The Moral Squalor of the Left

The doctrine of proportionality as an instrument of antisemitism

IDF troops with the bodies of six Jewish “settlers” massacred by Hamas

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Whenever Israel clashes with some terrorist group like Hamas, a cry goes up from the leftist fever swamps, demanding “proportionality.” By this is meant that Israeli retaliation must not exceed, in violence or death and destruction caused, the original attack.

The demand for proportionality is an odd one, given another term of art much favored by the Left: “cycle of violence”—in common parlance, tit-for-tat, back and forth exchanges, now and forever, amen. The fact that a cycle of violence rests on the maintenance of proportionality, with neither side striving for outright victory, is a reality that the comrades seem unable to grasp.

If you want a “forever war,” proportionality will deliver one.

Up to now, Israeli restraint and the Palestinian terrorist groups’ inability to deliver a knockout blow—proportionality, if you will—kept things frozen in place. This was the true cause of the much-bemoaned cycle of violence. Successive Israeli governments judged that the terrorist threat could be contained by waging a limited war of reprisal and deterrence. This policy was quite successful for many years—then suddenly it wasn’t. The pogrom carried out by Hamas in southern Israel earlier this month has revolutionized the war. The Israeli government and people have been shaken awake. And in its grief and anger, Israel will never contenance a return to the status quo ante.

On the Israeli side, therefore, victory is now defined as the destruction of Hamas—its armed cadres and its political infrastructure—in the Gaza Strip. And proportionality, to the extent that it ever existed at all, is out the window.

The truth is that among the principles of war, proportionality has no place. As Clausewitz put it, to introduce any such limiting principle into the theory of war would be an absurdity. War, he taught, is an act of force, and there can be no logical limit on the application of that force. If such limitations do govern the conduct of a particular war, they are imposed from the outside, by considerations of policy. Prior to the events of October 7, 2023, Israel waged a limited war against Palestinian terrorist groups because it seemed politically expedient, and because the definition of victory was containment. But the political calculus has changed, and with it the Israeli definition of victory, which is now the destruction of Hamas. The force applied will therefore correspond to the requirements of victory as so defined, not to some illusory principle of proportionality.

This is not to say that Israel will shrug off all restraints on the use of force. Considerations of humanity and practicality will govern the application of force, to avoid, as far as possible, civilian casualties. But such considerations will not—cannot—impose a decisive check on Israel’s military operations. And given Hamas’ well-known practice of using civilians as human shields, significant civilian casualties can hardly be avoided.

Of course, for the anti-Zionist, i.e. antisemitic, Left, proportionality has always been a bad-faith argument. It’s only trotted out to smear Israel with the charge that it overreacts to Palestinian terrorist provocation or even uses them as a pretext for “genocide.” And when something as heinous as the Hamas pogrom occurs, the Left abandons proportionality altogether. After all, describing a properly proportionate response to the gruesome slaughter of 1,400 Jews would be an awkward task. So instead, the comrades resort to charges that the whole thing was Israel’s fault because—settlers, colonialism, imperialism, apartheid, white supremacy! There must be an immediate cease-fire to prevent the wicked Jews from committing even more war crimes!

It’s all so hypocritical and transparently malicious that despite the bloody background against which this farce is being acted out, one is tempted to laugh. But the Nazis too were addicted to such comically over-the-top bigotry—and remember how that turned out! No, we must pay attention to what the comrades are saying. And we must understand the real meaning of the words and terms they use.

The antisemitism of the postmodern Left relies on a lexicon of intellectualized bigotry. If a pregnant woman is brutally killed, her stomach opened, her unborn baby savagely mutilated, the scene photographed to be broadcast on social media, who wouldn’t be shocked and sickened? Ah, but by replacing woman with settler in the preceding sentence, an unthinkably heinous crime becomes a noble act of liberation. This is how the Jew haters of the Left quiet their consciences. Proportionality is also to be found in that lexicon and its function is similar: to lend a spurious air of legitimacy to demands that are rooted in bias and bad faith.

In his book Why Orwell Matters (2002), the late Christopher Hitchens employed a phrase that grated on my nerves: “the moral grandeur of the Left.” But he was a man of the Left, not to mention one of those grand eccentrics that England occasionally produces, so I let it pass. Hitchens was also one of those Jews who regarded the Zionist project with skepticism, and I find myself wondering what he’d say had he lived to see the wave of antisemitism that swept the world after hundreds and hundreds of Jews were massacred. Nothing very complimentary concerning the postmodern Left, I suspect.

Postscript, October 19: I’ve been informed by Claire Berlinski, to whose Substack I hope you all subscribe, that Christopher Hitchens was not really a Jew. He was, it seems, just 1/32 ethnically Jewish. For that egregious error I offer my apologies, while blaming it on Wikipedia.