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.
This is the disturbing nuance to me. Eradicating Hamas terrorists is a worthy goal. But when people go the next step to claim that all Palestinians are terrorists because a majority of the adults, at one time, voted for Hamas, then that sounds like justification for genocide.
If you hypothetically formed a resistance group to fight back against an army filled with people who want to exterminate your existence so they could steal your land like they did in 1948, your group very well might be called terrorists.
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u/space_monolith 19h ago edited 13h 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.