Should We Invade Israel in the Name of Humanitarianism?

When I was in graduate school in the 1990s — and this continued into the aughts and 2010s — the dominant idea in liberal foreign policy circles was that of humanitarian intervention or Responsibility to Protect. The claim was that though states should ordinarily respect the sovereignty of other states, under extreme circumstances, say of genocide or ethnic cleansing, it was not just the right but the obligation of the international community to take coercive action, including using military force and violence, to stop the genocide or ethnic cleansing.

Occasionally, the theory went, this might involve or entail toppling the regime that was engaged in the genocide. Thus Vietnam was allowed to invade Cambodia and overthrow the Khmer Rouge, Tanzania was allowed to invade Uganda and topple the Idi Amin regime, NATO overthrew Slobodan Milošević, and so on.

While these actions were often framed as the obligation of the “international community,” the fact that the actors were usually neighboring states or former colonial overseers suggests that power politics was accepted as a legitimate adjunct to, even an underlying motivation of, the humanitarian intervention regime. That local or former colonial states might have other interests besides humanitarian ones — that the interveners were not always the United Nations as a whole but individual states with ulterior motives — did not detract from the fact that military violence was being used to stop genocide.

Again, this was a common liberal mainstream opinion between the early 1990s up through the Obama administration, which saw NATO intervene in Libya on similar grounds.

Now we’re confronted with a genocide in Gaza. Should neighboring states be authorized to invade Israel and stop the genocide there, even if that means Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime is toppled? (And don’t forget: the Vietnamese who overthrew the Khmer Rouge were hardly models of liberalism or democracy.) What say the Right to Protect advocates now? Where have all the liberal humanitarians gone?