Israel is fighting a just and moral war and deserves support as it faces being wiped off the map
Labor cabinet members display their feeble grasp of history in mistaken claims that Israel is committing war crimes.
Is Israel waging a just war? Israel’s military attack on Iran will be, ethically and politically, its most straightforward military action. Iran has repeatedly attacked Israel, twice this year firing hundreds of missiles, rockets and drones at Israel, and sponsors relentless terrorism and rocket attacks at Israel by its proxies, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza.
Israel gets much moralistic grief in Western media and the Muslim world for its actions against Hezbollah and Hamas.
Our own Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, keeps making speeches implying Israel is breaking international law. After condemning the Hamas terrorism against Israel on October 7 last year, Wong told the UN General Assembly that Israel had killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and “this must end”.
In a sentence directed at Israel, she declared: “War has rules. Every country in this room must abide by them. Even when confronting terrorists. Even when defending borders.”
There was a lot more anti-Israel stuff in this speech, which is part of the pattern of the Albanese government effectively reversing Australia’s longstanding, formerly bipartisan support for Israel.
Other government ministers have made similar arguments. Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic, who often seems to run his own foreign policy independent of the government, suggested Australia should be open to applying sanctions against Jerusalem. Education Minister Jason Clare accuses Israel of war crimes.
Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles was so intent on proving to the Greens that Australia didn’t provide arms to Israel, and wouldn’t do so, that he seemed almost to be proclaiming an arms embargo on the Jewish state. Taking political doublespeak to a sublime fatuousness, he claimed Australia’s involvement in the global supply chain of F-35 fighter aircraft, which Israel, like Australia, as a US ally, uses in its air force, was restricted to “non-lethal parts”.
The F-35, the primary fifth-generation fighter aircraft, is intensely lethal and Israel has been using it, with its Australian parts, in Lebanon.
But my focus here is a bit narrower. The implication in Wong’s words, and the words of so many Labor ministers, is that Israel is not waging a just war and is breaching the rules of war.
Is this true? Is the war Israel is involved in a just war at all, and is Israel prosecuting it within the rules of war?
No one in the ALP knows anywhere near as much about this as Mike Kelly. He was a career soldier for 20 years, becoming a colonel, then in the reserves. He was an army lawyer trained in the laws of war, in theory and practice. He served in difficult theatres including Iraq, Somalia, East Timor and Kenya, and completed a PhD examining the laws of war in military occupations. In 2007 he entered politics as Labor member for Eden-Monaro.
He served as a minister in the Rudd-Gillard governments. Kevin Rudd chose Kelly to replace Stephen Smith as defence minister, but Labor lost the 2013 election. Bill Shorten chose Kelly to be his defence minister, but Labor lost in 2019.
An alert Labor government would surely look to Kelly for advice. If the Albanese government has done so, it doesn’t seem to be following that advice, for Kelly told me: “There’s no doubt in my mind – Israel has not breached the rules of law in armed conflict. There’s no evidence they’ve done so.”
Kelly points to five factors in forming his judgment: the extreme difficulty of war in an urban environment; the way Hamas and Hezbollah have shaped the battlefield to maximise civilian casualties; the extensive efforts the Israeli military undertakes to avoid or minimise civilian casualties; Israel had to confront Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s total of 50,000 armed fighters in Gaza, a huge force; and the acute, urgent, existential threat Israel faces from the combined efforts of its enemies.
Consider some other sources. Major General Jim Molan, who was our most experienced modern general in warfare, was part of a 2015 inquiry into whether Israel, in its campaign in Gaza in 2014, acted within the rules of law. The inquiry found Israel’s actions “lawful” and “legitimate”. Molan said at the time the Israelis “held off for as long as they could in the face of provocation that represents war crimes, in my view”. Molan believed Israel compared well in its conduct with other Western militaries.
John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point in the US, recently offered this judgment: “Everything that the world has heard about Gaza has been counterfactual. It has been wrong. What Israel has done to protect civilians, and despite what Hamas has wanted, has been an amazing achievement that I didn’t even personally, as an urban warfare scholar, think was possible.”
