With October 7 approaching, campus protests against Israel cannot be too far behind. We’ve already seen a few.
For example, “Protesters return to Columbia University as the fall semester begins.” Emerson College in Boston was the starting point for a pro-Palestinian march throughout the streets of that city. Students for Justice in Palestine organized a march at Ohio State, calling for divestment in Israel.
To be sure, thanks to a new bit of backbone on the part of university leadership, based on political revulsion at what occurred last spring, these protests are less incendiary, many have been moved off campus, and the overnight “tent cities” have disappeared.
However, according to Rania Batrice, a Palestinian-American Democratic strategist: “This isn’t going away. We’re not going away. Young people and their pursuit of justice and equity everywhere is not going away.”
Israel has widely been accused of and castigated for a “disproportionate” response to Hamas’s attack on Oct 7, last year. But proportionality is only apropos for punishment—the punishment should fit the crime—not for defense, which the Israeli military is now engaged in.
Punishment must be proportional to be just. “The punishment should fit the crime” is one of this discipline’s hoariest and most well-established principles. If the punishment does not fit the crime, justice will not be achieved. This principle alone cannot determine an actual number of years in jail or any other specific penalty for any particular bout of lawbreaking, but it can serve as an overall guideline to righteousness in this realm.
For instance, the penalty for murder should be more serious than that for rape. When the baker in the movie Godfather asked the latter to kill the rapist of his daughter, the former was quite right in refusing and insisting that a severe beating would be much more apropos.
In contrast, in very sharp contrast indeed, proportionality must be banned from any discussion of self-defense. If I am coming at you, knife raised, with blood in my eye, yelling that I am going to kill you, so far, I have only issued a threat. What should be the chastisement for such a threat? I cannot say with any degree of specificity. But I know that it is far less than if I accomplished this intended foul deed of mine. Certainly, the death penalty should not be imposed upon me for a mere threat. That means, if it means anything at all, that if you may punish me for that threat, you may not kill me—e.g., you may not impose the death penalty upon me.
But to say that in such a situation, you are not entitled to plug me with a bullet right in the heart is abject nonsense. If you have a right to self-defense—and you do—then it wouldn’t be a crime at all for you to kill me. What other options do you have? You could try to run away, but I’m faster than you, and you wouldn’t dare turn your back on me. Moreover, you have the right to ‘stand your ground.’ While escaping by running away might be preferable to taking a human life, even one as worthless as mine in this case, you should have no legal obligation to do so.
There is, of course, the issue of gentleness. If you are sure you can render me harmless with a rubber bullet or pepper spray, not 99 percent sure, then you would be obliged to engage in this more moderate means of self-protection. Human life is still precious, even that of murderers and would-be murderers, such as myself, in this hypothetical case.
Where does Israel stand with regard to Hamas? The terrorists are criminals. If anyone in the history of the universe could be called lawless, these individuals qualify without question. At the time of this writing, has Israel fully captured Hamas? They have not. Hamas fighters remain at large, and they continue to hold Israeli hostages, threatening to kill them if Israel does not comply with their demands. In other words, these criminals are, at this very moment, engaging in the act of threatening murder. They are just as much attempted murderers as I was when I charged at you with that knife.
Should Israel respond to this terrorist provocation proportionally? Absolutely not. Hamas members are still at large; they are not prisoners who deserve proportional punishment. Instead, they are in the midst of killing innocent people and threatening to kill even more, in addition to the hostages they already hold.
Therefore, Israel may properly do to Hamas what you may do to me when I run at you with a knife aloft, threatening to kill you: shoot me down like a rabid dog.
Suppose, now, that in my run at you, I am carrying my two year old baby in front of me in a child carrier. If you shoot me—with a lead bullet, the only weapon you have—you necessarily kill not only me but also my innocent toddler. Are you now a murderer? Are you in the wrong? A thousand times, no. Rather, it is I, solely me, who is responsible for the death of my progeny.
If Israel is to root out Hamas, as they richly deserve, there must, of necessity, be collateral damage. This would be true even if these scoundrels did not embed themselves among innocent Gazans and use them as shields. Whose fault would be these collateral deaths? The buck stops with Hamas, as it did with me when I attacked you with my baby plastered to my chest. To aver, as campus protestors are now maintaining, that Israel should cease and desist from destroying Hamas due to these unfortunate deaths is to say that Israel has no right to defend itself. This is an obvious fallacy. Everyone has the right of self-defense, even, dare I say it, Jews.
Where does gentleness come in? Israel has employed this civilized practice to a greater degree, perhaps, than any other country on the face of the earth all throughout history. The IDF drops leaflets here, telling people to go there. Then, as in Rafah in the south of Gaza, they drop leaflets again, telling potential victims to go back north and/or anywhere else they can.
