KENNEY: Proportionalism in Conflict

What is the right response to a threat? When is a response disproportionate?

On the Israeli-Lebanon border in 2019. From the author’s collection.

by Shaun Kenney
COLUMNIST

Quick quiz!

Someone punches you in the face but then holds a baby up to protect themselves. Do you punch through the baby? Or do you go for a liver shot? Or do you calmly call the police? Or… do nothing at all and get ready for the next punch?

How people respond to conflict is a sticky question which plagues policy makers and philosophers alike. Ever since Elizabeth Anscombe famously challenged Oxford University’s bequest of an honorary degree to the man who vaporized 250,000 Japanese civilians, the question of proportionality in conflict has remained a fixture among Western thinkers for the last 70 years. As the Latin suggests, proportio is not a mere reaction, but rather a measurement — a discernment towards right action and a restoration of right.

Proportionalism is not merely just one-eye-for-one-eye. In fact, the English language translation for a proportional response is quite far from what is intended in international relations or moral philosophy.

Instead, a proportional response in the Western tradition means assessing both the immediacy and gravity of the threat in proportion to the potential loss of innocent civilian life. On this, the International Red Cross is explicitly clear:

The principle of proportionality prohibits attacks against military objectives which are “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”.

In the Western tradition, this framework is typically defined by what we call just war theory — which requires five distinct considerations:

1. Having a just cause.

2. Where the action is a last resort.

3. Where a proper authority has authorized the action.

4. Possessing right intention.

5. Where the end is proportional to the means used.

Three terms come into play: the ius ad bellum (justice of war), the ius in bello (justice during war), and finally the ius post bellum (justice after the war).

In short, the ends of the conflict must be just, the means employed to end the conflict should be consistent with the ends, and finally responsibility and accountability towards those responsible should be just after the conflict.

Different Ideas of Proportionality

In this sense, one may have the best of ends in sight. Yet if one pursues those ends unjustly — no matter how decent your ends might be and by any means necessary — then one in fact becomes committed to the very evil one seeks to destroy.

In short, the means must be consistent with the end in order for the act to be moral, ethical, and just.

In the Levant, things are seen a bit differently.

Unlike the Western tradition, in the Eastern tradition — notably a Byzantine one — the concept of a just war involves a concept of total reaction. Imagine a hammer is dropped on your toe. Your body does not react to the pain in a proportional sense, but rather in a disproportional one where the entire body reacts. So too, argues justifiable war theory, does the body politic react to an outside threat.

Much of the Arab world and those influenced by the old Eastern Roman Empire — revanchists in the Russian Federation included — share this view of justifiable war where the entire body politic (in this case the Arab world) is willing to spring to action in defense of fellow Palestinian Arabs in Gaza.

The same is true within Israel itself, as the entire body politic springs to action — some 350,000 reservists so far — in order to punish Hamas for the single largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust.

The pages of the London Review of Books — no stranger to the political left or the Palestinian cause — openly wring their hands on this point about the question of proportionality with regard to civilian casualties, and how previous exchange rates on prisoners are now creating some curious moral dilemmas:

In July 1968 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked an El-Al flight and landed it in Algeria, inaugurating a series of hijackings whose explicit aim was the release of Palestinian prisoners. The Algeria incident led to 22 Israeli hostages being exchanged for sixteen Palestinian prisoners, though the Israeli government denied that there had been a deal at all. Sixteen for 22: such an exchange rate would not hold for long. In September 1982, after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP-General Command captured three IDF soldiers; three years later, in what was known as the Jibril agreement, Israel and the PFLP-GC finally reached a prisoner-swap deal: three soldiers for 1150 Palestinian prisoners. In the 2011 deal to release Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas in 2006, the exchange rate was even more favourable to the Palestinians: 1027 prisoners for a single Israeli soldier. In anticipation of being forced to make many more such deals, Israel began arbitrarily to arrest more Palestinians, including minors, to increase its assets for future exchange. It also kept the bodies of Palestinian fighters, to be returned as part of any exchange. All of this reinforces the perception that the life of one of the colonisers is worth a thousand times more than the lives of the colonised.

Yet one wonders at what cost in innocent civilian life will Israel be willing to sacrifice to break Hamas? Is it at the exchange rate of 1027:1 as previously established? 22 to 1? The Israelis have much more than just explosives on their side. Time is perhaps their most valuable tool.

Yet our ideas of just war barely dent or scratch Levantine understandings of justifiable war — just war theory works great in instances of immediate self-defense, but not so well against low-to-mid grade fevers. Hamas is more than happy to sacrifice civilian lives whether the handbasket is fast or slow to its destination. Americans can stomach a great many things, but not the slaughter of defenseless innocent civilians. As Netanyahu himself remarked in his book A Place Among the Nations:

[A] weak Israel would elicit a great deal of American sympathy but not much else.

