What a really proportional response would look like, three ways to dissect the meaning of “proportional” and how this term is misused as a key part of disinformation warfare and lawfare (from: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/double-standards-in-the-double-entry-bookkeeping-of-war-crimes-and-proportionate-response-8c6665cccb27):
"Refer to past conflicts in which losses were uncorrelated with the justness of the cause involved.
Imagine counterfactuals with roles reversed.
Deceptively use “proportional” in its colloquial instead of its legal sense.
Deceptively use “genocide” unanchored from its legal meaning as its originator, Polish Jewish lawyer, Raphel Lemkin, intended. This is anti-semitic Jew-taunting.
#1: Past conflicts with higher losses on the wrong side
In his march to the sea General William Tecumseh Sherman said he’d “make Georgia howl.” And he did as the Union army burned hundreds of times more property and infrastructure in a 50 mile wide swatch from Atlanta to Savannah than Lee’s army had destroyed in his invasion of Pennsylvania. Was the Confederacy an oppressed victim of Union war crimes and “disproportionate” response? Only neo-Confederate Trumpsters flying confederate flags think so.
Japan lost hundreds of times and Germany 15 times more civilians in bombings than they inflicted on the Anglo-American enemies that defeated them. Was the Anglo-American response to Pearl Harbor, London and Coventry in Saipan, Okinawa, Dresden and Hamburg “disproportionate”? Their cause unjust?
If you answered yes to either question, you’re living in the same moral universe and knowledge level as “Queers for Palestine” and those students chanting “from the river to the sea” while unable to name which river and which sea.
#2: Role Reversal Counterfactuals
Now we can move on to #2, what “proportionate response” would really look like by imagining a counterfactual:
Jewish refugees’ 1988 genocidal charter demanding the destruction of the Arab state and its people,
Jewish refugee militants launching more than 7000 rockets against the target in a single week,
Its funding and supply of weapons by a co-religionist regional superpower with nuclear ambitions,
Its media and rabbis’ constant invocation of the Torah’s defining their enemies as “the satanic sons of pigs and dogs.”
A realistic role reversal would include the truly proportionate response that anti-Israel protesters and politicians demand:
“Every Friday and Saturday, every rabbi in Israel would remind his congregation how important it is to kill all of the Muslims in the world, wherever they find them.
“Israeli schools would brainwash Israeli kids to die killing Muslims, for the glory of making Judaism dominant in the Middle East. Israeli TV would broadcast threats of genocide to the Palestinians, with the IDF entertainment unit singing specially-written songs in Arabic about how bloody and glorious the massacre will be. (At the same time, they’d go to the UN and accuse the Palestinians of genocide.)
“Israeli girls would be killed by their own families if they liked boys. So would Israeli boys. IDF artillery would shoot rockets into Arab towns without any military targets, with the intention of killing as many civilians as possible, several times a day, sometimes hundreds of times a day.
“The Mossad would send young Jews to blow themselves up in shopping centres, hotels, cafes, nightclubs and bus stops around the world. Israeli municipalities would name streets after the suicide bombers, and the government would pay their families a pension for life in a scaled up “pay to slay” welfare scheme.
“The proud Jewish mothers of the suicide bombers would appear on Israeli TV encouraging mothers everywhere to give up their children for the cause of killing Muslims.”
#3: Deceptively use “proportionate” colloquially instead of legally
This ruse demands that we disentangle “proportionate’s” legal and colloquial meanings.
This requires thinking like a lawyer more competent than Groucho Marx’s threat, “I’m gonna call my lawyer as soon as he gets out of law school.” This requires more respect for learning and expertise than currently possessed by the wokerati mob’s white oppressor-BIPOC oppressed binary worldview. There’s a reason Voltaire told us, “beware of the great simplifiers.”
So let’s turn to an expert in how the laws of war are actually implemented on a battlefield and an expert in urban warfare: David French, an ex-Judge Advocate General (JAG) who served in Iraq and John Spencer, who wrote the book on urban warfare and teaches the subject at West Point.
French’s October 18 NY Times article does a deep dive into the nine month long battle to retake Mosul from ISIS in 2016. Note that my critic who played a comparison numbers game between Israel’s Gaza war and Mosul omits a key fact in his comp: that the Mosul battle elicited not a peep of protest anywhere in the world.
No Ivy League professors were “exhilarated” by ISIS’ “resistance.
No protestors chanted “gas the Iraqis” in front of the Sydney Opera House. No demos with signs reading “free the Caliphate from the Tigris to the Euphrates.” The surreal absurdity of these counterfactual slogans shows how the double standards question, as applied to Israel, answers itself.
Here’s how this double standards shell game works:
Double Standard #1:
Strip out the legal meaning of “proportionality” as defined by the UN Office of Genocide Prevention and Responsibility to Protect and replace it with its colloquial and heuristic meanings: use the same degree of force as the enemy. The UN defines “excessive” force in relation to military advantage derived from the attack, not by a “proportional” casualties taken or in relation to the defenders’ use of force standard:
“iv. Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated;”
“v. Attacking or bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives;”
French elaborates on this point: Israeli soldiers don’t have to respond to an RPG with an RPG or to a rifle with a rifle.
“Proportionality does not require the Israel Defense Forces to respond with the same degree of force or take the same proportion of casualties as Hamas. In addition, as the manual states, “the proportionality standard does not require that no incidental harm results from attacks.” If you’re a soldier on patrol and someone fires at you with a rifle, you don’t have to respond with a rifle. You can use a tank round or a missile in response, unless you have reason to believe the tank round or missile will cause extraordinary collateral damage. But if you’re taking fire from a single house, proportionality prohibits you from destroying the entire block. Throughout the war on terrorism, American forces used powerful, longer-range weapons to attack individual targets. That does not violate the laws of war.”
Let’s return to the Mosul comparison since my critic plays a numbers game citing: 18 Gazan non-combatant civilian deaths per 1 Israeli non-combatant civilian deaths (or an 18:1 ratio is “proportional?
This, of course, divorces numbers from intentions and behavior. No Gazan civilians killed by the IDF were INTENTIONALLY necrophilically raped, beheaded, burned in ovens, had their eyes gouged out, taken as hostages. This is the odious ideology of moral equivalence at work by laundering intentions through distracting with numbers.
Iran's 3Hs--Hamas, Hizbullah, Houthis--had better hope that Israeli society never fully mobilizes to launch a truly "proportional" response equivalent to October 7's orgy of death cult murder and mayhem. It would turn Gaza into an emirate of insects and grass.
