The surprise Israeli strikes across Iran ordered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provoked euphoria in some political precincts, but the campaign nonetheless looks like an exceptionally reckless gamble. The Israeli leader, who faces a myriad of legal and electoral challenges, opened a new theater of conflict during a time of extreme regional tension and with I.D.F. resources already stretched thin. The war itself was inaugurated with a barrage of violations of international law, including the letter and spirit of the United Nations Charter.
The world may have grown inured to the spectacle of “targeted killing,” but it is worth reminding ourselves from time to time that extrajudicial executions are violations of international humanitarian laws that govern warmaking and the right to life. It is simply not legal to assassinate diplomats, scientists, heads of state or even military leaders away from an actual battlefield, particularly when it also means killing their family members and neighbors.
Israeli officials use the term pre-emptive in describing the surprise attacks on Iran, but the war Israel began is more correctly identified as preventive. The threat Israel proposes to neutralize was not imminent. While Mr. Netanyahu insisted, as he has for years, that Iran was on the verge of producing its first nuclear weapons, U.S. intelligence services did not concur.
A pre-emptive attack on truly imminent threats has some justification under international law, but there is little standing in law or in the church’s just war tradition for a preventive attack against a speculative, future danger.
Proponents of realpolitik scoff at such niceties, arguing that the danger posed by a potentially nuclear-armed Iran far outweighs any moral or ideological commitments to shore up the leaky foundation of international law. Realpolitik has many fans among people who perceive themselves as the tough-minded sort who get the geopolitical job done—maximizing national self-interest in all expressions of soft and hard power. But shouldn’t a policy drained of emotion and morality and focused on the best practical outcome result in… well, the best practical outcome?
Hundreds of noncombatants have died in Iran, and scores have been killed in Israel. Though hundreds have been intercepted, at least 35 Iranian missiles punctured Israel’s “Iron Dome” air defenses, and despite the I.D.F’s obvious success in the air, military strategists say that Israel may have to put boots on the ground to take control of nuclear research sites, suggesting a far more costly confrontation. They add that the ultimate “success” of Israel’s adventure against Iran depends on the willingness of President Donald Trump to throw the U.S. military into the fray—unleashing, for example, American B-2 bombers on entombed nuclear research sites.
How did we get to this moment? Could it have been prevented by adhering to the international laws and standards often too readily dismissed in Jerusalem and Washington?
In judging the morality of an act of war, an easy ask is always: “Was the belligerent party left with no other recourse?” That does not appear to be true in this case.
In fact, in 2015, global powers including the United States had achieved an agreement, imperfect as they all are, that stepped the world back from a nuclear-armed Iran. But during his first term, Mr. Trump cast the Iran deal aside, reinstating U.S. economic sanctions on Iran and beginning a retaliatory erosion of the agreement’s monitoring efficacy.
Had the United States remained an active party, would the world have reached this precipice? It is not hard to perceive the failure of the Iran deal as another example of the Trump administration abandoning international norms and agreements, only to be forced to walk back its defiance to resolve a crisis of its own making.
Israel, like the United States, is party to some but not all the U.N. conventions and agreements that, taken together, constitute international humanitarian law and the laws of warfare. Israel allows itself wide latitude under those laws, rationalizing mortal strikes and accepting increasingly higher death tolls among noncombatants that accompany them. The carnage in Gaza has been one result.
With no apparent sense of irony, the Israeli government on June 16 deplored Iranian missile strikes that killed civilians in Tel Aviv. In issuing such communiques, Israel obliquely appeals to international law it often disregards.
The crack of a missile strike may seem decisive and determined. It may move the geopolitical needle sharply. Diplomacy and negotiation will never offer the same catharsis, but which approach will prove the most effective over the long term? Is it possible that we have already forgotten past, costly experiences in regime change and nation building?
As Israeli warplanes fly freely over Iran, is victory assured, or is this another “mission accomplished” moment?
Should Israel’s preventive war against Iran achieve the result Mr. Netanyahu apparently seeks, the overthrow of the theocratic regime in Tehran, it will be U.N. and other multilateral agencies and organizations that will be called on to put the regional pieces back together again. Unfortunately, the world may be witnessing not the end of the Israel-Iran conflict but the beginning of a new era of instability across the Middle East.
Adherence to international law, the ambitions of the U.N. Charter, and the other international treaties and agreements that have followed it cannot guarantee perfect geopolitical outcomes. But given the scandalous cost in lives and treasure, the incalculable suffering of noncombatants and the clear mayhem that they continue to produce, the hard-power policies of the so-called realists do not appear to result in inarguably superior results.
Does anyone in the world feel safer from the threat of a nuclear exchange in the Middle East today than they did on June 12? If, as the Israelis say, the Iranians were weeks or even days away from developing nuclear capability, surely they are rushing toward that goal now. Other regional powers may follow their lead.
Israel has relied for generations on the support of allies in the European Union and its patron, the United States. Now, a rising generation in the West seems mostly appalled by the I.D.F. campaign to obliterate Hamas in Gaza. This latest expression of indifference to international law will only cement a growing perception of Israel as a rogue state.
After neutralizing Hezbollah and Hamas, with Bashar al-Assad a bitter memory in Syria, Israeli strategists have chosen a moment of optimal weakness for this long-anticipated strike against Iran. But their resort to armed conflict holds out a promise of security that cannot be guaranteed by military might alone.
Dialogue and compromise, and the plodding progress toward universal respect for life promised by the international community’s still-developing body of humanitarian law, are more reliable means to the peace and security sought by Israel.
