A guide to the law of armed conflict, with some explicit references to Israel, Gaza, and Hamas. This is highly informative, but as the authors note, whether particular actions constitute war crimes, or otherwise violations of the law of armed conflict (not all violations are war crimes), is a "fact-sensitive" inquiry (although there are some clear violations: e.g., taking hostages).
"The War in Gaza: What is Israel allowed to do?" by David Enoch & Barak Medina (the link is to the Google Translate version--thanks to William Conner for the pointer). (UPDATE: Here is the "official" English version. [Thanks to Sergio Tenenbaum for the pointer.].)
The City University of New York, as a public institution, certainly cannot prohibit protests and speech in support of the Palestinians, but the CUNY faculty letter undermines its own credibility when it denies that the planned protests would "glorify Saturday’s [Oct. 7] violence and celebrate the killings, injuries and capture of innocent people" and then almost immediately refers to the barbaric "pillage and murder" attack on civilians by Hamas as a "military action"! Crossing borders to kill civilians is not a military action, full stop. (By the way, even if the protests were going to "glorify" the Hamas terror attack, that would still not justify barring the protests under American law.)
It's worth remembering what has gone on in the West Bank under successive conservative Israeli governments:
The model of two states living by side—Palestinian having full control over the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as the capital—was roughly the goal of the 1990s Oslo negotiations, but it has become much more complicated to accomplish because of what has occurred in the West Bank. Since 1967, 279 Jewish settlements have been established there, and they are now home to 700,000 Israeli Jews. For a territorially continuous and substantial Palestinian state to emerge the settlements would have to be dismantled, and Israel would have to yield East Jerusalem. No Israeli government would want to embark on that politically explosive mission, and so long as religious parties play a role in governing, it won’t be entertained even as an idea. More fundamentally, just as Hamas denies the legitimacy of Israel and rejects a two-state solution, ultra-religious Israeli parties reject the very notion of a Palestinian state, no matter its configuration. Furthermore, the scale and surprise of Hamas’s attack could well embolden and strengthen Israelis who warn that any kind of Palestinian state would pose a mortal threat to their country.
A forthright indictment of Netanyahu, in the NYT no less!
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