By guest author Dr. Mike Corgan
We are all hoping for a cease fire in Gaza, and possibly even one that lasts for longer than it takes to clear the rubble and mourn the dead.
Is there a just war going on here on either side?
Hamas has fired rockets into Israel and this certainly violates the principle of targeting only enemy forces. Rockets by their nature are not aimed at any particular point but are “area” weapons that can be expected to come down anywhere in the general direction to which they are pointed. Unless they are being fired at a massed military formation, rockets cannot be part of just war.
For their part, the Israelis are using drone and air strikes with what appear to be precision-guided weapons. Those weapons do hit where they are aimed–at targets, perhaps legitimate, in the middle of an extremely dense civilian population. Thus they are certain to cause casualties among innocents and they certainly have.
So far, over 150 are dead, many of whom are clearly not Hamas militants. The Israeli response is not part of just war either.
Israel claims that it faces an existential threat. Hamas’s fundamental documents do call for the abolition of Israel altogether and they are doing what they can to achieve that end by force.
Israel obviously has extraordinarily good intelligence on exactly where the Hamas leaders are located. However, they are choosing to eliminate what may be legitimate targets by methods that keep their military casualties low but raise casualties among Palestinian civilians.
Is there a just war going on here on either side? Not the way things appear.
Michael T. Corgan, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of International Relations, Boston University