Suchergebnisse
"Jeff McMahan"
Titel: Proportionality and Necessity in Israel’s Invasion of Gaza, 2023–2024
Autor: Jeff McMahan
Seite: 387-407
This article seeks to show that Israel’s war in Gaza in 2023 and 2024 has been an unjust war because it has violated both the requirement of proportionality and the requirement of necessity. The article explains the nature of proportionality, arguing that the main form of proportionality in war is simply the limit to the amount of harm inflicted on innocent people that can be justified either as the lesser evil or, more plausibly, on the basis of the special relations between combatants and their fellow citizens. The argument of the article is that, even on the basis of assumptions about moral justification and the numbers of innocent people who have been killed or saved by the war that are highly favorable to Israel, the war has nevertheless been highly disproportionate and morally unnecessary.
Titel: McMahan on the War Against Hamas
Autor: Daniel Statman
Seite: 179-207
According to Jeff McMahan, Israel had a right to defend itself against Hamas’s aggression, but the Palestinians too had a right to fight against Israel to undo the injustice of its occupation of Palestinian territories. Thus, both sides had a just cause for war. However, both sides failed to satisfy other ad bellum conditions, with Hamas failing only the necessity condition and Israel failing both the necessity and proportionality conditions. McMahan concludes that Israel’s war against Hamas was unjust, unlike Ukraine’s war against Russia, which he views as ‘paradigmatically just.’ I reject his view, arguing that: (a) The strategic goals of Hamas are the annihilation of Israel, the murder of many of its civilians, and the expulsion of others – goals that are manifestly immoral – thus it had no just cause for war. (b) Even on McMahan’s premises, it is absurd to imply a symmetry in the unjustness of Israel and Hamas. (c) McMahan’s understanding of ad bellum necessity and proportionality is untenable. (d) Israel did, in fact, satisfy the necessity condition. (e) If Ukraine’s war is proportionate, as McMahan assumes, then all the more so is Israel’s war in Gaza.
Titel: A Reply to Statman’s Defense of Israel’s War in Gaza
Autor: Jeff McMahan
Seite: 209-236
In ‘McMahan on the War Against Hamas,’ Daniel Statman systematically criticizes arguments advanced in the essay, ‘Proportionality and Necessity in Israel’s Invasion of Gaza, 2023–2024,’ which was published in this journal in 2024. The arguments in that essay assessed Israel’s war by reference to moral principles commonly recognized as governing the resort to war: in particular, principles of just cause, necessity, and proportionality. The present essay not only defends the arguments and claims of the earlier paper against Statman’s challenges, but also reinforces the earlier arguments with many new arguments intended to demonstrate that Israel’s war has been and continues to be an unjust war. It also includes further material comparing Israel’s war in Gaza with Russia’s war in Ukraine. The essay concludes with an appendix containing a short piece written in 2021 about the previous war in Gaza at that time. Its publication was censored then; hence it appears here for the first time.