As the Israeli military attack on Gaza steadily increases we’re hearing one of the standard propaganda weapons employed against Israel over the last forty years, which is that their response to Hamas and Gaza must be proportionate to the attacks Israel suffered on October 7, as listed here:

Hamas posted video online that made it’s way to Twitter. There you can see an Israeli family, taken hostage. You can see the trauma of the children who just witness the execution of their sister.

The Left clamors, “Proportionate response.”

Like a great many propaganda terms the power lies in the gap between what this means in legal theories of self-defence and especially in military matters, and what the public think it means, which is tit-for-tat – or perhaps more appropriately in this case, עַיִן בְּעַיִן שֵׁן בְּשֵׁן.

But that’s not what it means, and in any case, despite the public understanding, nobody expects the Israelis to send a thousand IDF soldiers into Gaza with Go-Pros on their helmets for some Biblical-scale rape, torture and murder – though the Jew-haters of the world would love seeing their darkest beliefs confirmed.

In fact this argument was addressed decades ago in almost the exact same circumstances of aerial bombing and the very personal killings of Jews:

The chief defendant, SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, had been commander of Einsatzgruppe D, which carried out mass murders in Moldova, southern Ukraine, and the Caucasus. An economist and father of five, he had supervised the killing of 90,000 Jews. Ohlendorf imagined that he had a moral conscience. The killers under his command, he told a U.S. Army prosecutor, were prohibited from using infants for target practice, or smashing their heads against trees.

As such he figured he had a good defence by comparing what he had done in killing defenceless people to the Allied carpet bombing raids:

I am not in a position to isolate this occurrence from the occurrences of 1943, 1944, and 1945 where with my own hands I took children and women out of the burning asphalt myself, and with my own hands I took big blocks of stone from the stomachs of pregnant women; and with my own eyes I saw 60,000 people die within 24 hours.
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The fact that individual men killed civilians face to face is looked upon as terrible and is pictured as specially gruesome because the order was clearly given to kill these people; but I cannot morally evaluate a deed any better, a deed which makes it possible, by pushing a button, to kill a much larger number of civilians, men, women, and children.

If you think you’ve heard this before and recently then you are correct, whether we’re talking about US attacks on Afghanistan or any Israeli air raid of the last forty years, plus the examples given in that first link. The Far Left have long thought they were on to a winner here and given the fact that even the Western public of immediate-post WWII times were revolted by the fire bombings of Hamburg (1943), Dresden (1945) and Tokyo (1945) they have good reason for thinking so.

However, even while the Nuremberg judges convicted Ohlendorf of war crimes and sentenced him to death they took time out to address this specific argument that he had raised in his defence:

A city is bombed for tactical purposes… it inevitably happens that nonmilitary persons are killed. This is an incident, a grave incident to be sure, but an unavoidable corollary of battle action. The civilians are not individualized. The bomb falls, it is aimed at the railroad yards, houses along the tracks are hit and many of their occupants killed. But that is entirely different, both in fact and in law, from an armed force marching up to these same railroad tracks, entering those houses abutting thereon, dragging out the men, women and children and shooting them.

Then there’s this speech specifically on the legal aspects of proportionality made in the House of Lords the other day by one Lord Verdirame KC (Kings Counsel). Key passages (but click on the link to read the whole thing):

“It does not mean that the defensive force has to be equal to the force used in the armed attack. Proportionality means that you can use force that is proportionate to the defensive objective, which is to stop, to repel and to prevent further attacks.

Israel has described its war aims as the destruction of Hamas’s capability. From a legal perspective, these war aims are consistent with proportionality in the law of self-defence, given what Hamas says it does and what Hamas has done and continues to do.

Asking a state that is acting in self-defence to agree to a ceasefire before its lawful defensive objectives have been met is, in effect, asking that state to stop defending itself.“

Which I’m sure everyone of the people demanding a cease fire now, must know and understand in the wake of the Hamas attacks on October 7. I am no longer willing to extend any assumption of good faith to the so-called “pro-Palestinian” people; they want Israel to be defenceless against Hamas; they want a lot of dead Jews. The protest march chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, is now clearly understood to not be a demand for a two-state solution but for a killing ground of Jews; a “Palestine” that has been freed of Jews – by…

Lord Verdirame continues:

The law of armed conflict, at its best, can mitigate the horrors of war but it cannot eliminate them. The great challenge in this conflict is that Hamas is the kind of belligerent that cynically exploits these rules by putting civilians under its control at risk and even using them to seek immunity for its military operations, military equipment and military personnel. An analysis of the application of the rules on proportionality in targeting in this conflict must always begin with this fact.
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Gaza is not an undefended town. It is true that obligations apply to the besieging forces when civilians are caught within the area that is being encircled, and those obligations include agreeing to the passage of humanitarian relief by third parties. But it is not correct to say that encircling an area with civilians in it is not permitted by the laws of war.

And he has to point out the obvious; that despite claims that Gaza is still “occupied” given the Israeli restrictions on sea, air and land transport into and out of Gaza to try and prevent weapons being imported, (something that clearly failed) – despite allowing some 20,000 Gazan’s per day to cross the border and work in Israel, a practice that is likely now permanently ended – that claim is also not legally true:

“The traditional view until 2005 was that occupation required physical presence in the territory. That view is consistent with Article 42 of the Hague regulations of 1907, which states that a territory is occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the occupying power. Again, it is also the view taken by the UK manual of the law of armed conflict, which reflects the UK’s official legal position and states that occupation ceases as soon as the occupying power evacuates the area.
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More fundamentally, it is Hamas that has been responsible for the government and administration of Gaza.”