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Why Palestinian Terrorism Is Never Legal or Justified: A Fact-Based Retort

Partygoers at the Supernova Psy-Trance Festival who filmed the events that unfolded on Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: Yes Studios

In a world of international anarchy, law-based counter-terrorism is never just about strategy, tactics, or doctrine. Whatever an insurgency’s specific features, this critical arena of national security planning should remain intellect-based and logic-centered.

For Israel in the Islamic Middle East, this means an ongoing awareness of enemy concepts of death. It signifies, among other things, that Israel’s counter-terrorism planners ought continuously to bear in mind the primacy of an historically under-examined form of geopolitical power.

This neglected form of power, abstract but incomparable, is “power over death” — meaning, in what manner should have jihadi promises of immortality been affected by the Assad regime collapse in Syriaand the still-unresolved Gaza War?

“An immortal person,” says Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, “is a contradiction in terms.” Accordingly, any promise of immortality to jihadi terrorists will be densely problematic. It will, however, still resonate among those many insurgents who routinely prefer mystery to reason.

Assuming that others use decision-making rationality often make sense in explaining world politics, but there remain enough significant exceptions to temper any mundane generalities.

If Israel’s national decision-makers were to survey the prevailing configuration of global jihadi terrorist organizations (Sunni and Shiite) from a suitably- augmented analytic standpoint, the nexus between “martyrdom operations” and “life-everlasting” could become more conspicuous and understandable.

At that point, Israel’s national security planners could begin to place themselves in a better position to deter murderous hostage-takers and suicide-bombers, in microcosm (i.e., as individual human terrorists) and in macrocosm (i.e., as law-violating organizations or states that support the terrorist microcosm).

Those jihadi insurgents who seek to justify gratuitously violent attacks on Israelis in the name of “martyrdom” are acting contrary to codified and customary international law.

All insurgents, even those who passionately claim “just cause,” must still satisfy longstanding jurisprudential limits on permissible targets and levels of violence. Moreover, as a binding matter of law, such limits can never be tempered by any actively contending claims of religious faith. Under law, Palestinian claims of insurgency “by any means necessary” remain nothing more than an empty witticism.

Under established rules, even the allegedly “sacred” rights of insurgency always exclude any deliberate targeting of civilians or any intentional use of force to inflict unnecessary suffering. When Hamas terrorists kidnapped and beheaded Israeli infants on October 7, 2023, they were acting not on behalf of sovereignty or self-determination, but rather to cultivate the grotesque pleasures of a lascivious barbarism.

Law and strategy are interrelated. At the same time, they remain analytically distinct. The legal “bottom line” is unambiguous: Violence becomes terrorism whenever “political” insurgents murder or maim noncombatants, whether with guns, knives, bombs or automobiles. Always irrelevant to assessments of “just means” (jus in bello) is whether the expressed cause of terror-violence is just or unjust (jus ad bellum). Under the universal “law of nations,” unjust means used to fight for allegedly just ends are still law-breaking ipso facto.

Sometimes, Israel’s martyrdom-seeking jihadi foes advance the supposedly legal argument of tu quoque. This argument stipulates that because “the other side” is guilty of similar, equivalent or even greater criminality, “our side” is innocent of any wrongdoing.

Jurisprudentially, any such argument is disingenuous and incorrect, especially after landmark legal judgments by the Nuremberg (Germany) and Far East (Japan) ad hoc tribunals. Historically, tu quoque is always an immutably discredited posture.

For conventional armies and insurgent forces, the right to use military force can never supplant “peremptory” rules of humanitarian international law. Nonetheless, without a scintilla of law-based evidence, supporters of jihadi terror-violence against Israeli noncombatants continuously insist that “ends justify means.”

Leaving aside the ordinary ethical standards by which any such argument should be dismissed on its face, ends can never justify means in the law of armed conflict. Indeed, there can be no authoritative argument against this civilizing affirmation.

Witless banalities of politics ought never be taken as valid expectations of international law. In such law, whether codified or customary, one person’s terrorist can never be another’s “freedom-fighter.”

It’s really not complicated. Whenever an insurgent group resorts to unjust means, its actions constitute terrorism. Even if adversarial claims of a hostile controlling power could be plausible or acceptable (e.g., relentless Palestinian claims concerning an Israeli “occupation”), corollary claims of entitlement to “any means necessary” remain false.

Recalling Hague Convention No. IV: “The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited.”

