As Israel continues ground operations in Gaza, the casualties continue to grow. Not surprisingly, the civilians are suffering the most. As Thucydides wrote, “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Of course, the suffering is not all on one side. Hamas continues to launch random rocket attacks into Israel and there will no doubt be more deaths among Israeli forces.
Having followed events in the news, I have noticed that a common talking point among those critical of Israel is the notion of proportionality. The view generally expressed by such critics is that Israel is not responding in a proportional manner to Hamas. While the news does not go into depth (depth is the bane of TV news) I infer that they are using the concept in the usual moral sense. Put a bit simply, the idea is that a response to a harmful or provocative action should be in proportion to that action. To go beyond that in doing harm would be unjust. For example, suppose someone gets angry at my political views, hits me with a small rock and thus bruises my arm. If I break his arm, then I have acted in a disproportionate way. As such, my action would be wrong. In the case of Israel, the critics say that Israel’s air strikes and ground invasion is not proportional to the random rocket attacks and hence is wrong.
On one hand, the critics do have a reasonable point. By the numbers, the rockets have killed and injured only a few people and the airstrikes and invasion have killed and injured many. As such, Israel seems to be acting wrongly be responding in such an extreme way.
On the other hand, it can be argued that Israel is acting in a just manner. While it is clear that Israel is killing far more people than Hamas’ rocket strikes, there is also the matter of considering what is required to stop the rocket strikes. Going back to my example above, if I shoot someone for brusing my arm with a rock, then I have clearly over reacted. However, there is the question of what my response should be. If I react in a way that is exactly proportional and throw a rock at him, then I will most likely just create a cycle of rock throwing. Each response will be proportional (a rock for a rock) but this would hardly be a desirable solution. It would be better to put an end to the rock throwing altogether.
In the case of Israel and Hamas, if Israel fired comparable rockets randomly into Gaza, then they would have an exactly proportional response. However, this would create an ongoing cycle of random deaths and injury. This hardly seems desirable (although a utilitarian argument could be made that an ongoing rocket exchange with few deaths would be better than an invasion that end up killing many people).
Perhaps there is a way for Israel to stop the rockets without killing and injuring a disproportionate number of people. If so, that would be the morally preferable approach. Unfortunately, Israel seems left with few options. Air strikes against the rockets will do more damage than the rockets do to Israel. Further, they will not stop the rocket attacks without inflicting massive destruction. Precision special forces operations could destroy some rocket launchers with minimal deaths, but such operations cannot be extensive enough to solve the problem. As such, the military way to stop the rockets would seem to be to use ground forces to defeat Hamas in the area. This will no doubt prove both difficult and costly. However, if such operations are the only way to stop the rocket attacks, then they would seem morally justified. Assuming, of course, that it is wrong for Hamas to fire rockets at Israel.
Going back to my example, if the person who hit me with a rock will not stop throwing rocks at me unless I break his arm, then I would be justified in doing that. This assumes, of course, that he should not be throwing rocks at me. If I deserve to be hit with rocks, then I would have no moral right to break his arm. But if I do not deserve to be hit by rocks and only a broken arm will stop him, then I would be right to break his arm.
As always, it would be better if a peaceful solution could be reached. However, history shows that this is not likely. We can expect more death, injury and suffering before this current situation comes to an end.
There must be something that other countries can do. Call me naive, but sitting at home watching the news and the carnage that is taking place and doing nothing tells me there is something worryingly wrong with the society we live in.
We can’t just take a passive attitude because we recognise that through history things have always been the same. That alone should tell us, it is time to stop that terrible trend.
I don’t have the answer, but I surely know that the day we all accept that what is going on in the Middle East is just history repeating itself and therefore one is to accept it, that will be the day we have all agreed to sign humanity’s death penalty, as we sit comfortably at home doing absolutely nothing.
For now, I continue to pray that God will bring comfort, faith and hope to the families of those who have been killed on either side.
Thank you for this post.
ransom33 @ http://www.ransom33.wordpress.com
Dear Author
I think U gotta have ur mind checked for any bit of sane’ness left….
just remove that as well.
and then U would just like the fav animal U eat for food
If I lived in Manhatten and Candians were raining rockets on me for three years, with my country’s army doing nothing, I’d wonder what the defense budget was for.
How an argument is framed is extremely important.
I can’t claim to be much of a philosopher but I have a degree in what amounts to media studies. I find it completely surprising that you would imply a media bias in favor of the gazans. I’ve heard some talk of proportionality, sure, and I agree that on the grounds of moral philosophy, it probably shouldn’t be the guiding ethic. At the same time you have to re-examine your definition of violence. Is, for example, restricting water supplies an act of aggression? Is expanding your borders or placing a settlement inside of supposedly sovereign “palestinian” territory an act of violence? Perhaps not, and I am certainly not an advocate of violence, but I think a fair question to ask is why would someone be so desperate, or perhaps crazy, as to start launching home-made rockets (which, by the way, generally do not have an explosive warhead. The risk is that you will be physically hit with the rocket) into a much larger, much more powerful, state?
The stock (and, I think, quite ignorant) answer would be “because they hate Israel”. The main story in Western media (CNN, CBC, BBC, etc) has been something like this:
Hamas is a band of evil terrorists. They randomly started firing missiles into Israel
Israel has not choice but to respond.
Civilian casualties are incidental byproducts of these (necessary) military strikes.
Yet your take seems to be that Israel is being maligned by international media. I would argue that:
1. the continued expansion of Israeli settlements into the Occupied Territories and the increasing restrictions on water are acts of aggression to the Palestinians, already starved for food and water and surviving off of international aid. As it reduces the food supply it directly harms (at random) civilians.
2. It’s pretty obvious that military strikes have not stopped rocket attacks in the past. See Hezobllah/Lebanon a little over a year ago, and every military strike in Gaza since the late 90s when rocket attacks became common.
3. Israel has taken a substantial propoganda initiative during this conflict.
As you are probably aware, the Army has barred all foreign media from entering Gaza,
and has carefully selected which Israeli media are allowed into the conflict zone (basically they barred “the left” and all human rights groups from entering).
I’m not really sure how you can show images of large-scale attacks in the world’s most densely populated refugee camp and make it look “objective” or emotionally neutral.
The death tole is nearing a thousand. The “count” of civilians vs. militants is somewhat hard to keep track of as many of those killed have left nothing behind but a pool of blood and perhaps a few bits of tattered clothing. However, if Israel claims around half of the casualties have been civilians (they do) and we were to compare that to, say, the Gazan’s take on those same stats (that 3/4 were civilians) there isn’t actually that much of a discrepancy between the numbers.
Yet according to virtually all of our media sources, the numbers are “uncertain” although it ‘appears that large numbers of civilians are being killed’. See where I’m going with this?
John says:
“The main story in Western media (CNN, CBC, BBC, etc) has been something like this:
Hamas is a band of evil terrorists. They randomly started firing missiles into Israel
Israel has not choice but to respond.
Civilian casualties are incidental byproducts of these (necessary) military strikes.’
Not really.