Israel, Hamas, and Moral Asymmetry

by David Pan

Last week I attended a conference on “AI and the Law, on the Battlefield and in Cyberspace” organized by Academic Exchange and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas, Austin. During the conference we received some updates about the situation in Israel and the Israeli efforts to comply with international law in their war against Hamas. Using rules of engagement and battlefield procedures similar to U.S. practices in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israelis have been trying to balance their need to fight a terrorist enemy against legal and moral imperatives to protect noncombatants. Their approach contrasts sharply with the way Hamas attempts to both terrorize and murder Israelis on the one hand and to use Palestinians as human shields on the other hand. We might say that this is a “morally asymmetric” war because Hamas does not abide by any legal or moral scruples and in fact takes advantage of the fact that Israel does maintain such scruples in its own conduct. By placing its command posts and ammunition stores underneath civilian structures such as schools, mosques, and hospitals, Hamas, with the help of Iran, forces Israel to choose between pursuing its military goals and protecting civilians. The asymmetric military advantage that Hamas enjoys consists in the fact that it would be clearly useless for Israel to employ similar human shields because Hamas would have absolutely no hesitation in killing Israeli civilians.

This moral asymmetry goes to heart of what this war is all about, and the difference between Israel’s and Hamas’s two approaches to war requires the United States to help to defend at all costs both Israel and the kind of moral and legal order that it represents. But this war is also not an isolated event. The moral gulf between Israel and Hamas is the same gulf that separates Russia from Ukraine. While Ukraine continues to exercise restraint in pursuing only military targets, Russia has been engaged in a terror campaign against Ukrainian civilians with its missile barrages. We are entering into a dangerous new era of world politics in which the defenders of international law and the protection of civilians are being assaulted by state and non-state actors that ignore such moral and legal scruples in their quest to maintain and expand their power. They base their rule in mechanisms of terror both within their regimes and against its outside enemies. To the extent that this form of politics is expanding from Russia, China, and Iran to reach more and more parts of the globe, the United States will become increasingly isolated. In order to maintain its own long-term national security, the United States needs to support its allies in their heroic struggles to defend their own sovereignty. Israel and Ukraine are not simply defending themselves. They are also protecting our shared vision of international legal order against those who are attempting to turn the world into a very dark place.

Parallel to this military confrontation, though, there is also an ideological war. The way that Russia and Iran are trying to paint the ideological divide is in terms of civilization, Russia versus the West, or Islam versus Judaism. But in fact the divide is one that separates supporters of human rights and international law against opponents. As Sherman Jackson lays out in my September 8, 2023, podcast interview with him, Islam has a strong tradition of human rights that goes back centuries. Today, the key to the long-term struggle for human rights will involve military confrontations like the ones with Hamas and Russia as well as theological and ideological ones over the meaning of traditions such as Islam. You can listen to my podcast with Sherman Jackson here. His essay on “Islam and the Promotion of Human Rights” in Telos 203 is available here.

Topics: Israel Initiative