On October 20, two weeks after the atrocities committed by Hamas on Israeli soil against Israeli citizens (including the rape and mass murder of girls and children) that resulted in more than 1,200 deaths, and one week before the start of Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza to neutralize Hamas , a group of Oxford University professors signed an open letter addressed to the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Rishi Sunak, urging him to ask the Israeli government for a cease-fire in Gaza, that is, to the bombings that Israel has already begun to carry out in order to destroy the main operational bases of Hamas.[1]

The main argument of these scholars, who included not only lawyers and political scientists, but also some prominent philosophers such as Jeff McMahon, John Broom, Henry Shue, Adrian Moore and Hilary Greaves, was this. (1) According to international law, Israel has the right to take self-defense measures against Hamas. (2) However, this right does not justify Israel’s violent attack on the civilian population of Gaza. (3) By “violent attack” the authors understood at the time the following facts: the deliberate deprivation of innocent Palestinian civilians of “water, food and electricity, as well as the means of escape” (although the authors admitted that Israel was provided with a limited amount of “food, water and medical means”); prohibiting the passage of “fuel to Gaza, which endangers the ability of hospitals to function”; acceptance of “extremely insufficient” amount of aid to Gaza (according to the UN); the order to evacuate 1.2 million women, men and children from northern Gaza, described by the Norwegian Refugee Council as a “war crime of forced displacement”; approximately 3,500 people died and another 12,500 were injured, including many children, journalists, medical workers, and humanitarian workers. The authors of the letter approvingly quoted UNRWA, the UN agency for supporting Palestinian refugees, which declared the situation an “unprecedented humanitarian disaster”.

The authors of the open letter made two conclusions. (1) Israel’s actions are an affront to human moral dignity. (2) Israel believes that “the atrocities committed by Hamas justify the humanitarian crisis currently unfolding in Gaza,” which means that Israel accepts (a) “the basic principle of terrorism — that all citizens must pay for the wrongdoing of their governments.” and (b) “the core practice of terrorism: collective punishment.” In other words, Israel is a terrorist state and practices state terrorism.

Without deciding the merits of these two conclusions (but see below), I want to mention a significant problem with the letter’s reasoning. In addition, the letter accepts the international legal principle of self-defense of the state against an external aggressor.[2] On the other hand, he condemns the military actions of Israel with the aim of neutralizing this aggressor, but without specifying what exactly they will be an acceptable alternative procedure through which Israel could act without practicing “state terrorism”, given the ideology and organization of Hamas, and the fact, evident from the actions of October 7 itself, that the group does not make the fundamental distinction accepted by international law between combatants and non-combatants.[3] A strange thing, given the knowledge of international law of some of the signatories of the University of Oxford. This letter gives us the impression that it asserts an abstract right which, however, cannot be enforced. But an unenforceable right is a fiction. The suspicion is that the authors of the letter DISCLAIMER OF LIABILITY in fact, Israel’s right to self-defense without saying so, perhaps without even realizing it.

There is also the issue of framing. There is no similar letter published by these or other Oxford professors on similar occasions. Where was Adrian Moore or Roxanne Banu, where was John Broom or Amiya Srinavasan, when Karabakh was ethnically cleansed by Azerbaijan’s aggression this September, “cleansed” of 120,000 Armenians, including 30,000 children?[4] Where were these teachers in recent years, when Communist China subjected and continues to subject the Uyghur Muslim minority to cultural and actual genocide? Where was their letter of protest against Russian air force bombing of Syrian civilian areas and hospitals since 2015 during the Syrian civil war or even against Moscow’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022 published? When they were outraged by the massacre perpetrated in Yemen by Saudi Arabia, which has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in recent years, not to mention the dozens of conflicts currently taking place in Africa, including the civil war in Sudan, as well as deadly attacks by Islamists in Burkina- Faso, Mali or Nigeria in public schools? In fact, why did these professors not sign an open letter on or immediately after October 7, calling on the international community to condemn the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians, which included the rape and sexual mutilation in the most brutal ways possible of hundreds of Jewish women, girls and children? Did Roxana Banu, an expert on the legal aspects of feminism, not consider this murderous orgy against women, which finds parallels only in the pages of a novel One hundred and twenty days of Sodom Marquis de Sade, “an insult to human moral dignity”? Why did these professors not express their solidarity with the Jews of the West, who after October 7 became the object of more or less violent attacks, some rhetorical, others physical, both on the campuses of famous universities and even on the streets of large cities in the cities of the West, including Germany , who considered themselves cured of anti-Semitism? Why haven’t the leaders of Hamas been asked yet? exact ceasefire in Gaza, i.e. the launching of thousands of rockets of Iranian origin on the cities of Israel? According to which principle of international law is the state obliged to cease fire, but not its aggressor?

