Questioning War
“Israelis & Palestinians do not deserve the consequences of evil forces that drive those who make decisions, profit from conflict, and push hateful rhetoric that make people lose their consciousness.”
This was a very powerful sentiment that I wholeheartedly embrace found in a very difficult to read (warning) Instagram post about the horror of the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7th.
This post is about considering the costs of war.
I acknowledge that I come at it from the perspective of a male-presenting and born straight white mildly Christian person of economic privilege, born into a safe area in a safe city, whose personal security threat level is basically always set at zero.
That may discount whatever I have to say about this in your eyes and that’s ok.
Most of why I write is to process my own thinking on something—and for me, that’s been a collaborative process that involves people in my community who know me well. In writing this over the course of this week, I’ve shared various drafts with many people who were generous enough to give me feedback, point me to resources, and ask pointed questions that challenged me. I appreciate them immensely.
Let me start by stating that I don’t believe that the average Israeli or the average Palestinian wants war. I don’t believe that the average Muslim or Jew wants war.
Are there extremists?
Sure–but as a Christian (in theory, anyway), I certainly would never want my whole culture to be defined by the values of those in the extremes–even if my country happened to elect those people to higher office. As Americans, we know a little something about our representatives not being representative.
Yet, here we are.
The majority of people want peace, but we’re on the verge of a conflict that could pit many nations against each other, including our own, cost trillions of dollars and put millions of lives in harm’s way, if not more.
So everyone wants peace, but things seem to be hurdling uncontrollably the other way.
How does that happen and how can it be stopped or the worst avoided?
If you were a New York area business leader in 2001 and you had called for restraint around the US response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks—despite the appalling nature of these attacks against civilians, you would have been burned at the stake.
You would have been called insensitive and unpatriotic if you said that a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan (and, in due course, Iraq) might not be the best course of action. Everyone in your network, nearly 100% of whom knew someone firsthand who died in the attacks, would have called for your job and put into question whether you valued the lives that were lost.
At the time, public support for the war with Afghanistan was hovering between 90-95%. As a born and raised New Yorker, if that barbaric attack didn’t make you want to strike back, I personally would have questioned your humanity and your loyalty to this country.
Yet, trillions of dollars later (billions of which became the profits of influential companies whose business is war), after 2400 servicemen and women were killed, with ten times that many suffering injuries, and over 70,000 civilians in the Middle East dead, there’s very little argument for that war being anything that anyone could call successful.
So what should we have done?
Nothing?
I don’t think that would have been the right answer either—strategically or emotionally.
Certainly, we did have some accomplishments in the War on Terror. I feel comfortable in saying that the killing of Bin Laden was justified and ultimately saved lives in the future.
I’m just not sure that 70,000 civilians had to die to get him.
Looking back, I wish we had a more substantive conversation about the cost of war and war’s often unclear end. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed our decision—but if we had perfect information about the next twenty years, I think we would have at least altered our approach.
Right now, there’s no space for that conversation in our public discourse. Not only can we not question what’s happening, we can’t even pause to consider it properly.
Elizabeth Speirs summarized so much of what I’m feeling right now in her recent NYT opinion piece:
“Moral certainty is an anchor we cling to when factual certainty is not possible. And the faster we express it, the more certain we appear. The most righteous among us post — and do it immediately.
Knee-jerk social media posts are not what bother me most, though. Instead, it’s the idea that not posting is wrong somehow — that everyone needs to speak, all the time. It discourages shutting up and listening and letting the voices that matter the most be heard over the din. It implies it’s not OK to have any uncertainty about what’s going on or any kind of moral analysis that does not lend itself to presentation in a social media post. It does not leave time or space for people to process traumatic events in the sanctuary of their own minds or to gather more information before pronouncing a judgment. It pressures people who don’t have an opinion yet or are working out what they think to manufacture one and present it to a jury of total strangers on the internet who will render an instant verdict on its propriety.”
The internet is not creating a culture of thoughtful consideration that our leaders should use as a model or be influenced by.
Genuinely good people of sympathetic characters are being shouted down as anti-Semitic or Hamas sympathizers for bringing up their concern for Palestinian civilians in the face of a serious military power imbalance.
Completely unqualified people with third-hand information are breaking down rocket paths around burning hospitals to give their quick take the way an NFL analyst might analyze whether a football play was actually a catch.
As Israel prepares for a ground attack where a massive amount of Palestinian civilian casualties will be unavoidable, even more than have already been killed in the last two weeks, we are perilously close to knocking over what could be a very long line of dominos without giving due consideration to the downstream consequences.
I would submit that the most human and empathetic thing we can do right now is have a serious conversation about the ultimate cost of war. We have to be able to do that without being accused of not caring about the hostages or the victims of these attacks. We owe it to everyone else in the region still in harm’s way on both sides of the conflict.
Isn’t it worth considering that a full-scale Middle East conflict that includes Americans, Iranians, and whoever else joins the fray will ultimately cost far more lives than have already been lost–including *both* far more Jewish *and* Palestinian lives?
Is that anti-Semitic or Islamophobic to say?
Are we on the precipice of another Afghanistan/Iran morass or are we standing at the onset of World War II deciding whether or not to stand up to or appease an evil with worldwide aspirations?
Don’t you have to ask the question if you care about life at all?
Deciding that the civilian cost of full-scale war might be too great and seeking to find other ways to topple Hamas obviously doesn’t mean you support Hamas.
To not retaliate against those who take innocent lives isn’t disrespectful of the lives lost any more than it’s not disrespectful to victims to rally against capital punishment as a principal.
He writes about a Palestinian doctor who lost three of his daughters when an Israeli tank struck their home during Israel’s 2008-9 war on Gaza.
The man told him, “The only real revenge for murder is achieving peace.”
If you don’t pause to seriously consider the cost and the part you’ll play in continuing cycles of violence, no matter what the social cost of doing so at the moment, you may live to regret it.
I was taught by my religious upbringing to turn the other cheek. I never really liked that, to be honest.
If I get hit, I want to hit back, and I think I’d be hard-pressed to teach my kid anything else.
But is it right?
How many movies have we watched when someone has a finger on the trigger, considering what most people consider to be justified retribution against an evil enemy for an unspeakable act?
What does the person who cares about them and the people who were lost always say?
“Don’t do it.”
We never see that friend trying to stop the cycle of violence as the bad guy and we shouldn’t now.
