The Jew News Review – Special Edition – Israel Myth Busting: Proportionality

Shalom!

As I mentioned in the last JNR Special Edition, each Wednesday I will feature a portion of Sam Harris’s essay, “5 MYTHS ABOUT ISRAEL AND THE WAR IN GAZA”. Last Wednesday we covered “Genocide”, this week will focus on the myth that International Law requires Israel’s response to be “proportional”. But before we dive into that topic, a few words on Hezbollah and the horrifying massacre of innocent Druze children that took place Monday on a football pitch in the town of Majdal Shams. Hezbollah initially took credit for the rockets, but when later discovered the dead were Druze, and not Jews, they denied it was responsible.

First, my heart goes out to the families of the dead and wounded children. Over a dozen kids bodies were literally ripped to shreds by the blast while helpless parents looked on. Having watched many of my own kids soccer games, the image is just too awful and painful to imagine. One would hope that Hezbollah meant to hit a military base that was nearby, but with jihadists, one can never be sure. 

And how was this deadly terrorist attack covered by the mainstream media? 

The Washington Post, which was just yesterday critically slammed by the Institute for Near East Policy, simply announced that “attacks in Gaza and Golan Heights” had occurred, and their headline pictured above, made Israel the aggressor without even mentioning that children had been slaughtered.  NPR‘s headline didn’t mention that children in Israel were killed at all, effectively downplaying the severity of the incident. All of the headlines were like this. Worse at the BBC and Sky News. There was no sense of 12 children murdered by Iranian proxy. 

According to Honest Reporting, CNN shifted focus from the many victims of the attack — the single deadliest strike on Israel since the October 7 Hamas massacre — to Hezbollah’s denial that it was responsible. The reporting on Hezbollah’s strike revealed an appalling media double standard. Casualties in Israel are stripped of sympathy. For many journalists, Israel is an “occupier” and an “aggressor,” and even its civilian losses are framed as a sort of just consequence.

Middle East analysts, including the JNR, have been warning that Israel is on the brink of a major war with Hezbollah. But the truth is that Hezbollah has been fighting and winning its war against Israel since October 8th. For the past 10 months, Hezbollah, which is the terrorist group supported by Iran that controls southern Lebanon, has essentially redrawn the northern border of Israel.

It’s accomplished that by pummeling that area daily with rockets and by displacing around 80,000 Israelis, making some 200,000 square miles unlivable for Israelis, and doing so within the sovereign state of Israel. Israel, which is being pounded by Iranian proxies from all directions, now faces one of the most perilous moments in recent history. 

And as I write this post late Tuesday evening, there are reports that Israel has retaliated by killing a Hamas military leader in Lebanon, and, dramatically, assassinating the highest Iranian political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, moments after he visited with the Ayatollah in Tehran. Iran acknowledged the hit and described the strike as a “severe escalation” that would not achieve its goals.

We shall see if Israel’s defense of Iranian proxy terrorism leads to an escalation. IMHO, it was a brilliant response that finally makes Iran pay for their sponsorship of terrorism that has virtually destroyed much of Northern Israel and now slaughtered innocent children. If I were an Iranian leader, I would not be sleeping well anymore.

And now, here is Sam Harris on Myth #2. 

(JNR note: Sam wrote this in January, before the United Nations report in May that the number of women and children killed, in the tally offered by the United Nations, suddenly dropped by nearly half! No civilian deaths are acceptable, and the situation of Israel having to deal with Hamas’ use of human shields in densely populated areas is deplorable and morally reprehensible. And Sam doesn’t mention that most military analysts think that Israel has set a new bar on how to avoid civilian casualties in war with it’s policy of dropping leaflets and calling residents on cell phones to warn them to leave the targeted area.)

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. 

Take care folks. 

Brad out.