One-Sided Rules of War
By Steve Huntley
October 29, 2023
We’re hearing a lot of talk these days about the rules of war. All of it is aimed at Israel. No one is calling on Hamas to follow those rules.
There’s a simple reason for that.
No one — no one — thinks Hamas will do anything other than what it always does. And what it did on Oct. 7. The music concert massacre. The murders of civilians from babies in cradles to grandmothers. The rapes. The mutilation and burning of bodies. The beheadings. The hostage-taking of civilians, including 20 children, one of them in a wheelchair. The use of Palestinians as human shields.
No one expects Hamas to obey civilization’s standard for conducting warfare. No one even thinks of calling on Hamas to do so.
But it’s a different case with the Jewish state. Israel is getting a lot of, what’s the right word — advice, guidance, cautions, veiled warnings? — whatever the word, Israel is hearing from various corners about its conduct of the war against Hamas.
Make sure to avoid civilian casualties.
Don’t do anything that would be “disproportionate.”
Don’t let “rage” affect your decisions, as President Biden put it in talking about the need to adhere to the rules of civilized warfare.
Delay the ground invasion of Gaza in hopes of getting more hostages out now that four have been released, say some European nations and the U.S. government.
Others, such as the Democrat squad in the U.S. House of Representatives, aka the congressional antisemitic caucus, demand a cease-fire.
All this is coming from people who bear no responsibility for protecting the citizens of Israel.
I mean, who else is going to step up to make Hamas pay for the terrible war crimes, the pogrom of Oct. 7?
Will the International Court of Justice based at The Hague issue an indictment and send a posse of steely lawmen into the Gaza Strip to arrest the Hamas war criminals and bring them to justice?
Dream on.
Will the United Nations assemble an army, equip it and dispatch it to Gaza City to wage the unbelievably complex and dangerous mission of urban warfare necessary to bring retribution to these terrorists?
There’s a reason the UN is called the Useless Nations. Even worse, the UN secretary general tried to justify the Hamas savagery of Oct. 7
Will the European Union call up soldiers from its member nations to rout Hamas out of the Gaza Strip?
Hell, European countries can’t even handle backing the Ukraine war on their own without the spine-enforcing support of the United States.
And what about all the Arab nations that are so, so concerned about the fate of the innocent Palestinians in Gaza? Will they tell the Israelis to stand aside while their armies invade Gaza to protect civilians and capture the Hamas terrorists?
A fantasy beyond the imagination of any sane human being. This is true even though Hamas is funded, armed and advised by Shia Iran, the committed enemy of the Sunni Arab world.
No, Israel knows — as it has tragically learned time and again — that only it will step up to protect Jews, only it will fight to save Jewish lives, only it will endure the terrors of war to combat a wretched bestial organization that in its charter is dedicated to genocide and mass murder of Jews.
While Israel has assimilated the lessons of history, incredibly too many in the world have not — even after the horrors of the Holocaust.
Worse, as we have seen, in some of our most esteemed institutions like Harvard, UPenn, Columbia and other elite universities ruled by extreme left thought, in some Muslim immigrant communities resistant to Western ideas of civilized warfare and even in the halls of Congress, the cancer of antisemitism is alive and well — and metastasizing.
No one but Israel is going to fight and bleed to protect Jews.
To his credit, Biden has committed America to providing military assistance to Israel and he has dispatched U.S. naval forces to Mideast waters with the goal of preventing Iran and other bad actors from widening the genocidal war against Israel.
Some have seen weakness on Biden’s part because the leaders of Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority canceled a summit with him during his recent visit to the region. I understand that argument.
But it masks a greater, more serious, more depressing truth. These Arab leaders have never even started preparing their populations for a real, lasting peace with Israel. Now they tremble in fear that anger in their streets from people fed lies for decades about Israel will threaten their rule.
That fear was intensified to the point of canceling the summit after Hamas falsely accused Israel of bombing a Gaza hospital. It should have been no surprise that intelligence and evidence quickly revealed it was an errant Islamic Jihad missile that fell into the hospital parking lot.
