Louis René Beres
The Gaza War and International Law: An Informed Assessment
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: In its obligatory war against Palestinian terror – a criminal process encouraged and sustained by Iran – Israel is acting within the bounds of pertinent international law. Though this assessment is difficult to...
Countering Hamas Terrorism: Israel, Iran and the “Samson Option”
Abstract: As Israel expands its law-enforcing offensive against Gaza-based Hamas, core attention should remain directed toward terrorist patron state Iran. With such attention, Israel will need to draw upon a comprehensive strategy that is...
Israel, Terrorism And Immortality: Hamas Attractions To “Power Over Death”
“An immortal person is a contradiction in terms.”
Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death and Time (2000)
Effective counter-terrorism is never just about strategy and tactics. For Israel, still at the start of Operation Swords of Iron, dealing...
Hamas Terror Attacks and International Law
Amid ongoing terror violence in Israel, the author — an expert in international law and regular JURIST contributor — argues that it is the responsibility of the United States and other world powers to...
Beyond Belligerent Nationalism
Special to Jewish Website
7 September 2023
Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971)
Emeritus Professor of International Law
Purdue University
lberes@purdue.edu
“The dust from which the first man was created was gathered in all four corners of the earth.”
Talmud
Despite persistent...
Israel, Counter-Terrorism, and International Law: The Analytic Challenges of ‘System’
“The existence of `system’ in the world is obvious to every observer of nature, no matter whom.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1959)
Whether conspicuous or obscure, terrorism generally presents itself as a systemic challenge. This means, inter...
Sovereignty and Survival
Special to Jewish Website
Abstract: Core issues surrounding Iran's nuclear weapons program have generally been strategic or political rather than legal. Nonetheless, if Israel should sometime decide that it no longer has any reasonable alternative...
Foundations of Nuclear War Avoidance: An Intellectual and Legal Challenge
“It must not be forgotten that it is perhaps more dangerous for a nation to allow itself to be conquered intellectually than by arms.” —Guillaume Apollinaire, “The New Spirit and the Poets” (1917)
Nuclear weapons...
A New Film’s Hidden Message: “Oppenheimer,” Escalation Dominance and Inadvertent Nuclear War
Introduction: The new film about Manhattan Project physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer raises counter-intuitive questions about nuclear weapons as instruments of peace. Despite serious misgivings about the bomb he had created (“I am become death, the destroyer...
Thinking About the Unthinkable, Again
In 1962, Herman Kahn riveted the US defense community with a book titled Thinking About the Unthinkable. Far ahead of its time, the American physicist’s seminal work displayed a rare combination of conceptual imagination, intellectual capacity...