A Third Short Post on Iran

Nations don’t have the right to be independent.

Amazingly, and to the consternation of many of his supporters, Trump has become an internationalist, though as an impulse rather than a change in principle. Moreover Trump is particularly aggressive and has changed the canons of how statesmen of both parties engage in their prudent internationalism whereby the claim about going to war was reluctant and inevitable because all attempts at diplomacy had been exhausted. Appeasement had preceded an English ultimatum on Poland being invaded by the Nazis. Yalta was offered as a last ditch attempt to avoid a Cold War. But Trump was quickly fed up with negotiations with Iran, demanding they agree never to have nuclear weapons and going to war when they didn’t say that, while previous diplomatists took as their motto “Trust but verify”, which meant not to rely on verbal assurances but painstakingly spell out the details of surveillance and stockpiles Iran would agree to, as was the case in Obama’s agreement with the Iranians which Trump dumped in his first term. Let us see what Trump’s new foreign policy bodes, well or not.

Now that the American and Israeli millitary have been so successful in degrading Iran’ military assets and its leadership, and there have been no sleeper cells in the United States to create havoc in our homeland, the focus of anti-Trump people is to say that there is no end game of the terms under which the war will; be over. In wars of necessity, the endgame is to survive, but in wars of choice like Iran, what deal is there to be struck? A quiescent Iran still intact? A regime change> A disorganized nation? But even powerful nations can be sure how their enemies will unravel. A revolution against the Kaiser was not the plan for the Allies in World War I. The United States did not know the Soviet Union would collapse after the United States had negotiated for the end of the Cold War. Moreover, under the new dispensation by Trump, Trump still remains in charge in that he can just shift the topic away from Iran, just let it languish, while observing from above and within, should Iran become belligerent, while turning to other matters, like conquering Antarctica or finding hidden deviants. There is no end of enemies to get obsessed about when the old scapegoats tire in the imaginations of the populace.

An objection by the Left to the war against Iran is that nations have a right to maintain their existence, even if the nations are immoral. But that is not the case even if the Nuremberg Trials and the United Nations say otherwise. Peace between nations is prudential rather than moral, nations having an armed truce so they don’t risk their sovereignty or prosperity. The British put down the Biafran Revolution in Nigeria in the Sixties because the precedent of Biafran independence might lead any number of African countries whose borders were established by Great Britain would try to rearrange configurations through local wars. Put the point more abstractly. A right is not a property of a nation, as in X has a right to exist as a nation. Rights are attributes of individuals and what nations can do is more or less recognize or enforce rights that are inherent in human nature though over time nations can recognize a right that expands the guarantee of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So I would say universal health care and universal education have become rights because those are now recognized as required for people to grasp the possibilities of their own ambitions, which is what “the pursuit of happiness” means. So nations do not have to put up with nations so obnoxious or dangerous tyo nations that they will not put up with it. Bill Clinton bombed Belgrade because concentration camps were active in Sarajevo. And so too the United States does not have to put up with the regime which kills its own civilian protesters in great number and has engaged in war with its regional neighbors so long as the initiating nation is prudent enough not to pick on a nation, however distasteful, that is quite dangerous to the moral party. The U. S. should not attack North Korea or Russia or China. Remain more or less within the truce and engage in only proxy wars like Ukraine.

So what nation can trust other nations? The answer is cultural affinities. The English speaking nations have such an affinity and, in fact, closely collaborate militarily. That is why it is a joke to say the United States can absorb Canada. Moreover, affinities can evolve. The European Union is developing a continental sized culture based on Christianity, the Enlightenment and democracy. Germany and France will have ended the four wars between them that lasted from the early nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Iran is so different from the United States in religion and political structure that it is an adversary.

Another Short Post on Iran

Trump is mercurial.

