Israel’s assault on Gaza and Christian just war theory

13 October 2023

By Martin Davie 

Reprinted from Christian Today [in the U.K.]

The current situation in Israel and Gaza

As I write this article on 12 October, the fighting in southern Israel seems to have largely stopped (although Hamas is continuing to fire rockets into Israel). The focus of military action has now shifted to Israel’s attack on the Hamas forces in the Gaza strip, an attack which currently takes the form of cutting off supplies of food, fuel and power and the bombardment of Gaza from land, sea and air. It is also expected that in the near future the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) will mount a land assault against Gaza.

It is generally accepted, at least in the Western world, that the actions taken by Hamas in their attack on southern Israel last Saturday, actions which included the beheading of babies, and the taking of approximately 150 hostages, were morally unjustifiable. In Christian terms they were acts of sin.

The question that now arises, however, is whether, from a Christian perspective, the actions of the IDF in attacking Gaza are morally justified. The purpose of this article is to look at how the Christian just war tradition provides us with a framework within which to give an answer to this question.

The Christian just war tradition

Although there are Christians who hold that the use of armed force is incompatible with the Christian faith, that is not the majority Christian position. The majority Christian position is that set out, for example, in Article XXXVII of the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles which states that ‘It is lawful for Christian men, at the command of the Magistrate, to wear weapons and to serve in the wars.’

The key point to note in this quotation is the reference to ‘the command of the Magistrate.’ According to Romans 13:1-7 God has given to ‘magistrates’, that is those with political authority, the ‘power of the sword’, the right to use force, including on occasion lethal force, to prevent or punish forms of injustice.

Seen from this perspective, war is regarded as being, in the words of Oliver O’Donovan, ‘an extraordinary extension of ordinary acts of judgement.’ That is to say, just as the magistrates normally take action by means of the policing and judicial systems of their countries to enact the justice of God in response to various forms of injustice, so also, on occasion, they have to resort to war for the same reason. War is permissible as a means of seeking to achieve justice in response to some form of injustice that would otherwise continue.

The theological thinking that underlies this position is set out in a letter written to Christians in Great Britain by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth in 1941. In this letter he declares that there is a realm outside of the Church in which God exercises his Fatherly care by giving the state the power of the sword:

“Where the life of men will not be governed by the preaching of the Gospel nor by prayer, nor by Baptism or the Lord’s Supper – in other words, where the bounds of the Church stop – there begins the realm within whose bounds God’s fatherly care, which does not fail even there, must be maintained and imposed, if necessary, by the threat of the sword, and, in the last resort, by its use.”

As Barth goes on to say:

“The State would lose all meaning and would be failing in its duty as an appointed minister of God, and it would be depriving men of the benefit which God, by its function, had intended for them, if it failed to defend the bounds between Right and Wrong by the threat, and by the actual use of, the sword.”

The criteria for just war

As well as saying that the power given to magistrates by God means that the state may use lethal force if it is necessary to do so, the Christian tradition has also said that the state must use the sword in a just fashion. A series of criteria for this, what are known as the criteria for a ‘just war,’ have been helpfully summarized by Darell Cole in his book When God says war is right.

According to Cole, the Christian just war tradition has divided these criteria under two headings , ‘the right to go to war’ and ‘right conduct in war.’

He lists five criteria under ‘the right to go to war’:

