A follow-up to my post on Bombing Your Way To Proportionality as one Natasha Hausdorff discusses more than just that aspect of waging war.

She’s a barrister who got a law degree at Oxford University and an LL.M. specialising in public international law. She then clerked for the President of the Supreme Court of Israel in Jerusalem. In 2018, as a Pegasus Scholar, Natasha was a Fellow at Columbia Law School in the National Security Law Program. She frequently lectures around the world on aspects of public international law and national security policy.

And in this segment she lectures a BBC journalist about exactly what International Law does and does not say is permitted in warfare, in regard to civilian casualties. Her points should be specially noted because they directly address the stock claims being made in this segment by the journalist.

Here’s some of her points summarised:

  • Israel has the right to a robust response, and proportionality under International law does not mean what ordinary people (and journalists and Far Left activists) think it means.
  • In addition, under the Convention On The Prevention and Punishment of Genocide it also has affirmative obligation to make sure that “never again”actually means never again – as do all the other signatories. Given what Hamas has done and what it says it will do to the Jews in future that Convention means they have to be eliminated.
  • Israel issues warnings to civilians as to where it will strike in Gaza and has pulled civilians out of the northern areas precisely because there’s fighting there with Hezbollah – unlike Hamas who are deliberately keeping civilians in places where they’re likely to be killed.
  • If the aid organisations currently demanding a ceasefire in order to save civilian lives are invested in saving civilian lives they are obligated to help remove them from the war zone, but Hamas has blocked such movements. (Yes, that includes a link to George Galloway and yes, even he’s horrified).
  • There is no basis under International Law that obliges Israel to provide fuel, water, power or medical supplies to Hamas, especially when it is well known that Hamas purloin all those things to wage war against Israel. Israel only has a legal obligation to facilitate third parties to provide such things, and even then, only if they can be sure they won’t be diverted by Hamas, which is not the case here.
  • Sieges are lawful unless the besieger is deliberately trying aimed at starving the local population.
  • It is “utterly morally repugnant” to claim that Israel is conducting “collective punishment”, as if this moral and ethical argument is merely a matter of comparing the death tolls of civilians.

Also note how different the actual law is from what the modern Left have crafted over the past few decades with the whole oppressor/oppressed theory, into which terrorism fits as yet another perfectly shaped block in the structure.

Basically if you’re officially designated by the Left as “oppressed and powerless” you can be and do and say anything you want. For example:

  • You can be White-hating bigots like the Harawira clan but you’re not racists.
  • You can be Trans and demand that a large and powerful man can enter female sports, even ones where it’s certain that you’ll badly injure the woman and girls.
  • You can be a terrorist and permitted to commit war crimes precisely because you don’t have the military power of your oppressors. That argument was actually being pushed by some of the Far Left more than sixty years ago, long before the movements of Post-Modernism, De-Colonialisation and all the rest of the theory became defined.