RUTHFULLY YOURS

It has become a cliché to point out that there is a difference between criticism of Israel and denial of its right to exist. The former is well within the boundaries of acceptable discourse, as it is with any country; the latter is not, as it entertains the possibility of dismantling a sovereign state (that just so happens to be the world’s only Jewish state), which is not considered a legitimate geopolitical option in any other context. But the distinction can be elided by disguising rejection of Israel’s right to exercise sovereignty — including the right to conduct defensive wars — as mere criticism of its conduct.

Not everyone attempts the disguise. Open Israel-haters like U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese deny that Israel has any right to self-defense, because they consider it an illegitimate state to begin with. Some call Israel’s military actions “genocide” not because of Israel’s conduct but because the war occurred within “the system of settler colonial apartheid that the Israeli government has built and maintained over the past seventy-five years,” as the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace wrote less than a week after October 7.

These extremists deny that Israel has any right to wage war against Hamas, even after October 7. Even if Israel killed only Hamas terrorists, and destroyed only weapons caches, and conducted a miraculous operation without harming a single civilian, Israel would still be in the wrong. Indeed, on this view, Israel could escape such condemnation only by accepting violence against its citizens or ceasing to exist — in other words, by forfeiting its most basic obligations as a sovereign nation. It is easy to see why most other Israel-haters would avoid making such an argument outright: When it is that easy to identify, it is easily dismissed as extreme, immoral, and, frankly, impractical.

What complicates things, however, are the frequent calls for “cease-fire” couched in terms of criticism of Israel’s conduct in the war. Most of Israel’s critics — humanitarians and opportunistic Hamas-sympathizers alike — have adopted this line. This is where classical just-war theory comes in. The theory holds that, for a war to be just, two distinct conditions must be met: First, a nation that resorts to war must do so for legitimate reasons. Second, the war itself must be conducted according to some basic principles that restrain soldiers from needless cruelty. These two parts of the theory have been wielded against Israel in a deliberately confusing manner since it launched its counteroffensive to destroy Hamas. This conflation strikes at the heart of our ability to speak and think clearly about Israel’s war against Hamas, and about what it would take to satisfy Israel’s supposed critics, including, occasionally, America’s most important elected officials and diplomats.

Critics of Israel’s conduct in the war, then, say that Israel launched its attack for justifiable reasons but that its conduct in Gaza has been so unjust as to warrant ending the campaign. There are some signals that these criticisms are not being leveled entirely in good faith. For one, the objections began making the rounds almost immediately after Israel’s response began. For another, the same warmed-over accusations of Israeli misconduct are trotted out every time Israel is dragged into war, without accounting for the particulars of the latest operation. But for those disposed to take the criticism seriously, some examination of the logic (or lack thereof) behind the accusations is warranted. Do any of the criticisms hold water? Or are they really rejections in disguise of Israel’s right to wage war?

One common criticism, repeated by lawmakers and activists alike, is that too many Gazan civilians, especially children, have died or are suffering on account of the war. “Far too many Palestinians have been killed” in Gaza, said Secretary of State Antony Blinken in November, not even a month after Israel’s military response began. If true, Israel’s conduct could violate the principle of proportionality: Military actions can harm civilians (or civilian infrastructure) only to the extent they are necessary to achieve legitimate military objectives.

Proportionality is a confusing principle and hard to apply in the best of circumstances. Civilian harm and military advantage are incommensurable, meaning they share no common standard of measurement. There is no way of knowing how much of one is worth trading for the other. It does not help that many analysts and commentators mistake it for, or misrepresent it as, a requirement that casualty numbers be roughly equal on both sides of a conflict. But one element of proportionality is clear: It is logically impossible to infer a violation simply by looking at civilian casualty numbers. The circumstances of each death are crucial, not just because some of the deceased are combatants whom Hamas claims as civilians but because the extent of collateral damage must be weighed against Israel’s need to attack a particular military target in a particular way. That is true writ small and writ large: Just as any given air strike or raid cannot be determined to be just or unjust by looking solely at casualty counts, Israel’s military campaign as a whole cannot be judged on that same basis without a thorough investigation of its achievements.