Trump lies about everything. He said Haitians were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. He said Obama was not born in the United States. He implied people aged 150 and more were getting Social Security payments. And so on. But Trump is often quite truthful and candid about his own motives even if other people might think such disclosures were selfish or embarrassing or simply simple minded. That is the case with his starting the Iran War. He said, when he was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, that he was no longer pursuing peace. Perhaps he was aware of the plans against Iran or maybe because he was going to leave a major legacy one way or another. As is said, he follows his own instincts.

As a matter of fact, now has been a good time to attack Iran. Its forces had been considerably weakened by last year’s exchanges between Israel and the United States with Iran and the war aims of the United States and Israel are coherent rather than scattered, which is what Democrats would claim. Trump wants to rid Iran of its nuclear, missile and naval capabilities even if Iran threats would not be imminent, and now was the good time to do it especially when the Israelis had found out just when the Iranian leadership would be just where they would be. And destabilizing the regime was another goal though it is difficult to know in advance how that would play out. Recent developments suggest Kurdish forces will come into play and that might turn the trick

Moreover, the President has authority to wage this war because the overly broad mandate given by Congress after 9/11 has never been repealed and the War Powers Act is now interpreted to mean that the President is allowed to war without going to Congress for a period of time rather than the time for war authorization is simply delayed while a crisis has to be dealt with. Also, Congress always has the right to withhold funds for a war, which it did when the Boland Amendment said no money to the Contras in Nicaragua and the Congress never stopped funding Korea or Vietnam. The American military, very cognizant of constitutionalism, has had no qualms about the legitimacy of this war. 

The war so far has been going well, thanks to the US and Israeli military, however much Pete Hegseth does not seem to do much more than bluster. Early used American weapons have done their work and now the U S can use less expensive munitions. The U. S. can withstand a long war because it can manufacture weapons in greater quantities than Iran and because its own population is not at all endangered. Casualties in Israel and the Arab states have been light. Russia and China, erstwhile allies of Iran have been silent. China will think again about attacking Taiwan. NATO has united in defending against Iran incursions. Nobody in the American homeland is threatened so far while the Cold War and many Americans feared for their collective lives and the War on Terror had 3000 civilian American casualties on 9/1 .and so the war on Iran is a cheap war even if gas prices are up. It is no wonder and perfectly reasonable for Trump to have a say in who will be Iran’s leader. That would be both a symbolic and actual victory over Iran, though it is more ambitious, as Trump is now demanding, to get from Iran an unconditional surrender, but Trump uses terms loosely and so we don’t know what he means more than that the term to him, as with “tariff”, sounds mellifluous.

Democratic commentators have been looking for reasons to find the war disadvantageous for the United States. The best one was provided by General Barry Mccaffrey, who worked in the Clinton White House. He said Iran might collapse and become a failed state because Iran has so many numerous minorities. But my couch potato analysis is that Iran didn’t collapse when the United States got rid of Mossedegh so we could control Iranian oil. We brought in the shah, who was a modernizer even if he lived extravagantly.  The clerical regime has to go. But Trump is an unreliable agent of change. He is likely to overreach because of his grandiosity and thereby bring on disaster.

A Short Post on Iran

The Iran War is a personal and political  diversion.

The first point to make on the war on Iran is that, as is generally agreed, this was a war of choice rather than a choice of necessity. Nuclear enrichment and nuclear bombs were far enough away that the Israelis could have, to use the phrase they used with Hamas, “mowed the grass” every few years to keep those prospects remote. Intercontinental missiles are said to be a decade or more away. And supporting regime change always meets the problem of which authoritarian regime will you free, given that the track record in recent years, in Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere, do not seem to make countries small d democrats. So what is the reason for war now?

