack. Most recently the Israeli forces were reported to have bombed a refugee area in Al-Mawasi, a coastal region west of Rafah previously designated by Israel as a safe zone for Palestinians. This was immediately denied by Israeli authorities, but, given the background of other similar attacks such as those on aid agency operators like Doctors Without Borders, such denials need to be taken with a grain or two of salt.

Finally, it has been suggested that I was mistakenly silent on past atrocities against Israel by Hamas even though I strongly denounced their October 7 attacks as terrorist. There have certainly been such past attacks on Israeli civilians but were I to move to a discussion of that I would also have to discuss Israel’s past military wrongs and the terrorist activities of its West Bank illegal settlers. This would require exploration of the history of the placement of a Jewish state in Palestine and its consequences upon which I will politely decline to embark since others are much better qualified to do and have done that.

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