On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization

by Douglas Murray

Western and Kurdish assault on ISIS strongholds like Mosul, Iraq, was “proportionate” or not. As it happens, there is no law of war that says you can start a war and then complain when you begin to lose. And there are no wars in human history in which the response to aggression can be exactly calibrated as equal to the initial aggression. Early in the aftermath of October 7, a number of media outlets started to ask the traditional question of whether Israel’s response to the attacks was going to be, or was already, “disproportionate.” As I explained to a number of them early in this process, the very idea is absurd. If an enemy breaks into your country, murders your citizens, rapes women at a music festival, and carries hundreds of your citizens into captivity what is the “proportionate” response? Would Israel be permitted to call it quits if it killed precisely the same number of men, women, and children as Hamas had killed that day? Or raped precisely the same number of women? Or kidnapped precisely the same number of innocent civilians from their homes and then held them in underground tunnels? Of course not. In fact, the world would rightly condemn any such move. There are laws of war. And there is a rightful concern with arbitrary or excessive use of force. But the aim of a war can never be to simply even the scores or respond in kind. The aim of any war is to achieve a strategic, and preferably also