Oded Na'aman ending war and defecation

For most people, dying is not a choice. Few would choose to be killed. One may say that one can choose not to fight to protect one's life. But this may involve being killed. Thus, in law, necessity is accepted as a defence against the charge of killing a person who is trying to kill you. 

Seven years ago, the Boston Review published an essay by Oded Na'aman- an Israeli philosopher who argues that war is a choice- which appears prescient given the recent atrocities carried out by Hamas. Sadly, Oded's message- viz Israel should choose appeasement- is at odds with the clear pattern which has emerged over the last three years. It is clear that after Biden showed the white feather on Afghanistan and then started to cool towards Ukraine, Hamas and Hezbollah and maybe Assad, would test American commitment to Israel. Would there be a repeat of Nixon's 'Operation Nickel Grass'? Or would fifty years of American domination of the MENA collapse because Biden turns chicken? The answer, of course, is that Biden is in a much stronger position than Nixon in '73. There is no Soviet threat or Egyptian or Syrian threat. Sooner of later, the non-Shias will want to crush Hezbollah so as to rebuild Lebanon. Iran can be subjected to a second 'war of the cities'. Qatar houses a US base. It can't run with the hares and hunt with the hounds. Al Jazeera will be shut down and Hamas loses its paymaster. The clincher is that there are half a million US citizens in Israel. Biden was a senator back in 1973. This is familiar territory for him. Gaza has to be pulverized because Hamas is the new ISIS. The 'Arab street' can go hang. What does it want- another fucking Spring Break? As for OPEC, it is welcome to try another embargo. The Green transition happens more quickly. 

Still, there is no gainsaying the fact that Hamas's success was the fault of an internally divided and complacent Israel. It wasn't pro-active in intelligence gathering. It trusted to 'Iron Dome'. Now, it is paying the price. But the people of Gaza will pay a much bigger price for Israel's refusal to crush Hamas out of fear that something worse might emerge. This meant Hamas could play the long game.

There have been plenty of Jewish terrorists with crazy ideologies. Why did the Zionist State manage to get rid of that nuisance? I'm sorry to say that it is because Jews were never in the habit of slitting the throats of their Uncles or Daddies or elder brothers or cousins so as to gain possession of ancestral property. Jews were similar to other orthodox religious communities who focussed on preserving their religion while pursuing peaceful professions or engaging in productive occupations. 

One occupation which is the reverse of productive is philosophy. Oded, who teaches it, writes-

As a child brought up in the Jewish-Israeli educational system, I was taught that none of Israel’s wars was a war of choice.

He was also taught not to shit himself or spend the remainder of his life shitting on his country. Sadly, he was not taught, at University, that if war is a choice, so is shitting. We can choose to reject both war and defecation. Sadly, Globalized Neo-Liberalism has a vested interest in promoting both war and shitting so as to generate excess profits and thus avert Capitalism's final crisis.

Like most Israelis, I believed that Israel uses its military might only to defend its citizens from imminent danger.

Which is why Israelis are prepared to serve in the military and give it money. If it wasn't defending them,  why the fuck spend any time or money to keep it around? In some of its neighbouring countries, people joined the Army so as to extort money from all and sundry and thus grow rich and powerful. Both the PLO and Hamas have made plenty of money for their maniacal killers. The IDF is a great tech incubator but an Israeli Army commander can't expect to become a billionaire. Sad.  

This is the Israeli ethos of necessary violence: peace is our yearning;

Which is true. Israel becomes more prosperous when it is peaceful because its people are industrious and innovative. Its leaders, however, don't have the same opportunities to unjustly enrich themselves as those in certain neighbouring countries. The truth is, the Jews of the middle east would have been ejected for one reason or another and the influx of Mizrachis has been roughly equal to the exodus of Palestinians. What gave Israel the advantage was the continued immigration of Ashkenazis from behind what had been the Iron curtain. Still, its neighbours recognized that it could be economically viable whereas no Palestinian entity at any time has had that potential. Thus one can make peace with the Israelis. There is no point engaging with Palestinians save to use them as a cat's paw- as Iran is now doing unless, somehow, Hamas has turned the tables on Teheran and is now using it rather than being used by it.

war is our plight.

