What Does ‘Proportionality’ Really Mean in Law?

If the Pallywankers were as informed as they are vocally certain… well, they wouldn’t be so vocally certain. The grim years since 7 October, 2023 have been an extended demonstration of Yeat’s lament that “the worst are full of passionate intensity”. What they excel at in screaming hate, they proportionally lack in informed opinion.

These are the people who, after all, endlessly parrot buzzwords they haven’t the first clue about. Not least, ‘proportionality’.

The average pro-Hamas moron seems to think that ‘proportionality’ means an evenly-matched scoreboard. As if Israel should have just counted up to 1200 dead ‘Palestinians’, then packed up and gone home. But, the laws of war being a book to these cretins, it should not surprise you that that’s not what proportionality means at all.

Not that these swivel-eyed, spittle-flecked imbeciles will bother reading it (too many long words, not enough pictures), but here’s a summary of the actual laws regarding proportionality.

Under International Humanitarian Law, proportionality requires that any degree of damage (up to and including death) to civilians not be “excessive” in relation to the “military advantage anticipated from a strike against a military target.”

That’s the whole trick. Not a running total. Not a UN press conference. One strike, one balance sheet, assessed with the information available before the bomb leaves the rail. If a combatant nation had to bomb an entire city into dust in order to win an existential war, that would be proportional.

Yes: even if it killed civilians.

Civilians die in wars. The law knows this and does not treat every corpse as a war crime. What the law forbids is intending to hit civilians with no military object at all. Hamas solved that inconvenience years ago by parking its war under other people’s roofs. Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions is dreary and precise: use your own population, or hostages, to shield fighters or weapons and you have turned the school, the mosque, the hospital into a military objective. A hospital above a complex of military tunnels and bunkers is not a magic force-field. It is a target Hamas volunteered.

In fact, the only actual war crime in this instance is the side who built a military post under a hospital. The side that bombs the military base, even if it has to obliterate the hospital in the process, has not committed a ‘war crime’: it’s punished one.

Of course this does not give the IDF a carte blanche licence. It means the strike is not illegal because it hit a hospital. It still has to pass the balance. Were the human shields volunteers or conscripts? If the IDF cannot tell, its own rules require it to assume the civilians are there against their will. Then the planners have to put a number on the likely civilian harm and another on the military gain. Two civilians over a cache that has already spat 500 rockets at Israeli towns is not the same problem as 10 families over the same hole. A long-range missile aimed at Tel Aviv can tip the scale back. A lone unskilled gunman is worth less than a rocket factory or a commander. None of this is a vibe. It is a lawyered checklist.

And here is the part the keffiyeh chorus never quite gets to. The decision is not left to a 19-year-old with a joystick. IDF guidelines send the balance to military lawyers who sit outside the chain of command, answer to no general and know they can be personally carved up later if they rubber-stamped a turkey. The hardest calls go to the Israeli Supreme Court in real time. Compare that with a death cult that films the massacre and then phones the BBC because it knows it’s a sympathetic propagandist funded by the British taxpayer.

Body-count score-keeping is not the test. Totting up “Palestinians” versus Israelis – even if you trust Hamas’s own morgue – tells you nothing about who was a fighter, who volunteered as a shield or what the strike was for. Israel’s stated object since 7 October is to destroy Hamas’s capacity to do it again. The law allows force proportionate to that object. It does not require Israel to lose.

And here’s the kicker for the ‘genocide’-parroting empty-headed sloganeers: Israel has conducted one of the lowest civilian-casualty wars in modern history.

On the UN’s own figures on modern war, globally, about nine civilians die for every combatant. Israel has brought that number down to between (depending on who you believe) seven and two. In other words, no matter how you cut it, Israel has clocked up a lower civilian death ratio than the UN’s own average.

A jabbering empty head who screeches ‘war crime’ and ‘genocide’ is nothing more than a Hamas-indoctrinated propagandist who has inculcated the true genocidists’ hate-boner for Jews.

The passionate and the ignorant will keep screaming that the scoreboard is uneven. The book they refuse to open says the scoreboard was never the game.