From Moral Theologian Professor Daniel Maguire, July 21, 2014
Maguire has taught ethics at the Marquette University (a Jesuit university) for several decades, and is still teaching there (despite strong efforts by the Catholic Archdiocese to get Marquette to fire him). He writes:
What better time to review the Catholic and Jewish ethics of war?
Gaza has been subjected to another brutal method of war: siege. Siege directly violates the “just-war” principle of “discrimination,” i.e. non-combatant immunity, since it targets all indiscriminately, innocent and guilty alike. Peaceful flotillas have attempted to break the siege of Gaza by bringing desperately needed medicine and food to Gaza and they have been repulsed by Israel; in one case Israelis shot and killed nine of those on a peace flotilla, one of them an American citizen.
Siege is the most devastating of weapons, condemned by both Jewish and Catholic ethics. As Michael Walzer says in his “War Against Civilians,” “more people died in the siege of Leningrad than in the infernos of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki taken together.” The health effects of the ever tightening siege on children and others in Gaza are devastating.
Maimonides in the twelfth century summed up the Talmudic view of siege, saying it could only be justified if it left one side open for citizens to escape. Of course, it would then no longer be a siege. Conclusion: a siege is immoral.
As for the “just war” theory principle regarding civilian casualties, the Jewish scholar Mark Ellis calls Gaza the largest prison in the world, and bombing and strafing that prison is, in “just war” terms, murder. John Ford, S.J. addressed this in a landmark article in Theological Studies in 1944. In Ford’s thinking you cannot shoot into a crowded room and say you only intended to kill the bad guy.