{“In war, whichever side may call itself the victor,
there are no winners, but all are losers.” - Neville Chamberlain That
quote would probably be better remembered if it wasn’t from Neville Chamberlain. The former British Prime Ministers is best
remembered for appeasing the maniac Adolf Hitler before WWII started. But Chamberlain wasn’t wrong. He was about Hitler in particular, there was
no bargaining with that evil man, but he was right about war. Even when it is necessary, even when it could
be deemed a righteous act of defending the weak against the strong, one doesn’t
“win” a war, one survives it, and hopefully limits the damage. That’s the situation that Israel has been
facing since October 7th of 2023: it can’t win, the only question is
how costly will survival be both to the Israelites themselves and to the Palestinians. The essay below is attempting to reason through
to that conclusion.}
Almost exactly six months ago, Israelis awoke to a
nightmare. Civilians in the southern part of the country, areas near the border
with Gaza, were under a brutal, ongoing attack. It would become the deadliest
day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust and a prelude to unspeakable
suffering on both sides of the border.
{To think and talk about the costs of the war against
Hamas that followed after October 7th is not to minimize the horror
of that day. The same is true for the
tragedies of 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In each case an act of sudden evil caught a people
off-guard and led to a forceful and far greater response. In each case, moral questions were raised by
how the aggrieved party responded and by the unintended consequences of those
responses. The original moral evil in
all four instances has no excuse, no justification, no sympathy.}
Six months after Hamas launched that deadly rampage, knowing
that Israel’s response would be ferocious, there are only losers in this
terrible war.
It’s hard now to find many winners with the death toll
mounting among Gazans and hunger growing in the strip. And with Israeli
hostages still held captive, perhaps in dank Hamas tunnels.
{As it was with WWI, WWII, and the War on Terror, so
it has been in Israel and Gaza. War
takes on a life of its own, one action leads to another, one cost justifies
another. WWI left an entire generation
decimated and cynical, it weakened institutions that were necessary for
civilization leaving them unable to stop the march toward WWII. WWII gave us not only the firebombing of
entire cities, but the atomic bomb and the Holocaust as well. The scale of the War on Terror was much
smaller than WWI and WWII, but it still left us with the Patriot Act, drone
strikes across the globe, seemingly endless war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and
the shame of Abu Ghraib. Looking back
upon history, each response appears solidly unavoidable, each war a product of choices
made at the time that felt reasonable, but if that is indeed true and such
death and destruction was the inevitable result of what had preceded it, we
still must count the cost to both the innocent who suffered alongside the perpetrators
and how fighting those wars changed us as well.
It is in this vein that All Quiet on the Western Front and
Slaughterhouse Five were written, among many others. And so, it is entirely reasonable to look at
the Israel/Hamas War after six months and count the cost, to remind ourselves
that history teaches us that we should not expect to find any winners.}
For Hamas, the fact that war continues may count as a
victory, but thousands of Hamas’ fighters — the exact number is disputed — have
been killed. Hamas may be decimated, perhaps unable to hold on to power, but
that’s no victory for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is under
growing global pressure and besieged by protesters at home, and whose legacy
will be forever darkened.
Even US President Joe Biden has paid a price, caught in an
election-year political vise between those who think he is too supportive of
Israel and those who think he has been too critical.
The strife has also detonated a worldwide explosion of
antisemitism, reviving a hatred that had lain lightly dormant. It’s causing
anxiety across Europe, and leading some American Jews to conclude that one
country where they had felt safe is no longer a haven, as they face
antisemitism from the left and the right. Anti-Muslim bigotry has also
increased.
This awful chapter started on October 7 last year, when
Hamas terrorists breached what was supposed to be a secure border and
slaughtered Israelis in their beds, in their living rooms, in their cars, at an
outdoor music festival and bus shelters and parks.
They raped countless women with horrifying brutality.
Israeli security forces were nowhere to be found for hours.
Hamas — the Iran-allied group that rules Gaza — killed more than 1,200 Israelis
and dragged back hundreds more as hostages. The area lay in ruins. Israelis’
sense of security had been shattered.