War ceased to be Israel's plight 50 years ago. Egypt made peace. Jordan had become friendly even earlier. Syria's Assad had beef with Arafat and that took priority over the Golan heights issue. More recently, Saudi Arabia and UAE have become very friendly. The question seemed to be whether China could broker a deal between Israel and Hamas. Then Hamas showed it wasn't interested in a deal. What it wanted was Gaza to be reduced to rubble because that might trigger a global jihad leading to the End of Days and the Resurrection after which there is a Final Final Battle. 

We never choose violence, Israelis believe, violence chooses us. Hence the name of our military, the Israel Defense Forces.

Why is it not called Jewish Murder Squad? Also, why is the IDF not killing Americans? It is it because it is nothing but a tool of Patriarchal Neo-Liberalism?  

Today, I no longer believe this is true.

Because your brains have been buggered to buggery by studying and then teaching an utterly shit subject.  

I believe that we, Israelis, did and do have choices.

You can kill each other and thus save Anti-Semites the trouble and expense of staging a Final Solution.  

But how might a whole society be mistaken about such a fundamental aspect of its existence?

Because of Neo-Liberalism- right? If you aren't spending your time killing innocent people, you start to do sensible things and people start wanting to do business with you. That's Capitalism! Only if Jews start killing each other the way Palestinian factions kill each other, will Neo-Liberalism be defeated. 

Conversely, how can individual members of society, such as me, come to doubt widespread, deeply seated belief?

Study or teach stupid shit. Also, take drugs. Lots of drugs. Still, it isn't till you get paid for writing stupid shit that you really double down on 'moral inversion' of this sort 

Sometimes actions most see as entirely reasonable are, in fact, abhorrent.

Like writing this article. 

At times, imperatives to which whole societies subscribe amount to mere prejudice;

that is certainly true of the Martin Buber Society or Fellowship or whatever it is called 

communities commit grave injustices while fully believing they are in the right.

Nonsense! People and communities do things which they believe will be advantageous to themselves or, at the least, enable them to survive.  

But suppose you live in such a time and a place. How would you know?

By conversing telepathically with the neighbour's cat while wearing a tin-foil hat to keep out Mind-control rays broad cast by Patriarchal Neo-Liberalism. 

Perhaps you couldn’t. In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon argues that we seek justice in order to seem as though we are just. We are asked to imagine a just man, “a simple and noble person, who . . . wants to be just rather than seem just.” But what if he should don the famous ring possessed by the Lydian king Gyges, which made its wearer invisible? Glaucon reasons that, without seeming just to others, “no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice.” The invisible man lacks the motivation to act justly, because the ring allows him to get away with injustice.

Those guys thought slavery and fucking little kids in the ass was 'just'. Why bother with them? Anyway, what 'just' actions has this virtue signaller every performed? He is pretending to be a savant with some worthwhile instruction to impart. This is Madoff style pedagogy. 

A version of this story is to be found in our world, without magic rings. In this version, a just person acting alone becomes effectively invisible not because of sorcery but because a flawed view of justice dominates his or her social environment.

The same thing happens to a beautiful person who is beautiful to himself alone. He become invisible when he joins the line up for the Miss Teen Tamil Nadu pageant. People assume he is some senile grandfather who got on the stage by mistake. This is because Tamil society has a completely distorted and flawed view of beauty.  

To society, this person’s actions and beliefs are abominable, and therefore his or her justice goes unseen by everyone else.

Just as TikTok videos of me twerking with my top off are going unseen by everyone else.  

Such a person’s body would be visible, but his or her justice would be unrecognized and thus unseen.

Nobody's justice or truth or ethical beliefs are visible. Their body may be visible though they may be requested to cover their genitals.  

