The Moral War

Six months into it may be difficult to recognize, but the case for war is still clear

Yes, it is six months ago that we woke up on that dreadful day and could barely comprehend what was happening. The first visual on my phone were the executed retirees at a bus stop, then came Naama Levy and from there a barrage of violence and human pain followed that is still going to this very day. So here we are, with no end in sight: Israel’s goals in Gaza are incomplete, many hostages continue to suffer their inhumane ordeals, from Tel Aviv to Washington to Toronto protests are dividing and angering people, and Iran is on the brink of directly engaging and setting the stage for an ever widening war. And yes, the world now also knows who the Houthis are.

At the same time the list of civilian casualties in Gaza is getting longer and although we can never be sure of the veracity of these numbers, they are influencing public opinion. They are undermining the already minimal global support for Israel. Last week’s attack on the World Central Kitchen food convoy in Gaza killing seven aid workers triggered a much closer review of how the IDF operates and how such casualties come about. On his weekly newsletter, Andrew Sullivan did some research while accusing Israel of overreacting much the way he thought the US did after 9/11. Sullivan, whose journalism I do respect, is part of a larger group of commentators that is increasingly signalling outrage over the carnage in Gaza and laying the blame at Israel’s door. What we see here are unhelpful historical comparisons and an overly critical position when it comes to Israel’s conduct of the war. That’s where I disagree. Let’s examine.

The Difficulty of Juxtaposing Conflicts - There have been a number of e-mails in my inbox pointing to Northern Ireland where the decades long conflict was ultimately resolved. Sullivan too points to the Brits not overreacting to ‘the troubles’ and obliterating the town of Derry in response. In other words: why did Israel not follow a similar approach: treat Hamas as the IRA, targeted incursions while minimizing casualties?

How realistic is that analogy? Was the IRA ready to cross the Irish Sea and rape and murder across England? Call for a global front again the English? No, it was a very different struggle confined to a small area and it was in the end a real tour the force for Tony Blair to sign a peace deal with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. The latter two had a lot of blood on their hands, war crimes possibly, although maybe not quite of the Yahya Sinwar variety. The Northern Ireland comparison may have useful elements, but there is no way that juxtaposing it to Israel-Gaza will give you any positive or useful insights. These are distinctly different conflicts.

The case for supporting Israel’s actions in Gaza is often made by pointing to the lethal bombing of Dresden in early 1945 with over 25,000 civilian casualties and to this day a debate rages as to its military necessity. But the point was: facing the Nazis there were very limited options other than to use all the means necessary to end the war which in the end would reduce the number of casualties on both sides. And advance American troops in the race to Berlin where the Soviets were ahead of everyone else. It was a double-layered attack with a massive civilian toll. This analogy helps in understanding that even the allies, the ‘good’ ones, had to cross certain boundaries to destroy the Nazis whose very existence and conduct of the war was synonymous with ‘evil’. But you still cannot make a full comparison to Gaza: circumstances, parties, strategic interests, each case is different. There are similarities, however.

Hitler’s Germany was emblematic of the worst possible crimes against humanity, for instance pogroms against Jews which had become a normalized practice. Thanks to the allies eighty years ago these gruesome events ceased to exist in most of the world. Until six months ago.

Assessing Israel’s Options - Any sane observer understood on October 7 that Israel had to move in and obliterate Hamas. The horrors, the potential for repeat and the near successful elimination of the very purpose of the state of Israel as the safest haven for Jews on this planet left it no other choice. In an interview with Joe Rogan, writer Coleman Hughes calmly lays out why this was the case: allowing Hamas to get away with the massacre by returning and hiding among its civilians would have provided the ultimate model for successfully conducting terrorist attacks. Kill and rape as you like, hide in such a way that the world will not allow anyone to attack you and you are effectively getting away with it. A new standard for practicing terror would have been set.

So given this, Israel made the choice to go to war, and conduct the incursion in a way where it would minimize civilian casualties, but where it also accepted the risk that innocent lives would be lost. That by the way is not genocide. It is waging war in an unprecedented way: no army in the history of warfare has gone to these lengths to minimize collateral civilian damage. Does the IDF make mistakes? Yes. Are there thousands of innocent dead bystanders? Yes. Are serious incidents investigated? Yes. Are IDF officers fired for transgressions: Yes. Should we pull our support because of that and accuse Israel of war crimes? Well, no.

The horrors of World War II were for many years not discussed. The greatest generation went back to work and moved on. There probably was some guilt and possibly embarrassment over things like Dresden. It did not fit the good vs. evil narrative. We all helped to create a near perfect recording of that war to describe something that by definition cannot be perfect. The world polished a ‘make believe’ over the war and conveniently hides behind ‘never again’ and ‘they fought for us’. It helped to airbrush questionable decisions during that war out of existence and in the process deleted the real nature of violent conflict, even when conducted by our side, out of our daily lives. So at a time when war is coming back into our living room we now either think it is too far away (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) or feel compelled to lecture those that have to fight it with a level of unprecedented moral superiority. We can’t even imagine the necessity for war, hence the disbelief and fatigue over Ukraine: are they still at it, is it over yet, is there a diplomatic solution? Can we get on with our lives?

No. Ukrainians can’t. Israelis can’t. And we can’t either.

In some places there are no luxury options. Pogroms are a rendezvous with history. And sometimes conflicts are not confined to smaller areas or can be managed and settled by savvy mediators and politicians. Sometimes the nuances of justice and human rights are shattered in a struggle for survival, a fight to protect loved ones against indiscriminate evil. Then war has to be waged with all its attendant horrors. That is what is happening in Gaza right now. Yes, we lament the casualties there, the tragedies, but we do know how much of that is the result of the heinous orchestrations of those that initiated this war six months ago. Moral purity is an impossibility in such a violent theatre, yet there still is a very moral case for this war. We better face that reality because at some point these hard choices to engage and fight will come to our front door too.

Photos: Dresden after the bombing and a rare photo of a pogrom, this one in Lviv in the summer of 1941 when Nazi Germany had just occupied the city. Lviv is located in present day Ukraine.