Useless Hot Takes 101: Israel v Palestine and the virtues of a disproportionate response

Middle Eastern politics are not my strength. I barely have an understanding of the Christianity that’s killing us; I know even less about the Jewish or Muslim fault lines crisscrossing the region. But Israel is a pink elephant in American politics, so the litmus test is about as relevant as those on abortion.

As we speak, Palestine is getting pretty well crushed. I think.

Because to be clear up front, the news has been pretty one-sided, on behalf of Palestine. I hear about the Israeli rockets responding to Arab mortars, but the only pictures I see are of collapsed Palestinian buildings. So I can tell that I’m not seeing the provocation as well as I’m seeing the response, so I have no way of knowing whether the response is in any way justified.

But I suspect that it isn’t, just based on the one-sided nature of the coverage. I suspect that if Israel was getting hit very hard, we’d see it. I suspect that if Israel’s body count were tragic, we’d hear about it. So it’s not a positive confirmation, but my impression is of Palestine having brought a knife to a gunfight, and of Israel having brought a howitzer.

Then today I saw some of that provocation, there was drone footage of some damage in Israel. A burned field. A pothole. Maybe a dozen dead. Compared to the bombed-out Palestinian homes and high-rises and close to 200 dead. So my suspicions were generally correct, the Palestinians are getting pasted.

There are dimensions of class and privilege and capacity at play here too. Were this a prizefight, it would have been called after the second bell, but here we are over a week in and Israel is just showing off at this point. That’s all this is! Clearly they have a superior capacity to wage war and persevere. It was only just a day or so ago that Israel reportedly began targeting Hamas leadership; what then has the past week been about? What on Earth have they been waiting for? All they’re doing is demonstrating their superiority to the world. If they’ve got the might and skill to manage this so well, they have the might and the skill to’ve ended it days ago.

I can see the value of a disproportionate response. I can see the value of providing a consequential disincentive to violent fanaticism. But this is not other places. This is a nation beating up on a people. This is Israel treating Palestinians kinda like how Europe treated Jews. (Don’t get cute, the Holocaust remains a horrific abomination of scale, and is the definition of an “outlier”.) It wasn’t cool then, it’s not cool now. But there are a million different kinds of disproportionate responses.

If uprooted militants are launching mortars into your neighborhood, targeting their infrastructure with superior firepower is a straightforward “disproportionate response”. You throw a rock at me, I’ll throw a bigger rock at you, and your car, and your home. Problem is, that’s a disincentive there like the death penalty is here.

So what if when militants are launching mortars into your neighborhood, you instead support the establishment of a legitimate Palestinian state with fixed boundaries and diplomatic relationships? And what if, instead of sending missiles raining down on children, you sent doctors and teachers to help care for them? What if you cultivated the support of Palestinians instead of propagating hatred into future generations? OMG that would be an INSANELY disproportionate response! They would never see it coming!

And clearly they have the capacity, they’ve been demonstrating their superiority on the evening news, night after night. Instead they’re just killing people.