Self-Defense: The Doctrine That Allowed Israel to Do What It Accused Hamas of Doing
https://karama.huquq.com/2025/12/self-defense-doctrine-that-allowed.html
The Tyranny of Proportionality
A war does not begin only with the first bomb. It begins earlier — in the language that makes the bomb thinkable. Before the rubble, there is a sentence; before the sentence, a worldview in which some people count fully and others count barely at all. Understanding what has happened in Gaza since October 7, 2023 requires reading the sentences first, because the rubble followed from them.
Every legal order rests on a quiet premise: that the law applies equally to all who fall under it. The moment that premise collapses — the moment the same act is judged one way when committed by one party and an entirely different way when committed by another — law ceases to be law and becomes an instrument of power. Few doctrines illustrate this transformation more vividly than the doctrine of self-defense.
The term this article will use for that transformation is supremacism, defined precisely and operationally: a system of judgment in which the same act is assessed by the identity of the actor rather than by the act itself — in which violence by one party is classified as defense and identical violence by another is classified as barbarism, not because the conduct differs, but because the parties do. Self-defense, in both international law and moral philosophy, is an inherent and uncontroversial right. A person attacked may repel the attack; a state subjected to aggression may defend itself. But the right has never been unlimited. Its legitimacy depends on a principle older than the modern state system: proportionality. An act of defense that vastly exceeds the harm it answers is not defense at all — it is revenge, punishment, or conquest wearing the costume of necessity. When proportionality is discarded, the doctrine of self-defense mutates into something else entirely. It becomes the claim that one party's violence is legitimate because of who it is, while the other party's violence is illegitimate because of who it is. The same crime acquires different meanings depending on the perpetrator and the victim.
This is precisely what has unfolded since October 7, 2023.
Two Claims, One Doctrine
When Israel invokes the principle of self-defense to justify its military campaign in Gaza, it simultaneously undermines its own critique of Hamas, which advances the same claim to legitimize its conduct. Hamas frames its attack as resistance — an act of self-determination and self-defense against more than seventy-five years of dispossession, occupation, blockade, and exclusion from the land its people regard as their own. Israel frames its response as the defense of a sovereign nation's right to exist and to protect its citizens. Both actors reach for the same doctrinal vocabulary. Yet one claim is treated by Western governments and much of the international media as inherently criminal, while the other is treated as beyond serious questioning — even when the conduct justified under its banner dwarfs, in scale and lethality, the attack it answers.
If self-defense is the universal right it purports to be, then both claims must be examined on the same evidentiary and legal terms. If, however, self-defense is available only to some — only to states over non-state actors, only to the militarily dominant over the dominated, only to groups deemed fully human and fully rights-bearing over groups implicitly treated as less so — then the doctrine is not law at all. It is a hierarchy disguised as jurisprudence.
Two Laws, Not One
Before the argument can proceed, it must be made precise, because critics of this analysis rely heavily on a deliberate or careless confusion between two distinct bodies of law.
The first is the law governing the resort to force — what lawyers call jus ad bellum, anchored in Article 51 of the UN Charter. This is the doctrine of self-defense proper: the right of a state to respond to an armed attack. On this point, honesty requires a concession. Whatever one thinks of Israel's broader policies, a cross-border assault that killed roughly 1,200 people and seized roughly 250 hostages is an armed attack by any definition, and Israel had the legal right to respond with force. This article does not dispute that right. Indeed, conceding it strengthens what follows, because it isolates the real question: not whether Israel could fight, but how.
The second body of law governs the conduct of force once conflict exists — jus in bello, the law of armed conflict codified in the Geneva Conventions and customary practice. Here the operative principles are distinction (attacks must target military objectives, not civilians) and proportionality (anticipated civilian harm must not be excessive in relation to the concrete military advantage sought). Two points about this proportionality standard must be stated plainly. First, it is not arithmetic: the law has never required that a defender's casualties equal the attacker's, and no serious version of this argument demands that. Second — and this is where the analysis turns — the standard is not limitless either. It forbids attacks in which civilian destruction is excessive relative to military gain, and it flatly forbids treating civilians as such, or entire populated areas, as the target. A state does not comply with the law of war by announcing that its true enemy hides among civilians and then methodically destroying the places where civilians live.
The argument, then, is not that self-defense "accedes" proportionality in some abstract sense. It is sharper: Israel invoked the jus ad bellum right of self-defense to launch a war, and then conducted that war in violation of jus in bello — and when confronted with the violations, it retreated back to the jus ad bellum claim, as though the right to begin a war were a license to wage it without limits. This is the doctrinal sleight of hand at the heart of the matter. The right to self-defense answers the question "may you fight?" It has never answered the question "may you do this?" Hamas's claim to jus ad bellum self-defense deserves — at minimum — the same examination Israel's receives, and Israel's conduct under jus in bello deserves the same scrutiny Hamas's receives. On both counts, the international community has examined one party exhaustively and the other barely at all.