That is, of course, unless it is predetermined that no military achievement could be worth any civilian death — which is another way of saying that the war itself is illegitimate.

The proportionality argument as it has been wielded against Israel therefore fails in spectacular fashion. Determinations that Israel’s Gaza campaign has violated the principle of proportionality are categorically premature. It is logically impossible to conclude at this juncture, with the intelligence thus far available to parties other than the combatants, that Israel has violated the principle of proportionality. That supposed “critics” have made such determinations nonetheless says more about the critics than it does about Israel. The only way their “criticism” makes any sense is to construe it as a claim about the war’s justness, that no Israeli aim is worth any of the collateral damage that comes with war — a claim no less extreme, immoral, and useless than in its unmasked form.

Another criticism of Israel’s conduct is that it is being reckless in its attacks. An international chorus of condemnation took this line in the wake of Israel’s tragic April 1 strike on a convoy of aid workers from the World Central Kitchen (WCK), which killed seven. What Israel claims was a mistake (and an investigation suggests may have been a diabolical Hamas ploy) was taken to be proof that Israel is being insufficiently careful to protect civilians in Gaza. Blinken exhorted Israel afterward to “do more” to avoid civilian casualties. President Biden “threatened,” according to Reuters, “to condition support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza on it taking concrete steps to protect aid workers and civilians.” (Those who take this line sometimes slip into unhinged slander, as when WCK founder José Andrés went so far as to accuse Israel of striking his workers “deliberately” as part of its “war against humanity itself.”)

The respectable-sounding version of this ostensible criticism suffers from the elementary error of logic that one mistake proves pervasive recklessness. That is akin to concluding from one plane crash that air travel is unsafe. Plane crashes happen, even occasionally as a result of human error; but it is logically fallacious to infer from this fact that boarding a 747 poses some unusual risk. Israel takes extraordinary steps to ensure that its attacks are targeted and based on firm intelligence. The WCK strike happened (by all accounts, among those who acknowledge that it was not “deliberate”) because Israel believed that Hamas terrorists were in the volunteers’ vans. It is not because the IDF didn’t bother to check readily available information, or because they don’t care one way or another. In this instance, they were wrong. But mistakes of this kind — reasonable but incorrect conclusions based on imperfect intelligence — do not, without significant further evidence, indicate systemic wrongdoing. They are things that happen in war.

Choosing to frame a mistake as a symbol of reckless disregard for civilian life is an act of sheer motivated reasoning. There is no allegation that the mistake stemmed from a policy of shooting first and asking questions later, or from some equivalent sign of systemic recklessness. To the contrary, the facts that emerged in the weeks after the WCK tragedy suggest that Hamas manipulated Israeli intelligence to draw a strike against the aid workers. (The individual IDF personnel who ultimately authorized the strike were fired nonetheless.)

The mere fact that Israel has made mistakes with tragic consequences does not prove — nor could it prove — that those very systems are broken, or geared toward callousness to civilian life. It proves at most that they are imperfect.

If Israel’s critics believe that perfection is the proper standard to which all militaries should be held, they should say so — and in the process declare that they have adopted a principle that discriminates against decent actors, who care about meeting such standards, and emboldens indecent ones, who don’t. What is far more likely is that this standard is yet another way to redefine acceptable military conduct to exclude whatever Israel does — another way in which Israel’s ability to conduct war altogether is backhandedly denied. In other words, it is a jus ad bellum argument that has nothing whatsoever to do with Israel’s actual conduct. The fact that even Israel’s supposedly friendliest and most sophisticated critics, in the highest echelons of government leading its primary ally, can muster only vague exhortations about “doing more” (more what?) and taking “concrete steps” (such as?) to achieve unstated standards of care for a population held hostage by an enemy terror organization, speaks to the way critics set a standard for Israel that requires perfection. Any prosecution of a war, therefore, is liable to this criticism at any time, for any reason. It is another way of revoking Israel’s right to wage war whenever the critics find it convenient.