Today, it is Gaza that lies in ruins, tens of thousands of
Palestinians killed by Israel in its quest to uproot and destroy Hamas. As
Israel crushes Gaza, its global reputation is getting shattered. But still the
IDF believes around 100 Israeli hostages remain captive of Hamas and other
militants in conditions that one shudders to imagine.
This week’s Israeli strike on a World Central Kitchen (WCK)
convoy, killing seven aid workers, adds to the calamity of this convulsion in
the perennially unstable crossroads of the Middle East. Amid the outrage and
heartbreak, WCK’s founder, celebrity chef José Andrés, accuses Israel of
targeting his staff. Israel has apologized, saying the convoy was
misidentified. Israel has fired two officers and reprimanded senior commanders
after an inquiry into the strike.
{The cost has been high. Evil like that unleashed on October 7th
against innocent men, women, and children always leads to a ripple effect of
costs, nearly always spirals out of control.
Inevitable? Perhaps, but still
horrific, still worthy of lament.}
There was never any question that Israel would respond to
October 7. It had been attacked by a group that promised it would repeat the
massacre of Israelis and is backed by Iran, a country whose leaders have vowed
to destroy Israel. The attack led some there to conclude that whatever price
Israel should pay for absolute victory — including in global public opinion —
it is worth paying. Besides, the attackers kidnapped hundreds of its citizens,
including women, children and the elderly. Israel needed to save them.
{I remember the days after 9/11. There was never any doubt that wherever these
terrorists were hiding, American bombs and bullets would find them. That day’s shock and horror gave rise quickly
to songs and slogans about stomping on terrorists, and to a sudden rise in
anti-Islamic sentiment among a people who previously had spent little time
thinking about Islam. Likewise, Israel
was going to respond, and with much greater force than Hamas had employed
(because of the limits of Hamas’ resources, not a limit on its hatred, they’ve
stated many times their desire to kill all Jews).
This is not the response envisioned by Jesus when he
commanded us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. Even if a government needs to respond with
war to protect its citizens, the hatred that war gives birth to in the hearts
of the people who were attacked is a tragedy.
Few times in Church history has the response to evil been forgiveness
and mercy. Individuals have responded to
their own suffering, even martyrdom, with Christ-like forgiveness, but rarely has
this translated to a whole people.
Sadly, when our nation experienced tragedy similar to what Israel has
just lived through, the Church in America wasn’t able (much of it wasn't willing) to be a voice of reconciliation after 9/11, myself included. The desire for justice, even messy justice
that says, “Kill them all, let God sort them out” is a powerful
enticement. The path of peace after
injustice is brutally hard, for this reason we are in awe of those like Nelson
Mandela who choose it instead of vengeance.}
In the immediate aftermath, world leaders expressed support
for Israel. But when the death toll in Gaza starting climbing, as Hamas knew it
would, international support for Israel turned to withering criticism. In the
most painful irony of all, Israel — the country that became home to Holocaust
survivors, under attack by a group whose original charter outlined a genocidal
ideology and a vow to destroy Israel — was itself perversely accused of
genocide.
{Entirely predictable.
The initial support followed by eventual criticism as the death and
destruction continued is the exact same pattern that America experienced after
9/11. The primary difference between the
two stories is that the reality of global antisemitism gave Israel a shorter runway between sympathy
and criticism, i.e. a much briefer window to respond to terrorism before
criticism, justifiable or not, began to mount.}
As always, the greatest suffering, the biggest losers, have
been civilians on both sides. Palestinians in Gaza are enduring a living
nightmare. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says more than 30,000 have
been killed in the conflict. The figures don’t distinguish between combatants
and civilians, but there’s little doubt that horrifyingly large numbers of
them, including children, have been killed. The territory is a wasteland.
Gazans are caught between the cynicism of Hamas, the
geopolitical concerns of their Arab neighbors and Israel’s determination to win
at any cost. Hamas leaders, comfortable in exile, proclaimed early on that they
are “proud to sacrifice martyrs.” Hamas fighters embedded themselves in Gaza’s
population, including in hospitals, essentially daring Israel to kill civilians
to get to them.
