Purity of Arms. By Christopher Shannon

January 12, 2024 2 Comments

The war in the Holy Land only intensifies the priority of justice

As the new year begins I find myself pondering dilemmas bequeathed by the old. When it comes to recent wars and rumors of wars, a passage from Augustine’s City of God seems particularly appropriate:

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? . . . Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.”

For the ancient categories of pirate and emperor, substitute the modern categories of terrorist and nation-state; for these general categories, insert Hamas and Israel. 

On October 7, Hamas launched an attack on Israel, killing roughly 1100 Israelis, most of them civilians. In response, the Israeli military, officially known as the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), has launched a campaign of total war resulting in the death of approximately 21,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians. Death totals vary somewhat depending on the source, but in general the kill ratio is something like 20 to 1 in favor of the Israelis. 

Much of the world responded to the initial Hamas attacks with understandable horror. Conservative Catholic talking heads such as R.R. Reno of First Things rushed to the defense of Israel’s initial response, claiming that it fulfilled all the requirements of the “Just War” checklist. At this later date, I do not see how a 20 to 1 kill ratio satisfies the requirement of Just War. Neither does the fact that the majority of these casualties continues to be civilian seem to square with Just War ethics. But let’s face it: Just War doctrine has never been much more than a fig leaf used by certain Western powers, most especially the United States, to justify its military actions. Has the U.S. ever fought an unjust war? Well, maybe in retrospect, but never at the time of the killing. Where is Augustine’s “justice” in all of this?

Israel, the U.S.’s closest ally, is perhaps the only country to surpass the United States in its conviction of the moral righteousness of its violence. The aftermath of World War II and the revelation of Hitler’s atrocities produced a variety of war-crimes trials and declarations of universal human rights. All were designed to distinguish the morality of the victors from the barbarism of the vanquished. The State of Israel was founded in this moment of high moralism in international affairs, founded in large part from European survivors of one of the greatest crimes in human history, the Holocaust. To the general affirmation of universal humanistic principles the Israeli army added an additional layer of righteousness rooted in specifically Jewish tradition: the doctrine of “purity of arms.” This doctrine includes the clause, “The soldier shall not employ his weaponry and power in order to harm non-combatants or prisoners of war, and shall do all he can to avoid harming their lives, body, honor and property.” Framed as a distinctly Jewish tradition, its sentiments fit well with the general assumptions of Western powers regarding the treatment of non-combatants. The United States has certainly affirmed equivalent principles in all its military engagements since World War II. 

No one other than a blind patriot would contend that these principles have actually guided U.S. military actions. I do not consider myself a pacifist, at least in any absolutist sense of that term. I believe that countries have a right to defend themselves from violent assault. I concede that under the best of circumstances civilians will die even in otherwise “just” wars. Still, when civilian deaths meet or exceed combat deaths, they are no longer “collateral damage” but integral to the conduct of a certain kind of war, most especially war that involves aerial bombing. This was the case in the U.S. bombing of Germany and Japan during World War II; it was also the case in our most sustained military effort during the Cold War, the Vietnam War. Americans rightly mourn the loss of 58,000 American soldiers in the conflict. Sadly, this is nothing compared to Vietnamese casualties: roughly 200,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, one million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters, and roughly two million civilians on both sides. For many Americans these facts have bred a default suspicion of any declaration of U.S. good intentions in foreign interventions. Protests against U.S. foreign policy have been a common, even expected, feature of college campus life. Patriotic Americans may not like this but the powers that be have come to accept it as normal.

Similar outrage directed against the Israeli response to Hamas has, for reasons unclear to me, not been accepted as simply what naïve, idealistic college students do. Critics are certainly justified in expressing outrage at pro-Palestinian student groups celebrating Hamas’s killing of Israeli civilians. But the support for Palestinians as a colonized people fighting against Western imperialism is firmly in the tradition established back in the 1960s, when, as early as 1965, Rutgers history professor Eugene Genovese declared: “I do not fear or regret the impending Vietcong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it.” Such anti-American sentiments were alive and well through my own undergraduate and graduate years in the eighties and nineties. And the romantic cult of revolutionary violence has long been a part of this sentiment. 

Through all these decades, no college presidents were hauled before Congress to explain why they allowed the open expression of such hatred directed at America. But showboating, anti-woke congressmen have for some reason come to the defense of Israel beyond any of their previous efforts in defense of America. So far, it has cost at least two presidents their jobs and placed many more in the hot seat. Do we care more about a foreign country than our own?

While I cannot condone the violence that has accompanied much of the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protests, I refuse to accept pro-Israel commentators like Bret Stephens comparing attacks on Jewish-American students as the equivalent of Kristallnacht. The more relevant analogy would be the violent reception with which any speaker not in line with current campus orthodoxy has been greeted in recent years. Or the Black Lives Matter protests of the Covid era. Or, further back, the anti-Apartheid demonstrations of the 1980s. These too extended far beyond college campuses to city streets. They were not controversial at colleges because white supremacy had long since ceased to be a legitimate political position that could be expressed publicly. Support for Israel, in contrast, has for many generations found a welcoming and supportive environment on college campuses. We seem to be coming to an end to that era. 

I do not doubt that opposition to Israel can easily fall into a more general anti-Semitism. But current opposition to Israel follows none of the anti-Semitic script that led to the Holocaust. College students do not warn of a secret conspiracy of Jewish bankers controlling the government, or of Jewish media moguls controlling our culture; rather, they denounce Israel as a racist, imperial power. This charge is, by itself, reasonable: Israel defines itself as a “Jewish” state; racial categories are an integral part of Israeli politics. I will leave it to greater minds than my own to distinguish between “racial” and “racist.” Amnesty International has not been able to discern a meaningful distinction. So too, the overwhelmingly European origins of the founders of Israel and the role of Israel in providing a reliable Western ally in the strategically crucial, oil-rich Middle East reasonably opens Israel to the anti-colonial outrage so common in campus politics. 

So, where is justice? Are we all just pirates? I know of no pure, universal standard that could adjudicate the conflicting claims of Israelis and Palestinians. I do know that the current international consensus recognizes the legitimacy of Israel’s borders prior to 1967. In our fallen world, that is about all we have to guide us. Short of returning to those borders, Israel remains an outlaw nation and a nation in a state of permanent war. 

The U.S. has continued to support Israel despite its illegal occupation of territories gained by force and its persistent expansion of Jewish settlements in those territories, settlements that understandably have led many Palestinians to reject the notion that Israel has any real commitment to a two-state solution. The United States’ “unshakable” support for Israel through all this has likewise led many Palestinians to question the American commitment to justice through the “peace process.” This fundamental, enduring, and violent political reality seems to me a more pressing concern than the antics of Ivy League college students. We must not let concern over the purity of rhetoric distract us from the fundamental issue of the purity of arms.

Christopher Shannon is associate professor of history at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. He is the author of several works on U.S. cultural history and American Catholic history, including American Pilgrimage: A Historical Journey Through Catholic Life in a New World (2022).