The news media should be engaging in serious soul searching after so many of our prestigious newspaper, broadcast and cable news outlets accepted uncritically and published/broadcast an accusation against Israel from an organization whose fundamental, essential, core belief is that the only good Jew is a dead Jew.
That’s the neighborhood that Israel must live in.
The Jewish state needs no sanctimonious advice, smug guidance or veiled warnings about how to defend its people.
And what does proportionality actually mean in war?
Hamas fired thousands of unguided missiles into Israel with the obvious intention of killing Israeli civilians. Would it be proportionate for Israel to fire the same number of unguided missiles into Gaza?
Would it be proportionate for Israeli troops to rape Palestinian women? To target babies for murder? Mutilate and burn bodies? Capture civilians as hostages?
That would be doing exactly the same thing as Hamas did. Isn’t that the very definition of a proportional response? Do exactly the same thing and in the same numbers as Hamas did?
Tit for tat, proportionality.
The Geneva Conventions adopted after World War II outlawed that kind of proportionality. Hamas has shown time and again it doesn’t care about those rules of war, its only standards of war are savagery, barbarism, cruelty and brutality.
But the Israelis are a civilized, moral people and they are not going to deliberately violate the conventions of warfare. They will do all that they can to minimize civilian casualties, to follow the civilized principles of conducting a necessary, just war.
They don’t need any moralizing advice or pious warnings about the battle they are fighting.
And when in history has any nation fought a war agreeing with recommendations to tie its hands behind its back?
Did anyone tell the Red Army to be sure to protect innocent German civilians when it unleashed its soldiers on a starving Berlin in 1945? An estimated almost 2 million German women in Berlin and elsewhere were raped by the Red Army. The Nazis had waged war on Russian civilians. The Soviets waged war on German civilians. Proportionality.
Despite the prospect of civilian deaths, America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan for the just, righteous reason of saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of GIs who faced the forbidding, bloody challenge of invading the home islands to end World War II. And don’t forget that Japan waged war on civilians. Exhibit No. 1: the Rape of Nanking.
And even after the terrible punishment of atomic bombs, fanatics within the Japanese military wanted to fight on.
That’s the kind of fanaticism Israel faces in its enemy Hamas, terrorists so maniacal that they use Palestinian civilians as human shields. So rabid they don’t care how high Palestinian bodies pile up. To them, Palestinian deaths are propaganda fodder in their war for Israel’s extinction.
Today’s reality is this: Hamas will keep flouting civilization’s rules of war, keep committing atrocities, keep sacrificing Palestinian lives as human shields. And the world will keep self-righteously wagging its finger at Israel. And worse — in academia, in far left political circles, in Muslim immigrant communities — apologists for Hamas will keep excusing and justifying its war crimes, its massacres, its rapes, its ritual of human sacrifice of Palestinian civilians.
War is hell, as Sherman said. It always has been and remains so.
Just ask the Ukrainians brutalized by Vladimir Putin’s armies. Just ask the people of Sudan, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and other nations that have suffered warfare in recent years. Just ask the people of Mosul where 10,000 civilians died in 2016 in a nine-month campaign by Iraqi troops, backed by U.S. air support ordered by President Barack Obama, to defeat Isis.
And just ask the survivors of the massacres, the pogroms of Oct. 7.
War is hell and no civilized nation enters one for any reason other than protecting its citizens.
That’s what Israel is doing. It didn’t seek this fight. It was attacked by the barbarians of Hamas. And it must exercise its best judgment on how to fight the genocidal fanatics of Hamas. It will conduct this fight by the rules of war as decreed by 21st century civilization.
It must fight this war to win and it doesn’t need lectures on how to do that.
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Steve Huntley, a retired Chicago journalist now living in Austin, Texas, has contributed other pieces to johnkassnews, from an examination of the secret jail for Christopher Columnbus and other politically problematic public art to an essay on Americans suffering from Joe Biden gas pain.
For almost three decades Huntley spent most of his career in Chicago journalism at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he was a feature writer, metro reporter, night city editor, metropolitan editor, editorial page editor and a columnist for the opinion pages.
