Michael Walzer With Israeli special forces starting operations in Gaza to complement the IDF’s surgical air campaign against the indiscriminate, increasingly long-rage terror barrage from “Hamastan,” the international community , quite predictably, is beginning to rev up its favorite mantra, i.e., that the Jewish state is guilty of “disproportionate response.” After all, Palestinian civilians—ordered by Hamas to stay in their homes rather than evacuate terror targets in residential areas as well as in mosques and hospitals—have begun to die as “collateral damage” in Israel’s anti-terror campaign to protect its own civilians, so far psychologically traumatized but not slaughtered because of Iron Dome and the option of bomb shelters or safe rooms. Hamas prefers to use its cement to build terror tunnels rather than bomb shelters for Gazans. Such protections that Israelis enjoy are not available to the exposed Jews of France where synagogue goers were terrorized by an enraged French Muslim mob, at first barely contained by five gendarmes whose initial orders seem to have been to act more like World Cup soccer refs than enforcers of the law. Did they have implicit orders from the French government whose commitment to be in neutral in “thought and deed” in the Mideast may have translated into a policy of semi-neutrality against terror in the Paris streets”? Was this a case of “disproportionate response” on the domestic level, but in the sense of inadequate response by a twenty-first century western government that has forgotten that the fundamental definition of the state is “the monopoly over the means of legitimate violence within a given territory” (Max Weber’s definition) and which doesn’t understand that failing to defend that monopoly by the use of force against violent challengers will ultimately undermine the survival of the state as well as the security of its law-abiding citizens? Internationally, in the Mideast, Israel is, to some extent, being hoisted on its own petard by its ritual adherence to a strict self-imposed code of military ethics, devised primarily by Moshe Habertal, something of a peacenik professor, who believes it is better for Israel soldiers to die than to recklessly risk the lives of Palestinian innocents in ways that dishonor the Jewish state. Despite the aspersions of its critics, Israel is the only country in modern history that in wartime has avoided intentionally using its air force to target the enemy’s civil population. Israel refuses to practice vendetta against Palestinian civilians (as distinguished from Hamas’ terror operatives) for complicated reasons. It doesn’t want to betray Jewish values, alienate international opinion, or encourage civil strife between Israeli Jews and Israel’s Muslim minority. In the abstract, I agree with Habertal about soldiers behaving to a high ethical standard, but in practice this is a very dangerous doctrine in a world—especially for Jews—not too far removed from Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all.” The doctrine that armies should not respond with disproportionate force to military threats probably has medieval roots in “just war” theory, but it has really blossomed since World War II as part of the understandable recoil from the wholesale destruction of innocent civilian life. The problem is that the Holy Land is a very dangerous neighborhood in which World War II rules allowing and encouraging attempts to terrorize and destroy innocent civilians still prevail. What else to make of Hamas’ founding charter, quoting “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and pledging to destroy or drive out all Jews from the Holy Land? Soon after the First Intifadah in the late 1980s, Michael Walzer argued that Israel was not justified in responding with a “disproportionate” anti-terror campaign. Despite the fact that the PLO had been targeting civilian airliners, for example, for twenty years, he argued that the First Intifadah was, essentially, a popular David vs. Goliath anti-occupation stone throwing affair by Palestinian youth who could not be viewed as a credible threat to the survival of the Jewish state. But that was before the Second Intifadah in which suicide bombing became a more lethal tactic, and what may now be called the Third Intifadah (which I would argue that has been gathering momentum since 2006) that features increasing ambitious rockets attacks (including those beyond Tel Aviv and aimed at the nuclear plant at Dimona) on Israeli civilians. If Walzer was at least partly right about the threat posed by Palestinian terrorism in 1988, he is almost certainly wrong about the situation today—and what, if Israel doesn’t act with unprecedented “disproportional” decisiveness—will be the situation tomorrow. Prime Minister Netanyahu has cautioned his security cabinet that “we will not become like the Russians in Chechnya.” The Russians were indeed brutal—probably more so than necessary to defeat Chechen terrorism. Yet one thing is indisputable: today there is a powerful Russian state and no Chechen terrorist regime that can threaten its survival. Will it be possible to say the same about Israel in 20 years if Hamas is allowed to win another victory in pursuit of its long-term genocidal objective against Jewish survival in the Mideast? It is the Hamas terror regime that is guilty of “disproportionate response” against civilized values and Israel’s survival—not Israel. If Israel continues to straitjacket itself by adherence to unrealistic rules against “disproportionate response” by its military, there might not be any more Israel in a generation. Better to take out Hamas now rather than risk the alternative.