Throughout the document published recently by the IDF Chief of Staff on IDF strategy, special attention was devoted to retaining Israel’s international legitimacy for the use of force. The issue was in fact interwoven into the document’s very fabric. The document underscores the importance of attaining international legitimacy, since “the enemy is active in non-military kinetic dimensions and has in the past succeeded in neutralizing IDF’s successes in that realm.” This entails “a defensive as well as an offensive component. It is designed to create legitimacy for Israel (including freedom of action for the IDF) while delegitimizing the enemy (thereby reducing its scope of activity).” To do so, the document contends, a political, cognitive, and legal effort must be made that will “begin in preparatory stages and continue throughout the whole campaign to create, preserve, and enhance the legitimacy of action enjoyed by Israel, both in Israel itself and among the international community.”

The IDF has done well in understanding the importance and centrality of legitimacy in achieving the necessary gains vis-à-vis the enemy, and in internalizing the fact that the days in which it was possible to ignore legal constraints and international public opinion during the fighting and still emerge from the campaign victorious are long gone. Today, every Western military involved in combat operates under the world’s watchful eye. Horrific photographs of damage resulting from warfare reach the media – print journalism, television, and the internet – directly and in real time, which creates immediate pressure to avoid harm to civilians and civilian infrastructures. This phenomenon, which also affects the policies on the use of force of the United States, Great Britain, and other Western powers, is all the more relevant when it comes to Israel, which is perpetually viewed through the world’s magnifying glass and usually judged by more stringent standards than those applied to any other nation.

Consequently, it is vitally important to examine what should be done to enhance Israel’s international legitimacy regarding its use of force, and what must be avoided, to the extent possible, in order not to undermine that legitimacy. First and foremost, the way to attain legitimacy is to uphold the directives of international law applicable to warfare. It is true that Israel is criticized and its legitimacy questioned even when it does play by all the rules, but as long as it operates on the basis of the laws of armed conflict, it has an answer to its critics and to possible legal proceedings and is better able to enlist the support of important allies.

Read the article in full at INSS.