The Intent Defense — Stated Fairly, Then Answered
The strongest defense of Israel's conduct is also the most obvious, and it must be stated in its best form before it can be answered. The defense runs as follows: Israel is not attacking civilians; it is attacking Hamas, a terrorist organization that deliberately embeds itself in hospitals, schools, and dense neighborhoods, uses human shields, and leaves any scrupulous army with no clean options. Civilian deaths, on this account, are the tragic but unintended consequence of Hamas's strategy, mitigated further by Israel's efforts — warnings, evacuation orders, humanitarian corridors — to reduce them. Israeli officials from the President down have insisted that they do not target civilians and that their forces take precautions unmatched by any military in history. On this view, the moral and legal gulf between the two parties could hardly be wider: one side aims at civilians and the other side merely fails, at terrible cost, to save them.
This defense fails — not on the say-so of this article, but on the defendants' own words, their own conduct, and the findings of the world's permanent international criminal court.
Start with the words, because they came first and they shaped everything after. On October 9, 2023 — two days into the war, before any serious military argument had even begun — Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a "complete siege" of Gaza: "No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly." Note what this statement is. It is not a tactical briefing about Hamas fighters. It is a description of an entire besieged population as animals, coupled with a policy — cutting food, water, fuel, and power to two million people — aimed at that population as such. Siege starvation of civilians is not collateral damage; it is the targeting of civilians' means of survival, and it is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions precisely because no military advantage can convert it into a lawful act.
The pattern of language is long, public, and unambiguous. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing troops as the ground invasion began, invoked the biblical command to remember what Amalek did — a reference his audience understands as a divine warrant for annihilation. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared there were "two million Nazis in Gaza." A deputy speaker of the Knesset asked, "Who's left in Gaza? Are there citizens?" and answered that there were only "tunnels, Hamas, and accursed terrorists." A member of the Knesset said of Gaza's children that they had "brought this upon themselves." Israel's president told the world that "it is an entire nation out there that is responsible" — and when challenged, explained that he had not meant what the words plainly said. Perhaps he did not. But a single strained denial cannot dissolve a chorus, and the chorus is what soldiers heard. Israel's oldest human rights organization, B'Tselem, documented in July 2025 how brigade commanders converted "there are no innocents in Gaza" into operational doctrine — one commander turning the Netzarim corridor into a kill zone where anyone crossing, including children, was shot, and the dead systematically classified as "terrorists." Intent in international criminal law is proven this way: not by a signed confession, but by a pattern of statements and conduct from which only one inference is reasonable.
Then consider the conduct itself, independent of anyone's rhetoric. The strongest possible evidence that a war aims at civilians rather than merely failing to spare them is the systematic destruction of the things only civilians use. More than 85 hospitals and health centers were put out of service; 855 medical staff were killed; 103 schools and universities were completely destroyed and 309 more partially so; 317 mosques were leveled; 206 archaeological and heritage sites were destroyed; cemeteries were bulldozed. Seventy thousand tons of bombs — more explosive tonnage than fell on Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined — were dropped on one of the most crowded places on earth. These are not Hamas military assets. A tunnel network does not require the erasure of every university, every cemetery, every hospital in a territory. When the destruction maps onto the infrastructure of civilian existence rather than onto the enemy's war-making capacity, the claim that the harm was incidental stops being a defense and becomes an insult to the intelligence of anyone hearing it.
Finally, there is the judgment of the International Criminal Court. In November 2024, the Court's Pre-Trial Chamber found "reasonable grounds to believe" that Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant — the same Gallant who announced the siege — bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and for intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, alongside other crimes against humanity. The Court simultaneously issued warrants for Hamas commanders. That symmetry is worth pausing on, because it is the point of this article in miniature: the one institution charged with applying the doctrine without fear or favor applied it to both parties. It was governments — above all the United States, and the Western capitals that rushed to affirm Israel's "right to defend itself" in the war's first hours — that refused the symmetry. The ICC's two sets of warrants do not establish that the crimes are equal; they establish that the law, when allowed to operate, saw prima facie criminal conduct on both sides. Everything since has been an effort to ensure that only one side is ever treated as having committed it.
None of this erases the distinction the intent defense relies on. Hamas deliberately targeted civilians on October 7 — that was the point of the attack — and nothing in this article minimizes it. But the defense collapses as a justification for the response, because it asks us to weigh one party's declared intent against the other party's demonstrated intent, and then to credit only the denial while ignoring the statements, the doctrine, the destruction, and the indictments. A statement of denial cannot refute a pattern of conduct. Words spoken by leaders in the war's first days — human animals, Amalek, no innocents, everyone has to be killed — followed by a siege, seventy thousand tons of bombs, and the methodical erasure of civilian life, are not unfortunate collateral of a careful campaign. They are the campaign, announced in advance.
