‘Notable and Quotable’

You properly skewer Israel’s critics who complain that it is violating international law by its disproportionate response to Hamas’s incessant launching of rockets [Editorial, “Notable and Quotable,” March 11, 2008]. The rubric of proportionality, however, is not the correct rubric to analyze the provision of food to people in Gaza.

Proportionality is relevant when weighing the incidental harm to civilians against the military advantage to be gained by a particular military action, not the obligation to see to it that civilians don’t starve.

The fourth Geneva Convention calls for allowing passage into combat areas such as Gaza of consignments of “essential foodstuffs, clothing and tonics for children under fifteen, expectant mothers and maternity cases.”

Additionally, Protocol I to the convention (adopted in 1977, but pointedly not ratified by the U.S. or Israel) calls for passage of “supplies essential to the survival of the civilian population.”

Contrary to what spokesmen for UNRWA, Amnesty International, and like-minded groups suggest in their predictable diatribes on Israel, there is no obligation in international law to allow all foodstuffs to pass. No one doubts that Israel’s refusal to allow unimpeded traffic into Gaza imposes hardships on Gazans, but that policy is perfectly legal. Given the language of the various treaty documents, it cannot be made illegal by labeling the policy “collective punishment,” a trick often tried by Israel’s critics.

Both the fourth convention and the protocol require that food and other items be allowed entry be used only for civilian populations.

Israel, or any other power, is not obligated legally or morally to feed those at war with it. We have been unable to find any evidence that UNRWA or other relief groups operating in Gaza refuse aid to those directly engaged in combat with Israel. (We’ve written to ask them if we have missed something. We’re not betting on getting an answer anytime soon.)

Israel’s critics also distort international law when they accuse it of launching disproportionate attacks on civilians in Gaza.

Without exception — from the former U.N. secretary general, Kofi Anan, to the U.N. high commissioner of human rights, Louis Arbour, to groups like Amnesty International — Israel’s critics dispense with any balancing between civilian causalities and military advantage.

For them (but not for international law), disproportionate means more civilian causalities than they are prepared to tolerate — by which they sometimes mean any. For them, military advantage is irrelevant.

MARC STERN
Assistant executive director
American Jewish Congress
General counsel and senior advisor
Law and Social Justice for the AJC
New York, N.Y.

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