Rachel Maddow thinks the Iran War is a payoff to all the Arab nations who have given lavish gifts to the Trump family. But that is to forget that the Sunnis hate the Shiites and need no encouragement only lavishing the Trumps because giving tribute is the ordinary way potentates do business even if the Constitution tried to eliminate emoluments to American leaders. Or maybe Trump is bored having accomplished his major agenda in the Big Beautiful Bill and simply wants to engage in grandiosity as in the Big Ballroom.  But Trump has always been careful about being careful to fight wars only if he can easily win or drop it as an issue when it becomes bothersome. Trump does not take on Russia or North Korea. He threatens Canada and Greenland and just drops them if they seem resistant, just moving on, as he has also done, it seems, with tariffs when the stock market thought on Liberation Day that it believed he really meant it and withdrawing ICE because of bad publicity. Trump’s virtue is only to fight wars you can easily win and that was the case with Venezuela and, apparently with Iran, who was told that the Iran missiles had been sufficiently used up in last year’s war between Iran and the combined US-Israel war that Israel would not see considerable damage and that has come to be the case. I don’t think Trump has the stature to endure a difficult war where the outcome is uncertain as was the case with Churchill. Trump is to be praised only with the minor virtue of Trump Always Chickens Out unless he can be the bully. No subtle diplomacy to wean Iran out of its isolation, but then again, earlier administrations had done that as when Obama got a nuclear deal with Iran which Trump promptly abrogated.

Look at the real reason for the war as having already accomplished its results and therefore is to be offered as motivation. Trump always changes the topic whenever he is in hot water, whether because he lacks attention span or is being sly.

The Jeffrey Epstein caper, which had a long everyday preoccupation for a long time disappeared on Saturday, as well as falling poll numbers and the prospects of the midterms. Shift the topic to foreign policy and that might mix things up so that Republicans will go back to the fold even if Republicans are adverse to foreign adventures. But the timing is everything and this ploy may be too early. Remember that George H. W. Bush was the conqueror of Kuwait but was defeated not too much later by Bill Clinton. Foreign policy is ephemeral to the public especially in a war where the American people are not endangered, which they were in WWII and the Cold War. This war doesn’t have much staying power for the public and so the persistent domestic issues will resurface.

A Short Post on Ukraine

Here is a principle of international relations if that can be dignified as a “principle” when it is backed up, as is usually the case in political science, with only a few examples. The principal is this: an alliance takes a long time to develop and when alliances change quickly because of immediate circumstances, such as a casus belli or a shift in national administrations, they are likely to be short-lived. Russia became an ally of Great Britain and the United States only when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union became an adversary of Great Britain and the United States as soon as the war ended as it had been since the Russian Revolution and has remained so until this past month. On the other hand, Great Britain and the United States who were in opposition from their founding through the Civil War, gradually realigned with one another so that the Americans couldn't but help to assist the British by the time of the First World War.

The reasons for that principle are based in two overall theories of international relations: geopolitics and elective affinities. That the two powers of France and Great Britain have been at war on and off from the Middle Ages through the Napoleonic Era, the two coming onto the same side at the time of the Crimean War and ever since, is because they were separated by only the English Channel and between them could contest the entire world, not just in Europe. Croatia and Bosnia were at war with one another also because there were two distinct peoples living right next to one another. The United States went to war with Spain in the Spanish-American War not because of the sinking of the Maine but because someone had to take over the remains of the Spanish Empire, particularly the Philippines, and the Americans didn’t want that to be Japan, the new rising power. Elective affinity helped the realignment of Great Britain and the United States because, at root, the Americans shared a common language, a common culture, and a mutual appreciation of democracy and constitutionalism. John Adams admired the British system. The division for a century was fratricidal. The United States championed Israel despite the geopolitical interest in cultivating the Arab states because the Israelis were Westerners who settled in an unfriendly area and were devoted to medical research, symphonies and a democratic regime.

