Just War Theory and the Goldstone Report

          The Commission’s analysis was clearly guided by just war moral philosophy as well as by the international laws of war that embody its principles. The three most important principles governing methods of warfare are those of proportionality, discrimination, and noncombatant immunity. Noncombatant immunity is easily understood: deliberate attacks on innocent civilians are categorically prohibited. However, the other two principles are more complex.

          The proportionality principle, or constraint, requires that even in a just war, the military measures that are employed must in some sense be proportional to what is at stake. The application of this criterion in many cases is difficult, ambiguous, and a matter of judgment over which reasonable people may disagree, since it requires weighing incommensurate values, such as the relative values of destroying important military targets in wars of self-defense versus the value of human lives, on both sides.

          However, the Israeli attack on Gaza is not one of the difficult cases. Even those who have accepted the idea that Israel has a legitimate right to defend itself against Hamas attacks have widely criticized the Israeli methods as disproportional. The sheer scale of the Israeli attacks on Gaza makes that an easy judgment to reach.

          From 2005 until the eve of the Israeli attack on Gaza, over 1200 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces. During this same period Israeli civilian casualties from Palestinian attacks dropped dramatically: from 2001 through 2005, about 680 were killed in terrorist attacks

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