Reply #14: A blockade is a legal . . [View All]

[msmcghee]

. . action when a state is engaged in war with an enemy according to international law. A blockade is not the administrative control of the society that's being blockaded. That means the laws of occuparion do not apply.

In fact, a blockade is "collective punishment" according to you and others here - yet it is an accepted form of international conflict - which means your interpretation of collective punishment is basically - bullshit.

The Geneva rules regarding collective punishment were put in place to criminalize the Nazi practice of selecting fifty or a hundred people from an occupied town and executing them - because the partisans in the town had killed a German or two.

These rules were never designed to cover anything that causes hardship to an occupied population. If the hardship has a credible purpose - like checkpoints and barriers in the WB that protect Israeli citizens from deadly attack - then that hardship is not collective punishment. It is self defense - which is the core principle around which all international laws of conflict are built.