So what of the present situation in Ukraine? Geopolitics partly explain it. Just as the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the Nineties could be understood as a set of boundary disputes occasioned by the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989. The war between Russia and Ukraine is also a border dispute over the boundaries of Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Ukraine had been given guarantees of its independence when it gave up its nuclear missiles when it left Russia. There are also cultural differences between eastern Ukraine, which had been part of the Austro Hungarian Empire and so a European country while eastern Ukraine and Crimea were largely russified and so a partition could have been arranged between Putin and Biden but Puyin miscalculated, thinking he could get it all, including Kiev and Odessa and so restore what Catherine the Great dad conquered in the eighteenth century. And so a protracted war between Europeans and Russians. With the United States on the European side

What Trump does is intrude and alter traditional alliances on the very flimsy excuse, the casus belli, akin to the U. S. S. Maine, of regarding Zelensky as having insulted him in the Oval Office even though Zelensky was willing to give over mineral deposits if he got some guarantees of independence which Trump was not willing to accede to. What was really at stake was not the trade but a realignment to Russia rather than Europe by Trump for reasons long discussed but not uncertain. Does Trump just like strongmen or is it thatPutin, for some reason, pulls his strings? We don't know. But such an alliance will be short lived because it can be dissolved in haste if made in haste, a subsequent President restoring its shared culture with Europe and in opposition to big power authoritarian regimes, but different this time in that Europe, having matured as as entity since after the Second World War, is an alternative democratic continent and wary of the American one. America will not be the leader of the Free World because it will have two consuls and perhaps, in not too long a time, the Pacific Rim a third democratic area. That may be what Trump hath wrought.

A Short Post on Gaza

Three weeks into the Trump Administration, there have been comic and dreadful incidents. The first week was comic opera about taking over Greenland, Canada and the Canal Zone, and then there came the tariffs on Mexico and Canada which were quickly resolved by the two countries agreeing to do what they would have done anyway if politely asked to do so, but that is not Trump's way, which is to bluster for its own sake, to make himself seem strong. Remember that he is a deeply superficial man.

The next week was much more sinister, and still unfolding. What does Musk plan to do now that he has access to the United States payment system? Getting unqualified people in office and purging Justice Department career employees seems not only vindictive but it also suspends the civil service system that has existed for a hundred fifty years. This is a very radical change that may or may not be Constitutional but still seriously worrisome. But it is fruitless to anguish about those real politics as whenJake Tapper and A. J. Vance bickering with ever more heat about whether Trump really said Pelosi and Schiff were of the enemy within. We know that Trump can be edited to mean whatever his supporters make him to mean.

But it is difficult not to be taken aback, especially by Trump’s supporters, with Trump’s jaw dropping announcement two days ago that he will take ownership over Gaza, has not ruled out using American troops to do so, and expelling the Palestinians from Gaza while making it the Riviera of the Near East.even though, as Trump admitted, the two nations don't want the by rebuilding after resettling Palestinians into Egypt and Jordan even, as Trump admitted, the two nations don '/t want the Palestinians. The America Firsters who supported Trump do not want foreign entanglements. No American boys and girls in Gaza. What is up with Trump? Is he serious or is this just a ploy? Who knows?  The Israelis don’t want it to happen either. It has been their long standing policy to fight their own battles with their own troops, except for experts and the Navy fliers who shot down Iranian drones and missiles. Israel does not want to be a colony of the United States; it wants to manage a great deal of autonomy as was shown by Netanyahnu thumbing his nose at Biden and pursuing his war on Hamas for fifteen months.

But Trump, for all his cynicism, is very naive and ignorant. He says he does not want to repeat a failed policy. He probably doesn't know that when the Israelis abandoned Gaza in 2005 they left an agricultural greenhouse industry that would provide exports throughout the Eastern Mediterranean  and the Palestinians destroyed them. There was English funding for building a high speed rail up and down Gaza and money for other infrastructure and new industry but the plan was rejected because the English would audit the books and the money not sent to graft and armament.  So that possibility was tried but Trump can't face up to that, while I am left with the prospect of a forever war, Hamas reborn in ten years and trying again to exterminate Israelis. Wouldn't it be nice to be in Coo Coo Land and everything bad would go away, like bleach clearing out Covid, as Trump had hoped?

