One-Sided Rules of War
By Steve Huntley
October 29, 2023
We’re hearing a lot of talk these days
about the rules of war. All of it is aimed at Israel. No one is calling on
Hamas to follow those rules.
There’s a simple reason for that.
No one — no one — thinks Hamas will do
anything other than what it always does. And what it did on Oct. 7. The music
concert massacre. The murders of civilians from babies in cradles to
grandmothers. The rapes. The mutilation and burning of bodies. The beheadings.
The hostage-taking of civilians, including 20 children, one of them in a
wheelchair. The use of Palestinians as human shields.
No one expects Hamas to obey
civilization’s standard for conducting warfare. No one even thinks of calling
on Hamas to do so.
But it’s a different case with the
Jewish state. Israel is getting a lot of, what’s the right word — advice,
guidance, cautions, veiled warnings? — whatever the word, Israel is hearing
from various corners about its conduct of the war against Hamas.
Make sure to avoid civilian
casualties.
Don’t do anything that would be
“disproportionate.”
Don’t let “rage” affect your
decisions, as President Biden put it in talking about the need to adhere to the
rules of civilized warfare.
Delay the ground invasion of Gaza in
hopes of getting more hostages out now that four have been released, say some
European nations and the U.S. government.
Others, such as the Democrat squad in
the U.S. House of Representatives, aka the congressional antisemitic caucus,
demand a cease-fire.
All this is coming from people who
bear no responsibility for protecting the citizens of Israel.
I mean, who else is going to step up
to make Hamas pay for the terrible war crimes, the pogrom of Oct. 7?
Will the International Court of
Justice based at The Hague issue an indictment and send a posse of steely
lawmen into the Gaza Strip to arrest the Hamas war criminals and bring them to
justice?
Dream on.
Will the United Nations assemble an
army, equip it and dispatch it to Gaza City to wage the unbelievably complex
and dangerous mission of urban warfare necessary to bring retribution to these
terrorists?
There’s a reason the UN is called the
Useless Nations. Even worse, the UN secretary general tried to justify the
Hamas savagery of Oct. 7
Will the European Union call up
soldiers from its member nations to rout Hamas out of the Gaza Strip?
Hell, European countries can’t even
handle backing the Ukraine war on their own without the spine-enforcing support
of the United States.
And what about all the Arab nations
that are so, so concerned about the fate of the innocent Palestinians in Gaza?
Will they tell the Israelis to stand aside while their armies invade Gaza to
protect civilians and capture the Hamas terrorists?
A fantasy beyond the imagination of
any sane human being. This is true even though Hamas is funded, armed and
advised by Shia Iran, the committed enemy of the Sunni Arab world.
No, Israel knows — as it has
tragically learned time and again — that only it will step up to protect Jews,
only it will fight to save Jewish lives, only it will endure the terrors of war
to combat a wretched bestial organization that in its charter is dedicated to
genocide and mass murder of Jews.
While Israel has assimilated the
lessons of history, incredibly too many in the world have not — even after the
horrors of the Holocaust.
Worse, as we have seen, in some of our
most esteemed institutions like Harvard, UPenn, Columbia and other elite
universities ruled by extreme left thought, in some Muslim immigrant
communities resistant to Western ideas of civilized warfare and even in the
halls of Congress, the cancer of antisemitism is alive and well — and
metastasizing.
No one but Israel is going to fight
and bleed to protect Jews.
To his credit, Biden has committed
America to providing military assistance to Israel and he has dispatched U.S.
naval forces to Mideast waters with the goal of preventing Iran and other bad
actors from widening the genocidal war against Israel.
Some have seen weakness on Biden’s
part because the leaders of Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority
canceled a summit with him during his recent visit to the region. I understand
that argument.
But it masks a greater, more serious,
more depressing truth. These Arab leaders have never even started preparing
their populations for a real, lasting peace with Israel. Now they tremble in
fear that anger in their streets from people fed lies for decades about Israel
will threaten their rule.
