The fantasy of “proportionality”
Posted by Jonathan Birch on December 29th, 2008
Hamas militants fired 200 rockets at Israeli communities, Israel reacted in the usual way, and at least 56 civilians have been killed. The cliché is that the response is “disproportionate” (examples here, here, here and here). You can call Israel’s response ineffectual, heavy-handed, counterproductive, short-sighted, demagogic, brutal, tragic, heartbreaking — but disproportionate? This ubiquity of this loaded word reveals strange logic at work.
What exactly would a proportionate response have been? Should Israel have fired 200 rockets back? Should America after September 11th have settled for blowing up the tallest building in Afghanistan? The Israeli government, like any responsible government, wants to neutralize a terrorist threat — not engage in tit-for-tat terrorism. The word “disproportionate” risks presupposing the latter aim, and repugnantly hints that to commit a “proportionate” number of civilian killings would have been a justifiable response.
Remember that the attacks by Hamas, intentionally directed at civilians, were absolutely wrong. Any government would be appalled, any government would respond. And remember that Hamas’ ideological obsession with violence holds back the prospect of a desperately needed settlement, no matter what Israel does. The situation in Gaza is ugly, but this is not a simple matter — and withholding judgment may be wiser than putting on a cute “Free Palestine!” badge.
Filed under: 9/11, jonathanbirch, middle east, middleeast, terrorism on December 29th, 2008
[...] Related: http://www.clarepolitics.co.uk/2008/12 /29/gaza-and-the-fantasy-of-proportionate-war/ [...]
Your points, though true, imply that proportionality means equal numbers of civilian casualties on each side. That’s not the definition which is actually being used when Israel is accused of disproportionate response by other governments, and it’s either ignorant or dishonest to suggest that.
The definition (at greater length on the wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(law)#International_law), is actual whether the civilian casualties are proportional to the military advantage gained, not the casualties inflicted by the enemy in the first place.
Sure, this misunderstanding is widespread, but there’s no need to perpetuate it.
Thanks Matt. You’re right, my post certainly did not engage in the technicalities of international law. Which is possibly for the best — “proportionality” in international law is rather strange, perhaps even unintelligible.
It defines “disproportionate” as causing a “clearly excessive” number of casualties for the military advantage gained. But “military advantage gained” isn’t a numerical variable, and certainly can’t be measured in units commensurable with the unit of civilian casualties. So what’s going on?
Maybe one could construct an intelligible concept of proportionality in this case by measuring “military gain” in terms of “deaths to Israeli civilians prevented”. But on such a measure, the “proportionality” of the response depends on the long-term danger Hamas posed to Israeli civilians, which, given Hamas’s propensity for firing rockets at random into Israel, was always very high.