Opinion - What the leading ‘just war’ theorist says about the strategies of Hamas and Israel
News reports on the Gaza war tend to focus on the destruction caused by Israel, as in “Israeli warplanes pounded Gaza, leaving at least 87 people dead or missing,” as CBS Evening News recently put it. Such coverage is often accompanied by heartrending footage of bodies in white shrouds and weeping Gazans.
Such reports, intentionally or not, leave the impression that Israel is the only actor in Gaza with agency and thus bears sole responsibility for these casualties.
Michael Walzer, the eminent political theorist and professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, begs to differ. Walzer is the author of the seminal 1977 book “Just and Unjust Wars,” arguably the most influential modern work on the laws of war. Every time the U.S. enters a war, one legal scholar has suggested, “political leaders and opinion makers seem to seek out Walzer’s blessing.”
Walzer argues that Hamas’s strategy in the Gaza war is to deliberately “put civilians at risk for political gain.” He regards as “misleading” the characterization of the underground infrastructure in Gaza as “tunnels” because Hamas actually built a vast subsurface military base directly below a densely populated territory of 2 million people. “You can drive a truck through” that underground fortification, Walzer recently pointed out in an interview, which is filled with “shops making weapons, storage rooms for weapons, dormitories for fighters, apartments for leaders, every form of communication available.”
He thinks that the nature of the Gaza war — where Hamas is at once embedded in the above-ground civilian population and militarily fortified below it —“isn’t recognized often enough in analyses of the war.”
Indeed, Walzer’s analysis suggests that the media has failed to explain that Hamas launched the Oct. 7 attack not as a one-off, shock-and-awe act of terrorism like 9/11, but to invite a devastating Israeli response. By fighting Israel from within and below Gaza’s unprotected population, Hamas would create tens of thousands of involuntary Palestinian martyrs whose deaths would generate intense international pressure on Israel to retreat from Gaza and hand a victory to Hamas.
As a senior Hamas operative put it shortly after the Oct. 7 attack, “We are called a nation of martyrs … We are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
Walzer’s critique spotlights the Biden administration’s failure to loudly and repeatedly condemn the Hamas strategy of what is essentially human sacrifice, which could have reduced the international support that the terrorist organization’s tactics depends on.
In particular, Walzer’s analysis makes the left-wing “settler-colonialism” argument in support of Hamas look morally disastrous, since the leaders of the purported “colonized” are pursuing a strategy designed to inflict maximum casualties on their own people.
It also follows from Walzer’s argument that, by attempting to block food shipments into Gaza, the Israeli far-right is foolishly supporting the Hamas strategy of trading Gazan lives for political gain.
Walzer is far from being pro-Israel. While he believes that Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attack was “justified, just and I think necessary,” he criticizes aspects of Israel’s conduct of what is now a multi-front war. He recently wrote that Israel’s pager bombs were “war crimes” because they exploded when Hezbollah soldiers were away from the battlefield and in many instances near noncombatant friends and family. That critique provoked controversy in the U.S. and Israel, but his contention that Hamas is putting Gazan civilians at risk for political gain has not generated nearly as much debate.
For those with entrenched positions on the Gaza war, Walzer’s characterization of Hamas may just be too embarrassing to acknowledge.
Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”
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