Beyond Proportionality Audiobook By Thane Rosenbaum cover art

Beyond Proportionality

Israel's Just War in Gaza

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Imagine a war without battlefields. There are no uniforms. Civilians and combatants are indistinguishable. Homes, schools, hospitals, and religious buildings are used as command and communication centers, and for the warehousing of weapons. Apartment rooftops are launching pads; the civilians who live inside . . . human shields. There are over 300 miles of reinforced tunnels, all outfitted with weapons and passageways for terrorists to take hostages and travel freely.

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.

The bombings over Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden, and the urban warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, produced large numbers of civilian dead that were not considered acts of genocide; the war in Gaza was no different.

©2025 Thane Rosenbaum (P)2025 Kalorama Ethics & Morality Freedom & Security Human Rights Israel & Palestine Middle East National & International Security Philosophy Politics & Government War Iran Military Law Holocaust
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Overall this book is interesting because it makes arguments out loud that many pro-Israel people won’t actually say, but which nevertheless are out there and part of people’s conversations and thinking.

But, where it falls short is that it goes too far with some claims — perhaps meant rhetorically, but said literally — and these end up undermining it overall by taking away from the credibility of everything else.

I’ll just give you one example at random. He says that Israel is “the only country in the region where homosexuals are not flung from buildings or hung from cranes.” I mean that’s just false. In Jordan, next door to Israel, same sex sexual activity is legal (there’s no sodomy law) - even though there’s no specific anti discrimination protection and no recognition of same sex marriage. Why did the author not just say something accurate, such as “among its neighbors - some of which punish and even murder gay people — Israel offers the most wholesome set of protections to homosexuals, by far”? This would have made the point effectively without being flat out false.

Makes claims that are too broad

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