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.

Professor Louis Rene Beres' Insights About Applying International Law Principles to Israel's War Against Hamas

Hamas' October 7, 2023 mass casualty attack in Israel displayed the barbarism at the heart of radical Islam. Any attempt to assert a moral equivalency between Hamas' war crimes/crimes against humanity, and Israel's restrained, lawful, and justified military response is obscene and unfounded. Unfortunately, self-proclaimed "progressives" continue to prove their moral bankruptcy by asserting this false equivalency, in the process demonstrating that their true agenda is not "peace and love" but rather the overthrow of Western civilization.

Professor Louis Rene Beres often uses the apt phrase, "International law is not a suicide pact," which in this context means that Israel does not have to consent to being destroyed merely because other parties do not approve of her methods of dealing with Hamas' depravity and violence. More specifically, Professor Beres explains why Israel's response--including the recent targeted assassination of Hamas commander Marwan Issa--is fully justified under the principles of international law.

The entire article is well worth reading. Here are several of Professor Beres' key points, in his own words:

1) "Under international law which is binding upon all sovereign states, terrorism represents a crime that should be prevented and must be punished. As was learned originally from Roman law and Jewish law (Torah), a universal rule exists. This 'peremptory' rule affirms the core principle of 'No crime without a punishment,' or Nullum crimen sine poena. It can be discovered, among other sources, at the London Charter of August 8, 1945. This is the founding document of the post-war Nuremberg Tribunal."

2) "In formal jurisprudence, terrorists are known as hostes humani generis or 'common enemies of humankind.' While the world legal system allows or even encourages certain insurgencies in matters of 'self-determination,' there is nothing about these matters that can ever justify deliberate attacks on civilians. In this connection, it is important to remember that an integral part of all criminal law is the underlying presence of mens rea or 'criminal intent.'

On this point, there can be no reasonable comparison of Marwan Issa's deliberate mass murder of Israeli noncombatants and the unintended civilian harms now being suffered in Gaza. As a matter of law, responsibility for such ongoing harms falls entirely upon the 'perfidious' behavior (i.e., 'human shields') of Hamas and Iran, and not on Israeli forces acting on behalf of legitimate self-defense."

3) "Under the law of war, even where an insurgent use of force has supportable 'just cause,' it must still fight with 'just means.' Accordingly, the vapid phrase 'One man's terrorist is another’s freedom fighter' is never more than an empty witticism."

4) "The willfully indiscriminate nature of jihadist terrorist operations (not just Hamas) is well documented. Such intentional blurring of the lines between lawful and unlawful targets is rooted in certain generic principles of 'holy war.' Several years ago, an oft-repeated remark by Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, then a prominent Muslim cleric in London, explained core doctrinal linkages between Islamic terror and 'holy war:'

Said the Sheikh, 'We don't make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents. Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever (a Jew or Christian) has no value. It has no sanctity.'

International law is not a suicide pact, especially when an adversary remains indifferent to its unassailable claims. As was learned yet again on October 7, 2023, jihadist attackers add gratuitously barbarous effects to their corrosive primal ideologies. At 'bottom line,' these are belief systems that gleefully embrace the sacrificial slaughter of 'unbelievers.' To wit, for Hamas and related terror groups, 'military objectives' have 'normally' included elementary schools, bomb shelters, ice-cream parlors, civilian bus stops and elderly pedestrians. In law, these perpetrators ought never to be called 'militants.' Whatever their alleged cause, they are criminals of the irredeemably worst sort."

Professor Beres concludes his analysis by pointing out that the nations of the world should be helping Israel instead of condemning her:

William Blackstone's 18th century Commentaries, the foundation of United States jurisprudence, explain that because international law is an integral part of each individual state's "common law," all states are "expected to aid and enforce the law of nations." This must be accomplished "by inflicting an adequate punishment upon the offenses against that universal law." Derivatively, by its precisely targeted removal of Hamas terrorist leader Marwan Issa, Israel acted not in violation of the law of nations, but in its indispensable enforcement. Presently, this neglected clarification of global justice should not be undervalued or overlooked.