A doctrine of cruelty and folly

A doctrine of cruelty and folly

    Rex Murphy
    The Globe and Mail
    July 29, 2006

Proportionality is the cry of the day since the crisis in Lebanon began.

The abduction of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah terrorists was the immediate occasion of the current conflict. Rockets launched by Hezbollah into Israel since 2000 may be said to provide its bristling context.

Proportionality would, I suppose, have called for Israel to send in its commandos and abduct two of Hezbollah's team and, for perfection's sake, to fire rockets at whatever and wherever it liked in Lebanon, up to the number Hezbollah has sent its way in the six years since Israel departed Lebanon.

For truly ideal proportionality, the rockets would have to be launched by a rogue army, operating out of Israel, in defiance of the Israeli government, and supported by states either indifferent to Israel's own interests or positively hostile to them.

Proportionality may be easy to pronounce but, as can be seen, it's delicate and refined in practice.

As far as I know, the Israeli military doesn't surround itself with Israeli civilians when it launches an operation, hiding rocket launchers in apartment buildings. Hezbollah, on the contrary, conducts its "adventures" only under these conditions.

Israel has the decency to be tormented by civilian deaths. Hezbollah views civilian casualties as a tactical and public-relations utility.

Hezbollah is a self-nominated militia that operates under the aegis of Iran and the "goodwill" of Syria. The Israeli military answers to its own government, and does not oblige itself with freelancing on its own or others' bidding.

It should be clear that to attempt the proportionality that has become so popular a cry against Israel runs up against some eminently practical difficulties, not least the very idea of any rules -- tactical, political or moral -- being thought to pertain to a terrorist militia.

Even-handed, balanced, neutral, proportional -- how do any of these words fit the current conflict?

Proportionality has one last grievous flaw. I can't recall the word being invoked by anyone at all when Hezbollah was firing its rockets and Israel wasn't responding.

Proportionality, as the word is currently understood, appears to me, anyway, to be a kind of code. The state of Israel is allowed now and then to respond to those who are unlawfully attacking it or abducting its soldiers, but it must on no account do so in a manner that might actually end the attacks and permanently stop the abductions. It must fight terrorists according to rules that do not, by definition, apply to terrorists.

To accept this understanding of proportionality is to accept that Israel is in a perpetual war of attrition, that it is always obliged to contain what force it has so that it is always balanced, even to ideal equivalence, with the force enjoyed by the rogues and terrorists who attack it.

I cannot think of any other state in the world that is asked and, by the truly high-minded, expected to live in a perpetual dynamic of attack and response -- with the initiative always understood to be with its enemies.

Such is proportionality. It is a doctrine of cruelty and folly, but, more significant, it is a doctrine designed for the only state in the world that has to seriously worry about the fact of its own existence.

Lately, it has more reason to do so than has ever been the norm for that battered country. One of the other ruder messages coming out of this current crisis is the number of voices starting to remind us that maybe Israel was a mistake to begin with. In Western opinion, this thought is but a whisper, but how common a whisper it is becoming.

Matthew Parris of The Times, no less, gave the thought its most weary expression: "My opinion -- held not passionately but with little personal doubt -- is that there is no point in arguing about whether the state of Israel should have been established where and when it was because it has become a fact. To try to remove it now would be at least as great an injustice as the one originally done to the Palestinians."

What an interesting thought: Clear away the clutter and the ennui and what it says is that Israel was a mistake, both where and when, and if it weren't so much trouble, maybe we could fix it.

Well, there are others on this globe who don't mind the trouble involved in fixing it, among them Hezbollah, al-Qaeda (which has jumped onside with Hezbollah) and the Iranian President, who speaks with such fervour of wiping Israel off the map. The latter is building a nuclear arsenal, and is likely not as dispassionate as the weary Mr. Parris.

That kind of whisper is the tuning of an orchestra we do not want to hear. Nor do we wish to view, even in our dreams, the horrid proportionality its strains would most likely evoke.

Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.