Our former chief of the defence force, Mark Binskin, inquired into the tragic accidental killing of seven aid workers, including an Australian, in Gaza. He was given full co-operation by the Israelis and said their investigation, reporting and responding were overall timely, appropriate and sufficient. He said the Israel Defence Forces’s approach to targeting decisions “are the same as the Australian Defence Force would likely be concerned with in similar circumstances”. He also said the IDF quickly held its people to account for mistakes or wrongdoing.
It’s possible, of course, to quote a thousand anti-Israel sources on the same issues. Many, however, start with anti-Israel bias, even a deep hostility to Israel, often enough the view that Israel is an inherently illegitimate state, intrinsically wicked.
What you see instead from the work of Kelly, Molan, Spencer and Binskin, and so many others, is a picture of Israel as a democratic and ethical nation thrust permanently into a maddening and impossible environment of constant threat and relentless attack.
None of this is to diminish the tragic loss of innocent civilian life in Gaza and Lebanon. The moral responsibility for that rests entirely with Hamas, Hezbollah and their masters in Iran who designed the situation to produce civilian casualties as a way of mobilising global opinion against Israel.
As is always the case, Israel is being asked to live up to impossible standards, then condemned as barbaric for self-defence. Disturbingly, the idea of national self-defence, in principle and in practice, is going out of fashion among several key elites in the West – academics, NGOs, some international relations practitioners, even some religious leaders.
The foundation of all ethical thinking in Western civilisation on how to act decently when armed conflict is inevitable, how to subject it to moral restraint, how a good person, and a good state, can act in war, is the just war theory. Other traditions have their versions of this, but in Western civilisation the just war theory was developed mainly within Christian thought.
In what I think a tragic misstep, many church leaders are edging away from just war theory. Thus the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference recently issued their social justice statement for 2024-25. Entitled Truth and Peace, it considers war and conflict. It’s pretty good because it mainly concerns God. War arises from the absence of God in human lives. Bishops know a lot about God but are more fallible on geopolitics. So it’s very good to see them concentrating on humanity’s relationship to God.
However, there’s a glaring omission. There’s no mention of just war theory, which is one of the magnificent achievements of Christian intellectual and moral endeavour. Barack Obama cited it in his Nobel Peace Prize speech. It’s not a theory to justify war but to restrain war and guide human beings in the most difficult circumstances they’ll encounter.
Under Pope Francis, church leaders have drifted away from just war theory. San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy, a close supporter of Francis, recently said the use of just war theory to justify war “is a major problem”; the church should emphasise non-violence instead.
In the real world the problem arises when the other guy, or the other nation, has no interest in non-violence. Do you let Islamic State slaughter the Yazidis on a mountainside, murder the men, rape the women, enslave the children, because you’re attached to non-violence? Do you let an intruder kill your spouse rather than act violently yourself?
Until recently, just war theory was a central part of Catholic and broader Christian teaching. In his World Day of Peace statement in 1982, Pope John Paul II, surely one of the greatest popes, observed: “people have a right and even a duty to protect their existence and freedom by proportionate means against any unjust aggressor”. Pope Paul VI, in his 1976 World Day of Peace message, said: “Disarmament is either for everyone, or it is a crime of neglect to defend oneself.”
Just war theory remains official Catholic doctrine. The Catechism of the Catholic Church rejects pacifism and says it’s right to defend your own life and a “grave duty” to defend the lives of others for whom you have responsibility.
It lays out the conditions for just war. To paraphrase, these are: the threat you’re countering must be serious; all means other than war must be exhausted; there must be a prospect of success; the effect of your actions must not create more harm than they’re trying to prevent. This last is the principle of proportionality, which applies whenever force is legitimately used. Thus, if a nation invades a small part of your territory, you’re not entitled to annihilate it with nuclear weapons.
Within a just war, there are serious restraints on conduct. You mustn’t deliberately target civilians (though civilians can be unintended casualties of a military strike). You must treat prisoners of war with respect for their human dignity. Various types of weapons are outlawed. Much of this has been codified in the Geneva Conventions.
In my last book, Christians, I interviewed General Sir Peter Cosgrove about his experience as a fighting platoon commander in the Vietnam war and the challenge of war to a believing Christian. He recalled that in combat he was frequently, spontaneously, unselfconsciously in prayer and that: “There was no thought of privileging a Christian over a non-Christian … There was sadness at the sight of (enemy) dead people. They are human beings, they have families too. Not remorse, because you’d done what your country asked you to, but sadness.”
