Through the blessings of marriage and a large extended family, I had, to a lesser degree of severity, the experience this Saturday that so many others had. I awoke to a text alerting me that the people in our extended family who live in Israel are okay, but one of them has been called up to serve. It is my sincere hope that Hamas is utterly destroyed.
Noah Rothman writes, with great and just fury, about Israel’s need to secure itself, and brushes away calls for proportionality.
There will be calls for Israelis to observe proportionality. But what would that look like? What is a proportionate response to the deliberate slaughter of civilians and hostage-taking designed to free more terrorists who would soon be returned to the fight against Israel? The very notion is preposterous. Moreover, a doctrine that prescribes proportionality is the one to which Jerusalem has adhered, and this attack has demonstrated that it is a failure. The Israeli people deserve reciprocity in the form of a response to this event that has the capacity to either restore deterrence or degrade and neutralize Hamas. Whatever form Israel’s response takes, it reserves the absolute right to its own self-defense.
I want to speak up in defense of the just war doctrine of proportionality, which is popularly misunderstood. It is not traditionally understood as hitting an enemy in a “likewise” manner that they have hit you, or to the “same degree” of severity. Or inflicting a similar number of casualties.
Noah is right that Hamas engages in barbaric acts that the IDF could never lower themselves to do. Israel’s critics have frequently and, in my view, wrongly, described Israel’s military actions as “disproportionate” responses to previous provocations.
The “proportion” in just-war theory is not in relation to the injury you received, but to the just goals you hope to secure. That is, proportionality in just-war theory licenses the amount of violence necessary to achieve a just goal. It may very well be that Israel will inflict many more casualties in Gaza in pursuit of its goal. Some of those will be because Hamas hides among the common population — including basing its HQ in a hospital. Others will because Hamas has underinvested in professions like medicine because it has instead been buying rockets.
Keith Pavlischek helped clarify what proportionality means in an article for New Atlantis a few years ago. “In everyday usage, the word ‘proportional’ implies numerical comparability,” he writes, “and that seems to be what most of Israel’s critics have in mind.” But:
The long tradition of just war theory distinguishes between the principles governing the justice of going to war (jus ad bellum) and those governing just conduct in warfare (jus in bello). There are two main jus in bello criteria. The criterion of discrimination prohibits direct and intentional attacks on noncombatants, although neither international law nor the just war tradition that has morally informed it requires that a legitimate military target must be spared from attack simply because its destruction may unintentionally injure or kill noncombatants or damage civilian property and infrastructure. International law and just war theory only insist that the anticipated collateral damage — the “merely foreseen” secondary effects — must be “proportionate” to the military advantage sought in attacking the legitimate military target. This sense of proportionality is the second jus in bello criterion; it has to do almost entirely with the foreseen but unintended harm done to noncombatants and to noncombatant infrastructure.
Exactly. I recommend Pavlischek’s article for outlining in detail the abuses of just-war theory that are often brought out to excuse the militarily ineffective but murderous crimes of terrorists and condemn effective and discriminating state actors.
Although passions can carry us beyond proportionality in war, Israel has repeatedly demonstrated caution and exceptional patience with its enemies. It also has a keen awareness of its accountability to the world and to its own citizens for the use of its resources, which guides it to use them discriminately on military targets, even if, as a secondary consequence, targeting those military outposts leads to civilian deaths and suffering.