Since the Middle Ages, belligerent leaders have taken refuge behind the seductive façade of just war theory according to which what matter above all during wartime are the intentions of the warriors, not the consequences of their actions. When leaders order their troops to drop bombs, they claim to be combating “evil” adversaries. But war culminates in indiscriminate death, destruction, maiming, and misery of both combatants (whether voluntary or conscripted) and noncombatants. When civilians are slaughtered, war supporters tend charitably to forgive and forget what they interpret to have been mistakes made by their own leaders. At the same time, the killing of civilians by adversarial leaders is denounced as murder and taken as proof that the war must continue on.
Throughout the U.S. invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the war makers themselves controlled much of the media, which dutifully parroted official government statements directed toward the citizens whose federal taxes were being used to fund the missions. As a result, many people remained largely unaware of what they were paying for, so much so that they opted to reelect President George W. Bush, even after it had emerged that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. The reigning assumption among the populace continued to be that the perpetrators of the crimes of September 11, 2001, were being brought to justice through the protracted Global War on Terror. In reality, the primary recipients of the government’s application of deadly force were nonviolent inhabitants of Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Syria.
When news broke about extraordinary rendition and the torture of inmates at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay prisons, there was some push back, with a few (not all) government officials publicly acknowledging that, as President Barack Obama put it, “We tortured some folks.” Disconcertingly, Obama then proceeded to normalize the summary execution of suspected terrorists through the use of lethal drones. Because the narrative continued to be controlled by the government, most U.S. citizens simply assumed that the military-age men being killed both within and outside declared war zones were guilty of crimes. In reality, thousands of men were effectively convicted by state execution, on the basis of purely circumstantial evidence, of possible complicity in future terrorist acts.
So long as the targets of state slaughter bear some physical resemblance to violent jihadists, the citizenry tends to accept the government’s version of the story about the persons carbonized by missiles to ashes. But what happens when leaders systematically and serially slaughter civilians on the ground—such as has occurred over the past year in Gaza and more recently in Lebanon—and the people paying for the weapons being used to commit what by all appearances are war crimes are made aware of what is going on?
The use of civilian shields is a well-known tactic, with members of terrorist groups such as Hamas embedding themselves within civilian structures and residential areas. But when hospitals, schools, and refugee camps are repeatedly bombed, the cumulative toll of the damage wrought by the government is difficult to reconcile with the allegedly good intentions of the killers. In Gaza, entire neighborhoods have been razed, with many thousands of civilians killed or injured and maimed, children orphaned (when not shot in the head), and all of the survivors psychologically traumatized by what looks to be a cruel, sadistic game forcing them to relocate over and over again in progressively more futile efforts to survive. At some point the proclamation that “Our intentions are good!” loses all plausibility.
Despite the dissemination through social media of ample evidence of what has transpired over the past year in Israel, the government’s commission of mass homicide continues to be regarded by many U.S. citizens and their elected representatives as fully compatible with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion of his nation’s right to self defense. There have, of course, been naysayers: both the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have expressed concern that Netanyahu and his colleagues have committed war crimes, even genocide, while claiming only to defend the state of Israel. A few nations, including Ireland and Italy, have announced that they will not supply Israel with bombs, given what they are likely to do with them, but the largest force-multiplier of them all, the U.S. government, continues to aid and abet the slaughter.
What makes the case of Israel qualitatively distinct from the U.S. military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan is that the people of Gaza being subjected to unfathomable psychological and physical abuse—when not also murdered—in fact inhabit Israel. This brings us to a fundamental problem with the just war paradigm assumed by so many for so long to be valid. The notion that a state has a right to self-defense does not withstand scrutiny, and certainly cannot be used to rationalize or excuse the mass slaughter of its residents.
Scholars over the centuries have devised various ploys for defending the just war paradigm, one of the most frequently rehearsed tropes among self-proclaimed “just war theorists” being that the state’s rights derive additively from the rights of its constituents. This is perhaps the argument which seduces war supporters most effectively: that because every citizen of a country has a right to life, therefore, the state has a derivative “right to life,” which is not a natural right, but a right enjoyed in virtue of the constituent members of the group.
Notwithstanding its superficial appeal, this approach commits the fallacy of composition, for the fact that each member of a group shares a characteristic says nothing about the set comprising those members. For example, an assembly of men, comprising all and only persons in possession of a Y-chromosome in each and every one of their cells, does not together make up a male assembly, because assemblies are not the sorts of entities capable of possessing Y-chromosomes. Assemblies of persons have no gender, and states have no rights to life.
Most obviously, states are not living, conscious, sentient things; they are artifacts. A state comprises no more and no less than a group of persons assembled within a circumscribed plot of land who have banded together and established a set of agreed-upon conventions so as to secure and promote their own well being. When a government massacres or sacrifices its own citizens against their will, this betrays the sad reality that the state has transmogrified into a separate, hostile force, acting not to protect but to undermine the interests of the people for whom it was erected.
