Just-War Reflections on Conflict in Israel and Gaza

Legitimate Self-Defense and Proportionality

On Tuesday, a rocket or missile struck Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, killing hundreds of people. The hospital had been sheltering thousands of people displaced by fighting or who had fled their homes after an order to evacuate was issued over the weekend by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) for the more than a million Gazans living in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. Hamas, the governing party in the Gaza Strip, immediately blamed the blast on Israel, while Israel has claimed it was caused by a misfired rocket launched by the radical group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Social media has been flooded with videos purporting to show the blast and offering evidence to support one side or the other’s claims, and social media users have been quick to blame one side or the other despite the lack of conclusive evidence of what really happened.

Since this latest conflict between Israel and Hamas erupted on October 7 when over 2,000 Hamas militants launched a horrific surprise attack on southern Israel, killing over 1,000 Israelis and taking over 100 hostage, there has been a swirl of competing claims in the press and of misinformation on social media. Old videos or photos from the civil war in Syria and even clips from video games have been passed off on social media as recent footage from Israel or Gaza. False stories about the Biden administration providing $8 billion in aid to Israel or about a Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza City being destroyed spread unchecked. This unprecedented wave of misinformation comes just as X (formerly Twitter) has weakened its ability to counter its spread and provide real-time fact-checking. Spurred on by algorithms that favor vitriol and polarization, social media users have felt compelled to take immediate sides in the conflict, issuing “takes” with every new development in the conflict and demonizing those who disagree in the slightest.

This cacophonous information environment is extremely ill-suited for the sober moral analysis demanded by the just-war tradition, and anyway, I am by no means an expert on the political or security situations in the Middle East. For those reasons, I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to offer a detailed analysis of the military situation, let alone political punditry or yet another “take” on the conflict in Gaza. As someone with expertise in the just-war tradition, however, I did want to offer some reflections on some key concepts from that tradition that have been appealed to in the debates over the conflict: legitimate self-defense and proportionality.

A quick note: The just-war tradition as we know it today has its origins in the work of Christian theologians, particularly St. Augustine, but has since evolved into a secular legal framework embodied in the international laws of war. Therefore, in the contemporary world, it serves two purposes: providing a legal and moral framework that political decision-makers and militaries use to guide their decision-making and that the public can use to evaluate those decisions; and offering a theological and ethical framework Christians can draw upon as a guide in fulfilling their vocation as disciples of Jesus, whether as soldiers, political leaders, or engaged members of the public. As a theologian, my own focus is primarily on the latter purpose, although without ignoring the former. There is, of course, a certain irony in drawing on the Christian just-war tradition to try to make sense of a conflict between the Jewish state of Israel and the Islamic militant group Hamas. Nevertheless, from a Christian perspective, the just-war tradition provides a lens for making moral sense of unfolding events and provides a needed alternative to the views of those Christians who interpret events in the Holy Land through an apocalyptic lens. Second, as I already noted, the just-war tradition provides the framework for the laws of war, which should be used to evaluate the actions of both Hamas and the IDF.

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Legitimate Self-Defense

Hamas’s attack on Israel was morally reprehensible because it was an indiscriminate attack on civilians, and even more so because its perpetrators engaged in rape, the desecration of corpses, and unspeakable, deliberate acts of violence against children. The attack was also carried out by an organization whose aim is the destruction of the state of Israel and which has shown a pathological disregard for the lives of the civilians it claims to represent in pursuing this aim. Like many others, however, I recognize that the current conflict arises in the context of the ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people, for example, through the ongoing confiscation of Palestinian land and the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and the blockade of the Gaza Strip. Likewise, as the Israeli press has pointed out, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu helped bolster Hamas in the Gaza Strip, promoting disunity among Palestinians and preventing the establishment of a unified Palestinian state. That situation cannot justify Hamas’s attack, however, which was a clear violation of international law. Israel has a right to defend itself militarily in the face of this attack.