Before that he was a reporter and editor with United Press International (UPI) in the South and Chicago, and Chicago bureau chief and a senior editor in Washington with U.S. News & World Report. Northwestern University Press has issued soft cover and eBook editions of Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America by Truman K. Gibson Jr. with Steve Huntley, a memoir of a Chicagoan who was a member of President Roosevelt’s World War II Black Cabinet working to desegregate the military.
Comments 36
Correct, Israel did not ask for this fight. Hamas must be destroyed, they are already in the US, as you can see from the Students they are here already spreading hated all over our Country and are young people are brainwashed, they know no History. It started in Israel and it will went there and I am afraid the end is not far away. Persia will rise again Scripture says and I know that Iran, China and Russia are behind all this. America is becoming a third World Country the way Obama said it would be. How come no one has the decency to write about him? Is everyone afraid? We that know Christ will be fine. I feel sorry for those idiots that have no clue as what is happening in the World and follow Hamas. The Country that we worked so hard for, is going down hill, the people were taken in by the Evil, and do not know the God of Abraham. Keep writing the truth John.
Correct, Israel did not ask for this fight. Hamas must be destroyed, they are already in the US, as you can see from the Students they are here already spreading hatred all over our Country and are young people are brainwashed, they know no History. It started in Israel and it will end there, and I am afraid the end is not far away. Persia will rise again Scripture says and I know that Iran, China and Russia are behind all this. America is becoming a third World Country the way Obama said it would be. How come no one has the decency to write about him? Is everyone afraid? We, that know Christ will be fine. I feel sorry for those idiots that have no clue as what is happening in the World and follow Hamas. The Country that we worked so hard for, is going down hill, the people were taken in by Evil, and do not know the God of Abraham. Keep writing the truth John.
Thank you, Steve, for writing something which certainly would never see the light of day were it left to the mainstream media.
This disgusting attempts to downplay or to even legitimize the atrocities committed by the Hamas animals are certainly to have been expected. But the immorality and savagery is not missed. No rational, moral adult would shed any tears in seeing Hamas wiped out. No decent adult would hold it against the Israelis if they did the dirty business of destroying the animals who made the Viking raids look gentle. We should be doing the right thing ourselves, if only this country still had the fortitude.
This is yet another solid op-ed from Steve Huntley but he could have done a better job of explaining what proportionality actually means according to international law. It does not mean tit for tat. It means that Israel’s strikes against HAMAS have to be proportional to the threat and stopping the threat. Israel has used a proportional response. HAMAS continues to fire rockets at Israeli civilian population centers so the threat still exists. Pictures from Gaza show some destroyed buildings but large areas that have been left virtually untouched. Israel is not carpet bombing but is trying to hit specific targets of rocket launch sites, HAMAS leaders and underground tunnels that shelter HAMAS murderers and their weapons and their command and control. Anyone claiming that Israel has violated the rules of war in that the response from the Israel Defense Forces has been disproportionate either doesn’t understand what that means or they are deliberately spreading lies. My thanks to Steve and John for spreading the truth.
Exactly right, Aaron. Proportionality is a significant enough challenge for Israel to observe (unlike its enemy) without spreading mistaken conceptions of it.
My faith in man’s humanity to each other after 9/11 was slowly returning but I see I was wrong. The absolute disregard for life displayed by Hamas and NOT condemned by some of our politicians is beyond belief. I just can’t wrap my head around such hate!
It sickens me to see the support here in our country for the destruction of Israel and the brainwashing of the idiots in our universities. Throw in the constant media coverage of pro- Palestinian demonstrations, it truly is a one-sided fight. The enemy has been here for a long time and is constantly showing their true colors yet so many are blind to this evil and it’s spreading like a cancer.
Through these dark times we must keep the faith because ultimately, God is in control!
Great job, Mr. Huntley- my biggest takeaway was “They don’t need any moralizing advice or pious warnings about the battle they are fighting”. When your opponent doesn’t just want to take your land, rather they want to eliminate you from the earth, that is a serious battle.
