A Time for Moral Clarity: Part Two, Proportionality

This one might court some controversy, but I think it has to be said.

We can all agree on one thing. Anyone with a modicum of humanity will feel moral anguish at the loss of a single innocent life, no matter what side of a political conflict it is on. Loss of life is not a numbers game, and to make it one is crass. One innocent death has no more or less moral weight than ten or a hundred. The numbers of innocent deaths doesn't increase or diminish the tragedy. So when you hear people say that there have been 1,000 innocent Palestinian deaths to every 1 Israeli death during the Israel-Palestine conflict, it's their effort at making a claim to which side is the actual victim, and which side is the victimizer. They are trying to turn a moral question into a political one, and doing so usually disingenuously. The reality is that they are all victims. One life has no more or less value as any other, and that's all that should matter. 

But admittedly it's hard not to think in terms of numbers. We do it all the time with just about everything. Quantifying, even when it come to human suffering, gives us a sense that we can determine better from worse, or distinguish winners from losers. Our impulse is to ask, doesn't it matter how many people died on each side? If 1,000 innocent Israelis were murdered, wouldn't it be disproportionate for Israel to respond by killing 10,000 innocent Palestinians? Doesn't that make Israel the aggressor and the Palestinians the victim? From a moral standpoint the answer is no, as explained above. 

Putting the moral question aside for a moment, the matter of proportionality nags at our sense of justice (the punishment has to fit the crime etc.) and demands some form of consideration. In purely political terms, proportionality is determined by the relative power of the sides involved in a conflict. It is a function of how much cost the sides are prepared to accept versus how much they are prepared to inflict. That's it. If one side is prepared to accept a tremendous amount of cost, then the other side must be prepared to inflict a greater amount of damage in order to achieve a resolution of the conflict. In other words, equal proportionality, which may make sense for our notion of justice, makes no sense in terms of politics because it does not end conflict, in fact it perpetuates it. Conflict resolution is only possible when one side overwhelms the other side. So for example, in a political conflict if one side does not place great value on the life of its citizens and is prepared to accept tremendous cost in those terms, then the other side must be willing to inflict great damage in those terms to achieve resolution. 

Up to now, in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Palestinians have been prepared to accept great loss of life and endure great suffering to achieve its perceived objectives, while the Israelis have been unwilling to inflict overwhelming cost in terms of human life and suffering to achieve theirs. This is the reason there has not been a political resolution thus far. Israel has sought to go about its business by tolerating sporadic flare-ups in hostilities, while the Palestinians have tolerated the losses Israel has been prepared to inflict. In a sense Israel has hampered itself since the beginning of this dispute by adhering to a moral standard not shared by its adversary, not that I am advocating that it should behave otherwise. But if the Palestinians adhered to a similar moral standard as the Israelis ie. the way they value human life, their tolerance for cost would have been significantly lower and the prospects for a resolution of the conflict would have been much greater. By this logic, a resolution is only possible in one of two scenarios; either Israel must be prepared to inflict overwhelming cost against the Palestinians beyond what the Palestinians are prepared to accept (essentially forcing them to the negotiating table), or the Palestinians must be less willing to accept the cost Israel is prepared to inflict. I believe, again, putting aside the question of morality, in purely political terms this is the only way to think about proportionality in this conflict. The good news is that both sides always have a say on how the proportionality equation will play out. We always hope that the political calculus will favour placing a higher value on human life and therefore accepting less cost, as opposed to the infliction of overwhelming cost. But as long as there is a kind of 'balance' ie. proportionality, the status quo will remain.