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Self-defence against peace
by Michael Mandel
Did self-defence justify Israel's war on Gaza?
Objections have been raised to this claim on grounds of
a lack of both proportionality and necessity. To kill
over 1000 Palestinians in 3 weeks, hundreds of them
children, and wound thousands more, in order to deter a
threat from rockets that did not kill or injure
anybody in Israel for the six months the truce was
declared by both sides, or even before Israel launched
its attack on December 27, is so disproportionate as to
be intolerable in any ethical system that holds
Palestinian lives equal in value to Israeli lives. It is
also so disproportionate as to defy belief that defence
against these rockets was the real motive of the war. To
ignore the many diplomatic avenues available to avoid
even this threat, such as lifting the suffocating
18-month siege, suggests the same thing.
A more fundamental objection, however, is the
self-evident legal and moral principle that an aggressor
cannot rely upon self-defence to justify violence
against resistance to its own aggression. You can find
this principle in domestic law and in the judgments of
the Nuremberg tribunals.
To quote one Nuremberg judge:
On of the most amazing phenomena of this case
which does not lack in startling features is the
manner in which the aggressive war conducted by
Germany against Russia has been treated by the
defense as if it were the other way around. …If it
is assumed that some of the resistance units in
Russia or members of the population did commit acts
which were in themselves unlawful under the rules of
war, it would still have to be shown that these acts
were not in legitimate defense against wrongs
perpetrated upon them by the invader. Under
International Law, as in Domestic Law, there can be
no reprisal against reprisal. The assassin who is
being repulsed by his intended victim may not slay
him and then, in turn, plead self defense. (Trial
of Otto Ohlendorf and others, Military Tribunal
II-A, April 8, 1948)
So who was the aggressor here?
There would have been no question as to who was the
aggressor had this attack taken place before Israel's
withdrawal from the Gaza strip in 2005. At that point
Israel had been committing a continuous aggression
against Gaza for 38 years, in its illegal and violent
occupation of it, along with the rest of the Palestinian
territory, including East Jerusalem, after its conquest
in 1967.
By 2005, the occupation had been condemned as illegal
by the highest organs with jurisdiction over
international law, most notably the International Court
of Justice in its 2004 opinion on the separation
barrier. A central illegality of the occupation for the
International Court lay in Israel's settlements, which
violate the law against colonization, and which are
central to the occupation. The fifteen judges of the
International Court were unanimously of the opinion that
the settlements were illegal and the wall itself was
held by a majority of 13-2 to be illegal, partly because
it was there to defend the settlements, and not Israel
itself, and thus could not qualify as self-defence.
The rocket attacks from Gaza started in 2001 and took
their first Israeli victim in 2004. Since then, there
had been 14 Israeli victims prior to the current war.
Tragic, indeed, but obviously paling in comparison to
the 1700 Palestinians killed in Gaza during the same
period. One death is indeed a tragedy, but many deaths
are not just "a statistic," as Stalin had it; they are
the tragedy multiplied many times over. Given Israel's
illegal, aggressive and violent occupation, prior to the
withdrawal, Gaza rockets could only be regarded as
necessary and proportionate self-defence, or as
reprisals against Israel's aggression.
Did Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 change the
situation?
It has been forcefully argued that the 18-month siege
of Gaza, a major reason for Hamas' refusal to extend the
truce, was itself an act of aggression, giving rise to a
right of self-defence.
But even more important, though usually ignored, is
Israel's continued illegal and aggressive occupation of
the West Bank and East Jerusalem after the withdrawal
from Gaza in 2005. Indeed, the withdrawal from Gaza was
intended to strengthen the hold on the other territories
and was accompanied by a greater increase in the number
of settlers there than those removed from Gaza.
The occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem
figured equally with Gaza in the condemnations of the
World Court and the Security Council. Furthermore, in
the Oslo Accords, Israel and the Palestinians agreed
that "The two sides view the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip as a single territorial unit, the integrity and
status of which will be preserved during the interim
period." Indeed, when Hamas won the elections in 2006,
elections declared impeccably fair and civil by all
international observers, it won them for the whole of
the Palestinian Authority, including the West Bank (it
was not allowed by Israel to campaign in East
Jerusalem). Many Hamas West Bank legislators remain in
Israeli jails.
And the basic fact is that the Palestinians of the
West Bank and Gaza are one people, however
separated they are by walls and fences and check-points.
Israel's unilateral withdrawal from one part of that
people's land cannot turn that people into aggressors
when they resist the illegal occupation of the rest.
So self-defense cannot justify this attack, or the
siege that preceded it. What can? That Hamas is a
"terrorist organization?" But terrorism is about
deliberately killing civilians for illegal political
ends, and in that enterprise, Israel has topped Hamas by
many multiples. That Hamas does not recognize Israel's "right to exist?" But Hamas has offered many times to
make a long-term truce with Israel on the basis of the
legal international borders, something it is clearly
entitled to insist upon. Israel says that's not good
enough, that Hamas first has to recognize Israel's
legitimacy, in other words, it has to concede the
legitimacy of the Jewish state and all it has meant
to the Palestinians. In other words, as one Israeli
journalist ironized, Israel is insisting that Hamas
embrace Zionism as a condition of even talking peace
with it.
These are not justifications for violence on this or
any scale. Indeed, they point to the most plausible
reason Israel is fighting Hamas (and the PLO before it):
self-defence, if you will, not against rockets and
mortars, but against having to make peace with the
Palestinians on the basis of the pre-1967 borders as
required by international law.
Michael Mandel is Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall
Law School of York University in Toronto, where he
teaches the Law of War, and the author of How America
Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage,
and Crimes Against Humanity (Pluto Press, 2004).
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