With our non-existant “borders” and the influx of people streaming into the U.S. who have not been vetted, there is no doubt that terrorists and others who will plot our demise are already here. And when they strike, and I truly believe that they will, we’ll have to listen to some people saying how the “U.S. deserved the attacks”, just like the clowns who claim that Israel deserved what happened. We heard this from some of these folks after 9/11, but that was over twenty years ago and the vitriol and hatred for our country by some of our own people has grown exponentially since then.
There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t worry about what type of world and country my grandkids are going to inherit.
From what I’ve read there were about 100 percent civilian casualties on Oct.7.
Proportionality?
According to an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz dated 19 Oct 23, about half of the Israelis killed in the 07 Oct 23 attack were military or police personnel. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-19/ty-article-magazine/israels-dead-the-names-of-those-killed-in-hamas-massacres-and-the-israel-hamas-war/0000018b-325c-d450-a3af-7b5cf0210000
I stand corrected. Correct me if I’m wrong in assuming that if there is compulsory military conscription in Israel, that almost half the population are police or military personnel.
There is a difference between an unarmed, just awakened in the middle of the night reservist and an armed alert and on duty soldier. I gotta believe most in the police/military group were the former.
Looks like the best option Israel has right now to avoid more civilian bloodshed since they are now in a war, is to demand unconditional surrender by Hamas who appears to be in control of Gaza who’s soldiers and people attacked, slaughtered and kidnapped Israel citizens without notice.
Just like World War 2, the Japanese attacked America. America fought back, and civilians were killed because the Japanese kept fighting. What’s going on in Israel is the same thing, Gaza attacked a nation that responded back heavily just like we did, unfortunately civilians are always part of wars.
If Hamas wants to unconditionally surrender which could mean war crimes, fine, let it be the start of peace. Yet if that’s the best for their people you would think they would do it, but they won’t.
Hamas really has no honor and unfortunately it’s part of the Muslim issue with their Israeli relatives the all going back to Abraham who caused this division. Unfortunately he listened to his wife! Same as Adam did! Had to add some Biblical humor. His first son Ishmael the illegitimate one by the maid servant Hagar and his true son of promise by his wife Sarah who was Isaac.
The Bible talks about Ishmael Abraham ‘s first born by Hagar his wife’s maid servant and how he was going to be and shall we call him a bit of a wild man towards his brothers that’s exactly what remains today unfortunately. Muslims need to learn the truth about Ishmael.
There never will be peace between these two, sadly.
Back in history, wars caused the total elimination of people by tribes, cities, religion, you name it. Now social media thinks everyone has a say in conflicts? Only those who actually start conflicts have already decided who’s expendable.
Right now it appears the elected leadership in Gaza and outside allies appear to have decided that the everyday Gazan family is very expendable. Sadly!
What an outstanding article! Absolutely, totally correct and spot on! Watching the rest of the world‘s reaction and advice to Israel these past days has been totally disgusting. This article says it all.
My guess is that some of the terrorists that have slipped through the border have been identified and quietly eliminated via the fbi,cia ,dea etc.
But there is no way they can catch every single one
So as best as I can tell it is only a matter of time before they surface
I cannot picture what plan Israel [And the U.S.] has to stabilize gaza once hamas is eliminated/controlled
When Israel is successful and this will be a long drawn out process, the cry for “justice” on the part of the squad and left facing young adults will be loud but louder still will be the destruction caused here in the US by all those illegals the idiot in the WH let stream across our borders. The infidel US must pay for supporting Israel in their mind and heart. I do worry deeply for my grandkids generation.
Excellent synopsis of the dilemma in Israel. What I am puzzled by is the Jews who push for a cease fire or other similar humanitarian conditions without addressing the continued violence by Hamas. Only when Hamas is destroyed will their be a potential beginning for resolution of the human catastrophe that is Gaza.
Another excellent column, Steve. I would only point out that the morality of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki cannot be reduced to the “righteous reason” of saving lives. The moral reasoning required is more serious and difficult than that.
