Proportionality in War

there is no such thing.

People have short memories. Very short memories. It is as if they forget the reasons why the British Government declared war on Germany in 1939. It is easy to forget that, tired and maimed and horrified, many in Britain did not want that war. It was not pleasant. By the time of the armistice on November 11, 1918, the use of chemical weapons such as chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas had resulted in more than 1.3 million casualties and approximately 90 000 deaths. This one fact alone means that the population of Britain was living with the horror of war, not to mention shellshock and those living with physical injuries. Lord Reith, the first General Manager of the BBC-he of the aphorism “a drawn sword, parting the darkness of ignorance” - had a facial disfigurement from a sniper’s bullet. The actor, Basil Redford suffered a similar fate. As for the upper classes, By the end of 1915 the British death toll included nine peers and an astonishing 95 sons of peers. It decimated the British aristocracy. At the end, 24 Lords had died. Over One Hundred and Sixteen Thousand Americans died in WW1. In total, about 880,000 British soldiers were killed.

It didn’t work!

The Germans felt that the terms of surrender were unfair. The Treaty of Versaille was supposed to curb the ambitions of Germany. That didn’t work out either.

So, by the early 1930’s “The commonest little dog I have ever seen..entirely undistinguished. You would never notice him in a crowd and would take him for the house painter he once was” (Neville Chamberlain on Hitler) was rallying national pride and disgust at the post war settlement and setting his sights on the rise of the Reich.

Nothing short of total surrender was on the cards towards the end of 1944. Despite attempts at a negotiated peace by high ranking Nazis, nothing short of annihilation of the German War Machine and its complicit population would have been acceptable. Already, the Nazi elite knew that their fate would end in the gallows at Nuremberg.

Elsewhere in the East China Sea, two Atomic Bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It took a second one to bring about the surrender of the Japanese. They did not know at that point that the Americans only had the two bombs.

There is a lot of controversy over the bombing, by the allies, of Dresden. The first myth is that Dresden had no military value. This is not true. Dresden employed over 50 thousand workers in over 100 factories who were directly connected to the war effort. But make no mistake, it was meant to terrorise, demoralise and warn. It was meant to bring Germany to its feet.

None of this is nice. War is not nice. There are no ‘noble’ wars. They are an obscenity. But the aim of the combatants and their political leaders is always the same; supremacy and victory.

The idea that you can fight a clean war is an absurdity. It dehumanises men and women beyond belief. But what is essentially human in all of this horror is the belief in the triumph of good over evil. It is not that the end justifies the means, it is that the end is only a means to an end, which is the restoration of peace and mutual respect.

Some historians suggest that, had Hitler been able to negotiate a peaceful settlement, Germany would not be what it is today. Underlying resentment would have not been extinguished. Germans would be wondering, ‘what if?’. They might have been amenable to having another go in the future. Nothing but total defeat could have drawn a line under the ambitions of Germany. And today, Germany is a powerful and essentially peaceful nation whose people are now probably the least tolerant of antisemitism.

Which brings me to the point.

On 7th October, 2023, Hamas killed more than 1200 Jews.

A massacre. Hostages were taken. Women were raped. Hamas is an organisation which denies the right of Israel to exist. They are doing a Hitler. There is no nuanced way to put it. So why the fuss about Israel and its response? Do you think for a moment that Hamas - this Christian-hating, Jew-hating, women-hating bunch of murderers understand anything but utter defeat? Would a negotiated settlement work? Eighty years of history in Palestine shows that it would not, from the rather naive proposals of the British Mandate in the 1940s to the present. Two world wars prove the point.

Hamas is clear on Israel. It will stop at nothing short of Israel’s utter destruction. In the face of that, I believe that Israel has every right to fight until Hamas is destroyed - and those who support it. The reality of this is not very nice. Civilians die. Atrocities happen. Countless lives on both sides are extinguished. Proportionality is for armchair warriors. This is fight for the very existence of the nation of Israel. They have no choice but to fight to the death.