To justify the State of Israel’s current indiscriminate killing of women and children in Gaza, the Israeli regime’s supporters generally put forward a one-line explanation: “Israel has a right to defend itself.” This simple-minded incantation is deployed as if it is the final word. It is meant to communicate this idea: “some people from Gaza killed some Israeli citizens in October 2023. Therefore, the Israeli state can morally and legally kill any person in Gaza indiscriminately.”
Women and children are being starved as a result of Israel’s bombing campaign? It doesn’t matter because “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Many of the people targeted had nothing to do with the October 2023 attack? It doesn’t matter because “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
In modern warfare, where modern weaponry means entire cities are leveled and whole populations can be wiped off the map, this sort of thinking is despicable. Tel Aviv is hardly alone in this sort of thinking, however. Those who fund the Israeli carpet bombing—the American state—has a long history of behaving this way. In Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, Americans routinely targeted noncombatants relying on lazy claims that amount to little more than saying that Japanese children deserved to be firebombed because they were born Japanese. Did those children have anything to do with the attack on Pearl Harbor? It doesn’t matter because “America has a right to defend itself.”
As the historian Ralph Raico points out in his lecture “The World at War,”Americans had not yet become so morally depraved before the Second World War. Referring to American glee over the firebombing of Tokyo, which Robert McNamara says may have killed 100,000 Japanese civilians in one night, Raico says:
I can’t imagine anyone in America in 1914 who would have greeted with joy the destruction of a Japanese city and the death of a hundred thousand people. You ask anybody in America. You ask Theodore Roosevelt himself! That old sissy probably would faint. You ask anybody, “Would you will the total annihilation of a Japanese city?” “What are you talking about? Are you crazy? What do you mean annihilation of a city? What are we, Tamerlane? What are we, Genghis Khan?”
In the twenty-first century, however, it doesn’t matter how many cities we obliterate because we have apparently moved beyond the idea of morality in war. There are no limits because “Israel/America has a right to defend itself.”
In the past, however, more civilized Europeans attempted in a variety of ways to restrain states during wars. Ideologically and philosophically, one of the more influential ideals for conduct in warfare has been so-called Just War Theory. One notable aspect of Just War Theory is that it limits which conflicts can be considered morally defensible while also limiting the behavior of states while fighting a “just war.” Many of the details behind Just War Theory vary over time, but International Relations scholar Vincent Ferrara summarizes it this way:
- A just war can only be waged as a last resort. All non-violent options must be exhausted before the use of force can be justified.
- A war is just only if it is waged by a legitimate authority. Even just causes cannot be served by actions taken by individuals or groups who do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever the society and outsiders to the society deem legitimate.
- A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered. For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered to be a just cause (although the justice of the cause is not sufficient--see the next point). Further, a just war can only be fought with “right” intentions: the only permissible objective of a just war is to redress the injury.
- A war can only be just if it is fought with a reasonable chance of success. Deaths and injury incurred in a hopeless cause are not morally justifiable.
- The ultimate goal of a just war is to re-establish peace. More specifically, the peace established after the war must be preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the war had not been fought.
- The violence used in the war must be proportional to the injury suffered. States are prohibited from using force not necessary to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered.
- The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.
It is also notable that many advocates of Just War Theory state that all of these conditions must be met for a war to be just. That is, once “our side” violates even one of these conditions, “our side” has given up its moral legitimacy as a belligerent.
Does Anyone Actually Care about Just War Theory?
Looking over this rather extensive list, many will say to themselves: “wow that’s a long list. In fact, it’s much too long, and if we stuck to that list virtually no war would be considered a just war.”
That, of course, is the idea. Just War Theory strongly suggests that nearly modern wars are conducted in a way that is morally indefensible.
Does anyone actually care about Just War Theory, though? In an era when one’s morality is more dictated by nationalism and political ideology, rather than by one’s religious convictions, we find that not even Christians seem to take this seriously.
In spite of the fact that, historically speaking, Just War Theory was central to Christian political thinking, many modern Christians are likely to regard it as good “in theory” but not really worth the risk if it means “our side” is less likely to win.
On Radio Rothbard this week, Eric Sammons, the editor-in-chief of the longstanding Catholic magazine Crisis, joins me to discuss the state of foreign-policy thinking among Catholics. Sammons explains how, even though Just War Theory continues to be explicitly endorsed by the Catholic hierarchy, the Catholic rank and file either doesn’t know about it, or doesn’t care.
As Sammons explains, Catholics have become beholden to modern political ideologies that are quite in conflict with the historical and traditional political ideals of their own church.
Even the old Catholic Left, which had been so reliably antiwar during the mid-twentieth century, as largely disappeared as the American Left doubled down on supporting whatever new war Obama, Biden, and Clinton foisted upon the American people, and on Washington’s foreign victims.
As Sammons notes, however, there is reason for hope. Among conservative Catholics there is a rising skepticism of the regime’s prowar narratives and a decided lack of enthusiasm about the state’s ongoing calls for ever more support for American intervention across the globe. Many younger Christians appear to be less gullible that their parents and grandparents who simply deferred to supporting whatever the American state said was the next great military crusade.
Listen to the podcast:
