The dilemma of 'proportionality' in perspective:
- Israel does is not only “responding” but defending itself from an existential war: Golda Meir warned us back in the 60s: "When the Arabs love their children more than they hate us, then there will be peace”. However, we underestimated this statement. We did not expect that Gaza's largest hospital, Al-Shifa, would be Hamas's largest operational center, where thousands of munitions and charred bodies of hostages were found (in fact, Gaza has 36 hospitals, an unusually high number of health centers per capita, while Palestinian leaders undergo surgeries in Israeli hospitals). Nor did we imagine that so many schools, refugee centers, hospitals, and mosques would be used as operational bases, weapon storage, and missile launch sites, which have a surprising capacity of firing more than 13,500 so far. We did not expect to find so many tunnels, totaling over 500 km² in a city 40 km² long. This is, a city of almost 5 levels underground filled with terrorist infrastructure. We also did not expect that, in addition to the October 7th attacks, more than 1,000 terrorist outbreaks would occur in the West Bank (yes, not only Gaza), summing 569 attacks with lethal objects on cars, 143 Molotov cocktail attacks, 70 with war weapons, 287 bombs and 319 incendiary tires thrown at cars, resulting in 53 victims. In Addition, Israel is waging a war on 7 fronts: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran, plus multiple attempts of anti-Semitic attacks in at least 10 European countries and 2 in Latin America. Let's not lose perspective that Israel is in an existential war, whose circumstances of "lack of proportionality" are provoked precisely to prevent Israel from defending itself.