Land, Scripture, and the Ancient Claims
There is a second layer to the justification, and it reveals the supremacist logic in the realm of history rather than tactics. Alongside self-defense, Israeli officials and their supporters invoke ancient biblical title to the land to assert a claim that overrides the presence of another people who have inhabited that same land, continuously and non-Jewish, for centuries.
This, too, is a matter of public record rather than inference. Netanyahu chose the biblical warrant of Amalek as the framing metaphor for the war itself. Senior ministers openly speak of Gaza's inhabitants as a population to be removed rather than people to be governed; Smotrich has said plainly that "there is no such thing as Palestinians, because there cannot be a Palestinian people." The Nation-State Basic Law of 2018 enshrined in constitutional form the principle that self-determination in the land is the exclusive right of the Jewish people. And settlement policy — condemned as a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention by every serious legal authority that has examined it, and by the International Court of Justice — continues to transfer Israeli civilians into occupied Palestinian territory, carving the West Bank into fragments while the world is told the issue is security.
The double standard operates with perfect symmetry in each domain. The indigenous attachment of one people is treated as eternal, sacred, and inalienable; the attachment of the other is treated as incidental, negotiable, or illegitimate. The land's non-Jewish inhabitants — whose families have lived upon it for generations — are cast as trespassers in their own homes, a demographic problem to be managed rather than a human community whose rights command equal respect.
Taken together, the two justifications form a closed system. Biblical title establishes who may hold the land; self-defense establishes what the holder may do to keep it. And the law of war — the one body of rules that could have constrained the second claim — has been set aside in practice and blurred in discourse, so that the answer to "what may the holder do?" is effectively: anything, and anyone who objects must first explain why they deny the holder's right to exist.
The Record
The asymmetry between the two sides' conduct — and between the scrutiny applied to each — is summarized below, covering October 7, 2023 through October 24, 2024:
Notes:
On Israeli deaths at the hands of Hamas on Oct. 7: there are no official figures identifying women and children, or civilians versus military personnel, nor who killed them — Hamas, or Israeli forces reacting to the attack. Official figures simply state "1,200 men, women, and children – including 46 Americans and citizens of more than 30 countries." For this reason, the table shows "?" where no official figures exist.
** The Gaza Ministry of Health is administered under Hamas, and its figures have been contested by Israeli officials. They are included here because they are the only continuous casualty count available, because their methodology has been found broadly consistent with independent demographic assessment by US intelligence and leading research groups, and because UN agencies and major news organizations have relied on them throughout the war. Where other sources exist — UN bodies, WHO, UNESCO, CPJ, the IPC famine classification, the ICC — they are cited alongside.*** The statements attributed to Israeli leaders in the text of this article are documented in the public record: Gallant's October 9, 2023 siege announcement; Netanyahu's Amalek reference (October 2023); Smotrich's "two million Nazis" remark; the Knesset members' statements collected by Israeli and Palestinian monitoring groups; and the conduct findings in B'Tselem's July 2025 report, Our Genocide, which cites, among other cases, Brig. Gen. Yehuda Vach's Netzarim corridor kill-zone doctrine.**** The data in the table does not cover events beyond the 2025. Despite the ceasefire and declaration of end to the fighting, bombardment and killings continued in Gaza and violence spread to West Bank.
The Unavoidable Conclusion
The lesson of this record is not complicated, but it is uncomfortable. Self-defense, stripped of the laws that govern its conduct, is not a legal doctrine — it is a license. It licenses the powerful to do what they condemn in the powerless, and to call the difference justice. It asks us to believe that 1,200 dead on one side are a crime against humanity while tens of thousands dead on the other are the regrettable price of security; that the kidnapping of 254 people is barbarism while the detention and abuse of thousands is policy; that one people's attachment to the land is a sacred right while the other people's is an obstacle to be removed; that "human animals" and "no innocents" and "Amalek" are mere rhetoric, while a terrorist organization's charter is the decisive evidence of its enemy's essence.
A system that produces these conclusions does not just fail the test of law. It inverts it. The purpose of the law of war is to impose limits that hold even — especially — when fear and grief argue for their suspension. When the limits bind only the weak and shield only the strong, the doctrine being invoked is not defending civilization. It is administering its exception, and announcing, by that administration, who counts as fully human and who does not.
The rubble in Gaza did not come first. The sentence came first — the sentence, and the doctrine that let the sentence pass for law.
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