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.
