What Happened Today

December 5, 2023

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The Big Story

“The surrender comes when the occupation of Gaza is ended. … [Hamas is] never going to stop fighting. Every slave revolt, every Warsaw Ghetto uprising, every occupied and oppressed people in the history of humanity understands—give me freedom or give me death.”

No, that’s not some 19-year-old campus radical, nor is it the Hamas Secretary for Social Justice and Jihad mouthing off on Lebanese TV. That’s Briahna Joy Gray, former national press secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, speaking Tuesday morning on Rising, the politics talk show she co-hosts with Reason editor Robby Soave on The Hill TV. The question at hand? Whether Hamas has any moral responsibility to surrender in order to save the lives of Palestinian civilians—as opposed to what they’re doing now, which is hiding among those civilians to maximize the collateral damage from Israeli bombing and artillery, in the hopes that the resulting international outrage will force Israel to abandon its military operation, thereby preserving Hamas in power. Gray answers that question with a resounding no.

One of the many notable contradictions in Gray’s ideological support for Hamas as the leader of Palestinian resistance is that she manages to present the group simultaneously as a collection of brave fighters with an obligation to continue fighting and as the victim of genocide. Hamas, of course, sees things quite differently, and its leaders, while repeatedly denying that they have any responsibility to protect Palestinian civilians, have continually expressed their desire not to “liberate Palestine” or improve the lives of its people but to commit many more Oct. 7 massacres on Israelis. 

While Israel carries out an operation in Gaza quite like the one that the United States supported in Mosul, Iraq, to destroy the Islamic State, Gray insists that U.S. weapons are being used to commit a genocide in Gaza, that Gaza is already under Israeli “occupation,” and that Israel was already “massacring” Palestinians before Oct. 7. She also offers this:

To what extent does America basically allowing, you know, enabling that [Israeli] nuclear program also create a dynamic in the region where there is an unwillingness for Arab nations … You know, the world keeps saying, well, “Why aren’t you taking care of the Palestinians? Palestinians are Jordanians.” You hear this kind of rhetoric all the time. But do they really have an ability to intercede in the way they might have, and have, frankly, in historical years past, given that it’s an open secret that Israel has nuclear weapons?

That’s a bit of a word salad, so let’s translate: What kind of Arab intercession would an Israeli nuclear weapon deter? It would not deter the Arab states from taking Palestinian refugees or publicly criticizing Israel or exerting diplomatic pressure on it to wrap up its ground campaign. It would, however, deter them from fighting an offensive war to wipe Israel off the map, as they “have [done], frankly, in historical years past.” And what of recent reporting that Arab leaders are privately urging the Israelis to go ahead and annihilate Hamas? Well, that’s another illusion created by Judeo-Anglo imperialism. Gray notes that while the Arab people stand in “strong solidarity with the resistance movement coming out of Gaza,” the Arab leaders “are the ones that have been signing these deals with the West, with Israel, in the interest of economic interests, oil interests, etc., and have been agreeing to some of these so-called compromises that have attempted to normalize relations with Israel in the region.” 

We try not to bore readers with every instance of a progressive commentator saying something ludicrous about Israel. And this isn’t Gray’s first rodeo—she’s been featured in The Scroll a few times since Oct. 7 and has had plenty of examples of Hamas apologia that we haven’t bothered to cover. But she’s not a marginal figure. Indeed, Gray is a walking synecdoche for the American progressive establishment’s adoption of what were formerly fringe, hard-left political positions. Take Gray’s own career: She’s a Harvard Law graduate and former corporate litigator who, since entering media, has served as senior politics editor of The Intercept and as press secretary for a man who nearly became the Democrats’ 2020 nominee. She’s now cohost of two shows: a podcast with Virgil Texas, from the wildly popular “dirtbag left” show Chapo Trap House, and Rising, which is a vehicle for the Beltway-approved “populists” left and right. 

Sure, Gray’s talking points—that Oct. 7 was like a slave revolt and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, that it’s a shame that Israeli nukes prevent the Arab states from attempting a rerun of the Yom Kippur War—are borrowed from the same Arab eliminationists and unreconstructed Stalinists who cheered the murder of Israelis and who themselves are too fringe to appear on television. But they speak to an emerging consensus uniting the hard and progressive left: that Israel is a colonial state backed by the power of U.S. imperialism, which is also what props up all those autocratic Arab states that want to do such unspeakable things as, you know, make peace with Israel and the United States and move past the pathological and self-defeating politics of Cold War anti-Zionism. Good progressives should instead side with the Arab street and against Arab governments in favor of never-ending “resistance” against Israeli “occupation,” regardless of the human cost or the futility of the cause. Oh, and don’t fall into the “right-wing trap” of condemning the methods of those who resist. That would be blaming the victim. 

This is increasingly how the young progressive cadres who staff major American newspapers, universities, nongovernmental organizations, and the government view the relation between Israelis and Palestinians. Absent a major course correction, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the Democratic Party follows suit.

Watch the segment here:

IN THE BACK PAGES: Shlomo Brody on how Israel missed its chance to wipe out the Hamas leadership—all the way back in 2003

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The Rest

→A former top U.S. diplomat has been outed as a Cuban spy. On Monday, the Justice Department unsealed charges against Manuel Rocha, 73, alleging that the Colombian-born U.S. diplomat spent decades as a “clandestine agent” of Cuba. The Yale-, Harvard-, and Georgetown-educated spy had a glittering career in the U.S. Foreign Service: After joining the State Department in 1981, he became the director of inter-American affairs on the National Security Council in 1995 and deputy chief of the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires in 1997, before being appointed ambassador to Bolivia in 2000. He also served as a special adviser to the U.S. military’s Southern Command and as a member of Henry Kissinger’s International Council on Terrorism. All the while, Rocha was working as a mole for the Cuban intelligence service—as he admitted to an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban spy. In recorded conversations with the agent, Rocha referred to Fidel Castro as “Comandante” and the United States as “the enemy” and bragged that his work with the “Direccion”—Cuba’s General Directorate of Intelligence—had been “enormous … more than a grand slam.” “To cover his tracks,” the AP reports, “Rocha referred to Cuba as ‘the island’ and led a ‘normal life’ disguised as a ‘right-wing person.’” A former colleague who met with Rocha in 2018 described him as a “MAGA Republican” who had gone “full-on Donald Trump.”

Read more here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/12/04/ambassador-cuba-spy-manuel-rocha/ 

→Israel and Hamas are engaged in some of the “fiercest fighting of the war” as the IDF expands its operations into Khan Younis in southern Gaza and closes in on Hamas’ remaining centers of power in the north. Tuesday afternoon, the IDF announced that its forces had reached the center of Khan Younis and the heart of Jabalia and Shejaia in Gaza City, the latter of which is believed to be Hamas’ “greatest remaining stronghold in northern Gaza,” according to The Jerusalem Post. Israel said that its operation had commenced on Sunday but was kept secret until Monday and that “several hundred” Hamas terrorists had been killed Sunday. The IDF estimates that it has killed some 6,000 Hamas fighters since the start of the war and wounded thousands more, out of what IDF sources have assessed is a roughly 30,000-man military force. It also announced the deaths of seven IDF soldiers in fighting on Monday and Tuesday, bringing the total to 82. On Tuesday, IDF Southern Command Chief Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman said, “We are in the heart of Jabalia, the heart of Shejaia, and as of last night, the heart of Khan Younis. We are in the most intense day since the start of the invasion—in terms of the number of killed terrorists, the number of battles, and the volume of fire brought to bear by ground and air forces.”

→Quote of the Day: 

In the tension between the economic benefits for Hamas and the continued disturbances [that were taking place at the Gaza border], it seems that at the moment things are heading toward an arrangement and a calming of the disturbances.

That was the assessment of the intelligence officer of the IDF’s Gaza Division situational report on a sharp uptick in drills by Hamas’ elite Nukhba forces on Oct. 1. The quote, which comes from a damning new report in The Times of Israel on the IDF’s failure to heed multiple detailed warnings about Hamas’ plans, neatly captures the false but widely held belief among Israeli leaders in the run-up to Oct. 7 that Israel had provided Hamas with enough economic incentives to dissuade the group from attacking and that troubling intelligence could therefore safely be ignored. The IDF failed to heed multiple detailed warnings about Hamas’ plans, according to the Times of Israel report, including a July 2022 presentation by an intelligence officer on “The Mass Invasion Plan of Hamas,” which outlined an operation in which the Nukhba forces would breach the border fence and invade southern Israel. The report also highlights a Spring 2022 drama, broadcast on Hamas TV, showing Hamas fighters disabling Israeli communications, attacking kibbutzim and IDF bases in the south, and returning to Gaza with kidnapped soldiers. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar publicly praised the show as “an inseparable part of what we are preparing.” 

