British author and journalist Douglas Murray was asked on Talk TV whether Israel’s strikes in the Gaza Strip constitute a “reasonable, proportionate and moral response”.
Murray replied, “There is some deep perversion in Britain whenever Israel is involved in a conflict, and it is the word you just used: Proportion, proportionate, proportionality. Only Britain is really obsessed with this. I’ve heard in for the last few days incessantly.”
“Proportionality in conflict rarely exists,” he stated, and then explained that insisting on a proportionate response “would mean that, in retaliation for what Hamas did in Israel on October 7th 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. Kill precisely the number of young people that Hamas killed on Saturday. They should find a town of exactly the same size as a town like 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.”
“Proportionality in conflict is a joke, and it’s a very strange British concept which we’ve had, that only the Israelis in the conflict, when they are attacked, are expected to have precisely the proportionate response,” added Murray.
And I (Wolf Paul) would add:
This is, unfortunately, not a specifically British problem; the entire West and of course the United Nations demand this, especially from Israel.
The civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip in the weeks since October 7 are largely attributable to Hamas, which places its terror facilities (which are legitimate targets under the laws of war) amid the civilian population, in and under schools and hospitals, in order to then present the world with the corpses of dead civilians, including children, as evidence of Israeli war crimes. And when the Israeli army, incidentally the only one in the world, warns civilians of impending attacks, they are sometimes prevented by Hamas from seeking safety.