Say what? Without dropping the bombs, the US would have have had a Gaza-like fight over the WHOLE OF JAPAN. It is conservely estimated that one million US troops would have been killed, and God knows how many millions of Japanese civilians.
Tom Stark,
Spot on!
I believe the allies predicted 2 million Japanese dead had the full invasion been necessary. Many would have been civilians, as Japan was fully mobilized for total war.
The atomic bombs quite frankly saved lives, allies and Japanese.
1. Japan deserved it! They could have surrendered.
2. Carpet bombing produces the same effect, ie Dresden, Tokyo, etc.
3. Japan has NEVER, EVER, apologized for Pearl Harbor
Well written.
There is another asymmetrical way Israel can fight Hammas: pictures.
Right now Hamas is doing a swell job with US protests (think Alinsky Rules for Radicals).
Israel needs to do the same but more graphically: Show the carnage in un-pixellated form. After that show the leadership of Hamas and then each Pro-Hamas swell that is their apologist. At the end of the ad ask the viewer if they wish to join the list of perverts that lop off heads of babies and rape young girls. Something like Dan Proft’s “Scream” but on steroids.
To a certain extent, it’s like the Germans with the Death Camps. The world ignores the truth until it gets its hands dirty cleaning up the mess. Then it’s a staged shock and outrage. Feigned ignorance.
The situation in Israel is a textbook case that outlines the corrupt, morally bankrupt legacy media for what it is.
It also exposes the far left for what it is.
Spot on Mr. Huntley, as usual/
The mass rape of German civilian women by Soviet Communist soldiers (U.S. “allies”) after the war was a crime against humanity. And Polish women used for labor by the Germans were also raped by Red Army troops-did they also deserve their fate? Hunley stated the Hamas is funded and armed by Iran, but failed to mention Hamas was created by Israel: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/
Perhaps instead of relying on the leftist Washington Post you might want to read the Wikipedia article on the founding of Hamas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hamas#:~:text=1987%20%E2%80%93%20The%20founding%20of%20Hamas,-See%20also%3A%20First&text=In%201987%2C%20four%20Palestinians%20were,of%20Egypt's%20Muslim%20Brotherhood.
Thank you, John Kass, for your support of Israel and for all of humanity, cutting through the mountain of hypocrisy that defines our age. I am Israeli, and despair at the explosion of hate towards us. We aren’t perfect, by no means, but we don’t deserve this. It’s an unjust world. And btw — I LOVE your writing.
Thank you. At johnkassnews we aim for common sense. thanks Margarlit
100%.
That is the number of replies that will agree with Mr. Huntley; I, being one of them.
Apparently, the history of this region-the history of the Jews and Israel is too complicated for even college professors (the “intelligent elites”) to understand.
Or worse; they KNOW the history all too well and choose to lie or at the very least: grotesquely distort the truth.
College campuses have for decades been the incubators for contrarian causes and anti-establishment discourse. I know of what I speak, because my college days included Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)Vietnam protests, Kent State, NORML, ready access to volumes on Tolstoy and Marx, posters of Che Guevara everywhere and midnight rendezvous with like-minded students and college professors espousing socialist/communist, leftist liberal propaganda blaming the “capitalist establishment” for the world’s problems. Grow your hair long and rebel against your parents/against authority.
So, it’s nothing new, but is just as shocking today as it was in the 60s/70s.
Can anyone remember college campuses being in turmoil during the 80s? I can’t. I can’t believe that the Bee Gees and disco had healed our nation. Or did the Leftists take their cause underground?
As I watched the pro-Hamas demonstrations, I wasn’t shocked. I was saddened, because I saw foot soldiers for Hate; unadulterated and unrestrained hate for Jews coming AFTER 1400 of them had been massacred by Hamas barbarians, who wants 9 million (population of Israel) dead Jews.
Hamas as the victims?
Hamas as “freedom fighters”?
Hamas as a “resistance”?
Is this a sick joke?
No.
The anti-Jewish/anti-Israel movement has been carefully and precisely choreographed in recent years by the Left. In this country, it is not rooted in Biblical terms, but rather political terms.