The person would therefore be forced to test his or her “iron nature” against pressure to conform to the unjust social norm.

Just as a person whose great wealth is invisible because he is as poor as shit, is forced to test his 'iron nature' by buying a super-yacht just to conform to an unjust social norm.  BTW I can sell you a super-yacht for just 184 quid. It is imaginary 

According to Bernard Williams, we think of such invisibly just persons as “morally autonomous: as reformers, perhaps, or as people who . . . will not follow a multitude to destruction.”

This is like the notion of the 'lamed wufnik' or the 'qutb' who are as the pillars of the universe.  

But this is only apparent in hindsight or reflection; when we “try to wave to” the moral resisters “over time or through the glass of the thought experiment, we are assuming implicitly that they have some essential thing ethically in common with us.” Williams wonders, however, whether the autonomous resister would be justified in his or her moral certainty.

Justification is only required of an agent, not an autonomous principal. Only if you are subordinate to another or are acting on their behalf do you have to justify your behaviour. I suppose an exception might be made for married people or those in a partnership. But such ties can be dissolved at will for truly autonomous subjects.  

These heroes cannot see us waving at them to confirm their sense of justice. They could not have known that their ethical peers awaited them at the other side of history.

But nutters we will always have with us. Guys who were certain the earth is flat will always find some similar eccentrics waving at them from far in the future.  

How, then, could men and women who face moral isolation tell whether they are, to use Williams’s phrase, solitary bearers of true justice or, instead, deluded cranks?

Are they making money or gaining respect? If so, who gives a flying fuck? 

Put another way, how might such persons be not only just but sane, not only moral but reasonable?

If they gain by their views or actions then, even if they are certifiably insane, the fact remains that they are mad in such a way that not to be mad would be madness. 

It may be difficult to believe that our own ethical community could run so grossly off course.

We live in an economic community. There is a customary morality associated with any given economic regime. This nutter can make money by writing this sort of shite and that is kosher according to the ethics prevailing in his . Others in his neighbourhood may be obliged to kill a member of another clan or, if his family needs a pension, become a suicide bomber. 

We usually imagine scenarios of moral isolation in distant times and places, or in dystopian visions.

No we don't. We have a wank.  

But of course this is the point: in our reluctance to suspect our own societies,

not to mention Mummy who, we are reluctant to recognize- has been TRYING TO POISON US! Also Daddy is worse than Hitler because he didn't let us borrow the car to drive to Kathmandu.  

do we not succumb to the social forces that invisibly just, morally autonomous people overcome—against which they struggle for their very sanity?

Why stop at sanity? Why not say they struggle just to keep from shitting their pants incessantly?  

In fact, many contemporary societies grapple with wrongs and mistakes committed at times of large-scale moral failure.

No they don't. It is a different matter that politicians may try to buy votes 

To consider the possibility of solitary moral resistance, we must look at our own past in relation to our present.

No. We must acknowledge that 'solitary moral resistance' is meaningless. There may be resistance and there may be people who don't do what they are told or who get in hot water with the authorities for some reason to do with their own deeply held beliefs or values, but there is no 'moral resistance'.  There is merely a public nuisance of a particular sort. 

War’s Necessity

In Israel, the paradigmatic example of a war of necessity occurred in October 1973.

That was a defensive war. But a war of necessity may be aggressive and involve gaining strategically important territory. The '67 war was of that nature. The Suez crisis, however, was not necessary but opportunistic. Essentially, Israel gained French patronage at a time when France was trying to hang on to Algeria.  

The Arab Coalition, led by Egypt and Syria, launched a surprise attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, the most sacred day in Judaism, which occurred that year during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. From the south, Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal, the 1967 cease-fire line, into Sinai. The Syrian army attacked the Golan Heights from the north. But Israel was able to regain the upper hand and secure a cease-fire that ended the war. In less than three weeks of fighting, 2,500–2,800 Israelis and at least 8,000 Arab Coalition forces were killed.

The US had been tilting away from Israel but the War forced Nixon to come to its aid because that's what American voters wanted. Biden remembers this. Even AOC has condemned Hamas. It is likely that Hamas's strike has managed to piss off everybody except the Iranians who, however, might change their minds and decide that since Hamas acted on its own, it should be left to take the consequences on its own. Palestinians must understand they are the paw of the cat, not its whiskers.  

After the war, Israelis heavily criticized their government and military leaders both for ignoring all warning signs and for dismissing Egyptian attempts to negotiate a peace agreement before the combat began. The military leadership was forced to resign, and eventually Prime Minister Golda Meir and Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan joined them.

Paving the way for Begin and Likud. The Labour party did make a comeback in the Nineties but Hamas terror strikes cost them dear. One might say, Bibi is  Hamas's gift to the world.

Yet today the Yom Kippur War is remembered as unavoidable.

It could only have been avoided if the US hadn't tilted against Israel.  

The same is true of all of Israel’s wars, no matter how poorly conceived or how many opportunities for de-escalation became known after the fact.

Moreover, Israelis remember their own existence as in some sense unavoidable despite the fact that they could easily have de-escalated tensions with their enemies by slitting their own throats. At the very least, Jews should kill all of their own children so that the entire community dies out. Yet, any Israeli who tries to stab his son or daughter faces 'moral isolation'. Indeed, those who are autonomous in the pursuit of this type of justice may even be labelled 'insane'. 

Even military rule over the Palestinians, with its incremental but continuous expropriation of Palestinian lands, is viewed as an unfortunate but necessary status quo which has lasted for nearly five decades.

What other type of rule did Hamas or the PLO provide the Palestinians? The Brits may have held elections but the Arabs boycotted them so British rule was military rule. So was Ottoman rule. 

Violence chooses us again and again.

Hamas has killed plenty of Palestinians. They don't appear to be terribly picky when it comes to killing. Basically, they will choose you if you don't stay the fuck away from them or else employ people to kill them before they can get to you.  

This deep-seated conviction is expressed in two infamous remarks attributed to Meier:

When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.

Golda Meier, unlike Arafat or Assad or Nasser, hadn't killed or even tortured any rival Jewish leader. Don't forget Nasser killed vastly more Arabs than Jews in his various military misadventures. As for the Assads.... 

Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.

So, no time soon while Hamas continues to flourish. Anyway, why should you not want your son to get his 72 virgins immediately instead of having to pay for him to go to Collidge and qualify as an Actuary?  

But the fact remains that Israelis have criticized their government for going to war.

They have also criticized it for not giving everybody lots and lots of money. Why is the government being so stingy? How come Bibi has money for guns and planes but not for public health programs featuring instruction in Sodomy for Senior Citizens? Did you know there are many ninety year old Alzheimer patients who have never had a chance to take it up the ass? The Government should be helping people to discover their sexual identity, not defending the country.  

As in the case of the Yom Kippur War, in the wake of many Israeli wars there came a disenchantment. The military campaign on which Israel embarked in June 1982, and which devolved into the 1982 Lebanon War, at first enjoyed widespread public support. By September the Israeli organization Peace Now had assembled one of the largest rallies Tel Aviv has ever seen, to protest the war and the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Initially the 2006 Lebanon War against Hezbollah was also seen as justified and necessary, but afterward the government appointed a retired judge, Eliyahu Winograd, to investigate the conflict. The Winograd Commission harshly criticized key decision-makers.

Had it severely criticized Hezbollah it would have been laughed at.  

Like the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq, Israeli wars are preceded by a widespread sense of necessity and followed by damning public criticism.

Like all wars. The 'damning public criticism' occurs only if they cost more in blood than they bring in in treasure.  

What explains this cycling of perspectives, the ritual of affirmation and rejection that endlessly loops?

