Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War

In recent years, the term lawfare has come to describe the use of international law as a political weapon. The Goldstone Report, which was published by the United Nations in September 2009, and the Gaza flotilla controversy, which erupted at the end of May 2010, are examples of it. In both cases, UN officials, distinguished lawyers, and diplomats put forward weak or indefensible legal arguments to condemn actions taken by Israel in self-defense. In this book, Peter Berkowitz exposes these abuses of the international laws of war by bringing into focus the flawed assumptions on which they rest and refuting the defective claims they promulgate.


Berkowitz shows that the Goldstone Report engaged in disreputable fact-finding and misapplied the relevant legal tests, even as its mission lacked proper foundations in international law. And he demonstrates that the arguments presented in the Gaza flotilla controversy to condemn Israel's blockade of Gaza as unlawful prove on inspection to be unsound and insubstantial. In both cases, he explains, the result has been to reward terrorists who, in gross violation of the international laws of war, deliberately efface the distinction between civilian and military objects and to punish liberal democracies--in particular Israel and the United States--that expose their soldiers and civilian populations to heightened risk in the quest to wage war lawfully.


Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he chairs the Koret-Taube Task Force on National Security and Law. He was cofounder and director of the Israel Program on Constitutional Government, has served as a senior consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics, and is a member of the Policy Advisory Board at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.