What's a "proportionate response" to a pogrom?
Israel's attacks against Gaza have been devastating and will likely get much worse. But what should it do instead?
As last weekend’s massacre in Israel fades from memory, leaving some mop-up work about whether images of murdered Jewish babies were computer-generated, the news cycle has shifted to Israel’s military response in Gaza.
You know which side I’m on in this conflict. And yet, this kind of thing really worries me:
Israel’s military directed the evacuation on Friday of all of the hundreds of thousands of civilians living in Gaza City ahead of a feared Israel ground offensive. The directive came on the heels of what the United Nations said was a warning they received from Israel to evacuate 1.1 million people living in the north of Gaza within 24 hours.
The Israeli military pulverized the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip with airstrikes and blocked deliveries of food, water, fuel and electricity ahead of a possible ground invasion as Palestinians tried to stock up on supplies.
International aid groups warned of a worsening humanitarian crisis after Israel prevented entry of supplies from Egypt to Gaza’s 2.3 million people. The Israel-Hamas war has claimed at least 2,800 lives on both sides since Hamas launched an unprecedented surprise attack on Oct. 7.
I’m seeing the “24 hours” figure (24 hours’ more notice than the people of Kfar Aza were given) being walked back online, but it’s clear that an already rising Palestinian death toll will get even higher in the coming days.
How many of these will be civilians, and how reliable the figures will be, remains to be seen, though they will be accepted at face value by the people nickel-and-diming about how many murdered child- sorry, settlers who haven’t yet attained the age of majority - were killed by beheading.1 And Hamas is working overtime to make sure that Palestinian death toll is as high as possible.2
But the side I support has already killed many innocent Palestinians, and it’s going to keep happening. It is depressing and devastating to watch, and makes me fear even more what comes next, inside Israel and even here in Canada.
Which leads to the question: if everything Israel has done since last weekend is illegal, or disproportionate, or unwise, or just plain wrong, what should it be doing instead?
I wrote last week about how a non-response effectively rewards Hamas for the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Alas, the position of some academics - like this Osgoode Hall professor, whom I’m embarrassed to report originally comes from my home province - have determined that international law is basically that the Palestinians can do what they want, and if they believe mass slaughter of Jews is what will get them a state, well, more power to them.
For those of us who believe Jews are actual human beings, yeah, that’s not going to fly. Some kind of military response is perfectly justified. If international law actually says the Israelis are required to go to the showers quietly - and I don’t think it does - then international law is an ass.
The problem is, Gaza is an extremely densely populated area. Its borders to Israel are sealed - I wonder why? - and many of Hamas’ military assets are next to and sometimes literally embedded inside schools and hospitals.
It seems there is almost no way to respond which doesn’t result in civilian casualties. Yet Israel loosening its grip on the territory will result in more of what we saw last weekend.
On Xwitter, “History Boomer” posed the question of what Israel can and should do, in light of last week’s atrocities, instead of what it’s doing now.
And in response, he…well, honestly, he didn’t really get any responses with actual concrete suggestions for Israel’s response. So far I’ve seen a lot of generalities about what could or should have been done years ago, and a few people saying Israel should wipe out all of the Palestinians or that the Palestinians are entitled to slaughter everyone in Israel.
Ah, the internet.
I usually leave the comment section for paid subscribers. But just for today, I’m going to open it up to everyone, so you can tell me how you think Israel should respond.
Or whether you think they are entitled to respond as well, or whether you think there should be any restrictions on its response at all. But just to give you a heads up, I am not at all shy about removing comments nor muting and banning commenters. I won’t tolerate any bigoted or inciteful responses in any direction.
The controversy over the 2002 Jenin “massacre,” which I was ensured was the worst mass-slaughter since the Second World War, resulting in a Palestinian death toll of (checks notes) 52, remains fresh in my mind.
Egypt, which totally cares about the plight of the Palestinians and absolutely doesn’t use them as a distraction to keep its people riled up about teh Jooz instead of decades of corrupt and incompetent governance, isn’t helping much, either.
When have states, in practice, acted proportionately to provocations from outside their borders?
It does not make sense to expect a proportionate response to terrorists crossing your borders to kill 0.05% of your entire populace, in a realist sense it’s the purpose of a state to respond in a disproportionate manner to deter future similar acts.
Look I think a 67 borders two-state solution would be best but I’m just saying that, if Israel responds in a way other countries normally have in the past, they’re going to destroy Gaza.
Take the US - if a foreign group killed 40000 civilians in the US in a terrorist attack, what would we do? If a foreign group killed 100000 Chinese civilians in one event, what would the Chinese government do?
Thank you for caring.