Sodomy. Moral isolation is causing invisible penises to enter impervious assholes. Spinoza wrote about this- right?  

Why are we so bad at learning from our past mistakes precisely when it is most important that we do so?

You are so bad at learning from past mistakes because you teach philosophy. That's a shit subject. It makes you stoooooopid. 

All the Boston Review is asking you to say is ' Us Jews hate Black peeps. We invented the Slave Trade. Canaan, the ancestor of the Palestinians, was punished for the sin of his father Ham (who was also the ancestor of the Black Races). Apparently Ham looked upon, his father, Noah's nakedness and probably sodomized him and then wrenched off his dick while giving him a reach-around. Anyway, Louis Farrakhan was right. Take it from me. I'm Jewish and teach Philosophy in Israel'.  

The tendency for retrospective condemnation cannot be fully explained by the information made public in the aftermath of war, nor by the leisure of hindsight. Too many mistakes in judgment have been repeated too many times for such an account to satisfy. Consider Israel’s ongoing campaigns in Gaza, which continue to escalate in spite of obvious errors. Any reasonable review of these engagements reveals a consistent, perhaps obsessive, repetition of mistaken estimates, failures of foresight, unjustified use of force, and lack of clear objectives. If anything, strategic mistakes and moral failures have worsened with every campaign. The number of casualties illustrates this most poignantly. In the Gaza War (December 2008–January 2009), more than 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed. During the last campaign, the 2014 Israel–Gaza Conflict (July–August 2014), more than 2,200 Palestinians and 72 Israelis were killed. A comparison helps to clarify just how disproportionate Israeli actions were: in the first three weeks of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the American military destroyed 1,600 armored vehicles; in Gaza in 2014, Hamas had no armored vehicles, yet, on average, an Israeli tank fired seven times more shells per day than did an American tank in the invasion of Iraq.

Which was a fucking walk-over! Iraqis thought the Americans would help restore prosperity and maybe introduce 'Democracy' or something cool of that sort. Sadly, Iraq has a lot of oil and not one single politician who wasn't a corrupt, murderous, thug.  

Israeli helicopters loosed twice as many Hellfire missiles as American helicopters did in those three weeks of 2003. Yet no one in Israel doubts that another war in Gaza, probably harsher than the last, is in the offing.

Israel's mistake was not to try to win such wars. The notion was that the Hamas we know might be better than the devil we don't.  

Whatever is the case with Israel and Israelis, the perspectival shift I have described—from war’s initial apparent necessity to recognition of its unbearable futility once the dead are buried and life (whose life?) goes on—is by no means unique to Israel. I dare say that this shift is a defining characteristic of war. For it seems to me that anyone who has a sense of the reality of war must recognize that war involves a radical distortion of one’s values, as well as one’s judgments of right and wrong. Indifference to pain and loss—one’s own and others’—is a prerequisite of war. Entire societies must grow numb to suffering.

Or they should pro-actively deal with internal and external threats. On the other hand, it is probably a good idea to be numb to the suffering reported by virtue signalling cretins. I'm not saying that this guy isn't weeping tears of blood because of all the suffering being caused to Alzheimer's patients who are being denied proper training and encouragement in the practice of sodomy so that they can make vital  discoveries about the sexual orientation on this side of the grave. Still, the proper way to respond to his evident misery is to laugh at him and say 'Spinoza called. He says you have a tiny dick. Also, your Mummy always hated you.'  

As Elaine Scarry has shown in The Body in Pain (1985),

the world is destroyed anytime you go to the dentist or stub your toe. 

the language of war often serves to conceal the deed itself, the better to induce an etherized state.

It is in that etherized state that invisible dicks sodomize oblivious assholes. This is why Senior Citizens must be provided with free instruction in Sodomy regardless of class, gender, colour or the status of being imaginary. 

We give benign names to weapons and campaigns, such as Defensive Shield, Protective Edge, and Pillar of Defense.

What fucking weapon or campaign has this cretin ever given a name to?  

