This is an important distinction. According to Kasher, there are restrictions when operating against “harmless civilians,” but everything is permissible when facing “terrorists.” Yet if he were to replace the word “terrorists” with “enemy combatants,” then his claims would be closer to an argument and would not slip, emotionally as well as intellectually, into propaganda.

The same is true of other terms employed by Kasher. He mentions, for example, situations in which there is a threat of our soldiers being kidnapped, and asks what actions are permissible in order to prevent that from happening. It seems the IDF is the only army in the world whose soldiers are “kidnapped” rather than “captured.”

In his essay, Kasher discusses two main issues: the morality of embarking on the Gaza war, and the morality of IDF conduct during the war. I will follow in his footsteps.

Kasher agrees that a country is permitted to go to war only for the purpose of self-defense, and only as a “last resort”—that is, after “all other alternatives have been exhausted.” The official justification for embarking on Operation Cast Lead was the rocket attacks on Israeli citizens originating from the Gaza Strip. Clearly, the state was obligated to protect its citizens from the rocket attacks. But can it really be said that all alternatives short of war were exhausted? Kasher answers with a definite “yes.” He justifies this answer with the claim that “demanding that Israel engage in direct negotiation with a terrorist organization that does not recognize its right to exist cannot be justified.”

This argument is illogical. The purpose of negotiations was not to persuade Hamas to recognize Israel and its right to exist (who needs this, anyway?), but rather to stop the rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. If such negotiations had been undertaken, Hamas would likely have demanded that Israel lift its siege of Gaza, open the border crossings, and agree to an exchange of prisoners. There is reason to believe that an agreement could have been reached on this basis.

Yet such a negotiation was never even attempted. Nor were any attempts made to negotiate with the Palestinian unity government in which Hamas was represented. Therefore, the decision to go to war in Gaza—with its civilian population of 1.5 million—was unjustified according to Kasher’s own principles. If a trial were conducted in front of a neutral judge, the prosecution would define the decision to embark on Operation Cast Lead as a crime. Furthermore, we are all aware that alongside the operation’s official goal, there was also an unofficial one: to topple the Hamas regime in Gaza. Since Kasher knows that this is an illegitimate goal, however, he simply ignores it.

He also avoids dealing with the claim that the entire operation was a form of collective punishment. Throughout the war, official Israeli spokesmen declared the need to exact a “high price” from Hamas—in other words, to wreak havoc on a massive scale in order to make life in Gaza as hellish as possible, under the assumption that the population would then revolt and bring down Hamas. What is the moral justification for such a strategy?

One crime leads to another. When a government decides to send its troops to war against a guerilla organization that operates, naturally, from within a civilian population, it is self-evident that such a campaign will inflict horrible suffering on that population. Kasher claims that this suffering—including the killing of 1,400 men, women, and children—was inevitable. In light of such a claim, the only conclusion one can reach is that the decision to embark on such a war is in itself an appalling act.

Kasher, however, makes things easy for himself: He refuses to believe Palestinian and international reports regarding the extent of death and destruction in Gaza, and declares—though his basis for doing so in unclear—that they are erroneous and unfounded. As he puts it, “one cannot judge the operation in a serious, professional, and responsible manner without having adequate knowledge of the actions in question, and one should therefore resist the political and emotional temptation to do so.” He demands instead that we wait for the results of the IDF’s own investigations before we so much as discuss the matter.