Just a bit more on the motivated reasoning inherent in this criticism is in order. Even the best-trained and most ethical militaries suffer from occasional intelligence failures, even in war zones less dense, confusing, or rigged with human shields than Gaza. In October 2015, for instance, the United States repeatedly bombed a trauma hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 42 and injuring 30. The Air Force (and Afghan authorities) mistakenly believed that Taliban fighters were hiding there, when in fact it was being used by Doctors Without Borders. The U.S. government apologized for the tragic mistake. No good-faith critic of American actions thought to extrapolate from this high-profile mistake that the U.S. armed forces were anything less than well-trained and committed to legitimate war aims.

Because that sort of “criticism” is reserved for the Jewish state, and portrays Israel as unreasonably cruel in its warfare, Israel’s defenders have called this a modern-day blood libel. While that freighted phrase might shed more heat than light on the discourse, what is clear is that the accusation that Israel chooses where and how to strike its enemies, and which ones, without due care is hardly a “criticism.” It is, rather, at best, an excuse to call for Israel to lay down arms entirely. Rather than aiming to disqualify this line of anti-Israel rhetoric by labeling it antisemitic — a strategy to which the harshest anti-Israel voices are immune, having convinced themselves that accusations of antisemitism are reflexive and fleeting — it may be more useful for Israel’s defenders to show that it suffers the dual disgrace of being illogical and deceptive, and all in service of a peculiar double standard.

In campus encampments and other outposts of anti-Israel animus, common rallying cries have included obvious eliminationist language (“There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free,” etc.). There was also the more general, more emotive, and nonsensical assertion that Israel is not engaged in a war but a genocide. On the premise of that absurd claim, Israel’s defenders are disingenuously accused of lacking sympathy for displaced Gazan civilians, not caring about dead children, and willfully overlooking Israel’s “indiscriminate” attacks — that’s the word President Biden used in December to describe the military campaign.

Making heads or tails of this cheap shot masquerading as a criticism of Israel’s conduct is a challenge because it is not, at its root, an argument at all. It is, in most cases, a dodge. Framed as something other than an argument about proportionality or recklessness, the charge is that Israel’s war against Hamas is just too bloody to be classified as a war — not in terms of military advantages gained, or of what it would look like if Israel made no mistakes, or of anything else. Just too bloody, period. It draws its strength from the indisputable underlying reality that war is hell. Indeed, it is. But that alone does not make a war unjust, much less a genocide. If it did, all wars would violate the second principle of justice, making the whole enterprise of just-war theory nonsensical.

By presenting depictions of war to a populace unaccustomed to its inherent horrors, those who want to stop the war shift the definition of “genocide” to mean “really bad war,” show pictures of Gazan children maimed by Israeli air strikes (or sometimes pictures of children caught in entirely different wars in other countries), and use other means to bring the awful realities of war closer to home. They bank on receiving visceral, sympathetic reactions: Nothing can justify such collateral damage; this must not be a normal war; it must be as awful a war as has ever been fought, the full weight of power coming down on the powerless — a genocide. Arguments over semantics and legal definitions of “genocide” aside (not to mention the moral inversion of accusing the Jews of perpetrating one), this elision of the comparisons necessary to determine whether Israel is conducting its war in an unusually lethal way is a means not of applying just-war analysis but of circumventing it. Any decent person would demand that whatever party is proximately responsible for unleashing hell must stop until it can come up with a more humane way to achieve its goals. Cease-fire now.

The obvious response to those trading on the hellish conditions in Gaza is that this is a war, and all wars produce unspeakable horrors. If Israel must cease its fire simply because any civilians are dying, because any human bodies are being tragically maimed, because there is any horrible suffering — and all these things have undoubtedly happened, because that is what happens in war — we have once again slipped into the long-rejected argument that Israel may not wage war at all. (And again, leave aside what provoked the war in the first place and the tactics Hamas uses to maximize harm to its own civilians.) But even when this claim is construed in its most favorable light — as an argument about the brutality of this war relative to wars generally — it does not hold water.

As ever, the critical question for any criticism of conduct is not whether many civilians, as an absolute number, have been killed. That would preclude all wars, regardless of how righteous the mission and how impeccable the military conduct. It is, rather, whether civilians have been killed at an unacceptably high rate. Without even entering the proportionality analysis, that is the barest evidence needed to present a prima facie case that Israel is doing something wrong in prosecuting its war aims.

Is that case plausible? In mid February, Reuters cited “a Hamas official based in Qatar” who said “that the group estimated it had lost 6,000 fighters” since Israel began its October counteroffensive. This appears to be the last time, as of this writing, that Hamas has given any such number. (Israel said at the time that the number was actually 12,000; its more recent estimate is that it has killed 17,000 Hamas militants.)

For the sake of a hypothetical, let us use Hamas’s number. Imagine further, against all evidence, that all subsequent casualties in Gaza have been civilians. Though in moments of candor its leadership admits that its tally may be off by as much as 25 percent, Hamas now claims that the total death toll is around 42,000.  And 36,000 of these, in this hypothetical, would be civilians. Imagine yet further that Hamas has undercounted and that there are 4,000 more civilians who have been killed by the IDF. In this improbable and horrifying scenario, only 6,000 of the 46,000 deceased — 13 percent — were combatants.

That number would still be an improvement on the usual combatant-to-civilian ratio of deaths in wartime. According to the United Nations, “civilians [account] for nearly 90 per cent of war-time casualties.” The U.N.’s number includes all wars — not just urban wars like the one occurring in Gaza, where civilians are densely clustered. Nor does it even begin to account for Hamas’s rampant and well-documented use of human shields, its prevention of civilian evacuations, and its theft of humanitarian aid, among the many other ways it sacrifices civilian lives for cynical ends.

Of course, the hypothetical does not reflect reality. A more reasonable, yet conservative, estimate is that Israel has killed two civilians for every one combatant. Based on some revisions that the United Nations quietly undertook in mid May, the number is likely even better than that — but even a two-to-one ratio would be astounding, far and away the most humane urban war ever prosecuted.

Such exceptional results are no coincidence. They are, rather, a reflection of Israel’s long-standing commitment to go out of its way to preserve civilian life within enemy territory. As international-law expert Michael Schmitt has written, “There is no question that the IDF’s warnings practice, in general, is the gold standard. Indeed, as a matter of policy, the IDF typically exceeds what the law requires.” Israel’s conduct in the war has indeed long been the source of much scrutiny by international-law experts: “Israel’s 2014 operations in Gaza, and the extensive efforts to provide such warnings, have elevated the discourse on this warnings precaution to unprecedented levels,” according to a paper from the International Law Association Study Group in 2017. “Some worry that the [IDF] created an unrealistically high bar on when and how to provide warnings.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that even as the current Gaza campaign progresses, as Israel has uncovered more intelligence and improved its urban-warfare tactics, the casualty count has essentially flatlined. True to form, the “critics” have pivoted to a new line of strained objections to Israel’s behavior, especially that the Israeli government is not doing enough to secure a negotiated release of the hostages still held by Hamas. From this repeated inability to hold Hamas responsible for anything it does — that it brought Israel’s response upon itself, that it endangers Gazan civilians, that it murders hostages, indeed that it continues to hold hostages, including two children, at all — one sees that scapegoating Israel, not ensuring a just peace between it and its neighbors, is the goal of the critical chorus.

Calling Israel’s conduct unusually brutal or bloody or “indiscriminate” is not just absurd; absurdity, like the hypothetical above, would not even get you there. Israel is quite obviously, by its enemy’s own implicit admission, fighting an exceedingly careful war. Yet that is not good enough for supposed “critics.” If this impeccably precise war still draws hysterical calls for Israel to cease its fire, perhaps it is time to stop entertaining the notion that the “criticisms” Israel faces every time it is dragged into war are anything other than expressions of the extreme denial of Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign nation. And perhaps it is time to stop referring to those “critics” as such for good.