A Few Notes On The Wars
Three and a half years into the Ukraine war, millions of people on both sides are dead or wounded — every single one of those casualties firmly and clearly resting on the head of one man, the man without whom the war would not exist, would have no reason to exist. Donald Trump’s mental acuity and moral compass are encapsulated in the fact that he has continued, throughout his campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize, to fail to grasp this simplest and most self-evident fact, and therefore to demand that both sides “stop the killing,” as though a man who shoots a burglar who has broken into his house and is threatening his wife and children is culpable because he refused to allow the burglar to murder his family.
It is becoming increasingly apparent — though it was clear enough to see right from the outset — that Benjamin Netanyahu is as resistant to ending his war in Gaza as Vladimir Putin is the war in Ukraine, and for the very same reason, namely that his own personal liberty and claims on power are only safe as long as he can portray himself as Israel’s indispensable bulwark against an ongoing national threat. The lack of mercy for civilians — let us narrow that to “very young children” in order to stave off the usual sophistry about how terrorists are always disguised as civilians, as if we didn’t all know that — is certainly an ugliness worthy of Netanyahu’s sometime friend Putin. Should Hamas get away with the mass murder and kidnapping of hundreds of Israelis? No. Should Netanyahu whip the Israeli people into such a fever of non-stop fury and fear that they are able to abide, or at least conveniently ignore, their government’s deliberate forced starvation of thousands of very young children and the intentional destruction of whole communities’ worth of homes and hospitals, effectively making any return to normal life after the war impossible? No.
It seems that some Old Testament notion of justice is being applied here, but applied falsely. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is not, and never was, an injunction to ruthlessness in seeking revenge without measure. It was, and is, precisely a demand for measure: for proper proportion, sensible restraint, justice as a simple re-balancing of the scales, as opposed to the kind of vengeful total destruction that only one being is entitled to undertake, at His will, and His will alone.
People who believe that supporting their party means supporting anyone who represents their party, or conversely that objecting to their party’s representatives necessitates supporting the opposing party, are aligned in principle with the old saw, “My country right or wrong.” Why must one always have a country? Why is a country worth supporting when it is wrong? Why is a wrong worth supporting when it is your country’s? Why all this need to belong, to have a “side,” to identify with a collective for its own sake? If it is about belonging, grow up. If it is about having a side, make it the side of truth, even when truth has been reduced to a slim and awkward fifth side that distorts the room and is thus summarily rejected by the other four. If it is about identity with a collective, make human nature your identity, and history’s narrow but clear-streamed valley of natural men your soul’s homeland, unless and until you find a present-day faction that conforms to that same nature, which is most unlikely at the best of times, and all but impossible at times such as these.
