Hi. This is Alan Dershowitz. It's the Dershow. As you know, we're moving toward a new schedule.

Right now, the Dershow is appearing episodically on audio, but we're hoping that in the next week or so

we'll be back to audio and video and hopefully appearing three or four days a week

and continuing with wonderful interactions that we've had with so many of you who have contributed so much to the Dershow.

In the meantime, I've gotten lots of emails and lots of messages from so many loyal viewers and listeners saying,

please come back. We want to hear your points of view. And so here is my point of view for today.

I want to talk today about what's going on in the Middle East.

There's never been a clearer dispute between complete evil and good. The complete evil is Hamas.

Every time they send a rocket, aimed at a school, a shelter, a bus, a hospital, every time they target civilians,

which they do all the time, they commit a war crime. But every time they fire a rocket from a populated area of Gaza

using their own civilians in hospitals and schools and UN locations, they also commit a war crime.

So every time Hamas sends a rocket into Israel from a populated area of the Gaza Strip, they commit a double war crime.

And Israel, of course, under the charter of the United Nations, has a complete and full, not only possibility,

permission, but obligation to respond in self-defense. Now, there's a lot of misunderstanding about what that means.

They don't have to respond proportionally if Hamas sends a rocket under international law, Israel can send 10 or 100 rockets.

As long as they are aiming them at military targets. Proportionality has nothing to do with the number of rockets you send to defend your civilians.

It has to do only, as a matter of international law, with whether your actions are directed against military targets.

And if you know there's going to be some inevitable civilian casualties, as there always will be when rockets are sent deliberately from behind civilians,

then the number of civilians who are endangered has to be proportional to the danger that's being presented, prevented by the use of the rockets.

And as President Biden has correctly pointed out, Israel's actions are not overreactions. They have been proportional.

They have a complete right of self-defense.

Now, 13 years ago, I wrote a book about the last time, or one of the last times, this has happened every four or five years, that Israel has had to defend itself against Hamas rockets.

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