The Hostage Question

Hostages are poignant and casualties are horrific.

Hamas is each day releasing 50 hostages in exchange for 150 people held in Israeli jails. The whole world watches the daily event of the hostages taken in ambulances to Israeli hospitals, footage of reunions, and snippets of what their captivity had been like, even though it means stalling the invasion of Israel to destroy Hamas because of its massacre of southern Israel on  Oct. 7th. President Biden says the release of the hostages has been front and center ever since the hostages were taken and that  rescuing the hostages results, Netenyahu states, because of Israeli military pressure rather than pondering the regrettable casualties that are the result of pursuing the war. Why are the hostages so important even though there are only hundreds of hostages while many thousands of Palestinian civilians, including women and children, die as the result of Israeli artillery. Isn’t that disproportionate?

The reason hostages are seen as more precious than civilians is existential. Hostages are particular while civilian casualties are statistical. A hostage is a person absconded and in grave danger of dying and so suspended between life and death and that leads to, well, suspense, which means concern for whether that particular person will die, a person full of feeling and personal lives, those recounted by un-hostaged relatives, and therefore precious because of their anguish. On the other hand, civilians are at any moment either dead or alive, mourned if gone but that over and done with, or else still alive and subject to the chance of a bomb falling on them or on the building which collapses on top of them. Some people have bad luck while others don’t even though the odds are worse in some places rather than others. Palestinians remind the world of the number of casualties even as Israelis have to remember what happened on Oct. 7th so as to explain why reprisal was justified. The media find the story of hostages a better story to cover because of individual biographies while all the media can show of casualties are bodies in shrouds, but the media is telling the story of the hostages because of its inherent poignancy: a person captured or released who was available to be killed.

There are precedents other than war of the poignancy of people under a sword of Damocles suspended under a thread, and so in recognition of immediate death, but still alive. Think of the Chilean miners a decade ago who were trapped underground world wide television closely following for days their eventual rescue while not covering the auto deaths on the highways at the same time  except as a record of a particularly grisly one without covering the people who had lost live ones. Car accidents are just statistical and to be alleviated by seat belts and driverless cars rather than saving the guy who gets behind the driver’s seat to some unknown fate. Also think of Billy Wilder’s most cynical movie,”Ace in the Hole”, from 1951, where newspaperman Kirk Douglas creates dispatches of a trapped miner that leads to a carnival atmosphere and Douglas extends the time until he would be freed so as to do it more safely until  the point that the miner dies, which is now a lose rather  than an inspiration for hope, which is what everyone admires as a token of humanity, however manipulated by Douglas for his own advantage.  

A way to overcome both hostages and casualties is to point to the grievances of one party and neglect those on the other side to the point that Palestiniians will claim that Oct. 7th was done by the Israelis to itself while Israelis will say that Gaza residents did not overthrow the Hamas regime and so those Palestinians afre being liberated by Israeli attacks on Gaza. A bit of hyperbole that is rhetorical and self-serving. But underneath the faux humanitarianism are the historical grounds for each side. Israelis were on the land for three or four thousand years and Palestinians claim that the land is part of the essential Muslim territory. There are quibbles about which side engaged in bad faith, the Israelis expelling the Palestinians during their War for Independence, the Israelis claiming that the Palestinians mostly left when they expected to return to their homes when Arab armies had taken over the area when they won the war. Both sides justify their own history, though I do find telling that the Palestinians never accepted any one of the many partitions offered to them. The Palestinian view “from the river to the sea” can be considered either principled or foolhardy or both.

