Peace and Proportionality

The horrendous events of the past weeks in Israel and the Gaza strip have given rise to some tentative discussions of the ethics of war. An important word on all sides in these discussions has been 'proportionate'. Is the Israeli response to the Hamas rockets 'proportionate'? Some Israeli commentators have distanced themselves from the idea of proportionality altogether. War, they say, is not about proportionality. It's about subduing the enemy.

Ideally, one supposes, we can all agree that subduing the enemy need not amount to killing them all off and razing their territories. And if it's possible to presume this much - that killing all one's enemies is not a necessary or preferable course of action - then an implicit argument for proportionate responses would seem to be in place.

Of course, many conquering peoples have found down the centuries that peace can be easier to achieve through mass murder than through accommodation and discussion. By simply wiping out one's enemies, one can (perhaps) achieve peace without weighing up niceties in military engagement. Peace, of course, for the conquerors. No peace, apart from in death, for the conquered.

Surely, this attitude is to be deplored. What hope, though, does the idea of 'proportionality' offer in its place? How can we think of 'proportionality' in such contexts? Can it be calculated, for example, by the number of dead soldiers or children, or by the number of deaths or bombs launched? Was Hiroshima proportionate? Was Iraq? Can we ever look at military campaigns and assess how 'proportionate' was their armed response? No doubt most of us are devoted to thinking in such terms - however we might go about configuring and calibrating the variables.

Rather than merely wondering whether the Israelis are being proportionate, however, perhaps we should also be asking ourselves whether the kind of peace they are trying to achieve - and which we as a world community are encouraging them and the Palestinians to pursue - is the right kind of peace. The most basic assumption we need to make and to insist upon in this context is that all military acts of killing are evil acts which should not occur. It needs to be made clear that peace of a good sort - of the kind we should like to see - cannot and will not be achieved by killings. For the biggest problem in the Middle East is that both sides are of the view that killing is a good way of making peace. It is a vote winner. It raises cheers. It offers the chance for 'vengeance' or 'revenge'.

The biggest battle we face in the middle east, we ought surely to say, is a battle where victory must be over hearts rather than territories. It is for this reason that talk of proportionality will never do or be enough. Peace, rather than 'proportionality', is what needs to be talked about and to be insisted upon. The greatest tragedy of the present situation is that talk of this kind is playing such a minimal role.