False Equivalency and Lack of Proportionality in the Gaza War
Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim
Yes, the October 7 massacre by Hamas was bestial, horrific, and inexcusable. Yet the major media seems compelled to recite the number of Israeli victims each time it reports the escalating number of Palestinian victims. The only apparent reason for this is to imply an equivalency of those killed. How can the 1,250 victims on the Israeli side be reasonably equated to the more than 40,000 Palestinian dead (including those buried in the rubble)?
Such false equivalency is matched by a lack of proportionality in the IDF war campaign. In both the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law that define the law of war, the principle of proportionality prohibits attacks on legitimate military targets if the number of civilian causalities would be disproportionate to the military objectives.
That Israel has violated proportionality throughout its six-month Gaza campaign is evident from its numerous war crimes, such as the following:
1. Indiscriminate Bombing. The repeated use of 2,000-pound bombs have leveled multistorey apartment buildings in Gaza, killing hundreds of residents in order to strike even just a single Hamas suspect. The IDF has relied on the “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy” AI programs, which have limited human oversight, to kill suspected militants, their families, and nearby neighbors in the hundreds on the mere possibility of on-site Hamas members. In shifting free-fire zones, snipers are ordered or allowed to shoot anyone in sight, even unarmed women and children. Where is the proportionality?
2. Attacks on hospitals and medical personnel. Claiming that they harbor militants or cover underground command centers, the IDF has decimated almost all of Gaza’s hospitals, including its largest one, Al-Shifa. At Shifa and other medical centers, the IDF has targeted health workers. Many doctors and hospital staff have been stripped, beaten, and transported to detention camps in Israel where they endure extreme hardship or torture. The cut-off of hospital electricity has caused the deaths of newborns in incubators. Some victims of the attacks on Al-Shifa have shown the marks of execution. The IDF has indiscriminately slaughtered civilians who sought safety in numbers at the hospital. Where is the proportionality?
3. Targeting of Journalists. The IDF has repeatedly targeted journalists, killing some 140 of them to date notwithstanding the highly visible “press” marking on their vests. The targeting of reporters as well as the recent expulsion of Al-Jazeera show a clear intent to limit public attention to atrocities inside the Gaza Strip. Where is the proportionality?
4. Targeting of schools, universities, mosques, and libraries. Attacks on Gaza’s religious and cultural infrastructure could have had no other objective than to obliterate Gaza’s historical, religious, and educational life. Such destruction has taken place despite the lack of military value. Where is the proportionality?
5. Starvation as a military tactic. The infliction of starvation as a military tactic is a war crime. When Israel began reducing the number of daily food convoys, Gazan families became desperate enough to eat weeds and animal feed. Not surprisingly, children and even adults in the north have begun to die of starvation. The recent IDF attack on a World Food Kitchen convoy was deliberate, killing seven of WKC team. The incident has highlighted Israel’s targeted killings of humanitarian aid workers. Where is the proportionality?
Netanyahu now threatens to invade Rafah, where more than one million Palestinians have sought safety from Israeli air and ground attacks. President Joe Biden has demanded that Israel produce an invasion plan that will protect civilians, but how is that possible when the population is so densely crowded into a confined space? This is the same question that should have been asked at the beginning of the war– if Netanyahu and his war cabinet had really wanted to limit civilian casualties. Why didn’t the IDF confine its military operation to the tunnels, where most of the Hamas militants were hiding?
Israel’s April 1 bombing of the Iranian Consulate in Syria has increased the threat of a broader Middle East war, one that would likely drag the U.S. military into a major conflict. Iran has vowed to retaliate. By violating the inviolability of diplomatic premises, Israel has not only disregarded the proportionality rule, but has also disrespected international law.
If the International Court of Justice ultimately decides that Israel has indeed committed genocide, it will be in part due to Israel’s continued refusal to respect the principle of proportionality.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Youtube screengrab.
