Life, values and endpoints in war: The strangest condemnation of Israel you will ever read

 For all practical purposes, the Israel-Gaza War is over.  Israel chose to lose.  They were not defeated.  Hamas has almost no capacity to fight a conventional war because it is a terrorist organization, not a military.  Hamas has barely fought.  Israel simply lost the will to fight, and they have given up.  They are pulling forces out of Gaza, they will not attack Rafah, where Hamas has gathered, and that means Israel has not accomplished its military objectives.  Hamas has achieved its objectives.  Hamas has killed Jews, which is its primary objective.  Hamas has gotten Palestinians killed-- remembering that Hamas celebrates all death, including Palestinians' deaths, and they have used those deaths to unify the world in anti-Semitism, while winning the bet that Israel would be too humane to fight back, as the intrinsic anti-Semitism of humanity would mean that the world would believe any lie to the contrary.  Israel could have won.  They had the firepower to win, but not the will.  So they lost, by choice.

After October 7, my initial analysis was that Israel lived or died by the strength of its deterrence, and that it needed to respond not only with enough force to eliminate Hamas, but to deter attacks from the other enemies in the region.  It has chosen otherwise.  It has chosen not only insufficient force to deter anyone, but insufficient force to defeat Hamas.

I reluctantly found myself thinking of the difficult moral calculus of war.  War is ugly.  People die.  The justification to kill is to achieve a just aim.  Israel has an absolute right to defend itself, no buts.  Israel has an absolute right to do whatever is necessary to destroy Hamas, no buts.  Everything before the 'but' is irrelevant, and once you start adding 'buts' you but the claim out of existence.  Israel was the side of right.  Hamas the side of wrong, full stop.

No buts, no excuses, no hemming, no hawing.  This is as pure a case of good versus evil, right versus wrong as the world has seen since WWII, with the frustrating perversity that so many around the world have it 180 degrees backwards even when they lack the excuse of religious tribalism, which should be no excuse at all to anyone capable of moral reasoning.

There was no agonizing on the Allied side in WWII about German civilians, and there should be no such agonizing now.  Yet Israel has not chosen to fight that way.  Contrary to the new blood libel, Israel has fought with a timidity that has shocked and appalled me.  Here is the problem.  If you are not fighting to win-- and the IDF has not-- then can you justify even a single death?  I wrote about this problem in January.  I wrote that if you are not fighting to win, then the deaths that you incur cannot be justified, even if your position is the "good" side.

Israel has pulled back from Gaza, and it appears as though they have decided to skip any attack on Rafah, which is where Hamas has clustered its forces.  Israel has done damage to Hamas, but the bulk of their forces, including both terrorists and arms, will get out of this conflict to rape and murder again, having hidden behind the human shields they use to manipulate useful idiots around the world.  Having been attacked in the manner that it was, by a terrorist-government, with the full support of its populace, Israel had not only a right, but an obligation to its own citizens to destroy Hamas.  The first responsibility of the state is to protect its citizens, and that means defeating the enemy, not protecting and feeding the enemy.

Israel has chosen otherwise.  It has not fought for victory.  Israel's two goals have been the destruction of materials (tunnels, arms) and avoiding Palestinian civilians, with the challenge being that Hamas uses civilians as human shields.  It works like this.  The IDF drops leaflets and uses text messages and alerts to tell the Palestinians exactly where they are going to attack, and when, so that the people can get out of the way.  Why?  The IDF does not want to kill.  They are going after inanimate structures.  Hamas responds by telling everyone to stay put and become martyrs.  Well, the civilians.  The terrorists leave, and let the civilians die, to become martyrs.  The IDF tries to get civilians out of the line of fire, Hamas tells them to stay, trying to get its own civilian population killed, its own children killed, to manipulate world opinion.

In fact, the death tolls you see on the Palestinian side are straight lies.  See the analysis here.  Complete fabrications, and badly done at that.

Yet Israel is trying to not kill the enemy.  No one in history has ever won a war this way.

As foolish as the strategy is, and as indefensibly evil as the other side is, though, consider the moral problem.  Israel is still killing, but doing so with a strategy that cannot possibly achieve any morally good outcome.

