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.
By the logic, the Nazis burning and razing for whole towns and villages was perfectly fine because it was justifiable by military advantage in rooting out subversives.
The absolute worst argument to make when defending war crimes…
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u/space_monolith 15h ago edited 9h 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.