→Throughout Israel’s campaign in Gaza, top U.S. defense officials have been offering questionable advice to their Israeli counterparts. According to a new investigative report in The Washington Post, a similar dynamic seems to have played out during the joint U.S.-Ukrainian planning for Ukraine’s ill-fated counteroffensive this spring. The article is full of officials from both countries trying to blame each other for the failed operation, so take everything with an appropriate grain of salt. That said, a few things jumped out at us. One is that U.S. defense officials, including Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, were confident that a mechanized frontal assault on Russian lines was feasible, while the Ukrainians and U.S. intelligence analysts were far more pessimistic, with the Ukrainians in particular fearing “catastrophic losses” from attempting to advance on entrenched Russian positions without air superiority. Another is that U.S. officials apparently believed they could transform Ukraine’s post-Soviet, defense-first military into a U.S.-style “combined arms” offensive force in a matter of months. And finally, there’s this quote from a senior Ukrainian military official on the U.S.-led war games for the offensive, which purported to show that the Ukrainians could penetrate the Russian lines: 

War-gaming “doesn’t work,” the official said in retrospect, in part because of the new technology that was transforming the battlefield. Ukrainian soldiers were fighting a war unlike anything NATO forces had experienced: a large conventional conflict, with World World I-style trenches overlaid by omnipresent drones and other futuristic tools—and without the air superiority the U.S. military has had in every modern conflict it has fought.

“All these methods … you can take them neatly and throw them away, you know?” the senior Ukrainian said of the war-game scenarios. “And throw them away because it doesn’t work like that now.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s plenty in the article to suggest that Washington was pushing an operation that might have made sense for the U.S. army, but which led the Ukrainian army into the current grinding stalemate—which, now that we mention it, is not an outcome unfamiliar to the U.S. military in recent decades.

Read the rest here: https://archive.is/pYBg2#selection-2641.54-2653.92 

→On Monday, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the surrender date for Douglass Mackey, aka the Trump-supporting alt-right Twitter user known as Ricky Vaughn who was tried for the crime of posting memes, pending the appeal of his conviction. Mackey is the first American to be prosecuted by the federal government for posting “disinformation” on social media. He was convicted for posting memes on Twitter (now X), during the 2016 election campaign encouraging Hillary Clinton supporters to vote by text, including one that read “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925”—content that mirrored the apparently noncriminal memes posted by Clinton supporters offering similar advice to Trump voters. For that, the Department of Justice charged him with “conspiracy against constitutional rights” under a little-known and rarely used 1870 law designed to prevent white mobs from physically intimidating Black voters. Mackey, who argued that the offending tweets were First Amendment-protected satire, was convicted earlier this year and sentenced to seven months in prison. The stay means he will be able to avoid prison until the appeals process is resolved. 

Read law professor Eugene Volokh’s Tablet article on the Mackey case here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/douglass-mackey-ricky-vaughn-memes-first-amendment 

→The State Department will sanction several dozen Israeli settlers involved in attacks on Palestinians, barring them from traveling to the United States, Axios reports. The State Department also plans to impose travel bans on several dozen Palestinians involved in attacks on Israelis. An anonymous U.S. official told Axios that the settler visa ban was assembled in direct response to a request from President Joe Biden, who asked his Cabinet secretaries to assemble a list of “individuals entities” engaged in violence in the West Bank or “actions that significantly obstruct, disrupt, or prevent efforts to achieve a two-state solution.” U.S. officials said the administration “decided to impose sanctions against Israeli settlers because it concluded that the current Israeli government is not seriously attempting to stop and prevent the attacks against Palestinians.”

→U.S. climate envoy and former secretary of state John Kerry appeared to fart onstage Sunday during a panel discussion at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai. Kerry was in the midst of a diatribe against coal-fired power plants when a microphone captured an unpleasant, yet unmistakable sound. The Washington Post had reported Saturday that the issue of methane was “taking center stage” at the conference, after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced sweeping new federal standards intended to curb emissions of the noxious gas. Perhaps Kerry took that turn of phrase a bit too literally.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Battle Cry of Hannukah, by Arynne Wexler

It’s time to bring back the spirit of Jewish defiance and anti-assimilation

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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How Israel Missed Its Chance to Eliminate the Leadership of Hamas

The widely misunderstood doctrine of proportionality can have wildly disproportionate consequences

by Shlomo Brody

The term “proportionality” is one of the most abused terms in just-war theory. The careless use of the term comes with a great cost in innocent lives lost. Israelis die when its leaders don’t act decisively out of fear of claims for acting “disproportionately.”