Since October 7, however, that phrase—”Israel has a right to defend itself”—has unfortunately been used to try to shut down conversation precisely where conversation is needed. Israel has cut off water and electricity to Gaza. “Well, Israel has a right to defend itself.” The IDF has ordered the evacuation of over 1 million Gazans from the northern half of the territory within 24 hours. “Well, of course, Israel has a right to defend itself.”

Israel does have a right to defend itself using military force, but what does that mean? In his explanation of the right to personal self-defense, St. Thomas Aquinas argues that when a person is being attacked, they have the right to defend themselves, even using deadly force if necessary. If, however, they use more than necessary violence, then they are no longer really defending themselves, but rather engaged in some other, unjustified, kind of act. The same principle applies to states. Yet Israel’s right to defend itself has been turned into a carte blanche that can justify any military response whatsoever.

So, what does self-defense mean in this case? One, more conservative, possibility is that it means that Israel had a right to repel or neutralize the militants who had attacked its people and secure its borders, and that it has a right to take reasonable measures to ensure that a similar incursion cannot occur again. Absent any evidence of an imminent, larger-scale invasion by Hamas (or some other entity), this would ensure that Israel was adequately defended from attack, but this would likewise mean that ongoing military action in Gaza, apart from a few skirmishes or aerial strikes, would be unjustified.

One might argue, however, that Israel’s defense requires the destruction of Hamas itself; in light of Hamas’s ideological desire to destroy the state of Israel itself, this latest attack is sufficient evidence that the organization’s continued existence poses an existential threat to Israel. This is a more expansive interpretation of Israel’s self-defense. For the reasons I outlined earlier, I don’t feel qualified to judge which interpretation is more strategically correct. This second interpretation, however, would mean that Israel’s right to self-defense entails a right to engage in sustained military action in the Gaza Strip itself, in order to root out and destroy Hamas’s leadership.

This possibility, however, raises some serious questions. Ongoing military action in the Gaza Strip will most likely lead to further cross-border attacks into Israel, leading to greater numbers of Israeli casualties, including civilian casualties. Going on the offensive would also risk the escalation of the conflict as other actors become involved, such as Hezbollah (based in Lebanon) or even Iran. Military action ostensibly conducted in self-defense may in reality render Israel more prone to attack. Similarly, military action in Gaza would lead (and already has led) to large numbers of civilian casualties, fueling support for Hamas among the populace. Or, if the operation is successful, the destruction of Hamas would lead to a power vacuum in the Gaza Strip, either leading to a failed state that could become a breeding ground for other terrorist groups, or requiring Israeli occupation, further fueling conflict.

Admittedly, these are pessimistic scenarios, but one of the purposes of just-war analysis is to raise questions that help us counteract the power of violence to bewitch us into thinking that it can magically solve problems that can’t be solved by other means. It asks us to think clearly and soberly about the consequences of actions and which choices will truly help us achieve the aims we set out to accomplish. If the stated aim of war is to defend Israel from attack so that it can live in peace, then waging a just war will mean conducting it in such a way that makes this outcome more likely and avoiding conduct that will contribute to the ongoing cycle of violence.

(Image: Ecrusized, CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)

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Proportionality

The just-war tradition insists that it is always wrong to intentionally target civilians during war. Some have appealed to this principle of noncombatant immunity, which is clearly reflected in the international law of war, to draw a bright line between attacks against civilians like that carried out by Hamas on October 7 and the unintended, or “collateral,” civilian casualties that have resulted from Israeli military action in previous conflicts, as well as the current conflict.

Attacks deliberately targeting civilians are particularly heinous, but the just-war tradition also proposes a second principle regulating the conduct of war (or jus in bello principle), the principle of proportionality. Even when civilians are not deliberately targeted, the tragic consequence of modern warfare is that civilians are unintentionally killed, or homes destroyed, when legitimate military targets are attacked. The principle of proportionality states that deliberate efforts should be made to minimize these casualties and that such “collateral damage” should be “proportionate” to the military objective of the attack. As with Aquinas’s account of self-defense, if a military fails to make efforts to minimize civilian casualties or engages in disproportionate violence, that is, violence that is more destructive of civilian life than morally necessary, then it is fair to question whether the ensuing civilian casualties were, in fact, unintentional.

