Professor Louis Rene Beres Lucidly Explains Why Israel's Justified Military Responses Are Not Terrorism Even if Civilians Are Killed

For several decades, Professor Louis Rene Beres has brilliantly explained international law to the general public in a manner devoid of excess legal jargon. I have previously cited his commentary regarding Israel's war versus Hamas and his application of the law of war to Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

In "True foundations of anti-Israel terrorism," Beres provides a detailed analysis that distinguishes between the war crimes committed by Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah versus the legitimate military tactics used by Israel:

Listening to the protest slogans shrieked by jihadist supporters in United States universities, a core conclusion should emerge: Witless banalities can never represent the meaningful expectations of international law. Under this universal law, whether codified or customary, one person's terrorist can never be another one’s "freedom-fighter." Though it is correct that insurgencies can sometimes be judged lawful or even law-enforcing, they must still conform to discoverable rules of humanitarian international law.

Whenever an insurgent group resorts to unjust means, its actions constitute terrorism. Even if adversarial claims of a hostile controlling power could be taken as plausible or acceptable (e.g., false Palestinian Arab claims concerning an alleged Israeli "occupation"), corollary claims of entitlement to "any means necessary" would remain false. Hague Convention No. IV states: "The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited."

What about Israel and Gaza at this grievous moment in time? To clarify any seeming contradictions, though Israel's bombardments of Gaza are still producing multiple Palestinian casualties, the legal responsibility for these harms still lies entirely with Hamas/Iranian "perfidy" ("human shields"). In law, there is an ineradicably consequential difference between raping and murdering innocent celebrants at a public music festival and the lethal consequences of a state's indispensable self-defense operations.

International law is never just a narrowly intuitive set of standards. Such law always has determinable form and decipherable content. It can never be casually invented or reinvented by enemy states or terror groups to justify variously selective interests. This is most notable when inhumane jihadist terror-violence targets a designated victim state's fragile civilian populations...

Under authoritative international law, terrorist crimes mandate universal cooperation in apprehension and punishment. As punishers of "grave breaches" under international law, all states are required to search out and "extradite or prosecute" individual terrorists. Under no circumstances are states permitted to regard terrorist "martyrs" as lawful "freedom fighters."

International law is emphatically binding for the United States, which incorporates this set of norms as the "supreme law of the land" at Article 6 of the Constitution, and also for Israel, which remains guided by immutably Jewish principles of a Higher Law. As a further matter of history, legal authority for the early American republic was derived in large part from William Blackstone's Commentaries, a magisterial work that owes much of its clarifying content to the peremptory or "jus cogens" principles of Torah.

The Biden-Harris administration has disregarded the legal obligations Beres describes in the last paragraph quoted above, notwithstanding the recent belated announcement that the United States has pressed charges against Hamas leaders for planning, supporting, and perpetrating the October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack against Israel. That announcement could be termed "too little, too late," because Hamas leaders have already killed many hostages who could have been saved had Biden-Harris unequivocally called upon Hamas to surrender, and because Hamas interpreted the Biden-Harris moral equivalency policy to mean that Hamas can win the war against Israel with American help.

International law is often invoked by people who are ill-informed--or deliberately deceptive--and who seek to demonize Israel while exonerating Iran and Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups. If such anti-Zionist and antisemitic slanders were not so dangerous, it would be amusing to observe people who first whine (falsely) that Israel is carpet bombing civilian populations, and then whine that Israel is targeting Hezbollah-issued pagers.

What do these people want, for Jews to just meekly go to the slaughterhouse without fighting back? Sadly, that is exactly what they want, with self-proclaimed "progressives" forming a bizarre "useful idiot" alliance with Islamists.

Beres provides an essential antidote to the nonsense spewed by Israel's enemies. Additionally, Elizabeth Samson analyzed the legality of the synchronized explosions of Hezbollah's pagers and walkie-talkies:

The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), to which Israel is party, addresses the question of intent in military operations and defines relevant terms. Protocol III of the CCW prohibits the use of weapons primarily designed to set fire to objects or cause burn injuries against civilians, outside an incident that has a clear military objective, and Amended Protocol II covers booby-traps and improvised explosive devices and distinguishes between military and civilian targets.

CCW Amended Protocol II, Article 2, defines "booby-trap" as a device which can kill or injure, and which functions unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an apparently harmless object or performs an apparently safe act, and "other devices" to include manually-emplaced munitions and devices such as improvised explosive devices designed to kill, injure or damage and which are actuated manually, by remote control, or automatically after a lapse of time. Here, an example of an illicit booby-trap device would be the explosives disguised by the Soviet Union to look like toys that they then dropped on Afghan villages in the 1980s to kill and maim Afghan children...

Israel's targeting of Hezbollah through pagers—purchased by Hezbollah for terror operatives to use in waging an asymmetric war—were solely "military objectives" and not "civilian objects" in accordance with the definitions outlined in the CCW.

Incidental loss of civilian life, while unfortunate, is the byproduct of a terror group choosing to operate among innocents. Waging war from civilian territory leaves those who seek to fight terrorism little choice but to fight on the terrain the terrorists lay out. Hezbollah has made all Lebanon its battlefield, without regard for civilian life. Israel has no choice but to bring the war home to them, and it did so legally. Diplomats and UN officials demean themselves and the organizations they represent when they purposely ignore law and dishonestly and for political purposes only betray its letter and spirit.