Question

These days there is a long, worn-out discussion in the world media about bombing the people of Gaza.
The famous claim about innocent civilians makes me think about a similar issue in another context.
The experts discussing the killing in Gaza argue that, on paper, 1,200 murdered Israelis do not justify many tens of thousands, and perhaps even more, dead and displaced Gazans. On paper, they are right. But there are other circumstances: the involvement of some of those killed in the murders, whether passive or active; the danger to a million Israelis; and so on.
This brings me to the following question:
If a small act was done to someone, but it caused him very severe long-term consequences, does that justify revenge whose result is identical, but in such a way that the act done in its name is itself more severe?.
There was once a movie I saw,
The Gift.
In the movie, a married couple is harassed by an unknown man who will not leave them alone and keeps bothering them endlessly.
It turns out in the film that this is revenge for the fact that in high school the husband falsely accused that same boy of being gay, because he knew his father was homophobic. That father beat him, threw him out of the house, and sent him to a boarding school. The revenge itself, at the end of the movie, is presented as him ruining the man’s marriage, causing his wife to leave him, and, as is implied, getting her pregnant.
Seemingly this is something unjustified on paper: a childish teenage stupidity dragged out to the point that the one who was humiliated holds onto it for decades and destroys the married life of a grown man.
On the other hand, there is the matter of the result: because of that teenage stupidity, that person’s life was destroyed. He lived in a boarding school, experienced a break with his family, and scars that never really healed over the years surely caused a drop in self-confidence, in the ability to build a normal life, and so on. So perhaps there is a kind of measure for measure here.
This makes me generally wonder about the ethics of the consequences of certain actions and the revenge that accompanies them:
1. One of the clearest examples of this, in my opinion, is cases of rape, social ostracism, and excommunication in general. In the category of rape, there is a horrifying act that causes mental and psychological damage, and physical and emotional trauma that lasts a lifetime. But there is one point that perhaps is not often emphasized: following rape, the victim often has no real ability to recover. It is a kind of outcome of “you murdered and also inherited”—the victim in the story is often in a lower sociological and economic position than the attacker, and that is one of the reasons such people are targeted: because it is known they will stay silent and be afraid to speak. As a result, the victim narrows his or her life down to the bare minimum in order not to run into the person who did this to them. Their education gets wrecked, their cognitive ability gets damaged, and even their ability to see reality clearly. Here too, the question of justice strongly enters the whole picture. In most rape cases, the accused is presented either as a devil or as an angel.
2. Ostracism as a tool for resolving a dispute: I read about the case of a convert-apostate who committed suicide in the Jewish community in the Middle Ages, Uriel da Costa. That young fellow returned to his Jewish community after being born to a family of forced converts, but he sharply disagreed with it and basically became a Karaite. A ban was imposed on him, along with warnings and lashes, and after he did not fall into line he underwent a second humiliation in which all the members of his community publicly stepped on his body. Seemingly the community had the right to ostracize him, and it was his problem that he continued living within it and violating its rules from the inside, and because of that he was punished. Nowadays freedom of speech and individual privacy are considered needs as vital as air to breathe, and anyone who violates them, does public shaming, or calls for boycotting a private individual because of his lifestyle, is considered to be doing something very serious, among other reasons because it can lead to depression and suicide.
My questions are:
1. Can revenge (as in the film) be based not only on intention and the severity of the act, but also on its consequences?
2. In your opinion, is it permissible to take revenge based on the feeling of mental damage that was done, if it is not objective damage (after all, one can always start over, and so on)?
3. In your opinion, are acts that cause psychological or emotional harm that lowers quality of life, causes depression, lowers cognitive ability, and so on—acts like ostracism, excommunication, withholding certain services from a certain person because of personal dislike (medical treatment, shopping at the supermarket, participation in leisure activities)—wrong on the basis of their outcome?