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U.S. Must Strongly Affirm Israel's Right of Self-Defense
(RealClearPolitics) Peter Berkowitz - Israel's Operation Protective Edge is a complex and costly military undertaking designed to degrade Hamas' capacity to launch missile bombardments and use cross-border attack tunnels to kill Israeli civilians. The defensive war, which was forced upon Israel in July when Hamas escalated rocket attacks and sent terrorists into southern Israel through the tunnels, has exacted a terrible price. Many pundits and politicians leapt to the conclusion that because Hamas has suffered much greater losses, Israel's response was disproportionate. The assumption that proportionality involves a rough equality of losses - or is violated when harm is caused to civilians - is superficial. And it has no foundation in international law. The international laws of war provide that the use of civilian areas for military purposes causes them to lose their immunity from military attack. Consequently, under the laws of war properly understood, most of the Palestinian civilian casualties and destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza are presumptively Hamas' responsibility. Israel is the only nation in the world subjected to scrutiny and slander for protecting its own civilians from military attacks launched from outside its borders. The legacy of the Goldstone report (2009) also threatens the United States. Simply put, it incentivizes terrorists to dress as civilians, hide among civilians, launch operations from civilian areas, and use civilians as human shields. It's a future roadmap for jihadists devoted to war against the United States. Therefore, U.S. leaders should seek opportunities to reaffirm Israel's inalienable right to self-defense, condemn Hamas' flagrant violations of the international laws of war, underscore Hamas' responsibility for civilian casualties in Gaza and the reduction of swathes of the strip to rubble, firmly oppose the recently established UNHRC commission of inquiry, and defend Israel's right and responsibility to conduct its own investigations of all credible allegations of unlawful military conduct by its combatants. The writer is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.