“PROPORTIONALITY” & IGNORANCE

ACTIVISTS ACCUSE ISRAEL OF CAVALIER KILLING. HOW STUPID CAN PEOPLE BE?

I’m sure that will do the trick.

There is a prevalent idea that Israel is killing Palestinians willy-nilly. There are two predominant streams in this thinking.

One is that the Israel Defence Forces are engaged in “genocide.” This is a near-ubiquitous allegation made by people who do not own a dictionary or have access to the internet. (I jest. Most of these people know the definition of “genocide” and that it doesn’t apply here. They just like rubbing salt in Jewish historical memory, the very term “genocide” having been created to describe 20th-century Jewish experience.)

The other argument, slightly more palatable, is that Israel has a right to defend itself but that the way they are going about it is “overkill.”

Let’s just take a sec to consider the audacity of comfortable Canadians and Swedes telling the defence forces of a country that has been under military and terrorist attacks for 76 years how to run a war. Imagine armchair generals in Montreal or Malmo purporting to tell the military with the world’s most advanced capabilities in precision warfare that they’re doing it wrong. It’s not just chutzpah. It’s witlessness.

According to one of the world’s foremost experts in urban warfare, Israel engages in “harm mitigation at a level that nobody’s ever tried.”

“If Israel was trying to conduct civilian harm there, nothing shows that,” says John Spencer. “Not my on-hand research, or the numbers. Very few people have the understanding of everything that’s come before every large-scale military operation, against a defending urban enemy.”

He adds: “You really don’t understand the complexity of what the IDF had to face, until you see the dense urban terrain. You’re walking on top of hundreds of miles of tunnel. You have a war of this scale, in a context that no military has faced in modern history.”

The allegation that Israel’s response has been disproportionate or indiscriminate is “baseless,” he said.

Every Israeli action has a “proportionality analysis,” Spencer said, which includes threat levels, target values, number of adjacent civilians, the ability to act without harming civilians, and measures to prevent that civilian harm.

Israel takes all of this seriously, he said. “There has been no actual evidence — unless you believe TikTok videos — of Israel targeting civilians, or any prohibited target.”

Yes but. Yes but.

When you have people on one side saying “But children are dying,” any defense comes off as support for infanticide.

But can we just grow the hell up here?

War is hell. Innocent people die. These are horrible truths.

This, too, seems an unsatisfactory response, obviously. But when your compass for moral determinations are Boy George (“War is stupid”) and Elaine Benes (“War — what is it good for?”), excuse me for not taking your interventions seriously.

As I said in yesterday’s post, if you want the war to end, and the dying to stop, stop encouraging the war and rewarding the side that maximizes the dying.

Let’s veer to a different issue, though.

Casualties, including civilian casualties, among Palestinians are orders of magnitude smaller than casualties of recent wars in flashpoints around the world, including places the activists raging against Israel have never heard of. As many as 600,000 people were killed in Tigray in the 2020–2022 conflict there — and you don’t even know what continent that’s on.

Keep your pants on. I am not diminishing Palestinian deaths, although this will be the pearl-clutching condemnation I induce from even raising this. Every death is a universe of tragedy. It’s not me who doesn’t seem to recognize this, but the activists who only care about dead Palestinians.

The other accusation will be “whataboutery,” the idea that I am deflecting from Palestinian suffering by redirecting to the suffering of others.

But no. It is the obsession with Palestinians and their issues that have allowed millions of others to die worldwide, ignored by a world obsessed with one tragic but comparatively minor conflict.

And why the obsession?

There are a few reasons. The Holy Land holds special meaning for more than half the world’s population. And there are other reasons. But the main reason is clear.

Because Jews.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Deny deny deny. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism blah blah blah.

As I will explain in my next post (they just keep coming!), the condemnation of Israel takes much the same form as centuries of condemnations of Jews. But if you don’t know that history and you steadfastly refuse to learn, you can keep chanting “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism!” while not realizing how stupid you sound.

Meanwhile, your cries of “disproportionality” ignore the reasons for the disproportionality.

Since October 7, 2023, more than 19,000 unguided rockets have been launched at Israel from Hamas and other terrorists in Gaza and from Hezbollah in Lebanon, the vast majority of which were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. Israel also has safe rooms in every structure and bomb shelters everywhere, with Red Alert warnings sending civilians racing for cover with a few seconds’ warning. This is why Israeli death tolls are a fraction those of Palestinian death tolls.

The RAND Corporation estimated that, for example, in the 2014 war, Israeli casualties could have been 50 times higher without these defensive infrastructures.

This is a core differentiator not only between the death tolls but between the morality of the two sides. Israel does everything in its power to minimize the death toll (on both sides) while Hamas maximizes the dead precisely so that useful idiots overseas tally up the dead and declare Palestine the moral victor.

Moreover, the message from overseas activists who declaim “disproportionate” casualties on the two sides is clear. They think there aren’t enough dead Jews. Oh. Do I sound harsh? I’ve already made plain that activists (wittingly or witlessly) reward the Hamas strategy of killing Palestinians. So what conclusion would you come to?

A personal note …

I started this Substack because I thought my perspective as a progressive, gay, non-Jewish, Zionist Canadian offered something different to the dialogue about antisemitism, anti-Zionism, Palestinians and peace. It actually never crossed my mind that people might give me money for it. When people started generously subscribing and donating, I threw myself into this project more, partly because I am a writer by trade and I am still building my RSPs for some distant retirement. Based on online advice (!) I started making my Saturday posts for “Paid Subscribers Only.” But, I modestly acknowledge, each one is too delicious to paywall. So I am going to assume that, if you like my stuff and want more of it, you’ll give if you can. If not, please share. (Please share regardless!) No more paywalls. But there may be other incentives I could offer. Not sure what. Got any ideas? Do folks want to get together for online discussions or see me compile some of these posts as a book? Let me know. Meanwhile, enjoy! (If that is the right word for these sometimes dark musings.)