Beyond Proportionality: Israel’s Just War in Gaza, by Thane Rosenbaum (Wicked Son Books, 2025)

Beyond Proportionality examines Israel’s battles against Hamas and Hezbollah under the laws of war and concludes that its wartime conduct was based on military necessity and fought justly. The targets are terrorists, weapons, and tunnels — not civilians.

Israel relies upon verifiable intelligence, deploys precise weapons, and endangers its own soldiers in order to minimize civilian death. 

Below is an excerpt from the book:

If you are a parent with an infant at home, what took place in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, must have affected you deeply. Imagine if your neighbor, who had already made it known that he or she denied your existence and wished for your house to be burned down with you and your family in it, broke into your home and slit your baby’s throat.

I will allow that to sink in for a moment. It deserves contemplation.

I fear most people have not given the reality of such barbarism very much thought. But that is precisely the barbarism that those who attended the Nova Music Festival, or who happened to live in small, ransacked kibbutzim on that fateful October 7 morning, experienced.

If you are a father with teenage daughters, there was barbarism for you, as well. Imagine if your similarly monstrous next door-neighbor invaded your home with a rapacious group of his male relatives and friends, and brutally gang raped your daughter —  and made you watch. When finished, they mutilated her breasts and genitalia with knives and machine guns. Can you imagine surviving something like that — as in, psychologically survive such an assault on your flesh and blood?
. . .

The next time some pink-haired progressive or anti-American Muslim is shouting “I am Hamas!” or “Globalize the Intifada!” or “Death to America!” please, at the very least, assume a facial expression that signals an appropriate level of disgust.

It is with these vulgarities in mind that the obvious must be stated: The laws of war were fashioned by military strategists who lived in civilized nations, men who believed that even in war there must be rules. There was honor in going to battle to defend a nation, but wars must be fought honorably — especially when facing adversaries committed to following the same set of rules. The laws of war provide a framework for how civilized nations can resolve their disputes, even if it requires going to war.

Non-state actors, however, terrorists — who abide by no rules at all, who have no pretenses about civility, and who believe themselves to be exempt from the laws of war — should expect that the civilized nations they face in battle will set at least some of those rules aside, too. It’s only fair, it is often necessary, and to do anything less is a betrayal of one’s own people.
. . .

When Barack Obama was running for president, he made his first visit to Israel, the summer before the election — a sideways campaign stop. … Obama wanted to burnish his foreign policy credentials, but mostly he needed to reassure American Jews, many of whom are Democrats, that [he] understood the moral purpose and strategic necessity of Israel, a nation created a mere three years after the liberation of Auschwitz.

. . .

Obama was a very young father of two small daughters. Unexpectedly, probably improvising from the scripted campaign materials, he responded to something he saw in Israel as a protective father would and should, and not as a cynical, gladhanding candidate.

. . .

Sderot has been target practice for Hamas and Islamic Jihad since 2007. The people who live there have grown accustomed to hearing sirens that cause them to enter outside bomb shelters and indoor safe rooms, or duck behind concrete barriers dredged along roads built for this very purpose. Obama spoke with Israeli families who told him that Sderot has faced tens of thousands of rockets in the time they have lived there. One such family had a small boy who lost a leg to one of those Qassam rockets.

When the visit was over, Obama held an impromptu press conference. … But it came as a surprise to many who were skeptical of his support for Israel when Obama read these words out loud:

“The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens. And so, I can assure you that if — I don’t even care if I was a politician. If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

We know the story from there. The candidate won the presidency, and almost instantly upon entering the Oval Office, forgot all about his visit to Israel. The memory of Sderot, a small city teeming with vulnerability, obviously did not stay with him. During his second term in office, when Israel was at war with Hamas in 2014, Obama repeatedly warned Israel to “show restraint,” “de-escalate the fighting,” and seek avenues for a “ceasefire.”

How soon he forgot.

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, and the author, most recently, of “Beyond Proportionality: Israel’s Just War in Gaza.”

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