The Long and Short of ‘Proportionality’

At my church last Sunday the Israeli-Hamas conflict was referred to and the need for a “proportionate” response on the part of Israel. Later I commented in conversation that I thought that proportionality was “meaningless.” As is usual enough in impromptu to-and-fros, positions passed each other by shedding little light. I share the fault.

My fault occurred because I was conscious that proportionality was used by some as an anti-Israeli trope designed to keep Israel permanently besieged by its enemies. In that context, it’s akin to Nazi propaganda in my eyes. I’m jaundiced.

I wrote this in QoL in May 2018, when thousands from Gaza (innocent civilians?) urged on by Hamas were attempting to breach the border:

Does anyone with even half a brain not understand that blood would be flowing in the streets if Hamas terrorists managed to get into Israeli towns. I visited Sderot in November 2014. It is the closest Israeli town to the Gaza border. Twenty-eight thousand rockets had been fired at Sderot since 2000. I saw piles of shrapnel kept at a local police station…Barbarians are on their doorsteps and Ms Bishop calls on Israel to be proportionate. What does that mean exactly? Was Churchill proportionate enough for Bishop I wonder. Let me see. If Israel were to ever lose, millions of Israeli Jews would be tortured, enslaved and killed. Do the sums, designer-gowned empty-head!

As you can see, it’s hard for me to be dispassionate. But, of course, out of the context in which it is used to cudgel Israel, proportionality is a civilised and civilising principle. It “forbids attacks in which the expected incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects or any combination thereof would be excess in relation to the anticipated military advantage gained,” as The Hill recently put it.

In general, the rules of war (or, formally, International Humanitarian Law) set out what can and cannot be done during an armed conflict. Rules of engagement for combat forces follow from the rules of war. In a sense, rules of war come down to the avoidance of revenge or vengeance and, speaking for our Western Christian civilisation, to common decency. So, I support proportionality as a principle. And it would have been helpful if I’d said so in my conversation after church. At the same time, I still think it has little or no precise meaning in practice.

Here, clearly, I’m not talking about Hamas, where proportionality has no application; neither in principle nor practice. To call them barbarians is too kind. Those who rape women to death, who burn people alive, who deliberately kill children and babies are monsters not human beings. To think that they even consider operating within any rule of war is plainly ridiculous.

But back to civilised people, specifically to the Israelis. They have a problem. Hamas wants to kill them all. For example an article from its Charter, cites verbatim the canonical hadith of Al-Bukhari (Vol. 4, Book 52, Number 176):

In the last days Muslims will fight with Jews until some of them will hide behind stones. The stones will betray them saying, Slave of Allah, the is a Jew hiding behind me; kill him.

After the latest monstrous attack, Israel intends to destroy Hamas. To do otherwise would leave Israelis hostage to the inevitable next time. And it could be much worse. Is this unreasonable? If anyone thinks it is, they should simply imagine being in a situation in which their lawless neighbours are forever intent on raping, killing and defiling their womenfolk, beheading their babies and perpetrating any other sadistic acts which enter their poisoned minds at any tick of the clock. Okay then, that settled, how many civilian causalities would be proportionate?

As Hamas is adept at using non-combatants as shields – which is against the rules of war, by the way – what should the Israeli military forces do? Give up? Suppose winning the fight would result in tens of thousands of non-combatant casualties? Would that be disproportionate? I reckon if we asked ten people independently about what is proportionate they would come up with ten different answers. That’s why I think proportionality is a principal without much precision in practice. Certainly, in demanding that civilians are not specifically targeted as an end in itself, it guards against outright barbarism. But it says nothing definitive about just how careful an Israeli combatant has to be in a bombed-out building inhabited by terrorists firing weapons while hiding behind civilians.

Was Roosevelt’s response to Pearl Harbour proportionate? Was Truman justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Japan might well have agreed to stop the war, but Truman wanted unconditional surrender. He faced the potential loss, on some estimates, of up to half a million US troops. It’s hypothetical. No one knows. What isn’t hypothetical is the loss of something upwards of 300,000 Japanese civilians, deliberately targeted, but with a military objective in mind. To wit, to end the war on US terms. And, therefore, the death of civilians was proportionate by the rules of war? Or was it? Clearly, people have different views. I have no doubt what the mothers of the US troops at risk would have concluded. Proportionality is not invariant to one’s stake in the game.

Civilised states should abide by the rules of war despite what uncivilised states do. At the same time, we better not hamstring ourselves or our allies by insisting on unreasonable, untenable and unrealisable measures of proportionality. Then only the bad guys win. Make no mistake, in Israel, that would mean Hamas and many Gazan “civilians” slaughtering the Jews; men, women, children, infants and and babies. No civilised niceties of proportionality would curb their bloodlust.