The Right Side of a Wrong War
Israel, Lebanon, and the terrible cloud of war
One of the strangest aspects of war is the awful ambiguity. When it’s innocent civilians dying on all sides, morality often blurs. For the outsiders who watch chaos unfold through TV screens, rights and wrongs can fall into a muddled wayside.
Israelis will tell you that whatever reckoning Gaza and Lebanon now face is entirely at the hands of Hamas and Hezbollah. They will say that the children who die within Palestine’s besieged borders are the unfortunate casualties of war. They will say that October 7th brought with it the brutal slaughtering of the largest number of Jewish people since The Holocaust — that brothers and daughters and genocide survivors alike were killed and taken hostage by terrorists with a senseless disregard for human life.
The Palestinians and Lebanese will tell you that it’s blameless civilians who are dying in Israel’s fiery bombardments. The citizens of Gaza will tell you that it isn’t their fault that Hamas uses their homes and hospitals to house their rockets. They’ll say that they’ve been bombed in their settlements only to be bombed again in the places to which they’re told to flee. The bombarded towns of Lebanon will say that the children and the elderly shouldn’t bear the blame for Hezbollah’s actions.
The truth is… all sides harbor righteous causes for fury. Those lurching through the dilapidated squalor of Gaza and those Southern Lebanese cities will feel one set of facts. The undiluted truth of all the lives they’ve lost is etched into their collective consciousness with a searing burn.
Those on the Israeli side of the border, still mourning children, friends, and family members of their own — hoping for the safe return of their loved ones that still remain among the hostages — they feel another set of facts. And each side bears the brunt of these divergent realities with a comparably grating heat.
But their sufferings are incommensurate. Because these truths are ones that transcend textbooks and cut deep into the lived experiences of warring masses, empathy between those disputed borders is sparse and quickly-fleeting. Compromise remains a lofty and far away dream floating cruelly out of reach.
There’s no reconciling the realities and histories of these embattled peoples. No one can tell Israel that they haven’t earned the right to retaliate; to Israelis these words are hollow. They’re weightless in the face of their losses. Nor can anyone tell the Palestinians that they haven’t endured horrible tragedies of their own. The indignation is on all sides, and in so many cases, it’s as righteous as can be.
To see representatives of either side of the issue address the world is to see people blinded by a dire, godly fury. They stare with unflinching eyes down the barrel of an endless war. As Gaza continues to crumble and Israel’s bombs have only begun seeking new targets in new nations, maniacal leaders across the Middle East watch with locked focus and issue thinly veiled threats toward the tiny seaside nation.
“If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated last October. Even as the leader has grown less popular with his citizens and edged closer and closer to despot territory in recent months, that stark reality remains as true as when the war first began.
It’s an unskirtable truth that many Muslims want no less than the total annihilation of the Israeli state. But to say that peace in Gaza alone is as straight forward as lowered arms is to grossly oversimplify the inhumane conditions under which the Palestinian people now live. Problems were always going to emerge within those walls, and the Israeli government bears some responsibility for the flames that stoked this conflict.
Even in times of peace Palestinian citizens have been murdered and victimized. But there’s hardly a claim of injustice that can be leveled by one side that can’t be readily turned upon the other. Though I can’t say my limited time in Israel has given me much insight into its thousands of years of war-torn history, I believe the politics of my own country offer a microcosmic glimpse into the same dynamic.
In recent years, the political landscape in the United States has grown more and more plagued by flagrant hypocrisies. And as members of each party have drifted to further extremes of ideology, the room for reasoned conversation between the opposite sides of the aisle has disappeared into a sea of hostility and dissension.
Social media, conspiracies, and deep-fakes have pried open ideological divides so wide that the country risks falling head first into a fissure of its very own creation. No issues remain on which the other side can’t pull a loaded “what about” card. In the age of algorithms and AI, whether the cards were summoned from a spurious deck loses its relevance.
But in this Middle Eastern conflict that stretches back whole millennia, the cards fill entire textbooks. And on every face of every heart, club, diamond, and spade is another blood-stained conflict. The further back the pages, the more obscured they grow. The suits, kings, queens, and empires meld into a daunting and macabre tale of violent days gone by.
Where these trying times first began is a place of faded legend. The records of that unapproachable past have been eroded, distorted, redacted, revised, repurposed, and reinterpreted. Some of the records are no more than stories — unwitting pawns being whispered ever-forward through the annals of time to tear a modern world asunder.
In our history, there are few territories so profoundly entrenched in battle and controversy as Israel. The sad reality is that there are no viable paths forward where the battle ceases completely. There’s no one state or two state solution that’s been proposed to which there’s not an armed group of extremist opposition.
Israel’s stated mission is one that the world can plainly see is futile. It wants to destroy an ideology through a campaign of bombs, tanks and rockets. It wants to erase each member of Hamas and Hezbollah, as though their erasure would mark a swift end to antisemitism across the globe. It’s fighting an unwinnable war with an unwavering determination. Israel’s opponents stretch well beyond Gaza and Libya, and they’re prepared for a war that spans entire decades — even if it means engulfing the Middle East in interminable hellfire.
There are few paths forward that don’t result in mass death. I’m not sure that there are any at all. In these wars hinging on religious disputes, there are scarcely any compromises that can be reached. As long as there are factions on both sides of this dispute who believe they’ve been granted the same land by the same god, the conversation of compromise isn’t one that leads anywhere new. And that’s one of the great dangers of religion. It closes the door to rational debate. Israelis and Palestinians can keep warring in vain until the world stops spinning, but as long as the creator of the universe is taking sides in their land disputes, the only peace we can hope for will be shaky and short-lived.
Disagreements over territory should be matters of law. It’s one of the great arguments for the separation of church and state.
There’s enough space on earth for Israelis, Palestinians, and the Lebanese to live in peace, but in holding onto the crumbling sites of bygone times, they find themselves fighting the same bloody battles over and over ad crushing infinitum. All attempts at compromise will succumb to grim and Sisyphean fates as long as all parties continue clinging with clenched fists to the murky remnants of a distant past.
I can’t trivialize the importance of these historic places, but I can say with a sober-hearted certainty that there’s no building, temple, palace, or artifact on earth that’s worth the price of the nearly 50,000 innocent lives humanity has paid for this war since last October. Maybe one day in the distant future, all of the factions within that fraught part of the world will find a way to live without being chained to their histories. But the stranglehold of faith-based thinking is a cloud that forever looms over this conflict. Until the shackles fall, or a hope for peace emerges through this stifling, stifling fog, this struggle will continue claiming victims like numbing clockwork.
I was touched by the compassion in your writing.
It is not appropriate to “take sides”; we are all God’s children and the suffering is terrible.
Why I wonder most about is the attack last year. For historical reasons to do with the founding of the State of Israel, the emphasis upon rape and sexual violence was guaranteed to raise an immediate and forceful response.
What objective was worth the certain strong retaliation by Israel? Gaza, in particular, was and is vulnerable to any kind of surface military intervention. Too many people on not enough land. Civilian casualties guaranteed on top of the hardship of simply existing.
I cannot help but wonder what clever mind thought up the plan, sold it to Hamas, and what end they had in mind.
I can’t help but think that the only party to gain has been Russia who gained an immediate reprieve from Ukrainian pressure and began to turn the tide as Ukraine began to suffer from the redirection of political attention and resources elsewhere. The US stands behind Ukraine but Israel has first claim on American support.
Would Putin sell out the Palestinians in order to survive and maybe win in Ukraine? There’s no doubt in my mind.