The Mythologies of the Middle East: Part Two Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/the-mythologies-of-the-middle-east-part-two/
The Myth of “Proportionality”
As a general rule, in the long history of war, victory is found only by being disproportionate in the use of force. That is a truism so banal as to need little elaboration. When both sides are “proportionate” in their ability to harm their opponents, the result is either a bloody tactical deadlock such as at Verdun or the Somme, or an open strategic sore like Vietnam and Afghanistan, or decades-long “proportionate” killing such as the Peloponnesian War or Thirty Years’ War.
The whole point of Western aid to Ukraine apparently and logically is to allow it to harm Russia disproportionally, especially given the vast imbalance in resources, both human and material. The great tragedy of this horrific two-year war is the reality that Ukraine has only been able to achieve proportional success against Russia, as the current deadlocked map of the battle space attests.
Hamas began its war on October 7, seeking to achieve a disproportionate success; that is, to kill more Jewish civilians in any single day since the gas chambers at Auschwitz. It knew the Israelis possessed a disproportionate ability in strictly military terms to retaliate and do real damage to Hamas. But the Hamas terrorist leaders in turn assumed they had a disproportionate ability to appeal to the larger Muslim and Arab Middle East of 500 million people, as well as hundreds of millions of supporters in the old Third World as well as in the U.S. and Europe. Their logic was brutally simple: while the West, the UN, and the rest would for a moment deplore their tactics, Hamas assumed that privately they either would approve of the damage inflicted on Israelis or at least tolerate it and thus use their various levels of influence to restrain the Israeli response.
In other words, as Israelis sought to destroy Hamas through classical laws of a disproportionate response, Hamas sought to limit the Israeli tactical ability to do so by its own geostrategic disproportionate effort to galvanize Western leftists to force Jerusalem to call off the IDF and to send massive “humanitarian” aid to Gaza. Hamas was confident it would find solidarity with the Muslim Street and thus garner cash and weapons from the Middle East. And it could appeal to the anti-Western block of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Turkey, and assorted rogue regimes to offer them both public support and stealthy resupply. In general, the more thuggish the regime, the more likely it was to openly support Hamas.
So we are in a war of disproportionality: the Israelis rush to destroy Hamas tactically to the point it can never recombine to resume control of Gaza, while the Gazans seek to rev up their benefactors worldwide to force the Israelis to accept a ceasefire, after which Hamas will declare victory on the premise it committed the most heinous crimes against the Jewish people since 1945 and survived.
If all belligerents seek to obtain disproportionate and thus victorious strategies and tactics, why does the world seem to demand Israel alone be proportionate? Lots of reasons. It is a powerful Western country and thus supposedly should suffer from the Western Left’s postcolonial, postimperial guilt, especially in a war against the victimized “other.”
As a Jewish state, it suffers the added writ of anti-Semitism, as we saw after October 7th when the supposedly careful distinction between “Israeli” and “Jewish” suddenly disappeared, and pro-Hamas thugs began attacking Jewish-Americans with impunity.
In realpolitik, there are 500 million Middle Eastern Muslims and 11 million Jewish Israelis, so examine the eerie paradoxes. In the real world of geostrategic power, Israel is vastly outnumbered, at least in terms of population, collective GDP, and area. Yet because it fights individual Arab or Muslim entities successfully, it thus somehow is damned as a bully. In other words, the world sides against Israel in part because the numbers, the oil, and the terrorists are all on the other side, but somehow still fault Israel for ganging up on Hamas or Hezbollah because it proves much more adept than either. And so presto, the underdog is conveniently libeled as the overdog the moment it proves too lethal on the battlefield.
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