All these rhetorical questions, of course, suggest that there is a pronounced systemic, perhaps even racist, bias against Israel that Oxford professors at least maintain. By this I do not mean to deny the problems created and the serious mistakes made by Israel in recent years regarding the settlement of the Palestinian issue, especially during the Netanyahu government. We will only note that the close military and economic cooperation between (still) democratic Israel and autocratic Azerbaijan, which aimed to destroy democratic Armenia, deserves absolute condemnation.[5] Furthermore, I do not want to question the effectiveness and legitimacy of Israel’s military actions LAST weeks The right to self-defense established by the UN defines three conditions: necessity, proportionality, speed (necessity, Subsidiarity, spontaneity). I don’t know if now, two months later, and when the Palestinian death toll is about ten times the original Israeli loss, those three conditions are still met.[6] But despite this, the bias mentioned above remains undeniable.

The letter of the Oxford professor may give the impression that it corresponds to the opinion of the majority of scientists of this famous university. However, everything is not quite like that. Oxford’s philosophy department, for example, has more than 50 professors, but only 12 of them were among the signatories. That’s why many refrained. However, there were no critical voices from Oxford on the open letter – with one exception, the response of Peter Hacker, a prominent philosopher from St. John’s College, analytical philosopher, author of more than 20 books (on the philosophy of language, mind, knowledge, human nature, Frege and Wittgenstein).[7] His firm and uncompromising response to the allegations in the open letter made a decisive contribution to the wider debate on the subject.[8]. I reproduce it below in its entirety, in my translation, to enable the Romanian reader to form perhaps a more accurate or balanced opinion of such an ancient and tragic conflict.

Response to an open letter on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza[9]

Peter Hacker

Saint Johncollege

Oxford

I was astonished to read the “Open Letter” signed by forty-two distinguished professors at Oxford University, which condemned Israel’s response to the deadly attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians, in which infants, children, boys and girls, women and pensioners were killed, as well as small persons the number of soldiers. It pained me to see among the signatories some of my fellow philosophers. Their vocation as philosophers is clarity of thought. But what good is philosophy to them if they cannot think clearly in matters of such importance?[10]

The open letter, although its authors include professors of international relations, does not place the Hamas attack in the current context of the Middle East. Hamas is funded by Qatar and Iran, trained and armed by Iran. Iran, like its ally Hamas, clearly wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Iran’s immediate interest in supporting the Hamas attack is to stop the rapprochement between Saudi Arabia, its main Sunni adversary in the region, and Israel, a rapprochement established by the Abraham Accords (2020). This rapprochement could initiate a very beneficial solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the two-state principle. It is not by chance that Yemeni Houthi Islamist rebels, who are also Iran’s proteges, began shelling Israel from a distance of a thousand kilometers. So the war that Israel has declared on Hamas is in response to an existential threat to the state of Israel.

Demanding an immediate cessation of hostilities from Israel is similar to demanding an immediate cessation of hostilities from Britain and the US on the eve of D-Day (D dayJune 6, 1944) to avoid civilian casualties. If Israel ends its war before it destroys Hamas and its infrastructure, it will mean that Israel will perpetuate Hamas’ rule over Gaza, demonstrate its inability to destroy Hamas, and invite it to regroup and strike again in a few years, as it has done in the past . Indeed, Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad, speaking on Lebanese television channel LBC on October 24, said: “Everything we do is justified,” adding that “the flooding of Al-Aqsa [numele dat de Hamas atacului] this is only the first wave, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the determination and the ability to fight.”

An open letter, being an example of duplicity on an Orwellian scale (see the novel 1984 year), argues that Israel’s war against Hamas is a “morally disastrous exercise” given the large number of innocent civilian deaths. …

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