Ed Morrissey:
It’s also based on absurd and completely ahistorical application of the doctrine of proportionality, which is also based on a deliberate obfuscation: “collective punishment.” We hear a lot of complaints about “collective punishment” by Israel of the Gazans, but that is a lie. That would apply if Israel still occupied Gaza, but they haven’t occupied it since 2005. This is not “collective punishment,” therefore — it is war, one started by the party recognized as the government of Gaza against Israel. Once started, the offended party has the right to see the war to a conclusion of victory either by feat of arms or the capitulation of its enemies in the field.
In no other war other than those involving Israel did the world impose a standard of civilian-death “proportionality,” because that standard would be absurd and does not exist. Did the US stop attacking the Taliban when the death toll in Afghanistan exceed the estimated 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11, for instance? Of course not, and no one called the war on Nazi Germany “collective punishment” on Germans either — and the Allies carpet-bombed Germany for years before ground troops utterly vanquished the Nazis.
Proportionality relates to the necessity of judging the gains of a military operation against the potential collateral loss of life among civilians and in making all practical efforts to limit the latter. It most certainly is not an equation of casualties. The IDF has always operated on the properly defined basis of proportionality and punished commanders who do not. It is beyond absurd, and arguably outright malevolent, to apply the casualty-equation standard to Israel in a war started in this manner. That’s especially true when based on the number of civilian deaths as reported by Hamas, a terrorist group that uses those numbers for its propaganda and includes its own operatives among those numbers too.
# posted by Ranger @ 7:18 PM