What about Israeli attacks on Gaza targets? Though Israel’s bombardments of Gaza are spawned multiple Palestinian casualties, the legal responsibility for these harms lay entirely with Hamas “perfidy” or “human shields.” While Palestinian casualties were always unwanted, inadvertent and unintentional, Israeli civilian deaths and injuries were always the result of jihadi criminal intent or “mens rea.”

International law does not provide an intuitive or subjective set of standards.  This law has determinable form and content. Therefore, it can never be casually invented or reinvented by terror groups to justify selective adversarial interests. This is especially the case when inhumane terror-violence intentionally targets a designated victim state’s most fragile and vulnerable civilians. Murdering captive infants is never defensible. Never.

National liberation” movements that fail to meet the test of just means can never be protected as lawful or legitimate in themselves. Even if relevant law were to accept the questionable argument that jihadi terror groups had fulfilled all valid criteria of “national liberation,” these groups would still fail to satisfy equally significant jurisprudential standards of distinctionproportionality, and military necessity.

These standards were specifically applied to insurgent or sub-state organizations by the common Article 3 of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and (additionally) by the two 1977 Protocols to these Conventions.

There is more. Standards of “humanity” remain binding upon all combatants by virtue of the broader norms of customary and conventional international law, including Article 1 of the Preamble to the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907. This rule, commonly called the “Martens Clause,” makes “all persons” responsible for the “laws of humanity” and for associated “dictates of public conscience.” There can be no exceptions to this universal responsibility.

Under international law, terrorist crimes mandate universal cooperation in both apprehension and punishment. As punishers of “grave breaches” under international law, all states are expected to search out and prosecute or extradite individual terrorists. This is emphatically true for the United States, which incorporates international law as the “supreme law of the land” at Article 6 of the Constitution.

For the foreseeable future, jihadi “martyrs” could present an incrementally existential threat to Israel. If these criminals should ever get their hands on usable fissile materials, however, this threat could become more immediately existential. This does not mean that terrorists would necessarily require a “chain-reaction” nuclear explosive, but only the essential ingredients for an advanced radiation dispersal device.

In a worst case scenario, jihadi use of radiation dispersal weapons against Israel could spur Iran into protracted and enlarged military conflict with Israel. At that unpredictable point, Israel’s policy considerations of adversarial “last things” could become all-important.

In essence, for Israel, a jihadist enemy that links terror-violence to faith-based hopes of immortality could pose an incomparable threat. To suitably deter this fearsome peril, Israel’s national security planners should more expressly examine all strategic, geographic, and legal dimensions of the problem. For these science-based planners, jihadi searches for “power over death” ought immediately to become a subject of highest policy urgency.

Prof. Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and scholarly articles dealing with international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism. In Israel, Prof. Beres was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon). His 12th and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed., 2018). 

The post Why Palestinian Terrorism Is Never Legal or Justified: A Fact-Based Retort first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Israel to Issue 54,000 Call-Up Notices to Ultra-Orthodox Students

Haredi Jewish men look at the scene of an explosion at a bus stop in Jerusalem, Israel, on Nov. 23, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Ammar Awad

Israel’s military said it would issue 54,000 call-up notices to ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students following a Supreme Court ruling mandating their conscription and amid growing pressure from reservists stretched by extended deployments.

The Supreme Court ruling last year overturned a decades-old exemption for ultra-Orthodox students, a policy established when the community comprised a far smaller segment of the population than the 13 percent it represents today.

Military service is compulsory for most Israeli Jews from the age of 18, lasting 24-32 months, with additional reserve duty in subsequent years. Members of Israel’s 21 percent Arab population are mostly exempt, though some do serve.

A statement by the military spokesperson confirmed the orders on Sunday just as local media reported legislative efforts by two ultra-Orthodox parties in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition to craft a compromise.

The exemption issue has grown more contentious as Israel’s armed forces in recent years have faced strains from simultaneous engagements with Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, and Iran.

Ultra-Orthodox leaders in Netanyahu’s brittle coalition have voiced concerns that integrating seminary students into military units alongside secular Israelis, including women, could jeopardize their religious identity.

The military statement promised to ensure conditions that respect the ultra-Orthodox way of life and to develop additional programs to support their integration into the military. It said the notices would go out this month.

The post Israel to Issue 54,000 Call-Up Notices to Ultra-Orthodox Students first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Influential Far-Right Minister Lashes out at Netanyahu Over Gaza War Policy

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends an inauguration event for Israel’s new light rail line for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, in Petah Tikva, Israel, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen

Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich sharply criticized on Sunday a cabinet decision to allow some aid into Gaza as a “grave mistake” that he said would benefit the terrorist group Hamas.

