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Source: https://jstribune.com/the-morality-of-the-gaza-war/
The Morality of the Gaza War
(Jerusalem Strategic Tribune) Michael Mandelbaum - The war in Gaza began on Oct. 7, 2023, with an attack on Israel by Hamas. Almost immediately after the attack took place, the charge that Israel was committing genocide began circulating. It has gained such wide acceptance that American public officials and candidates for public office have taken to repeating it as if it were a fact. It is not a fact. The charge is false. Israel conducted its Gaza campaign with greater fidelity to long-accepted international ethical and legal standards than any other country ever has. True, terrible crimes were committed on Oct. 7 and afterward, but they were committed by Hamas, not by Israel. Accepting and repeating the false charge against Israel lends legitimacy to Hamas's crimes and thereby encourages similar horrific criminal activity in the future. Genocide must have the intent to kill people because they are members of a particular group, and the actual large-scale killing of them, which judicial commentary has emphasized must involve a substantial part of that group. The German Nazis' murder of six million Jews during World War II fits that definition. The Israeli war in Gaza does not come close to fulfilling either condition. The Israeli government made it clear, both by what it said and what it did, that it was fighting Hamas, not the Palestinian people as a whole. The highest plausible estimate of the death toll of Palestinians amounts to only a small fraction - 3% (a large proportion of whom were combatants) - of Gaza's total population and less than 1% of all Palestinians everywhere, in no small part because Israel went to extraordinary lengths to spare civilians. By comparison, the Nazis killed 2/3 of Europe's Jews. Palestinians are not confined to Gaza. Millions live in the West Bank - the territory between the 1949 ceasefire lines and the Jordan River - whom Israel could, if it had been bent on genocide, have attacked and killed, but did not. Moreover, two million Arabs live in Israel within the pre-1967 lines. They are as Palestinian as the Gazans. What treatment have they received? They are full citizens of the State of Israel, with the right to vote in free and fair elections - making them the only Arabs in the Middle East who enjoy that right. Israel conformed scrupulously to what the laws of war require, arguably more scrupulously than any other country ever has. By contrast, Hamas blatantly, systematically, and deliberately violated them, making it guilty of war crimes. Hamas bears ultimate responsibility for all deaths, civilian and military, on and after Oct. 7 because it began the war. Hamas engaged in cross-border aggression, which the Western ethical tradition prohibits. Hamas did to Israel what Nazi Germany did to Poland in 1939, and what Vladimir Putin's Russia did to Ukraine in 2022: it invaded a neighboring country with the intent to destroy it. That is a war crime, one of which several Nazi officials were found guilty after World War II and for which they were executed. The writer is Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.