Response to AIS

Read the original letter from the AIS to the JCCV  to which this is a response.

We are as concerned about civilian casualties as you are. The international community spent considerable time and effort particularly after the horrors of World War 2 to delineate the separation between combatants and non-combatants. Where loss of life occurs as a result of not honoring that separation it is a human tragedy.

However it is disturbing to us that the AIS seems to be accepting the populist media interpretation of some "facts":

• the term and the definition of "proportionate response"

• the figures of the scale of destruction in Gaza

• the figures for the total number of casualties

• the figures of the ratio of civilian to terrorist deaths

All of these figures have been supplied from the Gazan side, and we would hope that you take a look at the figures released by the Israeli Government on the outcomes. We do not ask any more than your perusal of the other side's figures.

Also it needs to be noted that under international law reponsibility for the safety of civilians lies PRIMARILY with the government under whose protection they fall (elected HAMAS), and SECONDARILY with the party which is attacking. You will note as a matter of record that in WWI and WWII governments on both sides of the conflict always took primary responsibility for providing civilian shelters for their citizens.

In the case of the Gazan war the Hamas militants fell far short of fulfilling their responsibilities in this regard and thus inflated the civilian casualty toll. Perhaps they even caused the civilian toll completely. We shall never know.

If you look at the concept of proportionality, you will find that it has nothing to do with counting the deaths on either side of the conflict. Rather it is a term defining the necessity for a combatant to use no more force than is necessary to fulfil its war aims. Israel maintained that its war aims were (in part) to eliminate Hamas infastructure.

Obviously it is extremely difficult for any outside party to prove that this could have been done using some different tactic. But more than that: from our reading of all the public statements referring to the "disproportionate" response, there is an absence of even a suggestion of how Israel might have fulfilled its war aim without such force as it used. Thus the media and academic treatment of this concept of proportionality is of limited credibility. However, the criticism of "disproportionate response" presupposes that the response was indeed justified, and the large number of commentators who criticise Jerusalem for disproportionate response agree that a military response to Hamas was necessary and justified.