We “neutralize” or “liquidate” enemy forces, “sterilize” or “clean out” cities and villages; “produce results” and cause “collateral effects”; “disarm” rather than “injure”; portray war as “the road” to “freedom” or “security”; and we describe the loss of life as “the cost” incurred “on the road” to such goals.

He 'teaches' Philosophy. Would it not be truer to say that he decapitates his students and then buggers their brains while shitting on the tits of their mummies and grannies? Why is it that we use euphemisms like 'teaching' or 'lecturing' for a vile and brutal activity? 

The army is imagined as a giant creature with a body of its own, and military units—though comprised of individual human beings—are described as organs of this giant body.

This nutter and his colleagues are imagined as 'educators' when the fact is they are skull-fucking their students while shitting on the tits of their mummies and grannies.  

As Scarry puts it, “The ordinary five to six foot vertical expanse of the adult person now becomes a colossus with, for example, one foot in Italy, another in northern Africa, a head in Sweden, an arm pulling back toward the coast of France, then suddenly punching forward toward Germany.”

The ordinary shithead who writes for the Boston Review has become an 'educator' whereas the truth is his or her invisible cock is buggering the brains out of trillions of Graduate Students whose Mothers and Grandmother's tits are being simultaneously shat upon. The inhumanity! 

All these deadening metaphors, deceptively descriptive proper names, and hollow strategic terms conceal the pain, suffering, and loss that make war what it is.

If you don't fight back when attacked, you suffer worse pain and loss. That's what makes war what it is.

A person who has experienced war and yet subscribes to such vocabulary is either disingenuous or else has lost touch with moral reality.

It is one thing to experience war and another thing to experience defeat, occupation and extermination.  The moral reality is that fighting and winning is better than being defeated and exterminated.  

War commands a radically different common sense, and a different sense of justice.

No. Private citizens may kill in self-defence. A War may cause the imposition of a State of Emergency during which certain fundamental rights are suspended. But this can also occur in the event of a natural disaster or an epidemic or some other such catastrophic occurrence.  

It punishes sanity and rewards insanity.

No. An insane commander is likely to do stupid shit with the result that the war is lost. 

As individuals, we do not make war but subject ourselves to it.

Some individuals are brave and fight the enemy even if they lack military training. That is what is happening in Ukraine.  

We lose ourselves in it. The language of war overflows with assertions of control and power, which desperately mask the helplessness of a prolonged fit of rage.

Nothing is masked by 'fits of rages'.  

To return from war, you must find your participation in it incredible.

It is better to return from war with expanded organizational and leadership skills. Also Operations Research, Computing, and Communications technology tends to develop rapidly during war-time and thus de-mobbed soldiers can soon push the economy to much greater heights. Israel's military, it must be said, has been a great tech incubator. 

If only for a period of time, you must struggle to believe that you took part in it. You must confront your moral insanity if you are to leave it behind.

This may be true of certain psychologically fragile people. I still struggle with the traumas associated with the two years I spent as an auditor. You can return from Accountancy but Accountancy returns with you. For many ex-Accountants the audit is never over.  

A person who has participated in war and then simply gone on with her life, seemingly untouched by the transition, has never in fact returned from war.

Some may suffer post traumatic stress disorder, 'shell shock' or other mental illnesses. However, many suffer no ill effect. 

Sometimes the collective moral insanity of war is justified. Even those who are reluctant to see the Allies’ engagement in World War II as the epitome of justified war may agree that stopping Nazi Germany from conquering the world might justify all-out war.

America entered the War after it was attacked and Hitler declared war on it.  

At other times, war’s insanity is unjustified but excusable.

In which case it is justified. The excuse is the justification. 

There may be circumstances in which false evidence tragically leads us to conclude that war is the only way to prevent an even greater ruin.

Or where we think we will gain by it- e.g. the invasion of Iraq.  