Can I justify civilian deaths in Gaza?  Yes.  Hamas attacked Israel, Israel has a right of self-defense, as all peoples do, Hamas is trying to get its own civilians killed, and the defeat of the genocidal terrorists is necessary to protect more civilians.  Let Hamas live on the justification that they hide behind human shields and the killing will never end.  Hence, the only way the killing can ever end is by killing Hamas, which requires accepting civilian deaths, which are Hamas's fault, both because they initiated the war, and they are trying to maximize civilian deaths on their own side.

I have no illusions about what I advocate, and I do not obfuscate.  Now ask some Hamas apologist about October 7 and watch what happens.  Compare moral clarity to moral confusion.

Here, though, is the problem.  I can defend the civilian casualties inflicted.  The deaths.  The deaths of children.  But only if Israel actually defeats Hamas.  My moral argument rests on the defense of the Israeli population.  Palestinians, too, would be better off without Hamas, but the right of the Jews to live outweighs the interests of those committed so wholly to the extermination of the Jews, so the fact that the Palestinians would benefit from the end of Hamas is incidental, from my perspective.

As long as Hamas lives, the death will never stop.  Death without end, year after year.  Whatever cap you put on the casualties in the current engagement, if Hamas is not stopped, casualties will surpass it eventually, and it is not just a numbers game.  Israel has more of a right to kill in self-defense than Hamas has to kill in genocidal fervor.  Casualties in war are not simply about who kills more.  The defender has moral standing.  The attacker does not.  However, if the defender does not actually stop the attacker, the deaths incurred do not have the moral defense of actual defense.

And the IDF has decided that it does not have the will to stop Hamas.

None of the deaths that have occurred, then, have any moral justification.  Without the endpoint of the end of Hamas, I cannot justify Israel's response.  I can easily justify a much more aggressive campaign than the IDF has waged, as above, but I cannot justify a campaign that does not actually seek the end of Hamas.  That's death without purpose.  Civilian death without purpose.

The force necessary to defeat Hamas was easily within the IDF's capability, but Israel declined to use it, first delaying any response to October 7, then leafletting and using electronic messages to get civilians out of the line of fire, which amazingly enough, also warned Hamas where the fire would be so that they could escape too.

Without a strike on Rafah, Hamas lives, and Israel has decided to let them.

The problem with jihadists (one of them) is that they believe in martyrdom.  The only way to respond is with force at such a scale that they learn what death really is.

The thing is, unleashing death at that scale shocks the mind of the good.  Unleashing death at the scale necessary to keep security shocks the Israeli moral conscience.  Why has the IDF not done what is necessary to defeat Hamas?  Because Hamas hides behind human shields.  Children.  Trying to get them killed, and unlike them, Israelis don't want children to die, creating a moral dilemma.

Hamas hacked the Israeli conscience, while simultaneously manipulating the stupidity and anti-Semitism of the world.  Impressive, in a reprehensible way that makes me even more contemptuous of humanity than I was before.  Hamas recognized that Israelis don't want to murder children, hid behind those children-- their own-- and tried to get them killed to manipulate the world, knowing that widespread anti-Semitism would work in their favor.  The world will always blame the Jews, because after thousands of years of the entire world hating the Jews, betting on anti-Semitism is like betting on the sun rising in the East.

Indeed, Holocaust inversion, wherein one accuses the Jews of committing the real genocide, has its roots in Soviet anti-Semitic propaganda.  Izabella Tabarovsky has been writing about this since long before October 7.  She even notes that Mahmoud Abbas wrote a doctoral dissertation at a Russian university in 1982 based on Holocaust denial and inversion.  It is no accident that Marxist activists on college campuses are just recycling Soviet propaganda.  Nor is it a coincidence that Hamas and Putin are buddy-buddy, even if campus leftists are too dim to notice.

Yet the hack worked.  Israel could not bring itself to use the force necessary, for two reasons.  First, the scale of death necessary to defeat Hamas is beyond the conscience of most Jews.  A little while ago, I put up a comparison of the death toll in Gaza against Yemen, Syria, Darfur, and demonstrated in simple, graphical form the logical problem with saying that Israel is the country committing genocide.  But even at those low numbers, Israel balks, because Jews have rules.

