Principles of Just War

And the questions they raise

Photo by Mad El Bred on Unsplash

Principles of just war have evolved over millennia. Their necessity is obvious. All sides are safer if there are boundaries: Not to use mustard gas, for example, or not to bomb schools. Besides physical protection, the principles are also meant to protect our souls, especially those of our soldiers, curbing the bloodlust that can corrupt us.

The principles hold that war can only be justly fought in defense of self or others. That violence must be aimed at those fighting, not at bystanders. That it must be aimed at stopping aggression rather than punishing it. That if a military target must endanger civilians, those casualties must be limited -- i.e., proportional.  (To what? I’ll get to that later.)

I’m  going to use those principles to pull out questions about the war in Gaza. I’ll present the questions, but not my answers. Nor will I describe the conflict in detail. Descriptions are everywhere, hard to watch, but necessary.

I’ll focus on  Israel, because its actions raise deep questions. Hamas’s attack raises no questions: It was simply evil. They intentionally attacked civilians, and did so with savage, prohibited tactics.

Just war thinking addresses two facets of conflict: first going to war, then fighting it.

Deciding to go to war

Israel was attacked and has a right to defend itself. After that first step, though, harder questions arise. 

What is the ultimate purpose of the war? To ensure Israel’s survival?

Many feel that Israel’s survival is at stake. The country is tiny, and not recognized by many Arab countries. On the other hand, the surrounding nations have not joined Hamas in its attack, and of course Israel is supported by the United States.

A more limited goal, still fundamental, might be preferable. Perhaps the goal should be to ensure that Israelis can live without constant fear of attack.

What is the military goal?

Is it to destroy Hamas? What does that mean? Is it possible? 

If Hamas is essentially a state of mind, a commitment to destroy Israel, it can’t be destroyed. In fact, the suffering in Gaza now deepens the hatred. Impossible goals shed blood in vain. Most just war thinking forbids wasting lives.

But Hamas can also be defined as a military organization. A narrower goal would be to substantially degrade its military capability. That goal would entail fewer casualties, especially civilian casualties. What arguments could be given for choosing one goal over the other?

Many Israelis, including some in government, want to remove all Palestinians from Gaza. Does that count as ethnic cleansing? Under other labels, would it count as an acceptable goal? Why, or why not?

Waging war

The purpose must be disarming, rather than punishing, the enemy.

After any attack, let alone one as savage as October 7, there is a powerful urge to retaliate, to make the aggressors suffer. The just war tradition is meant to curb that ferocity. If it were possible just to accept a surrender, no killing would be justified at all. Death, injury, and destruction are justified only when nothing else will stop the aggression.

Violence must be aimed at those fighting

They’re the ones who pose the threat; they’re the ones who must be stopped.

Stopping them will cause a lot of pain, to them and everyone around. But the pain must be an unavoidable side effect, rather than an intended tool. Terrorism tries to use violence against non-combatants to weaken the enemy’s will. (It rarely works.) In contrast, bombing military targets is allowed, with its inevitable collateral damage, if those casualties are both necessary and proportionate. (Again, to what? )

Hamas made protecting civilians extraordinarily difficult. It built military infrastructures in tunnels beneath civilian centers, including hospitals and schools. (And note: They knew the Israeli response would be huge, but went ahead. In other words, Hamas willingly sacrifices its own people.)

Are the civilian casualties both necessary and proportionate?

There might be other ways to dismantle those tunnels, ways that would be far more dangerous to Israeli troops. Could they, for instance, attack each tunnel separately, on the ground, leaving the surroundings largely untouched?

Now, finally, to the issue of proportionality. First, it’s not a matter of evening the score. Israel has killed 20 times as many Palestinians as Hamas killed Israelis. Shocking as that ratio is, it’s a red flag – a dozen red flags -- but not a proof of wrongness.

The proportion that matters is between enemy suffering and one’s own military advantage. There’s no metric for that calculation, even it were focused solely on deaths. (Trying to determine, for instance, how many enemy deaths are allowed per soldier saved.)  Military advantage includes  ground controlled, materiel destroyed, and more. Enemy suffering includes combatants but also non-combatants, and their suffering is harder to justify. It includes more than injury and death, too. For example, more than a million Gazans, most of them non-combatans and half of them children, are displaced. Vast numbers have no shelter. Yet Israel has withheld thousands of tents at the border, fearing that their metal frames could be useful to Hamas. Because of other security concerns, many essential needs go unmet: food and water, for instance, and medication.

There is no common denominator for these things. That situation is not unusual; most of our decisions, even the simplest, involve balancing incommensurables. Deciding what to have for lunch, for instance, means balancing taste, cost, time, and nutrition. The same is true in deciding who to vote for, what to wear – most of life. The military calculation is just graver.  Extremes at least are clear: Saving one of one’s own soldiers would not justify a million enemy deaths. Let’s start from that, and work in toward the real world.

What makes that hard to do is that in Gaza, as in many wars, each side finds it hard to recognize that there are innocents on the other. The first step in trying to achieve proportionality lies in reversing that, so that all the lives in the balance come alive. We grapple with what to have for lunch, or who to vote for, by paying attention to what is at stake. All the factors, incommensurate as they are, are real to us.

Of all the questions that emerge from applying just war principles to Gaza, this is the most basic. Can we learn to see an enemy as worthy of our respect? Even when they don’t return the favor? How?