There’s a massive amount of crazy talk about ‘proportionality’ right now, centering on criticism of Israel for their bombardment and invasion of Gaza.<\/p>\n
I instinctively was quizzical when the issues was first raised, and want to take a few moments to talk it through and suggest why I think it’s an absurd notion – as it is frequently misused in the blogs and newspapers. International law seems pretty clear on it (and shockingly reasonable).<\/p>\n
Proportionality also came up during the Iraq war when the issue of Iraqi dead vs. US dead in the 9\/11 attacks was raised<\/a>.<\/p>\n Okay, Mr. Bush…NOW are we even for 9\/11? Or whatever reason you went into Iraq?<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n And somehow it felt very Old Testament to me; kind of well, you killed my brother, raped my sister, and stole 50 sheep. So I’ll kill your brother, rape your sister, and steal 50 sheep and we’ll call it even.<\/p>\n And as I read the commentators talking about Israel and Gaza – here’s Dennis Kucinich<\/a>:<\/p>\n [The Israeli attacks] do, however, “increase the possibility of an outbreak or escalation of conflict,” because they are a vastly disproportionate response to the provocation, and because the Palestinian population is suffering from those military attacks in numbers far exceeding Israeli losses in life and property.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, in essence, Israel is allowed to kill as many Palestinians as Palestine kills Israelis. With all due respect to Cong. Kucinich, that’s nuts.<\/p>\n Look, if someone attacks my wife and I with a knife, and she’s armed with a shotgun – she’s not obligated to put the shotgun down and go get a knife. A threshold of deadly force allows me to use whatever force is necessary and available to stop the threat (i.e. if she could have stopped the threat with a Taser, but didn’t have one, she’s not a bad person).<\/p>\n Actual international law is clear in saying pretty much the same thing<\/a>.<\/p>\n When international legal experts use the term “disproportionate use of force,” they have a very precise meaning in mind. As the President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Rosalyn Higgins, has noted, proportionality “cannot be in relation to any specific prior injury – it has to be in relation to the overall legitimate objective of ending the aggression.” In other words, if a state, like Israel, is facing aggression, then proportionality addresses whether force was specifically used by Israel to bring an end to the armed attack against it. By implication, force becomes excessive if it is employed for another purpose, like causing unnecessary harm to civilians. The pivotal factor determining whether force is excessive is the intent of the military commander. In particular, one has to assess what was the commander\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s intent regarding collateral civilian damage.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n So we have three questions to ask when judging this: Is it in response to a deadly threat? Yes, even though folks like Glenn Greenwald seem to think that letting Hamas kill a few Israeli citizens a month is kind of a Jizyah<\/i>. Is it specifically intended to end the threat while taking reasonable steps to minimize civilian casualties? Yes, again. And is it likely to end the threat? Here we move into more treacherous ground.<\/p>\n Because in reality, the support for Hamas, and Hamas-like positions in Gaza is deep and wide, based both in Hamas’ demonstrated willingness to brutally kill anyone who doesn’t support their positions and in the generation-long indoctrination of Palestinian youth that we’ve funded and permitted to happen.<\/p>\n So can Israel accomplish anything with this attack? Because if not, morally, it is certainly questionable.<\/p>\n Marc Lynch raises these questions in a post at his home at the excellent new Foreign Policy blog<\/a>. (My goal for Winds, by the way, is to be a single-A or double-A farm team for sites like FP)<\/p>\n I spent the morning at a lecture organized by GWU’s outstanding Homeland Security Policy Institute’s Ambassador’s Roundtable Series featuring Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Sallai Meridor. It was a profoundly dismaying experience. Because if Ambassador Meridor is taken at his word, then Israel has no strategy in Gaza<\/b>. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n On the other hand, there’s this fascinating post over at Kings of War<\/a>:<\/p>\n Following a link of a KOW reader teegeegeepea I ended up on his rather interesting blog Entitled to an Opinion<\/a> where he has posted a fascinating presentation by an Israeli intelligence scholar-practitioner Isaac Ben-Israel Fighting New Terror–Theory and Israeli Experience<\/a>. I think it’s a better guide to Israeli strategy in Gaza than anything else that I’ve seen lately. The gist of it is this:<\/p>\n In general, the underlying idea is: each system has its own critical point. If I know where it is, I hit this point and destroy the whole system. If I do not know this, I will have to go on hitting different components of the system until I accidentally hit the critical point. The more components I damage, even without hitting the critical point, the closer is the moment when the system disintegrates.<\/em><\/p>\n And there is a certain connection between “q” – which is the percentage of component interconnection – and “Q” which describes the probability of the whole system collapse.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In reality, my own belief is close to this. That the intention is to degrade Hamas effectiveness – military and other – by hitting as many high-value nodes as possible. <\/p>\n What effect will that have? I’ll argue, simply, that the belief is that given time it is likely that Hamas will collapse. And so the issue becomes kicking the can far enough down the road to see if Hamas will simply collapse.<\/p>\n I’m not sure that’s probable – possible, certainly. <\/p>\n And so we have a hard question of moral calculus , whether this kind of limited action with the toll it will take (of Palestinians as well as of Israeli soldiers) is worth the marginal improvement in conditions and the possibility Hamas will collapse down the road. It’s not a simple question.<\/p>\n And asking it is something that Israel has to do, because – to go back to my homely analogy – the fact that my wife has a shotgun in a confrontation with a man with a knife, even if he is clearly the aggressor and in the wrong, places a especial obligation on her to do everything reasonably in her power to keep from having to shoot him. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Proportionality doesn’t mean killing his brother if he kills yours. That’s weird Old Testament thinking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1976"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1976\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}