If there’s one consistent criticism international figures launch against Israel, it’s that its wartime responses to terror groups are disproportionate. In the current war, it took only a few days after Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre of over 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping of 240 more for NGOs like Human Rights Watch to accuse Israel of responding disproportionately. The United Nations Human Rights Office has similarly said it has “serious concerns that these are disproportionate attacks that could amount to war crimes.”

Such accusations have been regularly launched since Israel began its series of intermittent operations against terrorist armies like Hezbollah and Hamas. Early in the 2006 war with Hezbollah, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan accused Israel of “disproportionate use of force.” This was a common refrain by human rights groups during the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and the IDF’s 2008 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. Such pronouncements have a real impact. Polls showed that well over half of Europe’s residents felt Israel acted disproportionately in 2006. In 2018, when Hamas initiated months of weekly charges at the Gaza border fence, the U.N. Human Rights Council accused Israel of disproportionately firing on these protesters. This was in spite of the fact that Hamas terrorists were embedded with the mob and looking to break through the fence and launch raids on Israel. We now know what happens when Hamas catches the IDF unprepared.

It is critical to understand the meaning of the term “proportionality,” because it helps explain why one may morally fight a war despite the inevitable but widespread incidental killing of noncombatants. “Collateral damage” always occurs, especially in asymmetric warfare where one side purposely fights from the confines of a civilian population. Before going to war, one must consider whether its destructiveness will be out of proportion to the relative good that will be achieved by the war. So too, during war itself, one must ask whether the benefits of a particular strike or action will outweigh the toll on human lives.

Broadly speaking, this is a healthy moral standard for believers in multivalue moral frameworks. Any ethical commander should take into account their strategic goals alongside humanitarian considerations. As my own teacher, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, asserted during the First Lebanon War in 1982, we must recognize the inevitable side effects of military actions and take those into account before killing God’s creatures, even among our enemies.

Such notions were well known to early writers of military ethics. Proportionality demanded the following criteria: (1) the act is militarily necessary, (2) the destruction is effective and not wanton, and (3) the gains are not “grossly disproportionate” to the extent of destruction. If these general principles were met, then, in the words of M.W. Royse, a classic writer on this topic, “the act can hardly be condemned regardless of the amount of suffering and violence.” The principle of proportionality, in a nutshell, is not a separate standard. It is a means to broadly ensure that a military commander did not engage in the intentional killing of noncombatants, for which he is morally culpable.

International jurists, however, tried to go beyond these general standards to create definitive rules against any extensive damage to civilians. Beyond forbidding direct targeting of civilians, the 1977 Additional Protocol I (AP/1) to the Geneva Conventions prohibit:

An attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. (Article 51(5)(b). Emphasis added.)

At the time of action, each commander must therefore make a judgment call, based on the information they have. If a target may deliver a compelling or even decisive military gain, severe civilian losses may be tolerated. What would be a case of “excessive” collateral damage? The International Red Cross (ICRC), in its widely cited 1987 commentary to the AP/1 protocols, gave the following case: “For example, the presence of a soldier on leave obviously cannot justify the destruction of a village.” That’s true, but the extreme example isn’t too helpful for real-world scenarios. Giving an extreme negative example of a disproportionate act doesn’t provide clear guidance for what is a permissive proportionate act.

Recognizing the difficulty in determining what is a proportionate order, leading legal historian Geoffrey Best declared, “Although it may be tricky and embarrassing to define in advance, the reasonable man or woman knows one when he receives one.” As we know from other famous legal questions, the “I know it when I see it” criterion cannot be implemented as a legal norm. In the real world, “reasonable” men and women deeply disagree on what’s excessive, especially in relation to their judgment of the desired “direct military advantage.”

The ICRC, in its commentary, had a different solution to this problem of subjectivity: to change the rule. In their minds, AP/1 means “incidental losses and damages should never be extensive.” Note the critical change in language. Not excessive, but extensive. If the body count is high or the damage too great, then the action is illegal, no matter what the military gain.

Having redefined the meaning of the term, human rights officials could now easily condemn military actions that caused large numbers of casualties, even if they met the classic standard of proportionality. Thus, at the beginning of the 2006 war, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned Israel by declaring, “The bombardment of sites with alleged military significance, but resulting invariably in the killing of innocent civilians, is unjustifiable.” Similarly, the infamous Goldstone Commission that investigated the 2008 war in Gaza denounced Israel for killing more than what was considered the “acceptable loss of civilian life.”

