Was Israel Defending Itself in Gaza? - Michael Mandel

The Daily Star (Beirut), February 4, 2009 - Did self-defense 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 1,300 Palestinians in three 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 defense 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-defense 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....

Michael Mandel is Professor of Law at Osgood Hall Law School of University of Toronto, where he teaches the Laws of War.