On proportionality, again

As more and more rockets come down on the Israeli town of Sderot, I was thinking about Israel’s response to the rockets a year and a half ago. I remember Israel being charged with having a disproportionate response to the shelling by Israel’s bombing in south Lebanon. I thought at the time that this was an absurd claim, and I still do. Today, Bret Stephens has a column on the proportionality calculus which essentially says that there is no proportional way for Israel to reasonably respond to the rocket attacks.

I agree. I think that there are two connected reasons why the demand for Israel's response to be "proportional" is absurd.

First, it took me about a year to realize the following irony about proportionality. Proportionality is not a value in either Jewish or Islamic notions of just war. So there is an attack by an Islamic group, a response by a Jewish group and these Christian “moral thinkers” telling the Jews that they are not adhering to Christian principles of just war in the engagement.

Does anyone else hear “cultural imperialism”?

Did I miss Augusine’s authorial hand in the Geneva Conventions?

Again, while the light of intuition might claim that some kind of proportionality ought to be a part of any theory of just war, there are more and less reasonable versions of what it can be. The ones claimed last summer were the ridiculous ones. But even so, there is no a priori version of what is to count as proportional and what is not.

Like I mentioned last summer, it is clear that sending a nuclear weapon to solve a minor trade dispute is disproportional. But on the other hand, Israel, for all its shelling, did not achieve the status quo ante, which is the goal of proportionality, to do just enough to rectify the situation. Israel did not get its soldiers back. Assuming that there is a chance that they can somehow accomplish this with enough military action, they have not yet even put up a “proportional” fight. Israel still has way more fighting to go till they hit “proportional”. So there is no clear line that makes it easy to understand what it would be to be proportional.

It seems like legalistic religions like Judaism and Islam don’t have to deal with these line-drawing problems. They have rules telling them how and when they fight. Christianity, which is more (for the lack of a better word) theologico-philosophical, and less legal, has to first answer these questions about what proportionality is before it can come to an understanding of who is in the right on the in bello issues. (And anyone who knows what the phrase “conceptual analysis” means knows that there is no way to figure out what “proportional” is.)

This kind of thinking then just encourages Christian thinkers to work their way backward - first decide who you don’t like. Then draw your line so that the side you are initially prejudiced against looses.

Which takes me to the second reason. What we really see from this is that despite the intuition that we need some sort of proportional response, proportionality is most likely incoherent. There are just too many real cases where a country has no feasible response if it is to act proportionally. Obviously you can't tell a country that it just has to let its citizens get shelled and killed because the country has no options that meet your moral standards.

It also seems obvious that asking some "Christian" European country (or collection thereof) to go in and solve this problem in some way that they deem proportional will not work. After all, it was their colonialist meddling incursions in the Middle East that started these problems in the first place.

So I take it that from a moral perspective, the problem is unsolvable given the Just War paradigm that thinkers who operate in a Christian tradition use. That means that their condemnatory rhetoric is merely that - rhetoric. Rhetoric that agitates against one side for not solving an intractable problem merely reflects a prejudice against that side. Moreover, I see this as an argument for political realism in this case.