Yet no treaty has ever banned “extensive” warfare because no country could abide by such a rule, let alone agree to it. Just as the number of bodies in a morgue doesn’t indicate the quality of medical care in the hospital, so too a body count doesn’t indicate whether an army acted excessively or immorally. The key ethical (and, for that matter, legal) question remains whether the damage is excessive in relation to the military gain. This point, in fact, was readily acknowledged in a 1987 brief by a leading ICRC lawyer in her analysis of the 1982 Lebanon War: “The Israeli bombardment of Beirut in June and July of 1982 resulted in high civilian casualties, but not necessarily excessively so given the fact that the military targets were placed amongst the civilian population” (emphasis added). High casualty rates do not indicate excessiveness.

To exemplify this point, consider the assassination of a senior Hamas leader and its immoral aftermath that led then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to make the terrible mistake of not eliminating the entire leadership of Hamas, and thereby possibly saving Israelis and Palestinians two decades of horrific bloodshed, out of fear that Israel’s actions would be condemned as disproportionate.

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On July 22, 2002, an Israeli fighter jet dropped a one-ton bomb on a three-story apartment building in Gaza City. The target was Salah Shehade, the commander of the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. Since the outbreak of the so-called Second Intifada in 2001, Shehade had initiated a series of new combat techniques: explosive devices against tanks, boat bombs, high-trajectory Qassam rockets, and novel ways of deploying suicide bombers, including minors. Over the previous 12 months, Israeli intelligence officials asserted that Shehade had been directly involved in attacks that killed 474 people and wounded another 2,649. Israel’s defense minister would later claim that Shehade was actively preparing a series of six attacks in Israeli towns—an event that might have rivaled Oct. 7 for its psychological impact on Israel’s populace. He had deservedly become Israel’s No. 1 wanted man in Gaza. Israel needed to neutralize him.

The bomb instantly killed Shehade along with an assistant. But it also killed 13 civilians, including his wife and teenage daughter. Over 100 people were wounded. Fierce international condemnation was quick to follow. At the U.N. Security Council, a lineup of ambassadors condemned the Israeli strike as disproportionate (emphases added):

Action taken in self-defence must be proportionate. Israel must avoid civilian casualties and must avoid damaging civilian property and infrastructure. (Britain)

That disproportionate reaction led to the death of innocent civilians, most of them children, in addition to considerable material damage. (Guinea)

There can be no justification for the missile attack carried out by the Israeli air force in a residential area of Gaza, which left a high number of individuals, including children, dead or injured. (Denmark, on behalf of the European Union)

Once again, all of these statements focus on the inevitable collateral damage. They don’t ask whether the strike was excessive in proportion to the military advantage of killing, in the midst of an extended war on terror, the lead terrorist commander responsible for thousands of Israeli casualties.

Most incredible, in this respect, was the criticism of U.S. President George Bush, who rebuked Israel for “heavy-handed” action. When asked to distinguish it from cases of civilian casualties in Afghanistan, spokesperson Ari Fleischer explained, “The United States, because of an errant bomb, a mistake in a mission, has occasionally engaged in military action that very regrettably included losses of innocent lives.” The Israeli operation, by contrast, Fleischer asserted, “was a deliberate attack on the site, knowing that innocents would be lost in the consequences of the attack.” Again, Fleischer makes the common mistake of asserting that knowing a strike will cause the collateral death of civilians makes it inherently illegitimate.

More egregious, however, was the White House spokesman’s belief that the collateral damage from a well-planned targeted strike was somehow morally worse than the accidental American bombing earlier that month of an Afghani wedding party, in which 54 innocent civilians were killed. This was one of six U.S. special operations raids into the Uruzgan province that summer which failed to locate their wanted targets. In the process, a total of 80 Afghans were killed. Over the coming years, an estimated 22,000 Iraqi and Afghani noncombatants would be killed as collateral damage in America’s post-9/11 wars. Some of these noncombatants were killed by mistake; at other times, their regrettable but inevitable deaths were known in advance. That doesn’t necessarily make them morally wrong. Yet it does make Fleischer’s criticism deeply hypocritical.

