One of the favourite words used by critics of Israel in its current wars against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon is “proportionality.’’ What is meant by this word is that there is no comparison between the civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon and those suffered by Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 (and after), and thus that Israel is guilty of breaking some sort of international norm in its defensive war against those two terrorist groups. The implication is that so many Palestinian civilians have been killed compared to Israelis that the numbers show proof positive that Israel is committing war crimes at best, genocide at worst.
This concept needs further explanation.
In the first instance, the number of civilians killed by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza and Lebanon is now reported to be (by the extremely biased health ministries of both Gaza and Lebanon) as approximately 42,000 in Gaza and about 2,000 in Lebanon. In neither case do either health ministries break out the number of terrorists killed in Gaza and Lebanon from these gross totals. International military observers estimate that Israel has killed about 15,000 terrorists in Gaza and 1,000 or so of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Those terrorists—or “fighters,” if one insists on a neutral word—were combatants dedicated to wiping out Israel and killing as many Jews as possible.
In both cases, Hamas is the aggressor. It began the current war on Oct. 7, 2023, and began launching rockets into Israel within 24 hours of that attack. As Israel did not initiate this latest conflict, clearly Israel was and is the victim in this war.
The fact that Israel is more powerful than these groups—in number of soldiers and quality of air force—and is motivated by the refusal of its people to be led to the slaughter (as the Jews of Europe were led to the slaughter by the Nazis), obviously did not enter into the calculations of Hamas when it launched its attack.
One factor that did enter Hamas’s calculations was to shelter their aggression under civilian cover. Hamas’s basis of operations, arsenals, headquarters, communications centres, etc., were all hidden under civilian institutions in Gaza or in the hundreds of kilometres of tunnels that were dug under Gaza, passing underneath homes, hospitals, schools, and other ostensible civilian institutions. Hamas knew as surely as the sun rises in the east that Israel would have to attack these so-called civilian institutions in order to root the Hamas killers out. That is and was the reason for the high numbers of civilian deaths.
But there is another factor which must be taken into consideration that stands beside the deaths of civilians—or even the original attack by Hamas or Hamas’s capture of over 200 Israeli hostages, most of them civilians—and it is this: The concept of “proportionality” in war is a new idea that has been used almost exclusively to attack Israel in this particular war (as it has been used against Israel in the past).
Proportionality in international law does not address ratios of victims. In a number of places, it declares that killing civilians in war must be measured against the military advantages that those collateral deaths will inflict. And how does a nation, or any fighting entity, measure that? The definition is arbitrary and can only be decided by some unbiased—if there is such a thing—international body after the end of a conflict.
In World War II, the Nazi Luftwaffe killed some 20,000 British civilians in London during the Blitz (as counted from mid-September 1940 to mid-May 1941). Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force bombings of Hamburg in July 1943, and Dresden in February 1945, alone amounted to over 60,000 dead German civilians. Where was the proportionality?
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, most of the 3,000 deaths they inflicted were military. When the United States Army Air Force firebombed Tokyo on the night of March 9, 1945, it is estimated that 100,000 Japanese died in one night. Proportionality? In fact, in the many hundreds or possibly thousands of wars stretching back at least 10,000 years according to archeologists, there was never any “proportional” measure of civilian deaths as measured by one belligerent against another.
So why is Israel being accused of inflicting a disproportional number of casualties among civilians in this war? It is simply a more genteel form of Jew hate masquerading under an “ethical” concept that does not exist in the brutal reality we call war.
