[Wall Street Journal] Alan M. Dershowitz - Israel's actions in Gaza are justified under international law, and Israel should be commended for its self-defense against terrorism. Article 51 of the UN Charter reserves to every nation the right to engage in self-defense against armed attacks. The only limitation international law places on a democracy is that its actions must satisfy the principle of proportionality. In a recent incident, Israeli intelligence learned that a family's house in Gaza was being used to manufacture rockets. The Israeli military gave the residents 30 minutes to leave. Instead, the owner called Hamas, which sent mothers carrying babies to the house. Hamas knew that Israel would never fire at a home with civilians in it. Israel held its fire. The Hamas rockets that were protected by the human shields were then used against Israeli civilians. These despicable tactics - targeting Israeli civilians while hiding behind Palestinian civilians - can only work against moral democracies that care deeply about minimizing civilian casualties. They never work against amoral nations such as Russia, whose military has few inhibitions against killing civilians among whom enemy combatants are hiding. The claim that Israel has violated the principle of proportionality - by killing more Hamas terrorists than the number of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas rockets - is absurd. There is no legal equivalence between the deliberate killing of innocent civilians and the deliberate killing of Hamas combatants. Under the laws of war, any number of combatants can be killed to prevent the killing of even one innocent civilian. Until the world recognizes that Hamas is committing three war crimes - targeting Israeli civilians, using Palestinian civilians as human shields, and seeking the destruction of a member state of the UN - and that Israel is acting in self-defense and out of military necessity, the conflict will continue. The writer is a law professor at Harvard.
2009-01-02 06:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive