Daniel C. Maguire

Doesn’t Israel have a right to defend itself? Though it is hard for a question to be wrong, this is a dead wrong question even though it is the heart and soul of Israel’s defense of its attack on little Gaza.

It is also the basis of the U.S. assessment of the ongoing moral disaster. The Senate voted unanimously to answer the question in the affirmative while ignoring all other piercingly relevant circumstances. Never has a misplaced question had such prestige and high-level cachet.

The contorted question sins by deviousness and legerdemain. With verbal wizardry,offense suddenly becomes defense with all the legitimacy that defense imports. It is akin to asking “Does a rapist during a rape have a right to defend himself if the victim resists?”

With collective amnesia, Israel and the United States brush aside basic realities of warfare. Siege (or blockade) is an act of offensive warfare. Indeed it is among the most devastating of weapons, condemned by both “Just War” theory and – very much to the point – by Jewish and Christian ethics of war.

Maimonides in the Twelfth Century summed up the Talmudic view of siege, saying it could only be justified if it left one side open for citizens to escape. Of course, it would then no longer be a siege. Conclusion: a siege is immoral.

As Michael Walzer says in his treatment of “War Against Civilians,” “more people died in the siege of Leningrad than in the infernos of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki taken together.” The health effects of the long-term and ever-tightening siege on children and others in Gaza are horrific.

Read more