If disagreement about the Arab-Israeli conflict comes down to a dispute over the facts, as opposed to a dispute over the principles of justice and international law, then we are lucky. We are lucky because we can rectify this problem by simply correcting the record. In my view, the American people would not support Israel so blindly if they were not systemically misinformed. Thus, before I correct the historical record, let me enumerate some of those principles upon which we surely all agree. I do not think anyone will be so cruel, except in the throes of emotional tribalism, as to object to any of these principles.
First of all, there is no such thing as collective rights, collective crimes, collective guilt, or collective punishment. The people of Palestine and the people of Israel are not guilty of anything, as these are not real entities. It is not fair to punish any Israeli, much less any Jew around the world, for the crimes of certain Israelis, certain Jews, or the Israeli government. Similarly, it is not fair to punish any Palestinian, any Arab, or any Muslim for the crimes of Hamas, Hezbollah, any Arab country, or any extremist Islamic group. There is no such thing as land that belongs to “The Jews” or “The Palestinians,” but to certain individual Jews and individual Palestinians. To determine the rightful owner of any piece of land, we must refer to the normal principles of law. Religion and ethnicity are wholly irrelevant in settling disputes over the rightful ownership of land. Feudalist laws and fraudulent land titles are no objective means of determining property rights. The only objective means of determining who owns what, and who has what rights, is the principle of non-aggression, homesteading, and exchange. This, according to the normal principles of the English common law, or the codified principles of continental European law, and with all due respect to the traditions, customs, and historical rights of the various parts of every people, is the only path to objective negotiations and peaceful coexistence.
Second, no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to him. The fact that Jews, or anyone else, were the victims of horrible persecution in Europe does not entitle them to violate the rights of innocent third-parties in the name of preserving themselves. Even if a man steals one slice of bread to feed his starving children, he is still a thief. The only persons a man is entitled to take reparations from are those who committed the crime against him. In his quest for liberation, or later, in his quest for justice, he is not entitled to enslave another or even to harm one hair on his head. If, in the course of resisting an evil, a victim does harm to a third-party, then at the very least, after the fact, the victim is required to make reparations to his own victim, and to accept a just punishment for his crimes.
One of the tragic facts of life is that there are certain crimes which can never be repaired, and certain victims who never receive the justice they deserve. Sometimes, criminals do get away with it. Yet, this does not entitle the victims to demand of anyone else that they should be made to pay for the crimes of another. We should do what we can on earth to hold criminals to account and to make them repair their victims to the best of their ability. But there are certain crimes which can never be repaid, and we must leave punishment and reparation in these cases to God. If a homeless man steals twenty dollars from you and spends it on alcohol before you catch him, that twenty dollars is gone, and any attempt to indenture him to pay you back will only cost you more money than the slave is worth. You must accept the fact that you lost twenty dollars and move on. When the cost of justice is greater than the original injustice you suffered, then you only harm yourself by pursuing justice. Likewise, when the price of justice includes inflicting injustices which are greater than the original injustice suffered, this becomes revenge, and it is unhealthy for the soul. We must leave justice in these cases to the cosmic forces beyond our control, and allow God to sit in judgment, if a just God exists. Peace is so precious. Peace brings great harmony to the soul for those who are willing to forgive. It is not always possible to rectify an injustice, even with unlimited human power, but it is always possible to have peace, as long as one is willing to forgive. Thus, the better man trades justice for peace by the means of forgiveness. Forgiveness cannot be compelled, but it can be recommended.
Human nature is such that, when a people are threatened with slavery and extinction, when a man sees his parents and children murdered, when he sees his wife and daughters raped, when he lives every day under conditions of anarchy where neither persons nor property are safe, when he does not know when the next attack will be, when his future and his whole existence is blotted out before his eyes, there is nothing he would not do, no depth to which he would not sink, in order to deliver himself from evil, and to protect those whom he loves. This is why, in order for human beings to coexist peacefully, we must love each other. We must do our utmost to ensure that no people ever faces oppression or extinction, so that they will not be driven to extreme means of salvation. Whether it was the Germans of Weimar, or the Zionists, or the Palestinians today, conditions of permanent injustice, oppression, and hopelessness lead inevitably to war, and they tend to drag in third parties who had nothing to do with the original offense. Thus, good, just, and peace-minded men must cooperate together to prevent these conditions from coming about, to identify them when they do come about, and to try by all legal and peaceful means to give assistance to the desperate when possible. When we see a Weimar, we must help the Germans, when we see a Holocaust, we must help the Jew, and when we see a Nakba, we must help the Palestinian. Otherwise the cycle will go on forever. We can not and should not force men to be good, but we should take the world on our own shoulders as greatly as we can to prevent these evils from arising.
The Jew who is the victim of a Holocaust can ask other nations whether he may immigrate to their shores and find safety there. If they say no, he does not have a right to force them to help him. If a Jew asks to hide in your basement, all moral decency says that you should hide him, and that this would be an act of courage and heroism on your part. But you have the right to tell him no. Nobody is entitled to a hero; that’s what makes heroes heroic. Nobody is entitled to demand that another must sacrifice himself and his interests in the name of charity and good will. If you are walking through a street, and you hear a woman being raped, and you do nothing, you are not a criminal. You are just a coward and a bad person. The woman has no right to conscript you in her defense. If the Jew wants to immigrate to Palestine, and the Palestinian says no, the Jew does not have the right to immigrate. If the Jew is homeless and needs a house, he does not have the right to steal it from a Palestinian and make him homeless. The only people responsible for the Holocaust was the German leadership and their collaborators. To say that "the world" is guilty is nonsense, and to say that the Jew may exact reparations from anyone is psychotic. Those who refused to help the Jew in his time of need may or may not be bad people depending on the case, and they certainly forfeited a golden ticket to Heaven when God handed it to them, for every savior of a Jew sits in Heaven today, but they are not responsible for the Holocaust. No man has a just grievance against the whole world. The fact is, even if it was not consensual, it was the Palestinians who paid the highest price and who made the greatest sacrifices, to save the Jews from their plight. We Western men had no right, and have no right, to make the Palestinians pay for our guilty consciences.
The third principle is that it is never acceptable for any government to deliberately target civilians in war. This includes the deliberate murder of civilians in order to attack military targets. Collateral damage is not acceptable unless the offending government can prove it was necessary. In all cases of unintended collateral damage, the offending party should launch an internal investigation as to what went wrong, should hold the military officers responsible accountable, and should make reparation to the victims if possible. In the case of premeditated collateral damage, which is ubiquitous in the present war, the officials who order the controversial military action should, in each case, be able to justify their decision to kill civilians in accordance with international law.
This principle that civilians should not be attacked reflects the most basic principles of justice. This principle is also practical, as the killing of innocents only breeds hatred among the population of the enemy country. When one country kills innocent civilians in another, it strengthens the resolve of the enemy populace to fight on harder.
The use of human shields and how militaries are supposed to act when the enemy uses human shields are provided for in Protocol I of the Geneva convention, especially articles 51-58.1 These laws are vague, which is the source of many disputes and problems. First of all, the use of human shields by an army is immediately a war crime, regardless of circumstances. However, the use of human shields by an adversary does not relieve an opposing army from the duty of trying to protect the affected human shields. Second, militaries must have some definite protocol for distinguishing military from civilian targets. If a military does not distinguish between military and civilian targets on the basis that all enemy civilians are important to the adversary’s war effort, that military is guilty of “total war” which is a war crime. Third, when civilians are deliberately killed or put in danger, the attacker must be able to justify their killing on the grounds that the loss of civilian life was low in proportion to the military advantage gained by attacking the target. In practice, this third principle is subjective and difficult to enforce. Fourth, in cases of doubt whether a civilian target (such as a home, place of worship, or hospital) is being used by the adversary, the presumption is that they are not.
If an army drops a bomb on a civilian target, and it turns out that none of the casualties were enemy combatants, the army has committed a war crime. It does not matter if they believed that the target included enemy combatants at the time, because it is their duty as an attacking army to have good information. If an attack did not kill any enemies, the attacking army did not have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that enemies were there.
