The Horror of War Does Not Remove Its Necessity

I f I may be so indulged, I would like to journey deep into the Cave of the Abundantly Obvious and return in possession of a time-tested truth that, apparently, needs a timely reiteration: that, in every conceivable circumstance, war is horrible, but that, in some circumstances, it is necessary nevertheless.

I mention this because I have come increasingly to suspect that the most vocal critics of Israel’s conduct since the abomination of October 7 are unable to get past the first proposition. Push the average Palestinian-flag-wearing campus protester to explain the cause of his present vexation, and, once you have got past the ersatz hierarchies and inscrutable ideologies that inform his worldview, you will be told indignantly that Israel is engaged in a “genocide” — a term that, as far as I can detect, is being used incorrectly as a synonym for “death, destruction, and tragedy.” Or, to roll all that into one term: that is being used incorrectly as a synonym for “war.”

It is reasonable — imperative, even — for human beings to disdain war. War represents failure. War is ruinous. War renders as normal conduct that, properly understood, our civilization exists to impede. It is not reasonable, however, to consider war to represent the only failure among the available alternatives, to conclude that it yields the only form of ruin, or to determine that the conduct necessary for its prosecution is the only intolerable act. At root, Israel is engaged in a war against Hamas not because Israel is insensitive to the calamities that such wars ineluctably bring, but because Hamas has proven itself to be a violent, depraved, totalitarian outfit that sits beyond the reach of international diplomacy or academic therapy. That many innocent people will be killed as a result of Hamas’s being violent, depraved, and totalitarian is tragic, but that does not transmute those consequences into a “genocide,” it does not make a dispositive case against Israel’s decision, and it does not set the very notion of violence beyond the pale.

My grandfather once told my mother that the individual German and Italian troops whom he had met during World War II were typically “nice.” As a matter of fact, he seems to have felt sorry for them. Despite this, he fought and killed them — and he ought to have fought and killed them — because the alternative was to allow them to prevail. By no means was his an unusual experience. The average Russian soldier in Ukraine is probably decent enough when left alone. The redcoats at Yorktown had friends and families. Many of those who fought for the historical disgrace that was the Confederacy had complex stories that did not map neatly onto the overall stakes of that war. That, certainly, is worth acknowledging. But it is not worth acknowledging at the expense of everything else. Like my grandfather, Ukraine has to do what it has to do, as Washington did what he had to do, as the Union did what it had to do — and, in turn, as Israel has to do what it has to do. The material question here is, “Or what?”

Robert E. Lee once remarked that “it is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” Indeed so. But those words, uttered at Fredericksburg in the December of 1862, came more than a year too late for such an observation to carry much weight. By that point, the Civil War was. It had been created by secession, by the skirmish at Fort Sumter, and by the South’s ultimate desire to construct an empire built atop the “cornerstone” of slavery. These facts lay on the ground — visible to all. They, not some abstract desire to fight, were the cause of the bloodshed.

Ruminating in 1934 upon the tendency of history’s appeasers to attempt to avoid war by electing to “dwell upon its horrors and to imprint them vividly upon the minds of the younger generation,” Winston Churchill concluded that such “teaching ought to be very useful in preventing us from attacking or invading any other country,” but then asked rhetorically: “How would it help us if we were attacked or invaded ourselves?” That, as ever, is the correct question. The events that precipitated Israel’s retaliation against Hamas have already happened. In 2006, Hamas won an election in Gaza; since that time, it has governed the strip without interruption; and, on October 7, 2023, it invaded Israel, murdered more than 1,000 people, and took 250 hostages — most of whom are now dead. That the war that has resulted is as horrible as ever sits beyond doubt. But that’s not really the key point — is it?