One of the most basic ideas that go under the heading of Just War Theory is the concept of proportionality in responding to aggression. A just war, by definition, must be a defensive response to aggression by another nation or some analogous territorial entity. You cannot justly start a war out of the blue. Furthermore, this response must be in proportion to the magnitude of the threat. A threat to the independence or even the very existence of a country clearly merits a more serious response than one which merely destroys some military equipment and/or personnel.
When determining whether a given response to aggression is proportionate, one factor that undoubtedly needs to be taken into account is the number of deaths involved in both the original aggression and the response. However, it is a popular error to think that equality in numbers is what counts here. “A life for a life” is bronze-age morality and makes little sense in modern warfare. Terrorists like Hamas, who do not care a jot about their own civilians, can always arrange things so that they cannot be attacked without huge civilian casualties on their side. This should not be allowed to make them invulnerable to retaliation when they commit atrocities; on the contrary, it is part of the reason why such organisations need to be eliminated even at high cost in civilian lives in order to preserve basic human values.
It is not a new problem. The UK had to deal with a very similar situation in the 1940’s. The immediate cause of the declaration of war was Hitler’s invasion first of Czechoslovakia and then of Poland in spite of the Munich peace accord. This proved that no bargains made with Nazi Germany would hold, and that the only thing that would prevent Hitler from swallowing the whole of Europe (including the UK) was to destroy him. But it was clear from the first that Hitler and the Nazis could not be destroyed without killing a lot of German civilians.
Of course many of these people were themselves supporters of Hitler. We should never forget that this evil man did not simply seize power; he was actually voted into office by the German people and was hugely popular with the general public until he started to lose the war. But many Germans did not support him, and even those who did were still civilians with rights under the laws of war.
Most experts on the morality of just war do believe that the damage and loss of life caused by the air raids in Germany were mostly justified. They were proportionate because they were necessary for victory where defeat would have meant the destruction of our own country as an independent entity. This was especially the case where cities were the location of port or industrial facilities that were essential for the German war effort. But Dresden was not such a place and, for that reason, many people consider the fire-bombing and almost total destruction of Dresden as a war crime, albeit one that was never prosecuted.
The parallels with Hamas in Gaza are remarkably close. Like the Nazis, Hamas were originally voted into office by people who really ought to have known better. Previously Gaza had been part of the self-governing Palestinian territory, but the electorate there decided that they preferred Hamas to the PLO. Like the German electorate after 1933, they were not given any chance to change their minds subsequently and vote them out again. Like the German electorate, they are probably now divided in their loyalties. We don’t actually know what proportion of them are still Hamas supporters. A growing tide of social media posts from inside Gaza suggests that a large number are not.
Hitler originally regarded the German people as his allies and basked in their admiration, but he turned against them as Germany collapsed in 1945. He came to see them as cowards who had let him down, and he wanted to see Germany completely destroyed rather than have it survive him.
Hamas likewise regard the people of Gaza with total contempt and are willing to sacrifice them en masse for their own protection. But unlike Hitler, they have not come to this position gradually out of despair; it was their starting position. Right from the beginning, they fired their rockets into Israel almost exclusively from the roofs of hospitals and schools. They knew that the Israelis believed in taking out rocket launchers surgically rather than just carrying out reprisal raids, and they wanted to make sure that any such operation would lead to dead children whom they could display to the world’s press. This is even more the case today, when all Hamas’s command and control centres are deeply embedded into facilities such as hospitals.
Because of this, it simply is not possible to destroy Hamas without massive civilian losses. The question then becomes: is the destruction of Hamas itself a proportionate response to the events of 7th October? If it is, then the loss of civilian lives which Hamas themselves have knowingly and deliberately made inevitable, is also proportionate.
A few days after the atrocities, a Hamas leader named Ghazi Hamad explained their future programme of activity with remarkable frankness. They would continue to raid into Israel over and over again, he said, killing a couple of thousand people each time until there were no Jews left “from the river to the sea”. Those who were not dead would have fled for their own survival. Coming from anyone else, this might have been considered mere sabre-rattling. Coming from people who had just carried out precisely such a raid, and had shown how easily it could be done and how Israel had little defense against it, it is blood-chilling.
Golda Meir once said: “If Hamas laid down its arms, there would be no more war in the Middle East. If Israel laid down its arms, there would be no more Israel.”. When a nation is threatened with annihilation, whatever it needs to do to keep itself in existence becomes a legitimate aim in a just war of self-defence.
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