Jesus doesn’t mandate pacifism in the Gospels. He calls no soldier to renounce his profession. He certainly called his followers to love their enemies, but Jesus himself used force to throw money changers out of the temple. Pacifism is a moral option personally, but not for a community or government. Early Christians welcomed soldiers to the faith. Just war theory got its earliest profound consideration from St Augustine in the 4th century. He wanted Roman soldiers to protect Christian villages. That involved deadly force, to preserve life and order. That needed theological understanding.
If church leaders ever move definitively away from just war theory it won’t be a case of asking society to live more ethically, rather just abandoning Christian guidance in an inevitable trauma of human life, like saying we don’t believe in crime so we won’t talk about police.
Already Western societies are inclined to place impossible demands and restrictions on soldiers that lead only to greater death and injustice. Bad actors fight as they like, good actors can’t effectively fight at all. Israel is the chief victim of this thinking.
Paradoxically, no one understands these dynamics better than Islamist enemies of the West and of Israel. The sheer performative sadism, grotesque tortures and ultra sexualised violence of the Hamas atrocities were a sign of the terrorists’ personal depravity, but they were also a deliberate act of strategic policy.
Hamas designed its torture theatre not only to harm and distress, but to force a strong Israeli response, inevitably at the expense of the Palestinian civilians whose welfare Hamas so obviously holds in contempt. It entirely subordinates their welfare to Hamas’s religious hatred of Israel and Jews.
The strategic pay-off, as Kelly tells me, lies in the fact Iran and its proxies are not only waging a physical and psychological war against Israel, but above all they’re waging an information war against Israel.
Iran and its allies China and Russia are extremely active on social media and through human agents in the politics of Western societies. The Iranian government has pumped money into anti-Israel demonstrations and activism against Israel in the US and other societies, probably including Australia. All three ruthless dictatorships routinely work, hard and extensively, to push key messages through social media: the US is in decline; Western societies are decadent, violent and unsafe; the West is consumed with racial hatred; Israel has a murderous hostility to all Muslims (this is fantastic nonsense given 20 per cent of Israeli citizens are Arabs) and so on.
Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah constantly break all the laws of warfare. They routinely attack civilians and proclaim their desire to wipe Israel off the map. Hamas could end Gazan suffering any time by releasing Israeli hostages. But with Hezbollah they intentionally create an environment that provides the greatest ethical and moral difficulties for Israel in conducting the just military actions necessary to its survival.
They routinely repress, coerce, intimidate, persecute and murder anyone in their own societies who opposes their aims, and ensure that war is conducted in the middle of their civilians. Israel’s choice is surrender to the death of a million atrocities or conduct war in operationally and morally messy environments.
This is where proportionality comes in. It’s not the least fatuous element of Wong’s recent speeches on Israel that she laments there has been no Palestinian state established even though the UN provided for it 77 years ago. The fraudulent implication is that Israel has prevented this.
But when territory was first divided into an Arab and a Jewish state, Israel accepted this. The surrounding Arab armies and the resident Palestinians rejected it and launched a war of annihilation against Israel. Had the Arab world accepted that state, it would have been much bigger than the West Bank and Gaza of today.
Three times since then Israel has offered a Palestinian state on generous terms, only to be met by rejection and murderous terrorism. Several times in its short existence Israel has had to fight conventional wars of national survival, as in the Yom Kippur war of 1973. And now Iran, five minutes away from possessing nuclear weapons, proclaims its sacred mission of wiping Israel off the map while organising terror and missile strikes from every point on Israel’s border.
So to measure the proportionality of Israel’s response, think not just of 1200 murdered brutally, or 250 hostages, but think of a credible, proximate, desperate threat of annihilation of the world’s only Jewish state.
That the Albanese government has not grasped any of this, shows no understanding of the history, has turned so foolishly and nastily against Israel, Australia’s close friend these many decades, and at a time when much of the world is turning against Jerusalem and Jews, and friends should count for something, underlines that as well as failing in strategic policy, and geopolitical coherence, the Labor government has failed, more than anything, morally.
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