300 to 1 is disproportionate warfare

[Igel]

99. That's an insane title.

What, for a just war you have to have as many soldiers and civilians killed as on the other side?

Imagine an FBI raid on a "terrorist camp" in which *no* FBI agents died. "The FBI raided a terrorist camp today. 12 terrorists blew themselves up. To maintain a sense of justice, 12 FBI agents were rounded up and turned over to the surviving terrorist for execution." Because if 300 to 1 is bad, 12 to 0 is infinitely disproportionate. Can't have that kind of injustice.

What "disproportionate" usually means is combatant:civilian ratio. And in this kind of war it's hard to evaluate that. The "identified" combatants are in three groups: Those who are identified as such for some "good" reason (honor, survivor's benefits), those who are identified because it's hard to admit anything else (blew up while making a bomb, caught on film about to fire a rocket), and people with names who are already identified as targets weeks before the first shot is fired.

Everybody else, in the absence of papers and uniforms, looks like a civilian. This isn't true just in Gaza, but in general. We play the same game in the US--cops shoot somebody, they plant a gun and suddenly he's a criminal. Or you remove the gun from the scene and the shooter is an innocent. "Oh, that's a dead combatant. Quick, there's a weapons shortage, get his AK. Oh, now he's a civilian." You get to do the three green Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle) on the weapon and suddenly the morality of the other side decreases because the civilian count is higher and the combatant count is lower. It doesn't mean that all the civilian males killed were combatants; but it does mean that not all the combatants killed are counted as such. Since combatants tend to be adult males that aren't decrepit, and "reckless" is often another way of saying "random," the only way to gauge any kind of corrective to the identification of combatants/non-combatants is to look at demographics. If it's truly random fire, then the simplest default hypothesis is that the death count should approximate the demographics of the area. If a greatly disproportionate number of youngish males are killed, it's likely a high percentage of the demographic excess were fighters. There are tweaks to the default hypothesis that can justify a higher youngish male death toll, but I'm not sure that they can reasonably be so large as to reach the numbers seen.