The world is simply backwards in its empirical and moral assessments.

Which brings me to the other problem.  The world.  Pretty much, all of it, which should be no surprise when you think about the history of the world, the history of the world hating the Jews and trying to kill the Jews, and really, the long history of the entire world being completely wrong on major moral issues like slavery.  For most of human history, all of humanity was wrong on slavery.

Shall I credit the moral reasoning of "the world?"  The collective of humanity, who have always hated the Jews, who until very recently, accepted slavery in literally every society?  I should accept their moral judgment simply because they say so?  Not because they present an empirically grounded or philosophically sound argument, but because they all say so?

    Dear world,

    Your moral judgment means as much now as when literally all of you believed in slavery.

Always remember the Asch conformity experiments.  I defer to no one when their reasoning fails.

World opinion has never held moral weight, yet Israel has felt constrained by it, despite the fact that they would never have any support.  Recall that Israel was created by a vote of the UN, which has spent essentially every meeting since 1948 doing nothing but sponsoring anti-Israel motions.  More anti-Israel motions than motions regarding all other countries combined.  Think of every horrible place in the world, every horrible thing, and the one Western-style liberal democracy in the hellhole that is the Middle East, the one place that respects individual rights, where there is actually a significant population of minority Arab Muslims, with full citizenship and voting rights, where they have seats in the Knesset, and on the Supreme Court, that is the country that the UN spends its entire existence targeting.

Does that tell you something?

Yet between conscience and the supposed constraint of world opinion, after delaying and dithering, Israel did not fight to win.  The IDF dropped leaflets, trying with every technique they could, to get Palestinians civilians out of the line of fire.  They sent text-alerts, saying leave this area, we're going to destroy the tunnels here.  Israel negotiated over how much assistance would be given to the enemy it was trying to defeat-- an enemy literally committed to the extermination of every Jew-- while that enemy still held hostages.

The hostages are long dead.  They were raped to death.  Do not delude yourself.

Yet because the IDF delayed, warned, and used such minimal force, while refusing to attack their stronghold, Hamas will live.  World opinion is now firmly that the most evil country in all of human history is the place where Jews fought back.

But only a little, because maybe if we only fight back a little, they'll like us, and let us.

(No, they won't.)

And here is the problem.  When you only fight back a little, the moral justification for war falls apart.  As I wrote in January, and articulated again above, the moral justification for killing can come only from the combination of the cause itself, and actually seeking victory.  Consider.  Suppose Country A attacks Country B.  Country B decides that it will not fight hard enough to win, but it will launch one missile, knowing that the missile will hit a civilian area, and kill a bunch of civilians.  Taking victory off the table by its refusal to fight to victory, can you defend the launching of that missile?  No.  If you have taken true self-defense of the table, then that missile is immoral, because it kills without purpose.

Fundamentally, that's what IDF has done.  The IDF has fought immorally.  When most critics say this, they make a false accusation of "genocide."  The new blood libel.  I mean it differently.  The IDF fought insufficiently strongly to justify the deaths it caused.

I don't like war, or killing.  To do so without purpose is wrong.  Israel's cause is the right cause, but if Israel was not willing to win, then it should not have fought.  It can still win, but at this point, they almost certainly lack the will in the face of both world opinion and their own public opinion.

I am disgusted.  To be clear, the deaths that would have been caused, as horrifying as they would have been, would have been the moral responsibility of Hamas, because the right of self-defense is absolute.  However, if Israel was not actually going to defend itself, then any deaths it caused cannot be justified under self-defense.  The moral problem is a non-monotonicity.

Consider, by way of reference, an investment.  Suppose it would cost $100,000 to build a business.  If you put only $50,000 into the business, you do not have a business, and if the expenditures cannot be recouped because you have spent on items that immediately lose value, then you must either spend nothing, doing something else with that 100K, or put in the full 100K.  Anything in between is just stupid.  At least, though, you are only hurting yourself.