Israel is by far the most civilized country not only in the Middle East but throughout the globe. Says H.L. Mencken: “No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” Says me: Israel is attacked on prestigious university campuses for merely defending itself demonstrates only how far from intellectual acuity these institutions have gone.
Image of George Washington University protests — GWU Anti-Israel Protest © Ted Eytan (Licensed under CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The issue is not whether Israel has the right to kill soldiers of an army that has attacked Israel–of course they do (though note certain means, such as poisonous gas, are outlawed under international treaties that Israel has itself signed–and to be sure, Israel is not using such). The issue is the “collateral damage” of civilian deaths. Dropping leaflets is all fine but 2/3rd’s of the houses in Gaza have been damaged/destroyed–much worse than the proportion of German/Japanese housing during World War Two. I don’t claim to have a solution (though turning Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority is not a bad idea, with reconstruction paid for by Arab oil states). But it is a the civilian deaths/damage that is offending the world.
The Germans and Japanese were not primarily fighting from underground bunker tunnels using their civilian populations and infrastructue as shields.
How else would you have the Israelis fight? They seem to be far more considerate of their enemies’ lives than were the NATO allies after 9/11.
But the Germans and Japanese were basing military production (if not fighters–though they were also) in the cities. This was the justification for attacking them. And the weapons at the time were much less discriminate. But after 9/11 Afghanistan and Iraq had very few civilians killed by NATO arms–it was the ensuing fighting afterwards that consumed lives, and particularly in Iraq it was a civil conflict, not a fight against our troops (who were caught in the cross-fire).
I’m not certain how I would have the Israeli’s fight but remember that Netanyahu was building up Hamas to avoid having the PLO in a position to create a Palestinian state. And Israel’s behavior in the West Bank (allowing settlers to attack and “de-land” Palestinians, descendants of people who have been there for hundreds of years) now gets a pass (and it should not). But the primary audience for Israeli actions is not the Palestinians but Iran–Israel needs to show that retribution will occur and it will be merciless. It has and it is.
Marc, have you ever heard of the city of Dresden, Germany? We — USAAF & RAF — literally burnt it flat. Read “Slaughterhouse 5.”
We (USAAF) burnt most of Tokyo flat, incinerating lots and lots of women & children.
The only difference between the atomic bomb and what we were already doing to Japan was that it was one bomb from one B-29 and not a hundred B-29s. (The implicit threat was of 100 atomic bombs being dropped at a time…)
We were dropping so many bombs that we actually bombed some of our own planes that were flying at a lower altitude. One of our bombs went off in Japan the other day, put a nice hole in a road near an airport. The firestorms we created would produce hurricane-force winds that would literally suck people into the fire.
Our motto circa 1944-45 was “make the rubble bounce” — look at some of the pictures of Berlin circa 1945 and all you will see is piles of rubble.
The other thing to remember is that some of the damage in Gaza is from Hamas’ own ordinance. Building stuff that goes “bang” is fairly cheap & easy — building stuff that ONLY goes “bang” where and when you want it to isn’t so easy. And “friendly fire” isn’t.
Yea, you can make a rocket out of a piece of water main — but it isn’t going to have ANY accuracy and is more likely to land on your own land than anywhere else. And the reason why ammo dumps exist — why explosives are stored away from where people live — is that there are “sympathetic” explosions — the blast wave from a nearby explosion sets them off. So when you store your explosives in a hospital, don’t be surprised when the hospital explodes — and this has happened.
I’m well aware of Dresden, Tokyo, Berlin, etc. And actually, I support the use of atomic weapons because the war was killing an estimated 250,000 people a month (mostly in China). Atomic weapons (and the Soviet invasion) stopped the war. My point is that even with all of these attacks from the air more housing as a proportion of housing stock has been destroyed in Gaza than in Germany/Japan. That and the civilian deaths is what the world objects to. Note also Germany and Japan attacked a large number of nations and enslaved/murdered tens of millions. Hamas killed one thousand. None of this is to say that Israel doesn’t have a right to defend itself but I was pointing out what the world objected to (aside from that motivated by anti-Semitism and the usual settler-colonialist ideology). But, as I point out above, the main target of all this by Israel is Iran and Israel’s desire to let Iran know that it will use all means to prevent Iran from building atomic weapons. Israel is keeping its deterrent credible and it is nasty.
“… that Israel should cease and desist from destroying Hamas due to these unfortunate deaths is to say that Israel has no right to defend itself.”
They don’t believe that Israel has the right to exist in the first place — while they have no idea WHAT river or WHICH sea, their stated goal is to exterminate the Jews. The people leading this movement are quite clear about that, although many of the participants are there for the fun & frolics — and to meet people.
As an aside, this speaks volumes to the unmet social needs in academia, but I digress.
The SJP at the Univ of Maryland College Park want to *celebrate* Oct 7th — and a judge gave them permission to do so. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.567249/gov.uscourts.mdd.567249.35.0_2.pdf