Is There Such a Thing as a “Just War” in the Modern World?

To justify the State of Israel’s current indiscriminate killing of women and children in Gaza, the Israeli regime’s supporters generally put forward a one-line explanation: “Israel has a right to defend itself.” This simple-minded incantation is deployed as if it is the final word. It is meant to communicate this idea: “some people from Gaza killed some Israeli citizens in October 2023. Therefore, the Israeli state can morally and legally kill any person in Gaza indiscriminately.”

Women and children are being starved as a result of Israel’s bombing campaign? It doesn’t matter because “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Many of the people targeted had nothing to do with the October 2023 attack? It doesn’t matter because “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

In modern warfare, where modern weaponry means entire cities are leveled and whole populations can be wiped off the map, this sort of thinking is despicable. Tel Aviv is hardly alone in this sort of thinking, however. Those who fund the Israeli carpet bombing—the American state—has a long history of behaving this way. In Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, Americans routinely targeted noncombatants relying on lazy claims that amount to little more than saying that Japanese children deserved to be firebombed because they were born Japanese. Did those children have anything to do with the attack on Pearl Harbor? It doesn’t matter because “America has a right to defend itself.”

As the historian Ralph Raico points out in his lecture “The World at War,”Americans had not yet become so morally depraved before the Second World War. Referring to American glee over the firebombing of Tokyo, which Robert McNamara says may have killed 100,000 Japanese civilians in one night, Raico says:

I can’t imagine anyone in America in 1914 who would have greeted with joy the destruction of a Japanese city and the death of a hundred thousand people. You ask anybody in America. You ask Theodore Roosevelt himself! That old sissy probably would faint. You ask anyb

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Lew Rockwell

LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.