I have a simple view of the demonstrations in this country: leftist college professors are this generation’s Hamas leaders. And the students are the suicide bombers-yes, they are willing to blow up future employment opportunities for a “day of rage”, because they are so smart that common people couldn’t possibly understand the deep intellectual deliberations necessary to support the war crimes and atrocities of terrorists who want nothing more than to rid the world of Israel.
This isn’t a game where you choose sides.
This is where humanity must choose between Good or Evil.
No, you can’t argue that you “see both sides”.
You either support the Good-Israel or you support Evil-Hamas.
Another fine publication reported that Qatar, who, like Iran, funds and sponsors Hamas, has given hundreds of millions of dollars to American universities including Northwestern, George Washington, Bard College, Virginia, Cornell, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, George Mason, Stanford, and Harvard.
Thank you for such a well stated article.
Something that has been bothering me for sometime now are the feelings police. Universities, and government has added to this as has the media.
I have to ask what in the hell are schools teaching? The words the only good Jew is a dead Jew even being spoken is so egregious.
How do so many obediently follow a media that puts forth false information.
One member of Congress refuses to believe the horrible bombing of a hospital was not initiated by Israel.
How can those who spread lies be taken seriously? How can those who believe said person not seek the truth.
But I guess they are the same who put up signs that say Hate Has No Home Here.
I support Israel unequivocally to eliminate Hamas. I believe they are doing their very best to limit civilians’ casualties. My Daughter Emilee Rauschenberger has been the beneficiary of the IDF’s communications ‘to move locations’ on three separate times, prior to their bombing, since she found herself and her family trapped in Southern Gaza, through no fault of their own. But I ask this…”Why aren’t we all calling for the evacuation of nearly 500 American’s trapped outside the southern border, at the Rafah Crossing, into Egypt? YES, it is a High Priority to secure the Rescue & Release of the 200+ Hostages that Hamas is holding! We have rescued the Americans out of Israel via charter flights and cruise ships…but what about those Americans stranded, forgotten about in Souther Gaza. Get them out…please evacuate them into Egypt…we hear nothing directly from the Media or our State department…or Biden…or Blinken…about these Americans, which includes my Daughter Emilee Rauschenberger, her husband and her 5 children, aging from 14 to 4! Help me keep the Spotlight on Biden & Blicken to ‘get them out’…is it not a #1 Responsibility of the US Government! Thank you!
Re: Jim Hader replying to Lawrence Wanucha- Jim, you are half right on the leftist WP. So is Wikipedia. I don’t trust either for accuracy.
#prayforisreal#
Outstanding. Beautifully written. Spot on. The world should support the eradication of all terrorists, especially Hamas. To even mildly defend Hamas is virulent Antisemitism, nothing more. The behavior of the Squad is unconscionable.
So if “the behavior of the Squad is unconscionable” then what would you call this:
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org
Had another fun day of sirens and missles here in Jerusalem. My son-in-law, friends, family, acquaintances – all going into harms way.
This time is different. Im sorry that innocent people die in war, but 1400 innocent people were slaughtered by Hamas. So blame Hamas for their barbarity and using their own people as human shields.
Thus time, with G-d’s help, Israel finishes the job. It is war.
As a big fan of John Kass and Steve Huntley, I am saddened to see the lack of nuanced analysis of the current nightmare in the Middle East in Steve’s article and the comments. The current iteration of the nightmare goes back to at least 1948, and any analysis of events since October 7 needs to take into account that history. It is impossible to do this topic justice in a short comment, so I will only suggest that both sides have been guilty of war crimes, including the slaughter of civilians for political ends. Neither side should get a pass. Resorting to violence, even in response to the other side’s violence, is never going to resolve the situation satisfactorily. For those who apparently believe, like Steve and the commenters here, that Israel should be given the green light to destroy Gaza, I would suggest that they remind themselves of what David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, said in 1948: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?” Continual violent reactions to violence are not the answer. Eventually, one side needs to break the repetitive cycle. As my father taught me, “…two wrongs don’t make a right.” Outside parties should seek to facilitate a negotiated settlement, not encourage more violence.