The principle of non-monotonicity becomes a moral issue when we consider the realm of warfare.  You can choose to surrender if you don't have the will (or capacity) to fight.  I think that would have been the wrong choice for Israel, but if that's your decision, that's your call.  Or, you can fight to win, but fighting to win means killing far more than the number dead now.  Israel has shown that it was not willing to kill enough to win.  We have a non-monotonicity problem.

If Israel was not willing to kill enough to win, then they needed to surrender.  Let the jihadists have the place, and get out.  What kind of place would the land become?  Would "Palestine" then be "free," as the chant goes?  Not by any meaningful definition.  It is not a culture of classical nor modern liberalism, and they do not believe in freedom.  They believe in oppressive theocracy, but if those within who oppose that theocracy cannot abide it, then leave.

The Tiebout Hypothesis at scale.

As I wrote in my Musonius Rufus posts on exile, land doesn't mean anything to the rational person, so neither does exile.  If you won't fight to win, then leave and let the jihadists have the place.

(Gee, I wonder if that might encourage more terrorism...)

Those are the moral alternatives.  Get up and go, handing the place to the jihadists, or fight to win.  The former means you don't kill anyone.  You hand the place to the killers instead.  There will be more killing down the line, because you just showed them that they can get what they want by mass murder, but you haven't killed.  The other defensible choice is fight to win.  You kill, probably a lot.  It's ugly, but the moral defense is the right of self-defense and the need to defeat evil for the sake of stopping further evil.  Evil people put you in situations with suboptimal choices.  Welcome to this place called "life."  Make your choice.

What is not defensible is seeking the middle of the road, where you kill less than necessary to win, but enough to create a moral problem by having killed.  But if not for victory, to stop evil, then for what?

I don't want to quote Mr. Miyagi here, but wasn't there a line about grapes in the road?  His approach was to be the good guy.  Avoid the fight until you couldn't.  But if you have to fight, win.  Fight precisely as hard as they make you.  No harder, but as hard as you must to win.

Fighting, but not hard enough to win?  No.  It would have been more moral for the Israelis to pick up and leave than to fight this 1/10th-of-an-ass war that they have fought, killing with no plan for and hence no chance for victory.  Just death, nothing else.

Yet properly planned, more death in the short run would have done more for peace in the long-run.  Consider Germany and Japan now, compared to the 1930s.  We fought them.  We won.  We defeated evil.  In order for them to become modern, prosperous societies, the evil within them had to be defeated.  Had we fought the IDF's current approach, what would have happened?

Play that out, and then recognize that no death caused by any side would have had moral justification.  Fight justly and win justly, or not at all.  Modern Germany and Japan show the case for fighting hard when your cause is right.  Where is the empirical-moral case for the IDF's approach?  I see none.

The problem, then, is that with a battle plan that could not possibly lead to victory, much less a stable path to peace, how can one justify any of the deaths?

When Hamas's apologists ask such questions, they basically just want the Jews to lay down and die.  I don't.  I want evil defeated, but that returns me to the non-monotonicity.  Two options.  Fight hard, and fight to win, or not at all.  Total war, or leave and give the place to the jihadists.  Those were the options.  Israel has lost because it tried to find a middle path, caught between the state's need to defend itself and Hamas's successful hack of the Jewish conscience.  They weren't willing to shoot through human shields.

Now the terrorists know what works.  They know how to get world opinion on their side, and they know how to position themselves so that the Israelis won't shoot back.

Hamas doesn't have the firepower to kill all of the Israelis.  But, Israel has simply decided to accept a higher level of terrorist attacks, with their own people dying, and their own government unwilling to do what is necessary to stop it.  It is not my country, and not my government.  Their government simply will not protect them.  In a democracy, the government does as its citizens demand, and if Israelis do not demand action, then they accept being murdered by terrorists.

As H.L. Mencken wrote, "democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard."

Yet the moral problem remains.  I do condemn the IDF.  The IDF has killed senselessly, not because they are engaged in the genocide claimed by anti-Semitic liars and propagandists, but because there are only two options.  Fight to win, or not at all.  Looking for a middle option means killing with no purpose.  The IDF needed to commit to total war.  If not, Israel should just surrender.  If they will not defend themselves, what's the point?

Fight to win, or surrender.  Otherwise, the deaths you cause have no moral justification.

No music today.  That would seem tacky.