The case of Israel’s slaughter of people living in Israel is an obvious example of a state’s transmogrification into a hostile force which undermines instead of protecting its citizenry. Indeed, by wreaking havoc upon the Palestinians in Gaza, the government is simultaneously degrading the security situation of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel as well. Previously neutral Palestinian survivors, reasoning that they have nothing to lose anyway, and outraged by what they have witnessed with their very own eyes, may opt to join the ranks of Hamas.
A somewhat less obvious but contemporaneous example of this phenomenon is on display in Ukraine, where President Volodymyr Zelensky has imposed martial law and mandatory conscription upon male citizens, while increasing taxes on the populace to pay for his war with Russia and refusing to pursue pacific means to a resolution of the conflict. In a functioning democracy, the citizens would be able to reject the government’s policies allegedly enacted on their behalf, but this is not currently possible in Ukraine because the president canceled the scheduled 2024 election by which the voters might have ousted him from power and demanded that the government return to the negotiation table.
In this way, while claiming to defend “democracy,” Zelensky has stripped the citizens of Ukraine of their democratic right to elect a new leader. Those who reject the sacrifice of thousands of young men for what looks to be a fool’s errand, given the evident power disparity between a nuclear-armed state and one with no such weapons in its arsenal, are instead being silenced. By taxing the populace in order to pay for his program, Zelensky is furthermore coercing Ukrainians to fund the sacrifice of persons who have declined to enlist in the army—or even defected—on the grounds that they themselves do not believe that the border dispute is worth renouncing everything else, up to and including their lives.
There have been soldiers throughout history willing to die for their country or cause, but in every case where young persons are forced to don uniforms, on pain of punishment—in some cases, execution—for refusal to do so, they have been denied their right to disagree with the government. Draft dodgers and defectors are routinely criminalized and portrayed as cowards and scoundrels by the regime with which they take issue. In reality, such disaffected would-be soldiers have grasped the nature of statehood much better than those who wield power allegedly on their behalf.
Strikingly, even if one were to accept for the sake of argument that the state possessed a somewhat weaker “right to exist,” a problem would remain: in every war where citizens are sacrificed, whether as so-called collateral damage, as in Gaza, or as young men sent to fight and die on the front lines, as in Ukraine, the state is progressively whittled down during every war with the diminution of its citizenry. In Ukraine, President Zelensky has called for lowering the age of conscription on males, which ensures that even more citizens will die, and the population will become smaller as a result.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu continues his ruthless slaughter of Palestinians. As a result, many protesters all over the world, including Jewish persons within and outside Israel, have charged Netanyahu with ethnic cleansing or genocide. If members of Hamas decided to embed themselves among Jewish residents of Israel, would Netanyahu continue so assiduously to bomb them as well? He certainly has ended the lives of hostages held by Hamas, all the while claiming that the state of Israel’s right to exist underlies all that he does. If Netanyahu continues on his current trajectory, however, slaughtering Palestinians in the name of the state of Israel, then eventually there will be no more Palestinians left to kill, which some critics have surmised is the true intent behind what has only been camouflaged as a right to national defense.
Likewise, if Zelensky eventually sacrifices all of the young men of Ukraine as they come of what he has decreed to be fighting age, then Ukraine will have a very different composition from the one which existed at the outset of the war. The groups of people in both cases will have been transformed at the behest of their leader, who ignored the rights of those killed, in the name of a supposedly greater good.
A seldom recognized implication of the idea that a group’s leader has the right to commit homicide in virtue of his status as their leader is that through just such a progressive whittling down of a larger to a smaller group, any person could claim to have the right to kill anyone else, because even a group of one is a group. That limiting case may sound on its face preposterous, implying as it does that a person can both possess and not possess the right to commit homicide. But take any larger group and piece of land, say, the former state of Yugoslavia, subdivide it, label the new parts as independent states—Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo—and those resultant entities would thereby multiply, in the just war framework, the number of “legitimate authorities” supposedly permitted to commit homicide in the name of their group.
Such a reductio ad absurdum should be a cause for pause and a thorough reexamination of the just war paradigm, but we cannot expect leaders themselves to do this, for that would be for them willingly to cede the God-like power bestowed upon them—the power to end the lives of human beings. Despite having rather negative views of politicians, most citizens somehow fail to recognize that when a politician is elected as head of state there are no rational grounds for believing that he suddenly possesses a magical get-out-of-jail free card permitting the wanton slaughter of anyone he claims to be the evil enemy.
Because the cases of Israel and Ukraine are playing out abroad, they afford an opportunity for a sober reconsideration of the absurd but widely accepted idea that elected officials and their appointees in democratic nations may annihilate not only the citizens of other states but also the citizens of their own state—all in the name of the state. Because every leader throughout history has claimed to be acting on his good intentions and in the name of justice—from Hitler and Mussolini, to Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, to Netanyahu and Zelensky—it is nothing short of naïveté to bestow upon such persons the means with which to annihilate their fellow human beings. Nothing could be more unjust than to strip all of the rights of a person away, as happens in every act of homicide, and nothing could be more illogical than to say that this is being done by the state on that person’s behalf.