It is no wonder then that political scientists will abandon historical rights and consider only realpolitik: what is useful rather than what is right. Japan had interests in getting scrap metal from the US and access to Indonesian oil so as to pursue its war against China. The US had been leery of Japan becoming a great Pacific power and so had conquered the Philippines in the Spanish American War so as to keep it from Japan. But realpolitik can go just so far. Hitlrr did not need a war for Germany to be prosperous and glorious. His daring risked too much. George Bush did not need to recapture Kuwait even if Iraq's control of it raised oil prices. The US adjusts to OPEC without going to war with it, Sunni nations useful for longer geo-political ends.The Palestinians and the Israelis are implacable foes for religious reasons and the US sides with the Israelis for domestic political reasons based on the idea that Israelis are westerners and Arabs are only slowly becoming that. Cultural affinities triumph over geo-political interests.

There is another way to explain the plight of hostages and casualties that takes advantage of their two properties: hostages as poignant and casualties as horrific. Biden uses both of them to accomplish his own goal, which is to get things to settle down rather than in war solve the problem once and for all, despite what Netenyahu and his most ardent supporters may want. Biden said a few days after the hostage taking that freeing the hostages was the first priority and would encourage humanitarian pauses so as to allow that. That Biden view may well have been heartfelt even though any pause would allow Hamas to regroup. The best Netanyahu could do was to use the poignancy of the hostages to say that only military pressure would allow Hamas to release hostages. And Biden, apparently with his active intervention, arranged for a trade between time and hostages, putting aside the Palestinians left out of jail. Then Biden talked about extending the days for exchange and possibly extending the situation into a full truce, which is counter to the Netanyahu position that Hamas has to be destroyed or else it will rise again and massacre Israelis. But Biden is concerned that the Palestinian casualties are so considerable that it will stain Israel permanently, there always people to blame the Jews for doing what other nations do regularly, as was the case when  the US engaged in unacceptable behavior in Vietnam, killing civilians that were called “combatants'' because they were running away from American helicopters. So, by their own terms, Hamas would have won the war they expected: able to fight another day, thanks to American intervention. Biden would hope the Israeli people would kick out Netenyahu and elect a government that wpoui;ld supp[ort a two-state solution. Biden is sincere in what he says about Hamas and Israelis but is also cagey in the way he tries to leverage American power to his own ends, which means looking in the long run for a gradual accommodation between Israelis and Palestinians, over the course of generations, so deep is the chasm between them.

Responsibility in Israel and Gaza

Moral words on war are not illuminating.

Which side, Israel or Gaza, has the onus of the carnage each creates? Tube obvious answer is whomever started first, which is the case with Hamas, which runs the people in Gaza, and so Israelis are free to do whatever they  need to do to rid themselves of the Hamas menace, given that they kill women children, babies, the elderly and other people who are clearly non combatants. Hamas engages in genocide of the Jews, though with very few results but a sufficient warning that all measures can be taken to avoid that. Either one side or the other side can prevail. The media do not clarify the issue of who to blame. They shallow the original outrages against the Israelis, presenting footage of the destruction and then interviewing grieving Israeli survivors, and now present footage of the carnage in Gaza which provides footage of wounded Palestinians and interviews with loved ones back in the United State. Is it that whomever suffers lastly are the victims that are to gain sympathy? That can’t be right. I have also heard said that Isradlis should flatten Gaza, never mind that eliciting a response was certainly part of the plan by Hamas to draw Israelis into the tunnels under Gaza, a plan that the Israelis are reluctant to implement because of the carnage against civilians which will result. Moreover, most wars are not justified by which side loses the most citizens. The Germans lost more people than did the English speaking  but the Germans aren't judged as having morally won the war. There are bigger ideological issues at stake which encapture the actual events of war. The Confederates did not think they were wrong in having maintained slavery because they lost the Civil War. The Southerners just re-established slavery by another name less than a generation later.

The view that the first outrage requires and therefore justifies the response is not the way either the Americans or the Israelis see it. They both claim that, unlike Hamas, they are  subject to the international laws of warfare so as to limit atrocities such as the killing of civilians, even though it has been an established fact since air power arrived that civilian casualties were to be regarded as collateral damage for destroying military targets and thereby morally acceptable. That is no comfort to the Gaza civilians. 

