Well said!
As I responded to a Medium reader who commented on one of my articles, saying there's no justification for killing innocent Palestinians...
It's hard to argue with your position (that it's terrible that innocents are killed).
I too hate that innocents die. On either side.
The critical things to remember here IMO are:
- War is hell. There is no good war. There are only justified or unjustified wars. A war for survival is always justified. A war for the sake of expanding territory and/or taking over resources is not, unless those expansions are a matter of national survival. A war to stop evil is usually justified unless there are other means to accomplish that aim.
- In any war, innocents die. That's a huge part of what makes war hell.
- Israel did not start this war. There was a de-facto cease fire in effect on October 6, 2023. The next day, over 3000 Hamas terrorists swept across the border into Israel (FWIW, it was into territory that was part of Israel all the way back to the 1947 UN partition plan), and proceeded to carry out a multitude of inhuman acts that were clearly war crimes, before they (those who survived clashes with the IDF) fled back into the Gaza Strip with over 250 hostages, living and dead.
- All Hamas has to do to end this war is return the hostages and surrender. Israel cannot end the war peacefully because Hamas has loudly proclaimed that they will repeat their heinous attacks a second, third, fourth, and ten thousdandth time. Thus, the only way Israel can end the war is to eradicate Hamas, at least as a functioning organization. Tragically, the continued war will inescapably lead to further civilian casualties, no matter what efforts the IDF makes to minimize these (and a top US expert on urban warfare who has been to the Gaza Strip and embedded with IDF units has said that no military, including the US military, has ever conducted urban warfare with as much, let alone more, regard and efforts to minimize civilian casualties).
Finally, despite all the above, I agree that this is an ongoing tragedy.
