Proportionality: The principle applied to sharing global resources in ratios that bear a relationship to the degree of relative poverty in a country. How we wish! Right?
The legitimacy accorded of proportionality in armed conflict is a curious one. In crude terms, it seems that ‘an eye for an eye’ is alright. International law effectively sanctions the use of force to avenge. It solves nothing except to serve notice on an adversary that transgressions will be returned with force and consequences.
A (proportional) response to aggression with aggression cannot be an act of defense. It is an act to avenge, to hit back with equal force, to settle the urge to inflict as much pain as received. It doesn’t take away pain; instead, pain is multiplied by adding new victims and their suffering.
Deterrence is not achieved by proportionality. Assuming violence and war are the favoured means – to teach a lesson, to forestall any misadventures, to dismantle capabilities for mischief / attacks – excesses are the way, preferably in unthinkable, unimaginable ways to grind the horror and pain into the psyche of the original aggressors. This can be popular amongst the grieving victims and those who speak on their behalf. This includes their government leading the charge, now posturing as strong, undeterred, and on the side of justice.
It doesn’t take long to see that proportional response to violence or its escalation way beyond proportion, solves nothing, and doesn’t create a durable peace.
Proportionality in focusing on the immediate without regard to the backstory or the power inequities between adversaries, creates the illusion of fairness but seems a patently unjust principle.
The self-appointed referees of the international order, so quick to insist on the right to a proportional response, give up all pretense of being fair peace-brokers by siding with one side, offering words and weapons in support. It suits them. It enriches them. A national interest argument will always be at hand. How this alters notions of parity and proportionality is barely mentioned.
Family values, fairness and justice, democracy, dignity and respect, tolerance, etc. are laudable ideals. They are not goals but convenient talking points when stakes are low and you can afford to be smug and preachy. They ring hollow when you don’t use your professed power to rein in allies you fund, when they run amok. You forsake all moral authority when you refuse to intervene with all the tools at your disposal and prevent massacres that reek of genocide.
In a struggle between unequal powers – unequal in resources, access, infrastructure, freedoms, weaponry, and many other facets – how is proportionality to be gauged and established? Does the intensity, and the scale of damage and destruction to lives and property of the immediate, precipitating attack alone matter?
Actually no one wants peace. It is more profitable to sell arms to all sides that have the dollars to pay for it. It seems easier to rage than to do the hard work of dialogue and negotiation. It seems easier to bully and oppress, particularly if you have wealthy and powerful benefactors, than to learn the lessons for co-existence. It seems easier to evoke fear than hope, to kill than to care.
Television creates a level of separation from the theatre of war. Carefully scripted narratives accompanying select visuals and edited sound bytes are part of the broader disinformation project that projects oppressors as victims and victims as perpetrators. The vicarious experience allows one to take sides without the bother of the back story. With one side having the power to turn off the taps, snap the power lines, telecom and internet, and block food supplies, the asymmetry amongst combatants is near complete. The stage thus set is well past what one may consider a ‘proportional response’ to the outrageous killings inflicted in the first place that set of the current chain of events.
Was a military response the only option? Is the genocidal offensive at all justified? The savagery on both sides is shocking and has shaken the conscience across the world. Will peace reign only upon annihilation of a people who have suffered much over the past decades? Will international law apply only to pliant States, and not to those who make up their own rules and who insist their writ must rule?
An already strained regime of international law governing rules of engagement in conflict situations risks a breakdown. The wail of mourning is becoming louder by the day, drowned only by the noise of relentless bombardment. The day is not far off when there will only be the sound of shells exploding, with no one left to count the dead or to mourn. And then, in this desolate space, an uneasy quiet will reign. A piece of land without people, a peace built on the silence of the dead.
The people in the region deserve better. The world deserves better. The world demands better.
Image: Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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