Beyond Proportionality: Israel’s Just War in Gaza

HEADLINE

Israel was and is not committing genocide in Gaza under the laws of war and principles of proportionality.

BACK COVER

Imagine a war without battlefields. There are no uniforms. Civilians and combatants are indistinguishable. Homes, schools, hospitals, and religious buildings are used as command centers and for the warehousing of weapons. Apartment rooftops are launching pads; the civilians who live inside…human shields. There are over 300 miles of reinforced tunnels, all outfitted with weapons, communications, and surveillance equipment. Such passageways enable terrorists to travel freely.

Everywhere a soldier turns presents a threat. Collateral damage is the unavoidable consequence of a right of self-defense in a war where enemy combatants are standing behind their own civilians. The situation is madness, and a moral morass.

And, yet, every time Israel is forced to defend itself against terrorists who shield themselves among civilians, it is blamed for causing disproportionate death, when the legal principle of proportionality is not violated at all.

Beyond Proportionality examines the relevant legal standards, as embodied in the U.N. Charter, international humanitarian law, and, most especially, the principle of proportionality, as codified in the Geneva Conventions, and concludes that Israel’s war in Gaza is lawful and just. The targets are terrorists, weapons, and tunnels—not innocent civilians. Israel relies upon verifiable intelligence and deploys precise weapons, endangering its own soldiers in order to minimize civilian death. And, yet, as in any war, there is collateral damage, but it is proportionate to necessary military objectives.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Dresden, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, did not, under the laws of armed conflict, constitute genocide. The same could be said of the large number of civilians unintentionally killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, on urban terrain not unlike Gaza, but without the global public scrutiny.

AUTHOR BIO

Thane Rosenbaum is a law professor, legal and Middle East analyst, and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, including Saving Free Speech…from Itself, Payback: The Case for Revenge, and The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What’s Right. He writes a weekly essay for the Jewish Journal, for which he has received the Louis Rapoport Award for Excellence in Commentary, and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, CNN, and the Daily Beast, among other publications. He is the Legal Analyst for CBS News Radio, and appears on various cable news shows on such topics as the Middle East, global anti-Semitism, terrorism, human rights, legal affairs, constitutional law, and the Supreme Court.