Proportionality: The Fake Moral Principle Anti-Israel Activists Love
Proportionality: The Fake Moral Principle Anti-Israel Activists Love
Many anti-Israel proponents raise the claim that Israel’s response to Hamas’s massacre is disproportional, as if “proportion” is a moral principle. They may hypocritically and disingenuously claim that they do condemn Hamas’s massacre of October 7th, but if we look at the last 15 years, we can see that there has always been a much higher proportion of Palestinian casualties than Israeli casualties. Therefore, from a historical perspective, Israel is still on the immoral side due to the disproportionality of deaths on both sides.
For the sake of argument, let’s ignore the fact that the Arab side has always been the aggressor in all the wars that happened in Israel (1967 included), and therefore, the moral burden solely lies on their side. Let’s examine the issue of proportionality, which has gained significant attention in the media and is a major argument for the pro-Palestinian side.
What does proportionality in an ethical context mean? It means that justice requires that the punishment will fit the crime. For example:
If someone stole a loaf of bread, it would be disproportional to sentence him to 19 years of jail and hard labor; It would be a great injustice.
In this sense, the concept of “proportion” will be synonymous with “justice.” But notice that the pro-Hamas people are deliberately not saying “justice” but “proportion.” That is because there’s another element added to “proportion” here.
When they say that Israel’s response is disproportional, they are sneaking in the notion that there is moral equivalency at play, as if this is a war between sides who are on equal moral terms.
This is an example of the fallacy of “package dealing.”
According to Ayn Rand: “Package-dealing” is the fallacy of failing to discriminate crucial differences. It consists of treating together, as parts of a single conceptual whole or “package,” elements which differ essentially in nature, truth-status, importance or value.” [1]
What is happening here is that by package-dealing the concept of justice with the false moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, it makes us think that Israel is acting immorally, as if Israel’s aerial bombing of Gaza is the same as the sentencing of Jean Valjean for 19 years for stealing a loath of bread. Proportion is used to fool the average Joe, whose historical knowledge about the conflict is very limited, into thinking that a great injustice is happening.
As I’ve explained here and what the events of October 7th make vividly clear, Hamas is pure nihilistic evil and has absolutely zero moral grounding. From its beginning, the Arab-Israeli conflict was a war between civilization and barbarism. So much for moral equivalency. Now for the issue of “proportion.”
The common man accepts the basic notion that one should act “proportionately"—that one shouldn’t eat too much unhealthy food, drink too much alcohol, or go to the gym too much. It’s true that it would be immoral to act in this case in a disproportionate manner, but what would make it immoral is not the lack of proportion but the fact that you are damaging your own life.
The facts show that some things, in a certain proportion, have bad or sometimes even lethal effects. This doesn’t make proportion in itself a morally guiding principle.
If we were to live by the principle that everything we do should be exactly on a 1:1 equally proportionate issue, then we should only speak the truth 50% of the time, commit adultery every time one has sex with his partner, follow the law only half of the time, and so on and so forth. It’s ridiculous and immoral.
Proportionality is not a valid moral principle. It’s impossible to consistently live by it. To expect an entire country to sacrifice itself for the sake of this idea is a moral abomination.
What we should be asking is not if Israel’s response is proportional but rather what does justice demand of Israel to do. In this case, when the correct concepts are used, it’s much more straightforward. The only thing that justice demands of Israel is nothing less than the total capitulation of Gaza.
[1] - Ayn Rand: “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made”