Judgements as to whether the civilian casualties exacted by an attack are proportional to the military advantage gained by the attack are subjective. If a tunnel exists under a hospital which an army suspects the adversary is using to store weapons, does that justify the bombing of the hospital? If a home is being used as a machine gun nest to attack the soldiers of an invading army, does that justify bombing the house? It is likely that all people would respond no to the first, and yes to the second question. Yet, there are no clear principles involved to decide what is “proportionate.” One question which may clarify this is to ask how an enemy accused of using human shields could have acted differently. Under what circumstances would the Israeli army consider the homes of Palestinians illegitimate targets? The whole territory of Gaza is densely populated and the Israeli army designated an area in which 1.1 million people lived as being valid military targets. Thus, the Israeli government has effectively defined the entire area of Gaza as a legitimate military target, with the exception of small UN evacuation zones. Even these UN zones have been attacked and the Israeli government has now labeled Rafah a legitimate zone of attack, compelling the civilian population of Gaza to move South and then North in order to avoid being bombed. Israel also effectively destroys civilian homes en masse, meaning that the refugees have no place to return. This all must factor into the consideration as to whether Israel’s killing of civilians is “proportionate” to the military advantage gained.
Fourth, under no circumstances is it ever permissible to impose a blockade of staple goods like food, water, and medicine that are necessary for the survival of the people. Even during the heat of the fiercest war, it is never permissible to forbid food to flow into an enemy country. Starvation is never an acceptable weapon. This is also outlawed by the Geneva Convention.
Fifth, there is a fundamental difference between interstate wars and domestic rebellions. In an interstate war, both parties are legal equals. In a rebellion, the rebel group is not necessarily bound by international laws, as they have none of the privileges of international law. In the case of an interstate war, questions of justice are decided by international law. In cases of rebellion, the justice or injustice of the rebellion is a question of whether the rebelling party is the victim of tyranny on the part of their government. Americans could not dispute this, as our own country was founded on the idea that peoples have a right to rebel against their government, and create a new one, if that government is tyrannical.
Sixth, that, in questions of international relations, prudence, realism, diplomacy, and a willingness to compromise should take precedence over moral absolutism. Even a just war is foolish when peaceful means exist to resolve disputes. There is no way that all parties can get everything they want. Every country which is the victim of injustice or a breach of international law has the right to go to war under the limited auspices of repairing the injustice. As a practical matter, however, weaker nations defer to stronger ones not because the stronger are morally right, but because the weaker know that their situation would deteriorate if they resist. The offended nation has the right to decide for itself whether it is in its own interest to go to war over a perceived injustice. This is the fundamental attribute of sovereignty.
Seventh, that diplomacy is only effective when carried out in the open. All secret agreements between nations and ambiguities of intentions only frustrate the diplomatic process. All nations should declare their stances and intentions openly.
Eighth, that all nations must put their own interests first in international affairs, and that other nations should expect them to put their interests first.
Thus, the principles that we can all agree to are as follows: collectivism is nonsensical, injustices do not justify injustices, targeting civilians is a war crime, starvation blockades are always wrong, rebellions are different from interstate wars, realism must take precedence in foreign policy, secret diplomacy is foolish, and that all nations must put their own interests first.
I am not naïve enough to suggest that humanity will always live up to these standards. It is the first lesson of Christianity that man falls short of the high ideals he desires to achieve. The concept of the “laws of war” often becomes meaningless in the throes of battle, when different armies of different races, cultures, religions, and nationalities descend to the lowest of all barbarisms. I am not surprised to hear of the occurrence of a war crime. Nor do I fail to empathize with soldiers who react with rage against the enemy upon hearing of a war crime committed against his comrades or his people, and are thus motivated to commit atrocities themselves. I empathize, but I do not sympathize with this tribal instinct.
Similarly, I empathize with the human instinct to collectivist, tribal loyalties. The feeling on the part of Jews that any attack against Israel is an attack against them personally, and the feeling on the part of the Arabs that an attack against the Palestinians is an attack against them personally, are wholly understandable. But they are only subjective feelings, which cannot be the basis of cooperation. Only objective reality can be the basis of cooperation amongst peoples.
“Protocols Additional to the Geneva Convention of 1949” (Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross, 2010), articles 51-58, https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/assets/files/other/icrc_002_0321.pdf.