Atrocity, Barbarism, and Israel's Response

 This post will not concern books or publishing. It is a response to the attacks on Israel. Read at your own risk.

In the last hundred years, the United States has twice been attacked on its own soil with thousands of  casualties. The first was Pearl Harbor; the second, 9-11. Both of those times, it responded by going to war. And war is not, by its nature, a calibrated proportional response to the attack that led to it.

As a percentage of population, the attacks that began Saturday in Israel have dwarfed, by far, both of those events. After so many years of affirming "Never again," Jews have seen their deadliest day since the Holocaust. And there are other fundamental differences. Pearl Harbor and 9-11, especially the latter, resulted in the deaths of civilians. However, neither of them included face-to-face slaughter of entire families. Or mass rape of women. Or rape followed by murder, or by the display of the naked, bloody bodies of the victims to ecstatic crowds. Or the wholesale murder of babies, in some cases by beheading. Or children surrounded by the same crowds to be taunted and beaten. Or the taking of well over a hundred civilian hostages.

These atrocities are not unprecedented. Many hundreds of years ago, this is what happened when cities were sacked. More recently, there have been civil wars and religious conflicts featuring the same horrific barbarism. Russian forces have been accused of similar acts in their war against Ukraine. But those who are excusing or even cheering the attacks perpetrated by Hamas, supported and possibly planned by Iran, should think carefully about whether they want this way of waging war to become, in a much-used phrase, the new normal.

On both December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001, the entities that attacked us meant to wound us to the heart, and/or to change our foreign policy in dramatic ways. In neither case did they have the ambition to wipe the United States and its citizens out of existence. Hamas and Iran have made no secret of their intent to destroy Israel and its Jews. Israel, unlike the USA when embarking on those previous wars, is facing -- not for the first time -- an existential threat.

You may recall how the USA ended World War II, the war we only entered because of the attack on Pearl Harbor. You know the names Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Israel very likely has more, and much more powerful, nuclear weapons than the United States had at that time. Israel could easily drop such bombs on Gaza, and may well have the military capacity to hit Iran with them as well. Should we expect that earthshaking outcome?

I for one doubt it, and here's why. When we dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, we had a different goal. We wanted to induce Japan to surrender, and to do so before the USA suffered hundreds of thousands of fatalities and more than a million casualties. Israel, on the other hand, knows that neither the Hamas jihadists nor the Iranian mullahs are likely to surrender, no matter how many of their people are killed. What Israel needs to do is wipe out Hamas, both its soldiers and its leadership, and permanently change Iran's regime, which probably means killing everyone currently in it. A sufficient nuclear attack could achieve that goal, but the huge number of civilian casualties involved will probably discourage Israel from taking the nuclear path unless absolutely necessary.

So Israel and its enemies are facing either a very well aimed campaign of targeted strikes, whether from the air or from the ground, or else a long, bloody conventional war. It may well be impossible to avoid igniting yet another cycle of hatred and longing for revenge. Israel will most likely strive, still, to keep civilian casualties to a minimum -- while realizing that the possible "minimum" has unavoidably changed. But no one should count on, and no one can in good conscience insist upon, any overriding concern with this war's being "proportional."