ITAI’s Special Bulletin V
ITAI’s Special Bulletin V
By: Joseph Puder
October 19, 2023
In the upcoming days, weeks, and perhaps months, we will hear repeatedly the word “proportionality. “The international media is presenting the casualties among Israelis and Palestinians side by side and asking if Israel’s response to the horrors and atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists is proportionate.
Interviewed on BBC, British author and journalist, Douglas Murray, responded to the absurdity of the notion of proportionality by stating that, “This would mean that, in retaliation for what Hamas did in Israel on Saturday (October 7, 2023), Israel should try to locate a music festival in Gaza, for instance-and good luck with that-and rape precisely the number of women that Hamas raped on Saturday. Precisely kill the number of young people that Hamas killed on Saturday…”
Murray added, “Israelis should find a town of exactly the same size as Sderot, and make sure they go door to door and kill precisely the correct number of babies that Hamas killed in Sderot on Saturday and shoot in the head precisely the same number of old age pensioners as were shot in Sderot on Saturday, just to choose one town.”
Israel, in recent decades, appears to be the only country prevented by both allies and adversaries from winning a decisive victory. It happened in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, and in successive Israeli engagements with Hamas in Gaza. And insofar as “proportionality” is concerned, clearly the US fight against ISIS or in Afghanistan, was hardly proportional in terms of casualties, not to mention Russia’s war in Chechnya. In both cases the adversaries were slaughtered. Hamas’ ideology and brutality is the same as ISIS.
There is also the moral element that calls for justice. The Holocaust-like slaughter of innocent Israeli civilians: men, women, children, babies, raped young girls, Holocaust survivors, and the beheading of babies and adults, calls for a moral imperative to avenge the dastardly Hamas attack. Hamas started this unprovoked war, and Israel has the moral right to finish it by whatever means necessary to prevent Hamas from future attacks.
Another notion generally applied to Israel when it is challenged by deadly enemies is that of “moral equivalency.” Richard Land, wrote in the Christian Post,:” Those who claim a “moral equivalency” between the Hamas terrorists and the Israeli government betray either a lack of integrity or a seriously demagnetized moral compass. There is no more moral equivalency between Hamas and Israel than there was between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The U.S., like Israel, was not perfect, but if the Soviet “Evil Empire” had desired peace as much as America did in the Cold War, the Cold War would have ended far sooner and more peacefully than it did.”
Land added, “Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to eradicating the Jews in the Holy Land and “driving them into the sea.” Israel cannot peacefully coexist with a terrorist group that denies the Israelis’ right to exist in the Holy Land.”