To many in Israel and beyond, the last three weeks may have been measured — but are perceptively weak in the face of a multi-pronged threat from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Fatah.

Three weeks after the massacre of Israeli Jews in the Negev is all it took for Netanyahu to be proven correct.

Meanwhile, Jewish Israelis and Jewish Americans are forced to watch in horror as protesters march in defense of Hamas — not Palestine — before the bodies of Jewish babies had even cooled or the Israeli Defense Forces had fired a single shot in anger.

Three. Short. Weeks.

Proportionality and Public Education: A Thoughtful Response

I have to personally thank Ben Litchfield for a remarkably well-thought response to my two latest missives taking Spotsylvania Democrats and the local teachers’ union to task for their irresponsible rhetoric and anti-democratic behavior against our errant savant Spotsylvania School Board. One finds it interesting how the public reacts to such pieces. Most Republicans breathed a massive sigh of relief, even if a few hardliners still choose to defend the practice of book burning. Most Democrats chose to take it up with my editor.

Most of the critical responses tend — and continue to tend — toward defending the behavior and reaction both in the pews as the Spotsylvania County School Board fumbles in the dark against a hostile bureaucracy and a hostile teachers union — this despite the expressed democratic will of their neighbors.

More to the point, the position of too many critiques was to label them — and sadly myself — as actual Nazis, segregationists, and fascists. The employment of such “magic words” failing to work, they try other magic words — or even more predictable, lumping everyone together as Nazis, segregationists, fascists, and a whole other list of deplorables.

Meh.

Refusing the descent to Averno, Mr. Litchfield points towards the many forced errors of the Spotsylvania County School Board, most notably the bad behavior of their camp followers. Good government requiring active participation, Litchfield objects strenuously to the idea that elected officials have the right to fail or succeed on their own merits, where the people themselves have the unmitigated right to “make the machine stop” and reconsider their oaths of office. Stafford Supervisor Crystal Vanuch is in turn both “inflammatory” and “bigoted” and therefore deserving of comparison to both Citronella Nazis and Ralph Northam the Ku Klux Klan.

Litchfield concludes that Republicans writ large “would do well to rid [our] own house of the corruption within it” and only then, “maybe then, reasonable minds can come together to debate … true merit”.

Naturally, I welcome and am even flattered by his praise of a broader effort to point out that the conflict is not between left and right, but rather the extremes against the center. We agree on the need for the common good to triumph over the highest good, even if that means striving for second-best options. Who knew that standing athwart history yelling “STOP!” would have so many fans?

This is precisely the sort of conversation those of us who believe in the Fredericksburg Advance hoped to inspire when we began this publication. Mr. Litchfield should be singled out for praise, not only for his convictions but for his willingness to expose them to critique.

…and there is much to critique.

Pursuing Our Ends By Any Means Necessary Doesn’t Serve the Common Good

So here is the wider problem concerning the behavior of the bureaucrats and teachers attached to the Spotsylvania Public Schools, namely that their own bad behavior is justified via equivocation. If Mark Taylor doesn’t want to be called a Nazi, then he shouldn’t act like a genocidal maniac — right?

Let’s set aside just for a moment the fact that Mark Taylor most likely isn’t a Nazi. In fact, to call someone a Nazi is a pretty low thing which implies a great deal. Such cavalier use of these terms in fact diminishes their potency. If everything we don’t like is fascism, how will future generations recognize the real thing should it ever reappear pace Hannah Arendt?

Yet there is another problem here which the political left is blind towards, namely that public education as an institution is held and championed by the political left — and the institution will brook no criticism even from reasonable sources. Which means there is almost never a condition where equivocation — their actions justify our actions — is ever admissible. By pure power relation, public education as an institution holds the upper hand against those outside of it.

Now let me tell you what the political right sees — your neighbors, friends, and relatives too decent to tell you what they are really thinking for fear of being branded as Nazis or fascists themselves.

What they see is a group of individuals willing to use “any means necessary” in order to prosecute their ends.

What they see is a group of educators behaving badly, who then demand in turn that they — and they alone — should be trusted to educate their own children with minimal input from others (parents included). These same educators who object to banning sexually depraved images in public education have absolutely no problem imposing a failed DEI regime much less exposing students to Critical Race Theory and government-enforced gender pronouns. All of this is overblown myth, they are told, until they read how public school administrators and their school boards have treated concerned parents in both Fairfax and Loudoun.

One cannot be deaf to this. What these parents see isn’t a concern for public education, but a school board given legitimacy by those willing to break their own democratic norms in pursuit of raw power. What is more, the political left are willing to employ tactics forbidden to the political right in order to regain power.

I’m sorry, folks — that’s not just unfair. That’s un-democratic.

