In practice, this results in aerial tactics which are in no major way different from those used by Nato against Yugoslavia in 1999. In Lebanon, the IDF’s aim (to coerce a foreign power by inflicting intolerable damage on its national infrastructure), the targets (roads, bridges, TV stations, and so forth), and the consequences (roughly similar numbers of innocent deaths given the comparable length of the combat), are very similar. Those who oppose Israel today but supported Nato in 1999 perhaps need to reconsider either their current opposition or their previous support. ~Paul Robinson, The Spectator

Likewise those who questioned or criticised the consequences of the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 ought to reconsider seriously whether Lebanon is not very much like the campaign they wanted to criticise in the past.  It is interesting that Mr. Robinson should cite this example, which some people think has no bearing on the matter and which scarcely anyone else but myself has invoked since the war in Lebanon began, since my view of the two conflicts has been that they are strikingly similar in their unnecessary endangerment of civilian lives and the relatively weak justifications that have been invoked to wage the campaigns as they have been waged.  Mr. Robinson’s entire article is a very intelligent consideration of the different sides of the question of proportionality, and he concludes with a valuable point:

The result of putting this ethic into practice may thus be increased opposition to the state. Perhaps, therefore, the question we should be asking of Israeli actions is not so much whether they are moral as whether they are wise.