A way out of the moral quandary is to invoke the idea of responsibility, which means a decision, whether individual or collective, which leads to subsequent results. I have heard it said that Gazans are responsible for what happens to them because they voted in Hamas twenty or so years ago, even though there have been no further elections, and the Gazans have not revolted against Hamas and then negotiated for what are their own interests rather than let Hamas remain in place and treat  Gaza as only a launching ground against Israel. But that is to treat “responsibility” very narrowly. The term  means, after all, the ability to respond, which means doing only what it is actually capable of doing. A person is not responsible because they cannot fly on their own arms, but they are responsible, in a democratic nation like the United States, for the electorate to pick officials who will or will not allow abortion or raise or lower taxes. But if you look at the Arab world, few if any of those nations do engage in democratic politics. Rather, they regard themselves as passive observers of politics, victims, if you prefer, of politics. Social scientists think it takes a long time for a  people to evolve so that they own and are agents of politics. So while there might be some dissenters among them, it is unreasonable to think that Gazans will revolt against Hamas.

This redefined definition of responsibility as meaning all the circumstances that constrain decision making means consulting any number of the causes of the present war and not rely just on, as pro Gazans argue, only to the fact that the Israelis control the exits and entrances of food, fuel and people and are therefore to be regarded as an occupied territory. That is not the way the Israelis set Gaza up when they vacated Gaza. They bombed their own synagogues so as not to blame the onus of that on the Gazans. They left their hydroponic tanks which provided produce to  sell; to Europe. Offered as well was a two billion dollar development fund that was rejected because controls would be in place to prevent corruption and the accumulation of arms. There were architectural plans for a high speed rail transit system up and down the Gaza Strip. That would lead to Gaza as an economic and social entity and, eventually, to be integrated with the West Bank as a separate state solution, which was turned down  by Arafat as well as Hamas. So responsibility has to be attached to Palestinian people and bodies and not just to the Israelis unless everything follows from the responsibility for the creation of Israel itself, that being the central and significant injustice. Do the pro-Palestinian advocates really believe the slogan “Palestine from the River to the Sea”? Because that would mean no compromise is possible and so the war should continue indefinitely rather than ever cease. Do those who carry those banners take responsibility for unending war? The only peace possible is a two state solution whereby both sides have to give up something dear. The Israelis have to accept that Judea and Samaria, parts of biblical Israel, will be accepted as a Palestinian state in what is now called the West Bank. And what Palestinians have to accept is that a separate state, even including tunnels and roads that6 make Gaza continuous with the West Bank, once Gaza is rid of Hamas and absorbed by the Palestine Authority, is that it would have no army and no airport, but a lot of autonomy and economic development.

Another moral term that is used today so as to provide a way to grasp the situation, such as “responsibility”, because moral terms are supposed to be objective and so cover both sides to a conflict, is the standard of humanitarianism, which goes beyond and is inclusive of the rules of war. Both sides are responsible for being humane and so Israel should supply Gaza with food, water, electricity and the like to spare Gaza civilians and the latest reports are that water will be supplied. The question is whether it is humane for the Israelis to tell Gazans to leave Gaza’s northern region as difficult as that may be. On the one hand, you can’t tell a civilian population to evacuate according to the rules of war but it seems sensible advice given the battle that is about to begin.  And so one can despair about using any moral terms to confront the situation and make sense of it, moral terms just weapons mobilized by the sides of the parties to use as part of their own ammunition, Israelis pointing to the original atrocities and Gazans to the present one, both sides sure of their moral standing, rather than looking at the long time and complex causes and consequences, such as whether Israel should exist at all, which is the root question. George Marshall back in 1948 said it should not be recognized because it would lead to endless warfare, and that has come to pass, however it may be that Israelis think that a breakthrough with Saudi Arabia would make Israel a normal nation in the Middle East rather than a Western enclave inserted in an Arab area. Maybe this war will be the last one. People always say that about many wars.