Myth #2: International Humanitarian Law Requires that Israel’s response to Palestinian aggression be “proportional.”
The term “proportional” is being widely misunderstood when talking about the war in Gaza. To be truly “proportional,” in the way that many people imagine this word is used, Israeli soldiers would need to rape, torture, and murder the same number Palestinian noncombatants as Hamas raped, tortured, and murdered in Israel on October 7th. But, of course, no one believes that such reciprocal savagery would constitute a sane or ethical response to Hamas’s violence.
In fact, the concept of “proportionality” doesn’t refer to the numbers of casualties on either side of a conflict, much less insist that they be equal. It simply asks that we weigh the military importance of an action against the resulting destruction of civilian life and property. International law allows Israel to utterly destroy Hamas, given what happened on October 7th, and given the fact that they continue to fire rockets into Israeli cities, intentionally targeting civilians. As I’ve said, there is no way for Israel to fight Hamas without a massive loss of innocent life because, again, Hamas has embedded itself in the civilian population, on purpose, to cause as much civilian death as possible.
Jihadism aside, in this age of social media, it seems that many people are discovering for the first time what modern warfare is actually like. Independent of the rightness or wrongness of any cause, enormous numbers of innocent people die. The Allies killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians in World War II. And hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians along with them. How would that have looked on TikTok?More recent wars are no exception. Around 2,300 US soldiers died in the war in Afghanistan. And yet we killed over 50,000 members of the Taliban and other opposing forces, and around 50,000 Afghan civilians died too. So there was around a 40 to 1 disparity in the number of deaths between the two sides. In the War in Iraq, we suffered twice the fatalities, around 4,600, and we caused something like 40,000 military deaths, so a 9 to 1 ratio, but there were somewhere around 200,000 civilians killed. Of course, many of those deaths were due to the sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia in Iraq, for which we also get blamed. Accepting that blame yields a fatality ratio once again of over 40 to 1.
My point isn’t to defend any of our tactics in past wars—or the wars themselves. My point isn’t even to defend the specific choices that Israel has made in waging this war. Frankly, I don’t consider myself informed enough to know what they should be doing. My point is that Israel is being held to a level of scrutiny in how it conducts this war that has never been applied to the United States, or the UK, or France, or any other country in a time of conflict. And unlike our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel’s war against Hamas is genuinely existential. And again, they are fighting jihadists, who have built hundreds of miles of tunnels under a civilian population, for the purpose of maximizing the loss of civilian life. It’s an impossible situation.
Of course, the loss of civilian life in Gaza is absolutely tragic. And nothing I’m saying here is meant to minimize the horror of it. I’m repeating myself on this point for a reason, because it’s very difficult to maintain moral clarity in the presence of dead and injured children. Our hearts tell us to rescue children by whatever means possible, and it’s a good thing that we have that response. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that all this tragedy and horror has been consciously engineered by Hamas for reasons that make perfect sense to jihadists, but which no normal army has ever contemplated or would ever contemplate. Yes, this conflict has many of the features of ordinary guerilla warfare. But guerilla warfare plus certainty of Paradise is much worse.
There is simply no good way to fight an enemy of this kind. When you are fighting jihadists, your own scruples—the shame and horror you feel at killing noncombatants—become another weapon in their hands. Jihadists are very clever. They know that by our own moral code, the images of innocent civilians being killed in Gaza are totally unacceptable. They know that we can only tolerate so much of that, lest we become unrecognizable to ourselves—lest we become monsters. But these people are already monsters. Hamas simply does not care about Palestinian children, and they are committed to murdering Israeli children whenever they can. That is why they have to be destroyed. There are only terrible and more terrible options here. And, again, the problem is deeper than Israel and the Palestinians. Eventually Muslim societies need to understand that their religious beliefs—specifically the doctrines about jihad and martyrdom—make any conflict of this kind far more pointlessly horrible than it needs to be. That is their fault. And it will remain their fault no matter how many children die in Gaza.
Again, modern, democratic, largely secular societies must wake up to the reality of the situation: We have a sadistically insane terrorist organization, raping, torturing and murdering noncombatants, and taking hostages, including children, and then using their own children as human shields so that they cannot be effectively fought by civilized people. They know that eventually civilized people become a little less civilized in situations like this, and can care only so much about collateral damage. So Israel can be expected to slip off the moral high ground, by killing enormous numbers of noncombatants, and even commit its own war crimes eventually. And civilized people the world over, who imagine themselves unimplicated in this conflict, will become hysterical and put pressure on Israel to stop fighting—as they did even before Israel started fighting.
The crucial distinction, which almost no one can keep in view, is that there are now two types of people in this world: those who intentionally torture and kill children and other noncombatants, to maximize horror, and those who seek to avoid doing so, however imperfectly, while defending themselves against the first sort of people. The gulf between these two groups could not be wider, and everything we care about—literally everything—exists on one side of it.