• The first is ‘proper authority’. Cole expounds this as meaning that: ‘For a war to be just, it must be declared and waged by someone who truly has the authority to do so.’ This means the properly constituted political authorities in a particular state.
• The second is ‘just cause.’ This means, says Cole, that ‘those whom we attack must deserve to be attacked on account of some wrong that they have done.’ This criterion follows from the truth that the use of the sword is only justified in order to punish wrongdoing. For military action to be justified there must be an identifiable wrong that needs to be punished.
• The third is ‘right intention.’ This means ‘that we must intend our use of force to advance the good and to avoid the evil’. When our aims are to secure peace, to punish those who perpetrate evil on the innocent, or to uplift the good, we exhibit right intention.
• The fourth is that war is ‘the only way to right the wrong.’ Echoing the thought of Martin Luther, Cole writes that this criterion means that ‘because warfare brings such human suffering, we should try to right wrongs by means other than warfare if we can, just as good doctors resort to surgery only when it is the only way to heal the patient’.
• The fifth and final criterion is that there should be a ‘reasonable hope of success.’ If the point of engaging in warfare is to try to correct a wrong and bring about a just peace then there is no point in the exercise if there is no hope that this end can be obtained.

Under ‘right conduct in war,’ Cole lists two criteria:

• The first is ‘discrimination, or non-combatant immunity.’ This means that ‘we should never plan to target innocent civilians intentionally.’ The reason for this criterion, Cole says is:

“…that part of the very meaning of a just war is that we intend to attack only those who deserve to be attacked. When we combat the enemy, this principle constrains us both to never intentionally kill the innocent, and to do all that we can to avoid killing the innocent.”

• The second is ‘proportion.’ This criterion comes into the picture because while it is always wrong to deliberately target innocent civilians it may sometimes be the case that it is impossible to act against the military forces of the enemy without causing civilian casualties. Cole gives the example of a hypothetical mission to bomb a railway depot in the middle of the city. Deliberately to bomb this with the intention of damaging enemy morale by causing civilian casualties would be wrong. What would not necessarily be wrong, however, would be to bomb the depot in order to prevent troops and munitions reaching the front line, even though civilian casualties would occur as a result.

The action of the IDF and the just war criteria

If we consider the action that the IDF is taking against Hamas under the five criteria for the ‘right to go to war’ we find that its actions meet all five criteria.

War is being waged by the IDF on behalf of a proper authority, namely the duly constituted government of Israel, which is taking action to protect those living in Israel from harm.

War is being waged by the IDF for a just cause, namely to punish Hamas for the massacres that took place in southern Israel and the continuing indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli targets, to try to secure the release of those whom Hamas has kidnapped and to prevent, or at least minimise, similar wrongdoing by Hamas in the future.

War is being waged by the IDF with the right intention of trying to secure peace and to punish those who perpetrate evil on the innocent.

War is being waged by the IDF because there seems to be no other way to ‘right the wrong.’ Hamas is committed to the destruction of Israel by military means and is being financed and politically supported by Iran to achieve this end. There is no indication that it will cease attacking Israel unless it is forced to do so.

Finally, there is a reasonable hope of success. The IDF probably has the capacity if not to completely destroy Hamas, then at least to punish its wrongdoing and very severely limit its capacity to do harm in future.

If we move on to the criteria for ‘right conduct in war’ it can also be argued that the IDF’s actions meet the criteria in spite of the horrendous suffering that the civilian population of Gaza is undergoing.

With regard to discrimination, the IDF has a proven track record of taking pains to avoid civilian casualties (Colonel Richard Kemp of the British army has said that ‘the IDF does more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare’) and there does not seem to be any evidence that it has now changed its approach and is deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza.

With regard to proportion, trying to attack Hamas in Gaza, which has densely populated urban areas in which Hamas has embedded itself in the midst of the civilian population, necessarily means that there will be civilian casualties. That is tragic but unavoidable. In similar fashion the suffering caused to the civilian population in Gaza by the restriction of fuel, food and power is also tragic but unavoidable, since Hamas needs to be deprived of the resources it needs to keep fighting and there is no way to restrict its supply of these resources without affecting everyone else.

In summary, war is never desirable. It is a by-product of human fallenness which will cease to exist when Christ comes in glory. However, until that time war may sometimes be necessary, and the seven just war criteria give us a Christian framework for determining whether war is being waged justly. My argument is that the current actions of the IDF seem to meet these criteria.

Martin Davie is a lay Anglican theologian and Associate Tutor in Doctrine at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.