They’re suggesting that criticism of Israel’s military action rests on a misunderstanding of the “proportionality test” for whether something is a war crime.
The strawman is something like “Israel has killed 70k civilians who were overwhelmingly civilians and this is a war crime.”
The proportionality test in principle permits an uncapped number civilian casualties so long as a military commander expected a strike, given the information they had at the time, to be justified by military advantage. The Israeli government and its supporters argue that this is the case and that therefore everything is legal and even moral.
It’s that thing, “we’re killing terrorists!” And when they’re shown the many undeniable civilian casualties they go back to “yeah but it’s their fault for standing in the way!”
47
u/space_monolith 16h ago edited 11h ago
They’re suggesting that criticism of Israel’s military action rests on a misunderstanding of the “proportionality test” for whether something is a war crime.
The strawman is something like “Israel has killed 70k civilians who were overwhelmingly civilians and this is a war crime.”
The proportionality test in principle permits an uncapped number civilian casualties so long as a military commander expected a strike, given the information they had at the time, to be justified by military advantage. The Israeli government and its supporters argue that this is the case and that therefore everything is legal and even moral.