Imprimir

Jerusalem – Palestinian terror traditionally has led Israel to adopt countermeasures varying in degree of force, risk and controversy. By tactically blending terrorists into the civilian population, Palestinian terror organizations too often have placed Israel in the uneasy position of having to risk civilian life and injury when targeting the terrorists.

This vintage tactic was common during the Lebanon War and has been typical during the current Al-Aqsa intifada. But whether Israel responded indiscriminately, as in the 1996 Kfar Kana incident, or by exercising discrimination, as in its current policy of liquidations, the international community consistently has erupted in a massive outcry.

Most notable are the various human-rights organizations that argue that by deliberately assassinating terrorists, Israel is violating one of the most basic human rights: the right to life. Given that this right is ensconced in several important international documents, among them the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Israel is thereby presented as a violator of international law. This is pure nonsense, for such a fundamental international norm also clearly encompasses the right of Israeli citizens to live free from the threat of death or maming.

Admittedly, the right to self-defense may necessarily entail killing and injuring other human beings. Israel always has had to walk a fine line when dealing with terrorism, balancing the imperative effectively to fight it with the restraints of international law and morality.

But the same dilemma has preoccupied mankind for millennia. Using Roman concepts of war as well as the ethics of early Christian moralists, St. Thomas Aquinas articulated an idea in the 13th Century that today we call the Modern Just War Doctrine. This doctrine delineates the framework within which war itself is morally permissible and then draws perimeters around ethical war conduct. Since no fair-minded observer would dare question Israel’s need to exercise self-defense in the face of Palestinian aggression, let us focus on the second part of the doctrine.

As Georgetown University professor William O’Brien explains, war-conduct doctrine comprises two central elements: proportion and discrimination.

• A military action must be proportionate to both the strategic and political ends involved. Assuming that Israel’s primary goal is to quell Palestinian terror and motivate the Palestinians to return to the negotiating table, then the targeting of certain terrorist leaders for assassination is appropriate. In fact, the IDF has been highly measured in its responses. If not, Ramallah would be no more than a rubble today.
• Discrimination is also particularly well served by Israel’s assassination policy. Considering the other available options – all collective actions, such as indiscriminate shelling of population centers or economic closures of entire areas – the chosen course of selective liquidation should be commended for its precision and restraint.

Assassination itself is not necessarily a crime, depending on the context — especially when that context is retributive. Punishment, as Purdue University professor Louis Rene Beres points out, is actually a sacred principle of international law. But «no crime without a punishment» takes on particular validity when the crime involved is as egregious as terrorism.

As Beres reminds us, when the Nuremberg Tribunal was established in 1945, it affirmed that «so far from it being unjust to punish [an offender], it would be unjust if his wrongs were allowed to go unpunished.» By standards of international law, terrorists are known as common enemies of mankind. Defending the right to life of this kind of criminal when he is devoting himself to denying others the ability to exercise that same right simply doesn’t follow. In fact, it is obscene.

With remarkable hypocrisy, the same enlightened members of the international community that urged Israel to take “risks for peace» and embark on the dangerous Oslo road – whose final destination was war -condemn Israel for defending itself against the Palestinian violence that they are always so willing to justify. This, and not Israel’s legitimate assassination policy, is the true immorality.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Jerusalem.