Just and Unjust Wars in Palestine

Michael Walzer is universally regarded—and rightly so—as the preeminent explicator of just war moral philosophy; no serious analysis of this topic can fail to acknowledge Walzer’s classic 1977 book, Just and Unjust Wars. Unfortunately, as many serious philosophers have noted, Walzer is also unwilling to fully apply his own analysis to Israeli behavior, especially towards the Palestinians.

On September 21, Walzer penned a lengthy column in The New York Times, “Israel’s Pager Bombs Have No Place in a Just War.” As the title makes clear, while regarding Israel’s war against Hezbollah as a just one, he is critical of Israel’s detonation of the bombs it had secretly planted in the pagers and walkie-talkies of Hezbollah activists.

In his column, Walzer also discusses Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza. Here is the key paragraph: 

The theory of just war depends heavily on the distinction between combatants and civilians. In contemporary warfare, these two groups are often mixed together in the same spaces — often, indeed, deliberately mixed together because the killing of civilians invites moral condemnation. The war that Hamas designed in Gaza is a grim illustration of the strategy of putting civilians at risk for political gain. Still, a military responding to this strategy has to do everything it can to avoid or minimize civilian casualties. Israel claims to be doing that in Gaza, although serious criticism of its conduct there has appeared in media around the world, not to mention a case brought against Israeli and Hamas officials alike at the International Criminal Court alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.

“Alleging” war crimes? Mere “allegations,” as Walzer surely means to suggest but without openly saying so, could be wrong. In fact, there is not the slightest doubt that Israel has been committing massive war crimes in Gaza. The only serious debate among observers of Israeli behavior is whether or not these war crimes amount to genocide—and many close observers and commentators, including some prominent Israelis, are reluctantly concluding that they do.

However, it is not necessary for my argument to enter into this highly-charged debate, so I will argue only that the Israeli attacks on Gaza amount to war crimes, whether or not they fall short of genocide. Most critiques of Israel’s warfare have focused on its bombing of Gazan apartment houses and other dwellings, schools, universities, and hospitals, claiming that it is targeting Hamas fighters or “command and control” facilities in them. As a result, over 40,000 people have been killed, the vast majority of them women and children. It is true that these figures are from the Gazan health ministry, which Israel claims to be controlled by Hamas, but they are widely accepted by Western experts, journalists, and observers.

Even if one accepts Israel’s claims that these attacks are aimed only at legitimate military targets, they are massive violations of the just war principle of “proportionality,” which holds that even legitimate attacks on military targets that unintentionally kill nearby civilians must ensure that such deaths are not out of proportion to the military value of the target. Unavoidably, whether or not such attacks are “proportionate” engenders much disagreement and debate. Still, some cases are clear. It is hard to imagine a more disproportionate action than Israel’s bringing down apartment houses because there are a few Hamas fighters or “leaders” in them.

But it gets worse: the Israeli siege and blockade of Gaza, which has been in effect for at least twenty years but has been dramatically intensified since the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians a year ago, is a prima facie war crime of the greatest magnitude since it harms only civilians. The siege blocks or holds to a bare minimum the delivery of food, water, medicine, fuel oil, and electricity to Gaza—but by Israel’s own estimates, Hamas is not affected because it has stored vast amounts of all these necessities of life in its underground caves and tunnels.

Several days before the publication of Walzer’s column, fifteen human rights and aid organizations issued a joint press release entitled “Israel’s siege now blocks 83% of food aid reaching Gaza, new data reveals.” Here are the main points from the study:

83% of required food aid does not make it into Gaza, up from 34% in 2023. This reduction means people in Gaza have gone from having an average of two meals a day to just one meal every other day. An estimated 50,000 children aged between 6 and 59 months urgently require treatment for malnutrition by the end of the year…

1.87 million people are in need of shelter with at least 60 percent of homes destroyed or damaged. Yet tents for around just 25,000 people have entered Gaza since May 2024.

A record-low average of 69 trucks per day entered Gaza in August 2024, compared to 500 per working day last year; which was already not enough to meet people’s needs. In August, more than 1 million people in southern and central Gaza did not receive any food rations.

Now, only 17 out of 36 hospitals remain partially functional. Critical infrastructure such as water networks, sanitation facilities, and bread mills have been razed to the ground.