Now Fredericksburg is no stranger to political argument. Heck — the city was literally founded as a poke in the eyes to then-Governor Spotswood so local farmers didn’t have to pay a tax to use his wharves. Yet let me offer some friendly Republican advice on how to better cage the disagreement which Litchfield asks others to consider in due course:

1. Vanuch’s concerns about what the Muslims do to the soil do not require metaphor. They can stand on their own two feet.

2. The Spotsylvania School Board’s actions do not require the SOS Playbook to throw as much sand into the gears of local education from bureaucrats and teachers alike until it fails — which means the blame for failure is now shared. Democracy either honors the public will or it does not.

3. Imagine for a moment dozens of conservative activists employed within the SCPS deliberately sabotaging the school board for imposing DEI, CRT, and transgender ideology in public schools. Would they too have the right to “make the machine stop” using all means at their disposal because the ends are justified?

Back to proportionality, folks.

Our means must be consistent with our ends. If your means toward an end are not consistent with the end? If you have to call people Nazis and fascists? Then maybe — just maybe — your ends aren’t all that good.

In this, Democrats have to recognize a certain Republican truth. Defining half of the community as Nazis and then locking them out isn’t democracy, but a pernicious sort of fascism all of its own.

Liberal observers — Mounk and Lukianoff respectively — are starting to understand this critique for what it is, and local school administrators — and we have some good ones in the Fredericksburg region, I assure you — understand the problem for what it is and should fling the doors open to solutions up to and including charter schools and school choice options.

Such are the considered opinions of your friends and neighbors, dear reader. They may not have the guts to tell you openly, but we all believe it.

Now we can ignore this, consider this, argue the finer points… but do not settle for calling the opposition names in the hopes it improves what you believe and why.

Closing Thoughts Redux: Steel Sharpening Steel

In this, it is probably best to reflect on what ought to be a minor milestone showing how two political figures can engage respectfully on a question of serious import.

Mr. Litchfield represents that rather refreshing and perhaps more common than most people realize positioning among Generation X and Millennials who give a damn. Disagreement, in fact, is good. Much like our whiskey, the stronger the better. Doesn’t have to be disagreeable, either.

Yet the bile that seems to be the shortcut to thought — “magic words” — is already old. Adults on both sides are starting to recognize the cancer for what it is and are applying the chemotherapy as best we can. Kudos to Mr. Litchfield for having the courage to say as such to his own lunatic fringe. God knows, it gets old having to do it on my end.

Perhaps more encouraging, Litchfield and myself locate a great deal of common ground on questions of import, disagreeing perhaps on the means rather than the common end for what is best about Virginia and America. For anyone worried about the state of democracy, that two very disparate viewpoints can arrive at common ground should be a remarkably positive thing indeed.

There is something refreshing about being able to express a conservative idea in the public square without it being spiked by an editor, and moreover to discover that some of us really do want to have adult conversations and especially on the things on which we disagree, and even better than this wants to understand why our opposition believes as they do. Even better still, that conservatives as well as liberals are tired of being dragged by the nose by our respective extremes, ignoring what is most vital about the core functions of government. This strikes me as both a common and a highest good, one focused on people rather than abstractions, tribes, or ideology.

Of course, there are disagreements. I take further heart that they are loud and few. Rudeness, reminds Eric Hoffer, is a weak person’s imitation of strength. On this point, Hoffer was more than prescient:

It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of inadequacy and impotence. They hate not wickedness but weakness. When it is in their power to do so, they weak destroy weakness wherever they see it. Woe to the weak when they are preyed upon by the weak. The self-hatred of the weak is likewise an instance of their hatred of weakness.

Too many of our friends and neighbors perhaps feel this weakness. Perhaps it is one of the reasons why our politics is so messed up today? Probably why I don’t take the criticism terribly seriously.

Nevertheless, I remain firm in my convictions and my critique of how Spotsylvania Democrats have chosen to combat the Spotsylvania School Board majority, and more widely, how Democrats — even Mr. Litchfield — excuse their own bad behavior by vilifying others and the using un-democratic efforts to undermine the elected will of the public. Such actions only set the bar even lower for what is acceptable political activity in local and state politics. That is the politics of weakness grasping for power, not moral outrage commanding the high ground.

To take the dual position that (1) bad behavior should never justify another person’s bad behavior, nor (2) should the democratic will of the public be trumped by a handful of political activists — see January 6th — seems to me to be the most common sense of all positions. Nor should it be terribly extreme to (3) heap nothing but contempt and disdain for the use of “magic words” as a shortcut to thought, as if triggering one’s amygdala was any substitute for engaging one’s cerebral cortex.

My thanks again to Mr. Litchfield for rising to the occasion in a sober and reflective way. Whether I have matched that spirit is up to the reader — caveat lector. Litchfield offered thoughtful responses, and thoughtfully and with tremendous respect we are discussing the matter at hand as adults. I certainly look forward to such exchanges in the future.

If you are like me, that’s not just valuable. That’s democracy worth defending.

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