Hamas and Proportionality

Please watch this video interview with Ilan Troen. He is an emeritus professor at Brandeis whose daughter and son in law were murdered in the Hamas pogrom:

Ilan is the friend of a friend. He and his family have been firmly in the peace camp, advocating Palestinian rights, which of course made no difference to the terrorists.

As the Israeli analyst Haviv Rettig Gur has pointed out, the purpose of the Hamas attack was simply to kill Israelis, with no other military objective:

Families were butchered in cold blood. In one home, a terrorist shot the parents dead, took a child’s cellphone and started broadcasting it all in a livestream on their Facebook account. Grandmothers were pulled in wheelchairs to waiting vehicles ready to carry them as hostages into Gaza. Then came the mothers carrying babies. Footage circulated on social media, put there by Hamas, of an Israeli child asking his mother if the gunmen that surrounded them were going to kill them. “They said they won’t,” the mother replied as they were taken outside to some unknown fate.

The stream of videos didn’t stop. An IDF soldier’s body was paraded in Gaza. A young woman, bleeding, was pulled by the hair from a car after being kidnapped and taken into the Strip. And all of it was broadcast by Hamas to the world in joyful pride, sparking celebrations in Tehran, Ramallah and no small part of the online pro-Palestinian activist world.

There are many other accounts with narratives of even more barbarous acts, but I will not post them.

Much has been said about the need for "proportionality" in Israel's response to the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

The progressive blogger Scott Lemieux, for example, has warned of “the immorally disproportionate response that is surely coming." Needless to say, he has not identified his vision of a morally proportionate response to the intentional murder of over 1200 civilians and kidnapping at least 150 civilian hostages from many nations. 

The siege of Gaza is a measured response, aimed at depriving the terrorists of the means to renew their supply of missiles and other weapons. No country in the world would provide fuel and power for the manufacture of arms to murder its civilians. The blockade of food and water must end soon, as international humanitarian law requires Israel to provide necessities to civilians, but the blockade of fuel and power is both permissible as a military measure and essential to continue indefinitely.

What Lemieux and others do not acknowledge is that the principle of proportionality in international humanitarian law, according to the ICRC, requires that the anticipated "loss of human life and damage to civilian objects should not be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected from the destruction of a military objective." In other words, Israel is entitled to use as much force as is reasonably necessary for the “destruction” of Hamas.

Hamas sought no military advantage other than the murder of Israelis, thus committing a massive war crime. The Hamas threat to execute civilian hostages and "broadcast it with audio and video" is further evidence of inhumanity, intentionally reminiscent of the ISIS beheadings.

In 1977, I coauthored what may have been the first article in any American Jewish publication advocating the establishment of a Palestinian state. The Hamas terrorists have set back the cause of Palestinian independence for at least a generation. No Israeli will agree to allow Hamas control of Gaza's borders, nor should they.

Israel's response must be proportionate to the objective of destroying Hamas and removing its ability ever to launch another terror attack. Nothing more.