The Israeli assassination of Shehade was no more excessive than a host of attacks in the “wars on terror” that followed in the coming years or, for that matter, the “humanitarian interventions” in Yugoslavia or Iraq that preceded it. An Israeli commission later justified the strike by asserting that the number of civilian casualties was not foreseeable. An Israeli general apologized on CNN. In truth, there was nothing to apologize for. The deaths were lamentable and tragic. But given the significance of the target, the attack was morally justifiable even if noncombatant casualties were inevitable.

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Israel’s more grievous error was that it didn’t assassinate Shehade earlier. In March 2002, Israel located him within a Gaza apartment but didn’t strike because of the number of civilians around. Three days later, a suicide bomber deployed by Shehade blew himself up in Jerusalem’s Café Moment, killing 11 Israeli citizens. A similar opportunity was passed up again in June. Two weeks later, a Hamas suicide bomber killed 19 passengers on a bus in Jerusalem. In fairness, Israel was hoping to find opportunities to eliminate Shehade with fewer civilians around, as it succeeded in doing with other terrorists. For a lower-level operator, that may have been reasonable. Yet ultimately, one must prioritize acting decisively to stop senior enemy operators before they kill your own citizens.

Some critics question the wisdom of targeted killings because they assume that another operative will simply take their place. They fail to recognize that the number of skilled terrorist operators is quite limited. Killing them disrupts the entire organization. The ultimate accomplishment of Israel’s targeted killings, despite the unfortunate amount of collateral damage, was well summed up by journalist Ronen Bergman: “Thanks to its streamlined targeted killing apparatus, the Israeli intelligence community triumphed over something that for many years had been considered unbeatable: suicide terrorism.” The collateral civilian casualties were not excessive in achieving such a triumph, which spared thousands of Israelis from being killed and maimed.

Israel committed an even greater moral error by allowing the political and diplomatic fallout from the Shehade killing to stop it from a once-in-a-generation opportunity: the ability to kill the entire Hamas political and military leadership. In September 2003, Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin gathered with all of his senior men in a three-story Gaza apartment building. Intelligence officials, led by Shin Bet head Avi Dichter, estimated that this was a historic opportunity to cause irreparable damage to the terrorist group.

Yet Israel didn’t strike. Fearful of dozens of civilian casualties along with the local and international protests that would ensue, Prime Minister Sharon, at the urging of the Army Chief of Staff Moshe “Bogie” Yaalon, called off an attack using a massive bomb to topple the building. The backlash, they feared, would be even more intense than in the aftermath of the Shehade assassination. An alternative plan was hastily proposed to shoot a smaller missile to destroy the third floor, where intelligence officials speculated the meeting was taking place.

They guessed wrong. The meeting, it turned out, was on the first floor. Immediately after impact, the Hamas men went running out of the building. Israel could have utilized drones to blast every screeching car. The defense minister, however, ruled out that option. “Civilians were likely to be hurt,” he said. Within a few days, 16 Israeli citizens were dead and another 75 wounded by two Hamas suicide bombers. Among the victims were Dr. David Applebaum, head of a Jerusalem emergency room, and his daughter Nava, who was to be married on the following day.

It would take another several months of Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli targeted assassinations before Egypt brokered a ceasefire. Hamas survived and rebuilt itself, leading ultimately to its conflict with Israel in 2008 and repeated hostilities ever since.

It would have certainly been justified for Israel to wipe out the Hamas leadership in 2003. The collateral damage would have been extensive, but not excessive. Israel’s decision not to act cost the lives of many innocent Israelis. Fears of “disproportionate” accusations led Israel to shirk its primary moral responsibility, which is to protect its own citizens from being murdered by terrorists.

Yet it wasn’t just concern with the “CNN effect” and the Shehade backlash that led to inaction. In a later interview with The Washington Post, Yaalon asserted that two other factors guided his thought process not to strike. Firstly, any action taken had to pass the "mirror test": At the end of the day, will he be able to look at himself in the mirror? Secondly, from his mother’s experience, who was the lone survivor of the Holocaust from her family, he learned, “Jews shouldn't be killed, but it also means that we don't kill others. You need strength to defend Israel, and on the other hand, to be a human.”

This misguided binary is a bad lesson to learn from the Holocaust, placing self-interests against some foggy notion of humanitarianism. “To be a human” means to protect your own people. That’s a moral obligation, not just a matter of interests. Yaalon is a seasoned army veteran with many heroic actions under his belt. He dedicated his life to protecting the Jewish nation and deserves much praise for that. Yet by not approving this unique military opportunity, he and Sharon committed a moral error that continues to cost Israel dearly. The price for worrying about cries of “proportionality” was disproportionate.