Although the principle of proportionality makes perfect sense in the abstract, it is notoriously difficult to work out what should be considered proportionate or disproportionate collateral damage in the concrete. The United States and Israeli militaries have rules of engagement (ROEs) that attempt to balance humanitarian considerations with flexibility in achieving military objectives and that are usually rigorously applied before military operations are conducted. Of course, these ROEs can and should be debated, but my purpose here is simply to point out that Israeli military doctrine takes the principle of proportionality into consideration.

That’s why some Israeli policy and military decisions over the past few days have been somewhat surprising, most importantly the decision to order the evacuation of all the residents of the northern half of the Gaza Strip. Defenders have pointed out that the order represents an effort to minimize civilian casualties that was not afforded to the Israeli victims of Hamas’s attack, which is true, but the order also suggests a willingness to abandon any effort to exercise discrimination in selecting targets, and therefore to make the requisite judgements of proportionality. Even in a best-case scenario, this means that the IDF does not believe it will be able to combat Hamas by targeting specific buildings or installations, but rather may need to conduct wide-ranging military activity that leads to the destruction of large swathes of civilian infrastructure. In a worst-case scenario, the evacuation order suggests a willingness to indiscriminately destroy civilian buildings and even kill civilians unable or unwilling to evacuate rather than engage in the exacting process of identifying legitimate targets and making efforts to minimize civilian casualties, for example, as was used in counter-terrorism efforts against ISIS in Syria and Iraq during the 2010s.

It’s perhaps too early to make definitive judgments, but the decisions to cut off electricity and water to the Gaza Strip, which has contributed to a humanitarian crisis, and the order to evacuate huge numbers of residents, appear to be unjustified measures against the civilian population that go beyond what is necessary for Israel to legitimately defend itself. It remains to be seen what kind of military operations the IDF will conduct in Gaza, and indeed the large-scale operations in Gaza seem to have been delayed for some reason. One possibility is that, just as Israeli intelligence was blind-sided by Hamas’s attack, the Israeli military had not developed a plan for military operations against Hamas in Gaza, and now military leaders are unsure how to proceed. Only time will tell.

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The Catholic Church Responds

In the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack, Pope Francis affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself, but expressed skepticism about the “siege” placed on the people of Gaza in response. More recently, he has expressed concern for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the need for respect for humanitarian law, statements that drew protests from Israel’s ambassador to the Holy See.

Last Friday, the Patriarchs and Heads of the Churches in Jerusalem, including the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, issued a statement calling for a “de-escalation” of the conflict, although Pizzaballa later somewhat distanced himself from the statement because of its lack of a clear condemnation of Hamas. This all came after an earlier statement on October 7 that condemned violence against civilians and called for peace.

I think these statements from the Vatican, and from the Church leaders responsible for Catholics in the Holy Land, largely reflect the same moral concerns I raised in my own analysis above.

If you have any thoughts about the just-war tradition and the conflict in Gaza, or disagree with something I wrote, share your thoughts in the comments!

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Of Interest…

• At Commonweal, the church historian Shaun Blanchard has an interesting essay arguing that the historical roots of synodality as a way of understanding Church governance may have been obscured by, first, its association with conciliarism, the movement that emphasized the role of councils of bishops in Church governance, and second, the exaggerated emphasis placed on papal supremacy in response to conciliarism. Blanchard also shares my concern that a lack of understanding the Church’s history hinders our efforts to grasp how Vatican II represented both continuity and change in the Church’s Tradition.

• On Monday, October 30, at 7 pm Eastern, the Catholic Theological Society of America will host a virtual event titled, “The End of the Golden Era:
  Theology in the Age of Academic Precarity,” at which I will be a panelist. The discussion will focus on the changing role of theology at Catholic universities and what the future of Catholic theology as a discipline might be, a topic I have written about here at Window Light!