Proportional response

Unsurprisingly, France's president, Nikolas Sarkozy has already called Israel's air raids of Hamas' terrorist facilities, "disproportionate."

Israel's bombing can be seen as disproportionate only if the Just War Theory principle of proportionality is (wrongly) understood as meaning a tit for tat response. That is, if Hamas kills three Israelis, Israel may retaliate, but not more violently than Hamas. This is a severe misunderstanding of what proportionality means in Just War theory.

In 2006, Catholic cleric, co-blogger and Afghanistan veteran John Krenson wrote that "proportionate" does not mean tit for tat responses, but responses proprtionate to the good being defended.

Just War theory recognizes that a nation has the right to defend itself from aggression. Proportionality does not mean that Israel cannot fight back with more violence than Hamas is using against it. It means that its response must be proportionate to the good Israel is defending. In this case, the good Israel is defending is the right of its citizens to live and work free of the threat of sudden death from Hamas' rockets. A proportionate response for Israel is to take all measures to eliminate this threat, but not to use more violence than necessary to achieve that end. A related Just War principle, discrimination, means that Israel must discriminate between legitimate targets and non-legitimate targets, attacking the former but not the latter.

Israel's primary obligation is not to limit its retaliation to the level of violence that Hamas has been using against Israel, but to use the full amount of force necessary either to remove Hamas' capability or will to do so any more.

This should be self evident, but remember that many on the Left thought back in 2001 that as soon as the US had killed 3,000 al Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan, we should have come home because that's how many people died on 9/11. But I've known for years that the Left long ago ceased to know how to do moral reasoning.

(I should point out, though, that the Israeli Left is united behind the IDF and the military necessity of Israel's defense. Unlike the American Left, though, most of the Israeli Left are military veterans.)

See also Richard Cohen's 2006 column, "A Proportionate Response is Madness."

Further: Michael Totten wonders just what a proportionate response would look like, otherwise, and Harvard law Professor Alan Dershowitz says that making moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas is moral idiocy. Bret Stephens writes that "Hamas Knows One Big Thing," but also questions Olmert's abiliy to end this well.