When an air defense system intercepts 9 out of 10 rockets fired into civilian areas, it achieves something remarkable for civil defense. Yet in international opinion, that success frequently works against the state that built it. By denying adversaries the mass casualties they seek to inflict, Israel’s defense creates a strange political inversion. The absence of catastrophic domestic death tolls is rarely treated as a triumph of civilian protection. Instead, it is treated as an indictment, a statistical imbalance that makes almost any counterstrike appear gratuitous or unprovoked. Protection is misread as invulnerability, and invulnerability is mistaken for the absence of danger.
Much of this confusion stems from a misunderstanding of proportionality. In public discourse, the concept has been degraded into a crude demand for casualty parity, as if wartime justice were simply a matter of balancing ledgers and tallying comparable dead. Under international humanitarian law, proportionality has never meant symmetry. As codified in the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute, it is an operational test: an attack is unlawful only if the anticipated civilian harm is clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected from that strike. It requires commanders to weigh tactical necessity against collateral risk before striking, not to balance body counts after the fact.
The Iron Dome warps this perception. When rockets detonate harmlessly miles above population centers, outside observers treat active barrages as a manageable nuisance rather than an act of war. Because interceptors work, neutralizing a rocket launcher or command post no longer looks like an urgent effort to prevent slaughter; it looks like an optional strike against an outmatched opponent. The shield does not eliminate the threat but conceals the danger, creating a dynamic in which defense undermines the justification for striking back.
The absurdity recalls a well-known Iranian joke: a boy runs crying to his teacher that a classmate named Kambiz is picking on him. The teacher asks, “Did Kambiz hit you?” The boy wails, “No! He won’t let me hit him!” Modern opinion often treats a functioning shield the same way, in effect, as though blocking a blow were an unfair provocation against the one who threw it.
The wide casualty gap is real, but treating that disparity as automatic evidence of wrongdoing ignores the doctrines behind it. Israel approaches civilian protection as an existential duty, investing in early-warning sirens, fortified safe rooms, and interceptor batteries designed to put metal between incoming munitions and its people. By contrast, groups including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad rely on urban embedding as a core strategy. Their military infrastructure, comprising extensive tunnel networks, launch sites, and weapons depots, is deliberately woven into schools, clinics, and crowded neighborhoods. This is not simply an accident of geography; it is a calculated asymmetric tactic designed to exploit the legal constraints of a conventional military.
Discomfort with Israel’s robust defensive system shows a reflexive instinct to equate vulnerability with virtue and capability with guilt. Western commentary increasingly operates on an unspoken expectation that a state’s right to defend itself is authenticated only by visible victimhood. Because the anti-missile system keeps its civilians alive, to a great but not total degree, Israel is denied the moral latitude routinely extended to nations that absorb catastrophic losses before hitting back. But international law has never required a nation to let its citizens die just to prove someone is trying to kill them. An air defense battery is an instrument of preservation, not an abdication of self-defense, and no sovereign state should have to sacrifice its own people to purchase permission to fight back.
It is also important to call into question this proportionality doctrine, even though it is embedded in international law. At one time, slavery, too, was acceptable under this legal regime. No rational, decent person, then, can argue that just because something is compatible with international law, it is therefore licit.
Let us, then, consider a case where “anticipated civilian harm is clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage.” Suppose that A is improperly attacking B; the former is the unjustified aggressor, the latter, the justified defender. B now kills 200 of A’s soldiers, to save the life of but one of its own fighters. This is wildly disproportionate. But it is hardly unjust.
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Consider another scenario. C improperly attacks D with a knife; C is the aggressor; D, the victim. D has both a knife and a gun at his disposal. Proportionality would require, would it not, that D employ only his knife. That would be a “fair” battle between them. That would be proportional. Here, D would have a 50% chance of emerging triumphant, assuming that the two of them are otherwise equally powerful.
Instead, D shoots C while 25 feet still separate the two, and C had not the slightest chance of reaching D. D is engaged in a radically disproportional defense. Should he be considered a criminal for so doing? Yes, under the doctrine that required proportionality. So much for proportionality.
Walter E. Block is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans. Hushang Manuchehri is an independent writer.