I will first lay out Maimonides’ argument. Then I will tie it to a condemnation of Israel’s military action against Gaza.

In terms of moral justification, war is extremely problematic. But even if we sort out most of the moral problems with war, sieges remain extremely problematic. For if making war can be moral at all, then the first principle of morality in warfare is that it is always wrong to intentionally make war against non-combatants. Children, for instance, are never fair game in war. Perhaps unintentionally causing their deaths is excusable in some circumstances. But trying to win a war by killing the enemy’s children is always wrong…

Yet sieges make war on non-combatants, first. Suppose that you are trying to starve a city into submission. Who will starve first? Since the city cannot resist if it permits its defenders to starve, non-combatants will starve first. Indeed, as Russia learned during the Nazi’s 900-day siege of Leningrad, children starve first. Human growth requires more nutrition than human decline. So to successfully starve a city into submission, you must first kill the children, then the other non-combatants, and finally the defenders of the city. Killing the non-combatants, children first, is the means to your end. You cannot intend the end without intending the means. Therefore, to starve a city into submission, you must intentionally make war against non-combatants, children first.

Maimonides understood all of this, but he also thought that some wars are just – such as wars of defense against the barbarian Christian Crusaders who, after storming Jerusalem in 1099 C.E., slaughtered the entire Jewish population of the city: “man, woman, and infant” (even according to the Crusader accounts, which brag about the holiness of the deed). He also thought that war cannot be successfully fought without sieges. So he faced a conundrum: 1.) Sieges are immoral. 2.) Fighting some wars is not immoral. 3.) even moral wars cannot be won without sieges. It seems like 1 – 3 cannot all be true, since you cannot be fighting, really, if you are not trying to win.

His solution, in figurative language (he understood that most cities are not literally square), is this: four-sided sieges are immoral, but three-sided sieges are not necessarily immoral. His literal meaning is that it is always wrong to force non-combatants to stay in the way of your military action – say, by forcing them to stay in a city you are trying to starve into submission – because if you do that then you are trying to kill non-combatants as a means of getting at the enemy combatants. However, if you allow non-combatants every opportunity to leave the besieged area, then (so long as you act morally in every other respect), it will not be your fault if they fail to leave and are killed. It will be their fault, if they understand your offer and yet failed to leave; it will be their parents’ fault, if they are children and their parents chose to keep them in harm’s way; and it will be the enemy’s fault, if the enemy does not allow them to leave.

I am not sure about Maimonides’ ideas about who is to blame for the deaths of non-combatants who stay in the way of a siege. I think that it depends on what kind of opportunity we give them to leave. It must be a realistic opportunity, at least in terms of survival, I think. There is much to say about what we could mean by “realistic”, here. But none of it is relevant t since I want to discuss Israel’s recent attacks on Gaza. Israel provides no opportunity for Palestinians of any age to leave Gaza.

What Israel is doing to Gaza is not exactly a siege, as Maimonides understood sieges. It is both better and worse than a medieval siege. It is better than a medieval siege because Israel is not trying to simply starve Gaza into submission: Israel lets in enough food to keep most Gazans barely alive (only some Gazans die of starvation, usually children, of course). It is worse than a medieval siege because Gaza – the most densely populated region on Earth – as it is now, is an Israeli creation, created primarily out of Israel's will to set aside undesirable (i.e., Palestinian) Israeli citizens. There is medieval precedent for this: in the Middle Ages Christian nations forced undesirables, especially Jews, into ghettos. There is also modern precedent: the Nazis did the same.

Lovely precedents!

Although the current Israeli action against Gaza is not exactly like a medieval siege, it is exactly the sort of thing that Maimonides condemns: it is an attempt to kill Hamas leaders by means of killing the civilians that stand in the way. In the last several days, Israel has killed over 100 Palestinian children. So far, the only clear legitimate military objective Israel has achieved is the killing of Nizar Rayyan, a Palestinian blowhard who has often called for (and perhaps participated in) violence against Israel. In order to kill Rayyan, Israel killed at least seven of his children and one of his wives – 13 family members in all. Israel blames this on him: he was a “coward” because he never left his home or family. Therefore, it was his fault that Israel had to kill at least seven children to get at him. Killing noncombatants who cannot get out of the way, in order to get at enemies: that is what Maimonides condemns. Yet that is current Israeli policy.