That fear was intensified to the point
of canceling the summit after Hamas falsely accused Israel of bombing a Gaza
hospital. It should have been no surprise that intelligence and evidence
quickly revealed it was an errant Islamic Jihad missile that fell into the
hospital parking lot.
The news media should be engaging in
serious soul searching after so many of our prestigious newspaper, broadcast
and cable news outlets accepted uncritically and published/broadcast an
accusation against Israel from an organization whose fundamental, essential,
core belief is that the only good Jew is a dead Jew.
That’s the neighborhood that Israel
must live in.
The Jewish state needs no
sanctimonious advice, smug guidance or veiled warnings about how to defend its
people.
And what does proportionality actually
mean in war?
Hamas fired thousands of unguided
missiles into Israel with the obvious intention of killing Israeli civilians.
Would it be proportionate for Israel to fire the same number of unguided
missiles into Gaza?
Would it be proportionate for Israeli
troops to rape Palestinian women? To target babies for murder? Mutilate and
burn bodies? Capture civilians as hostages?
That would be doing exactly the same
thing as Hamas did. Isn’t that the very definition of a proportional response?
Do exactly the same thing and in the same numbers as Hamas did?
Tit for tat, proportionality.
The Geneva Conventions adopted after
World War II outlawed that kind of proportionality. Hamas has shown time and
again it doesn’t care about those rules of war, its only standards of war are
savagery, barbarism, cruelty and brutality.
But the Israelis are a civilized,
moral people and they are not going to deliberately violate the conventions of
warfare. They will do all that they can to minimize civilian casualties, to
follow the civilized principles of conducting a necessary, just war.
They don’t need any moralizing advice
or pious warnings about the battle they are fighting.
And when in history has any nation
fought a war agreeing with recommendations to tie its hands behind its back?
Did anyone tell the Red Army to be
sure to protect innocent German civilians when it unleashed its soldiers on a
starving Berlin in 1945? An estimated almost 2 million German women in Berlin
and elsewhere were raped by the Red Army. The Nazis had waged war on Russian
civilians. The Soviets waged war on German civilians. Proportionality.
Despite the prospect of civilian
deaths, America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan for the just, righteous
reason of saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of GIs who faced the
forbidding, bloody challenge of invading the home islands to end World War II.
And don’t forget that Japan waged war on civilians. Exhibit No. 1: the Rape of
Nanking.
And even after the terrible punishment
of atomic bombs, fanatics within the Japanese military wanted to fight on.
That’s the kind of fanaticism Israel
faces in its enemy Hamas, terrorists so maniacal that they use Palestinian
civilians as human shields. So rabid they don’t care how high Palestinian
bodies pile up. To them, Palestinian deaths are propaganda fodder in their war
for Israel’s extinction.
Today’s reality is this: Hamas will
keep flouting civilization’s rules of war, keep committing atrocities, keep
sacrificing Palestinian lives as human shields. And the world will keep
self-righteously wagging its finger at Israel. And worse — in academia, in far
left political circles, in Muslim immigrant communities — apologists for Hamas
will keep excusing and justifying its war crimes, its massacres, its rapes, its
ritual of human sacrifice of Palestinian civilians.
War is hell, as Sherman said. It
always has been and remains so.
Just ask the Ukrainians brutalized by
Vladimir Putin’s armies. Just ask the people of Sudan, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and
other nations that have suffered warfare in recent years. Just ask the people
of Mosul where 10,000 civilians died in 2016 in a nine-month campaign by Iraqi
troops, backed by U.S. air support ordered by President Barack Obama, to defeat
Isis.
And just ask the survivors of the
massacres, the pogroms of Oct. 7.
War is hell and no civilized nation
enters one for any reason other than protecting its citizens.
That’s what Israel is doing. It didn’t
seek this fight. It was attacked by the barbarians of Hamas. And it must
exercise its best judgment on how to fight the genocidal fanatics of Hamas. It
will conduct this fight by the rules of war as decreed by 21st century
civilization.
It must fight this war to win and it
doesn’t need lectures on how to do that.