Smotrich also accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of failing to ensure that Israel’s military is following government directives in prosecuting the war against Hamas in Gaza. He said he was considering his “next steps” but stopped short of explicitly threatening to quit the coalition.

Smotrich’s comments come a day before Netanyahu is due to hold talks in Washington with President Donald Trump on a US-backed proposal for a 60-day Gaza ceasefire.

“… the cabinet and the Prime Minister made a grave mistake yesterday in approving the entry of aid through a route that also benefits Hamas,” Smotrich said on X, arguing that the aid would ultimately reach the Islamist group and serve as “logistical support for the enemy during wartime”.

The Israeli government has not announced any changes to its aid policy in Gaza. Israeli media reported that the government had voted to allow additional aid to enter northern Gaza.

The prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The military declined to comment.

Israel accuses Hamas of stealing aid for its own fighters or to sell to finance its operations, an accusation Hamas denies. Gaza is in the grip of a humanitarian catastrophe, with conditions threatening to push nearly a half a million people into famine within months, according to U.N. estimates.

Israel in May partially lifted a nearly three-month blockade on aid. Two Israeli officials said on June 27 the government had temporarily stopped aid from entering north Gaza.

PRESSURE

Public pressure in Israel is mounting on Netanyahu to secure a permanent ceasefire, a move opposed by some hardline members of his right-wing coalition. An Israeli team left for Qatar on Sunday for talks on a possible Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal.

Smotrich, who in January threatened to withdraw his Religious Zionism party from the government if Israel agreed to a complete end to the war before having achieved its objectives, did not mention the ceasefire in his criticism of Netanyahu.

The right-wing coalition holds a slim parliamentary majority, although some opposition lawmakers have offered to support the government from collapsing if a ceasefire is agreed.

The post Influential Far-Right Minister Lashes out at Netanyahu Over Gaza War Policy first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Australia Police Charge Man Over Alleged Arson on Melbourne Synagogue

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks to the media during a press conference with New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon at the Australian Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, Aug. 16, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Tracey Nearmy

Australian police have charged a man in connection with an alleged arson attack on a Melbourne synagogue with worshippers in the building, the latest in a series of incidents targeting the nation’s Jewish community.

There were no injuries to the 20 people inside the East Melbourne Synagogue, who fled from the fire on Friday night. Firefighters extinguished the blaze in the capital of Victoria state.

Australia has experienced several antisemitic incidents since the start of the Israel-Gaza war in October 2023.

Counter-terrorism detectives late on Saturday arrested the 34-year-old resident of Sydney, capital of neighboring New South Wales, charging him with offenses including criminal damage by fire, police said.

“The man allegedly poured a flammable liquid on the front door of the building and set it on fire before fleeing the scene,” police said in a statement.

The suspect, whom the authorities declined to identify, was remanded in custody after his case was heard at Melbourne Magistrates Court on Sunday and no application was made for bail, the Australian Broadcasting Corp reported.

Authorities are investigating whether the synagogue fire was linked to a disturbance on Friday night at an Israeli restaurant in Melbourne, in which one person was arrested for hindering police.

The restaurant was extensively damaged, according to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, an umbrella group for Australia’s Jews.

It said the fire at the synagogue, one of Melbourne’s oldest, was set as those inside sat down to Sabbath dinner.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog went on X to “condemn outright the vile arson attack targeting Jews in Melbourne’s historic and oldest synagogue on the Sabbath, and on an Israeli restaurant where people had come to enjoy a meal together”.

“This is not the first such attack in Australia in recent months. But it must be the last,” Herzog said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the incidents as “severe hate crimes” that he viewed “with utmost gravity.” “The State of Israel will continue to stand alongside the Australian Jewish community,” Netanyahu said on X.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese late on Saturday described the alleged arson, which comes seven months after another synagogue in Melbourne was targeted by arsonists, as shocking and said those responsible should face the law’s full force.

“My Government will provide all necessary support toward this effort,” Albanese posted on X.

Homes, schools, synagogues and vehicles in Australia have been targeted by antisemitic vandalism and arson. The incidents included a fake plan by organized crime to attack a Sydney synagogue using a caravan of explosives in order to divert police resources, police said in March.

The post Australia Police Charge Man Over Alleged Arson on Melbourne Synagogue first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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