The report also quoted Jolien Veldwijik, CARE Country Director in the West Bank and Gaza: “The situation was intolerable long before last October’s escalation and is beyond catastrophic now. Over 11 months, we have reached shocking levels of conflict, displacement, disease and hunger. Yet, aid is still not getting in.”

This was hardly the first report on what seventy-five years of Israeli attacks and sieges have done to the Palestinians. In his column, Walzer has nothing to say about them. However, in his book, Just and Unjust Wars, where he considers general principles—that is, divorced from the Israeli context—Walzer takes a very dim view of the morality of sieges. Indeed, the very title of the chapter in which he analyzes them is: “War Against Civilians: Sieges and Blockades.”

In this chapter, Walzer considers the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 72 AD. He writes: “Collective starvation is a bitter fate: parents and children, friends and lovers, must watch one another die, and the dying is terribly drawn out, physically and morally destructive long before it is over…it is the women who last longest in sieges, the young men who soonest fall into that deadly lethargy that precedes actual death…that is what a siege is like. Moreover, that is what it is meant to be like [emphasis Walzer’s].”

Aside from the problem of Israel’s methods, are its wars against Hamas and Hezbollah just? Walzer has no doubt about it, despite his criticism of Israel’s pager bombs. As he writes: “Condemning an act of war is not the same as condemning the war itself. Hamas and Hezbollah are fighting against Israel for an immoral and unjust purpose: the elimination of the Jewish state.”

But it is also true that it is unlikely that Hamas would exist, let alone control Gaza and make inroads in the West Bank if a political settlement had been reached at any point in this conflict. In my own 2020 book on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Mythologies Without End, I argue that the evidence is overwhelming that it has been Israeli policies and actions, not those of the Arab states or the Palestinians, that have been the main obstacle to a political settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Yet, it is true that the nature and scale of the Hamas October 7 attacks were horrific and that any nation would respond with armed force. Two things, however paradoxical they may seem, are true:

1) The Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians were in no way justified—and not only because attacks on civilians are never morally justifiable, but also because they are counter-productive. Every attack on Israeli civilians leads to ever-more extensive and merciless brutal responses.

2) Yet, it is simply preposterous not to connect seventy-five years of Israeli occupation, repression, economic warfare, deliberate impoverishment, assassinations, armed attacks, and general humiliation of the Palestinians to Hamas’s terrorism.

Initially, some observers gingerly raised this issue, typically saying that while there was no justification for the October 7 Hamas attacks, one also had to consider what was usually termed “the context.” But because even just carefully mentioning “the context” resulted in a storm of contempt and outrage from Israelis and “pro-Israeli” Americans, today that issue is rarely raised.

It is true, as Walzer argues, that “It is hard to imagine any country responding differently” to the Hamas attack and its stated intention to continue such attacks. Nonetheless, for Israel’s attempt to destroy Hamas to be truly considered a just war, Israel would have to have done the following:

1) Immediately and publicly agreed to the consensus two-state settlement, an end to Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and the removal of most of the existing ones, and an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with its capital in East Jerusalem.

2) Refrain from any punishment of the people of Gaza, with no bombing of apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, etc., and the end of the siege of Gaza.

3) Go after Hamas in its tunnels. Obviously, this would lead to more Israeli military casualties. However, armies are not allowed, either by international law or common morality, at least in principle, to kill innocent civilians in order to protect their own soldiers. 

Walzer agrees with this principle, both in his previous writing and The New York Times essay. He puts it this way: “The war that Hamas designed in Gaza is a grim illustration of the strategy of putting civilians at risk for political gain. Still, a military responding to this strategy has to do everything it can to avoid or minimize civilian casualties.”

In short, Walzer’s excessively mild criticism of the Israeli attack on Gaza effectively amounts to, at a minimum, obscurantism about the massive Israeli criminality. Those of us who admire Walzer’s moral philosophy are aghast at his long and repeated refusal to judge Israeli behavior in terms of that philosophy.

Jerome Slater is a professor (emeritus) of political science at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Mythologies Without End: The U.S. and the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1917-2020.

Image: Anas-Mohammed / Shutterstock.com.