Since the start of the Gaza war, more than 200 hundred aid workers have been killed. As a result, the health situation of the civilian population, still reeling from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)’s attacks, has worsened considerably, since many aid operations have been cancelled. One cannot but wonder what is crossing Netanyahu’s mind who is unable to see the suffering of hundreds of thousands of human beings, a situation that is mainly his responsibility.
It doesn’t escape anybody that, to a large extent, this has to do with Netanyahu’s desire to escape accountability for his actions. What is becoming increasingly evident is that absolute power has transformed him, making him even more ruthless and more impervious to criticism or to the calls for human kindness.
When he took office as prime minister for the second time in 2009, Netanyahu developed a perverse political doctrine that held that increasing the rift between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority would be to Israel’s advantage. That way, the diplomatic paralysis created would eliminate the possibility of negotiations with the Palestinians about the division of Israel into two states.
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy –to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank,” he declared years later. Consequent with this strategy, between 2012 and 2018 Netanyahu gave approval to Qatar to transfer a total of approximately a billion dollars to Gaza, half of which went to Hamas, including its military wing.
On May 5, 2019, Gershon Hacohen, an Israeli major general in reserves, had told the Ynet news website, “We need to tell the truth. Netanyahu’s strategy is to prevent the option of two states, so he is turning Hamas into its closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally.”
Confirming Hacohen’s point of view, on October 8, 2023, Tal Schneider, an Israeli political commentator, wrote in The Times of Israel, “…Israel has allowed suitcases holding millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through its crossings since 2018, in order to maintain its fragile ceasefire with the Hamas rulers of the Strip. Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset.
On October 24, 2023, Iris Leal, an Israeli journalist, showing a remarkable capacity to anticipate events, wrote in Haaretz, “If we don’t want to show weakness, the goals of the war must be logical: a heavy blow, but not the insanity of flattening and occupying Gaza that has seized everyone. We have to rehabilitate, not spill more blood. We must concentrate our efforts on a major hostage deal and make time for the process of recovery and the defascization of Israeli society. It will begin with bringing down the government and its leader and establishing a commission of inquiry for the events of Black Saturday, the events of the black year that preceded it, and the rot of the years of Netanyahu’s rule that led to them.” Those words are as valid now as when they were written more than five months ago.
Writing in Pagina 12, an Argentine newspaper, Julián Varsavsky, an Argentine essayist and communications expert said, “Netanyahu and Hamas are mortal enemies that oppose the existence of two states. That symbiosis requires both to be in power. Hamas’ suicide attacks strengthened Netanyahu in 1996: the anti-terrorist struggle gets votes.”
This situation will haunt Netanyahu for years to come. He is showing the characteristics of a psychopath, unable to listen to anybody’s opinion but his own, particularly when his own political survival is at stake. Psychopaths suffer from a personality disorder manifested, among other features, by shallow emotions, absence of regret or remorse, impulsivity, inability to distinguish right and wrong, and behavior that conflicts with social norms, all of them present in Netanyahu.
The relentless IDF’s bombardment of the civilian population remind me of the poem The Pilot,
by the Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai, translated by Peter Cole.
The Pilot
When next you circle
in your chopper
over Jenin,
pilot, remember the children
and old women
in the homes at which you fire.
Spread a layer
of chocolate across your missile,
and do your best to be precise—
so their souvenir will be sweet
when the walls start to fall.
Netanyahu’s unchecked arrogance makes him interested in a never-ending conflict with the Palestinians. As Haaretz columnist Bradely Burston has stated, “He wants the world to accuse Israel of genocide and apartheid, violent occupation and ethnic cleansing” to make Israelis believe “the world hates us, and he is the only one who can save them.”
Israel will survive Netanyahu’s ruling. However, the damage that he has caused to the social and juridical fabric of Israel has been immense. After the most ruthless and indiscriminate bombing of civilians in recent times, all that is left of Gaza are terrified survivors, a ravaged land, and the devil’s footprints.
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