Focusing on How We Wage War
Terry H. Schwadron
Sept. 24, 2024
By the time you are reading this, Hezbollah will have riddled Israel’s north with more dozens of indiscriminately aimed missiles, and Israel will have responded with bombs and perhaps even infantry into enemy positions in Southern Lebanon. Or, if you hear it from Hezbollah, as ordered by Iran, the order of mayhem will be reversed.
Strike or response, the effects are not changing. War by whatever name is underway after a year of conflict with Hamas in Gaza and in selected, likely avoidable strife across the West Bank. Israel bombed 300 specific sites in last couple of days, while Hezbollah lobbed 165 missiles, and authorities were counting the dead.
It is a conflict that refuses to recognize a reason to stop, that finally rejects all international efforts to intervene, that has lost identifiable ways to find an excuse to explore a way out. It is a conflict that freely mixes global anti-Semitism with the regional politics of land grabbing or any sense of Israeli security with imposed conditions for Palestinian statehood.
It’s a complex story decades and more long in which Arab states have been as willing to keep Palestinians in overcrowded, poor “refugee” areas as Israel has been to maintain occupation conditions. Those Arab nations have willingly provided weapons and money for multiple generations of angered Palestinians rather than towards well-being and living conditions; an increasingly right-wing Israeli government, never fully in majority, insists on provoking more conflict over creating Jewish settlements by pushing Palestinians out.
But listen to our own American talk in the election and on campuses, and you’d think it is an U.S. decision to make about how to wave a wand and eliminate generational hate. Donald Trump, whose evangelical supporters and black-and-white foreign policy thoughts push him to back Israel without question, is blaming Jews if he loses the election; Kamala Harris is being pressed on whether she will alter U.S. aid for Israeli weapons to push for a two-state solution in the Middle East.
How to Wage War
We’re engaged in an endless discussion about the most moral — or immoral ways — to kill one another. For the year since Hamas attacked and killed 1200 and took 200 Israelis and others, including Americans, hostage, it has proved to be how Israel has pursued its reprisals that have captured imagination rather than the awful reason for needing to respond in the first place.
Last week’s apparent long-term Israeli scheme to explode pagers and walkie-talkie communications devices used by Hezbollah officials was a brilliant, if terrifying way to provide perhaps the most personally targeted weapons that war has known, but one that is drawing as much public criticism as bombs sent into Beirut apartment buildings to find Hezbollah military leaders. In that respect, arming personal devices is being seen as a public invite to terrorists to copy the technique, following the same, unfortunate trend of targeting of theaters, sports arenas with truck bombs and airplanes with hidden explosives.
Whoever sets the rules of war needs to think this one through. For the participants, once in a war, it seems impossible to stop for moral or humanitarian questions. We have rules about land mines in civilian areas, though Russia is violating them, and supposed rules about targeting civilian neighborhoods, now generally being ignored worldwide.
As the daily onslaught in Gazan areas where Hamas’ military hide among civilians lifts just a bit, we’re looking at a full-scale war developing in Lebanon, where Iran is supporting a kind of government within a government. It is unclear whether there is any effective Lebanese government outside of Hezbollah.
Yet even as Iranian-coordinated missiles continue to strike Israel, it is Israel that continues to draw global condemnation for bombing civilian areas.
Lebanon is a recognized state, not under Israeli occupation. It is an embodiment of what the Gazans and West Bank Palestinians say they want. From an Israeli point of view, the missiles are still raining in. As with Hamas, the Houthis and Iran itself, the goal is to eliminate the Jewish state.
Everything about the Israel-Palestinian conflict is wrong, from its disputed history to any projected ways to release the hostages of Oct. 7 or any political resolution that can work in a reliably practical way. It is a conflict that has forgotten that real people are getting killed and hurt, that relies on cruelty in the name that it is better for them to die than us.
Jewish New Year
The Jewish New Year celebrations are a week away, a time for contemplation and renewal of spirit. What will mark this year, however, are the ripples from Israeli insistence on destroying Gaza, civilian and military, to reclaim a sense of security.
Those ripples have confused humanitarian concerns with whatever it means to be Jewish, in America or in other countries. For Trump. American Jews must identify completely with a right-wing coalition in Israel that believes in land-grabbing and starvation of Gazans or “need to have their heads examined.”
But American Jews, 2 percent of the population at best, have mixed views about such identification, particularly with the Netanyahu administration that believes in occupation and expanding settlements rather than work towards a recognition of Palestinian rights. The debate that presents itself in this country dismisses any anti-war or humanitarian sentiment for a black and white view of who wins.
We can predict only that New Year sermons will be filled with examination about what this year watching a deteriorating and deepening hate affects whatever mix of religious, moral, sympathetic and political associations are attached to U.S. Jewish identity.
The daily reports of carnage and terror on all sides suggests no one is winning. Rather, we are baking in the generational seeds of future and continuing conflict.
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