Proportional Response

Every time the Israelis decide to attack, they get accused of a disproportionate response. It seems like people ignore the fact that the Israelis put up with an enormous amount of bombing, generally show great restraint, give up land to people who want to kill them, and usually try to kill only the bad people who are trying to kill Israelis instead of the general population. But there is another way to consider the proportional response concept.

Hamas spends, relative to whatever it takes in, a lot of money on weapons. Somebody has to be paying for those rockets. Perhaps, Israel, in the spirit of proportionality, should stop paying for Israeli infastructure and buy more weapons. Their infastructure and their weapons would still be far superior than anything Hamas has, but the proportions would be equal.

Aim badly. The general idea is to lob something highly dangerous in your neighbor's general direction, not actually try to take out military targets. Israel continues to be highly disproportionate in terms of targets. With modern targeting systems, this might be hard to reproduce, so perhaps the Israels should simply compile a list of places that the Palestinians have hit in Israel. Then, in order to acheive proportionality in terms of targets, they could simply bomb any similar target.

Stop uprooting your own people in order to give land to people who are sworn to kill you. It was a deeply disproportionate response to force fellow Israelis out of Gaza to give it to the Palestinians. When have we ever seen a Palestinian do something similar?

One a more serious note, I think the Israeli government's sudden consciousness of their responsibility to defend their own country has to do with the fact that the people currently in power would like to stay in power, but it looks like they may lose to Benjamin Netanyahu. So they try to prove they can be like Netanyahu, but I don't know if they understand what the end state needs to be. They proved, in Lebanon, that they can fight wars in such a way that results in the security situation becoming worse for Israel.

But as to Hamas, and those in Gaza; stop firing rockets! Stop teaching your kids it's glorious to kill. Don't precipitate a war you know you can't win.