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This description of the war does not match with my perception of reality, either based on casualty figures or the pictures that I see. Even the most dedicated pro-Israelis concede that Palestinian casualties have always far exceeded Israeli ones, but Israel's war is the "extremely restrained" one?
Either way, I think there is a basic asymmetry between unjustified violence and retaliation. If person A chops off person B's arm and everyone else around looks away and says that A is in their right to do that, then B has been wronged. If B then chops A's arm off in retaliation, B was justified in doing so. If A chops B's other arm off in retaliation for that, this is not justified, because justified violence does not beget a similar right to retaliation.
Please exercise the minimum of good faith to grant me that I am not approaching this from an ethnic perspective. I don't see where Christians come into this, but historical wrongs committed by Arabs against Jews seem like a better candidate for something that would justify the actions around Israel's establishment. This is an area where I have to admit relative ignorance, but my sense was that the scattering of the Jews of the Levant was largely at the hand of "Western" powers, starting with the Roman empire, and that actually Arab suzerains treated them better throughout history than the crusaders that would occasionally insinuate themselves into the region; and either way, any hostilities experienced by remnant resident Jewish population were out of proportion with the injustices visited upon the resident Arabs by the invading European Israelis. Because of the disconnect between the principal agents of Jews' displacement to Europe (the Romans) and the current "targets of retaliation" (the Arabs), who moved into the post-Roman vacuum much later, I find it hard to accept that the latter would have any moral culpability for what the Jews suffered in the European diaspora.
No, not particularly, because as I said above there is an asymmetry between first-mover violence and retaliation. Since I don't accept the Nazi argument that starting WWII was proportionate retaliation for Versailles, they are the ones who moved first, with the civilian population as both an intended beneficiary and enthusiastic supporter of their actions. I would go even beyond the publicity-friendly rationalisation by military need and say that the Allies would morally not be so wrong to murder those civilians out of pure revenge. (Though actually still a bit less so than the Gazans, because they had more options to make Germany and Germans pay available to them at the time than the Gazans had wrt Israel!) To dispel any attempts to put a racial angle on this, I would say the same about the firebombing of Tokyo.
Ugh, I didn't anticipate that using that particular metaphor would invite this interpretation. The only reason I reached for it is that mafia/police collusion was the first trope I could think of where the protagonist is subjected to injustice and can't get succour. What matters for the metaphor is not even the collusion among the mafiosi, but the collusion between them and the police (the US + vassals). Would you be happier if I changed the stand-in for Israel to be a single guy who has a small frontier town's police and judges in his pocket, with a single pampered daughter who had a cushy upbringing thanks to what he racketeered from some townspeople?
Which just leads to an endless game of temporal gerrymandering. Israel says that Hamas started the current war on October 7th, ergo Israel is entitled to retaliate. Hamas would have a rather different view of who really started it. Who should we believe? Personally, I'm inclined to lean more towards the Israelis.
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It’s not for lack of trying, though.
Hamas appears to be limited more by Israeli tech and funding advantages than by its own morality. Israel…it’s less clear. I would argue they are operating further from their maximum capability than Hamas. Whether that’s due to conscience or to realpolitik, I’d still call it “restraint.”
Or to put it another way: if Hamas wanted to cause more casualties among Israeli civilians, what would it do differently? Because I get the impression it’s taking all the opportunities it can. The scarcity of such opportunities, and the horrific penalties it pays in return, doesn’t excuse much.
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It’s ridiculous to suggest that developing defensive technology that reduces your civilian casualties means you no longer have the right to respond to attempted acts of war against civilians to the same degree.
Does this argument generalise into one against animal rights/welfare?
(It doesn't seem so ridiculous to me. Noblesse oblige.)
I don’t think the argument translates the way you imply. Nevertheless, if we can obtain truly identical animal products (meat, leather etc) without harming animals I would consider it morally justifiable to wind down the process of farming them. Similarly, it is fair to acknowledge that without the Iron Dome Israel would likely have killed far more Palestinians than it has in order to prevent Israeli civilian deaths. October 7 shows the limitations of this strategy, however, such that the relevant analogy (that of, say, not beating the shit out of your toddler who keeps punching you) is not wholly fair.
Israel can prevent some Palestinian attacks. Nevertheless, the genocidal urge remains and it is transparently impossible to prevent (at this time) all Palestinian anti-Jewish violence with solely defensive means. This justifies ongoing violent retaliation without significant concern about ‘proportionality’.
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Being good at defense does not mean you're not allowed to kill the enemy. Palestinian casualties have exceeded Israeli ones because Israel's defense is good, not because they're going light on trying to kill Israelis.
Also, Israel doesn't build military bases in hospitals in order to increase its own casualties. A lot of the Palestinian casualties that "exceeded Israeli ones" are a result of deliberate Palestinian action.
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