Thread by @PaulDMiller2

Ok, I have another take on the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Considering I recently wrote a book on just war, I should say something about the moral aspect of the conflict.

amazon.com/Just-Ordered-L…

Hamas is a terrorist organization that deliberately murders civilians and says it wants to destroy Israel.

Verdict: unjust, **no matter what you think of the Palestinians' cause**.

This isn't hard, people.

If you sympathize with the Palestinians, you should hate Hamas. Hamas is the greatest enemy of the Palestinians. It hijacked Palestinian autonomy for its jihadist ideology and made it essentially impossible to support Gaza without being complicit with terrorism.

"But Hamas is waging a just war for Palestinian independence against Israeli occupation."

Even if true, it would *still* be unjust for Hamas to deliberately target civilians.

Murdering civilians is bad and war doesn't change that.

Besides, Palestinian independence does not constitute a just cause for war against Israel, especially in 2021, long after Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and its repeated participation in negotiations to end the dispute.

Only if you think that Israel's very existence is a standing aggression against the Palestinian can you conclude that the Palestinians have a right of war against them today.

If you believe that, well, my Tweets won't convince you of anything.

Not even the UN agrees with you. The UN voted in 1947 to approve a partition plan that would create the states of Israel and Palestine, implicitly affirming that the existence of one was consistent with the other.

Israel's existence is not an aggression.

Anyway, I generally do not think wars of self-determination are self-evidently just. (See my engagement with Walzer in chapter 5 of my book.) If self-determination leads to responsible sovereignty and greater peace and justice, sure, but that is often not the case.

And also: War is supposed to be a last resort, not an ongoing threat while on-again, off-again negotiations sputter along decade after decade while one side continues to vow the eradication of the other.

Hamas' aggression this year is patently not a "last resort."

On the other side: Israel has a right to defend itself, full stop. If you are tempted to add a "but" to that sentence, stop a moment and read @JonahDispatch latest column: gfile.thedispatch.com/p/structural-a…

I do think sometimes Israel's defenders on the right use its right to exist to deflect legitimate criticisms about some of Israel's choices. It is absolutely fair to hold Israel up to a high standard.

But if it's fair to criticize Israel, it's absolutely fair to criticize Hamas.