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Gaza Riots: The Israelis Were Right to Stand Their Ground

(Hoover Institution-Stanford University) Richard A. Epstein - On May 14, thousands of angry Palestinian demonstrators were rebuffed with deadly force as they sought to storm into Israel from Gaza. A mob, even of "unarmed" individuals, is typically intent on committing acts of violence by its sheer force of numbers. Indeed, the fiery confrontation looked like a war zone, marked by the hurling of Molotov cocktails, rocks, grenades, and pipe bombs at IDF forces. At multiple points along the border, Hamas operatives used wire cutters to tear up fences in order to allow hordes of thuggish Palestinians to fan out into Israeli territory. As Israeli intelligence reports, Hamas paid women and children to go to the front in order to put them in the line of fire. This was no peaceful protest, and it takes an uninformed view of the law of self-defense to insist that Israeli soldiers should have held back their fire until personally faced with "imminent danger," at which point it would have been too late both for them and the civilians they were there to protect. There is no principle in the law of self-defense that requires a group to forego self-defense. The Israelis were right to stand their ground. The writer, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University Law School.
2018-05-25 00:00:00
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