In most wars, civilians would have been allowed to flee the
fighting, but the people of Gaza were not allowed to leave the territory
whether they wanted to or not. Hamas urged them to stay. Egypt, worried about
whether Israel would allow the people to return and concerned about instability
on its soil, closed its border to all but a small number of Palestinian
civilians.
The cruel fact is that the lives of Palestinians have not
been the highest priority for anyone in this war.
{It has always been this way in human history,
innocent civilians always pay the highest price in war. It has also always been true that the evil
men who sow the seeds of war rarely are the ones who pay the consequences, that’s
one of the reasons why they’re willing to start down that path in the first
place.}
Complicating the situation is the political crisis in
Israel, which preceded the October 7 attack. Netanyahu — a political survivor
who faces corruption charges — already presided over the most right-wing
government in Israel’s history. Before the war, tens of thousands of Israelis
took to the streets in nearly 10 months of weekly protests against a plan that
would have severely weakened Israeli democracy by stripping the Supreme Court
of much of its power.
Netanyahu was, in my view and others’, already the worst
prime minister in Israel’s history even before October 7.
Polls have found that most Israelis want him gone. Now Benny
Gantz, a member of the war cabinet but also the leading opposition figure
before the war, has called for new elections in September. Recent polling says
say he’s Netanyahu’s most likely successor.
Devastation in Gaza as Israel wages war on Hamas
The fact that Netanyahu is heading the government during one
of the most dangerous, most damaging times in Israel’s history only adds to the
disturbing nature of this conflict. Israel is not in good hands.
Would another leader, a different government, have been able
to conduct the war with fewer civilian deaths, with less damage to Israel’s
global standing, without eroding the vital relationship between Israel and the
United States? I suspect the answer is yes.
{Few leaders are up to the task of shepherding their
people through a time of war and at the same time minimizing the cost that it exacts
from both their own people and the civilians on the other side. While it is true that Netanyahu has numerous
critics both in Israel and beyond, I think the essay strays in this section
away from the salient and necessary conversation about the cost of war itself.}
If there’s any glimmer of hope in this dispiriting landscape
it is that the young Abraham Accords — which normalized relations between
Israel and some of its Arab neighbors — have survived the toughest of stress
tests. That augurs well for the long run, for more stability of the region,
eventually.
{What lies on the other side of this war? None know for certain. If there is a path to a wider peace between
Israel and its neighbors, it will feel like a miracle. We can hope that the horrors of this war will
make it harder to start the next one.}
It opens the door to the possibility that once this war is
over, once the post-war phase — whatever that looks like — also comes to an
end, there could be a new architecture that leads to peace. For that to happen,
however, two of the many losing protagonists in this conflict, Hamas and
Netanyahu, cannot remain in power.
{We have set aside time in our worship services each
Sunday since October 7th to pray for Israel and Gaza, for the Jews
and the Palestinians, for Christians, Muslims, and followers of Judaism in the
Holy Land. As I lead these prayers, my
focus is primarily upon those suffering from the war, on both sides, pleading
to God to protect them. I also pray for
a just and lasting peace, admitting in my prayers that I don’t know how we get
from here to there. Which leaders would
it require and what choices would they need to make? That answer is in God’s hands alone. I don’t know if peace is possible with
Netanyahu as the Prime Minister of Israel, because nobody really knows the
answer to that question. And so, rather
than calling for specific steps, my prayers leave the “how” in the hands of God,
and focus instead on the ordinary people whose lives have been forever changed
by this violence, may they be protected, comforted, and healed, and may peace
prevail even after the horrors of war.}
{Lastly, talking to my Bible Study group and leading
FB Live prayers just after October 7th, I said, “There are no good
choices left.” I then explained that whatever
the government of Israel did next, the choices would all be bad, and the cost
high. The same calculus existed for the
Palestinians, they would only have bad choices left to them after what Hamas
had done. That wasn’t prophecy, simply an
awareness of history because humanity has seen this cycle play out over and
over again. Unfortunately, this time
hasn’t been an exception to the rule, this war has been like so many others
that preceded it. Whatever happens next,
let us pray for those in need, let us hope for justice and peace.}