It is also possible that making war is justified but blameworthy—for instance, if we miss the opportunity to peacefully prevent circumstances from deteriorating to the point where war becomes the only option.

Anybody can blame anybody for anything. I frequently blame Julius Caesar for causing my diabetes. True, I tend to be very drunk when I do so but you can't deny that Caesar's ghost might be adding sugar to everything I eat.  

Wars have a way of seeming impossible right up until the moment when they quite suddenly are (or at least seem to be) entirely necessary.

Not for the aggressor who tends to have planned the thing quite meticulously.  

It is as though once war becomes a plausible option—a live option, as William James would call it—it is then irresistible. For when war is merely an option, not a necessity, then of course we should avoid it. But if so, then war is never an option we may reasonably decide against: it is a necessity, or it is nothing at all. At most, there is a brief moment in which the matter may still be decided either way; a moment in which the live option of war can be quashed or realized.

This is nonsense. Germany and Japan and Hamas planned their attacks meticulously. But they bit off more than they could chew.  

Even when war is warranted, its destructive mindset is not continuous with one’s conception of oneself before war wreaks havoc and after order has been restored.

Which is why Eisenhower turned totes psycho. After becoming President he would frequently beat and sodomize Nixon on live TV.  

The shift from the belief that war is a necessity to a retrospective awareness of its futility signals the suspension and subsequent return of sanity.

This guy is insane because of his terrible experiences as as soldier. 

In order even to celebrate winning a war, we must first deny that we have fought it

Very true. Churchill often said that Britain hadn't participated in either World War. True, some tourists went to Flanders or Dunkirk for a picnic but they didn't fight anybody.  

—that is, we must ignore the horror, destruction, injury, pain, loss, and deaths that were essential to the war we fought.

We celebrate the destruction we wrought on the enemy.  

We overwrite the rotten bodies of the dead and the circumstances of their deaths with massive, clean, geometrical monuments,

why don't we erect small, dirty, ungeometrical, monuments for our heroes?  

with flowers and pictures from the fallen’s unspoiled youth.

We should place turds on such monuments. 

Every war in which we engage, most especially a war we initiate, is a war we imagine as something else, something that makes sense, that has a meaning controlled and contained, understood and endorsed. A decent person cannot fully endorse even a justified war. This is not to say that a decent person should refuse to fight in one, but rather that the moral reality of justified war comes clearly into view only when we are of two minds about it.

Why not three minds? Also, a decent person cannot fully endorse even a justified bowel motion. Indeed, a decent person should suck himself off so as to show contrition for going potty. Anyway, that's what I think Spinoza was getting at. Either Spinoza or Julius Caesar. I tend to confuse the two. 

It must be noted that since the practice of conscription was abandoned in most Western countries during the latter part of the twentieth century,

because they have nuclear weapons or come under a nuclear umbrella. The day may come when Israel too abandons conscription and just nukes its enemies.  

wars have been fought on behalf of citizens, not by them.

Citizens are welcome to join the army. 

The moral experience of war has been outsourced to professional armies—often drawn from the poor and underclasses—who fight far away, indeed, as far as possible from the fresh air of the homes they purport to serve.

Better to fight far away rather than wait till you have to fight in your own back yard. 

Like many other facets of contemporary life, today’s wars rely on a division of labor that insulates most Western citizens from the moral significance of their choices, actions, and way of life. Wars have become so impalpable that we may not know whether and how many wars are fought on our behalf at any given moment. Not surprisingly, for the wealthy and bourgeois, this has made war both more abstract and, in a sense, less objectionable.

The wealthy don't want their tax money flushed down the toilet.  

More often than not, they do not know anyone serving as a soldier. To overcome this structural cluelessness, we must seek to understand the experiences we are spared.

Why? The fact is, few of us have been subjected to anal rape while serving a prison sentence. We don't need to understand the experience unless that is what gets our rocks off.  

When the possibility of war becomes real and comes to one’s home, one experiences a collapse of meaning that correlates with a sense of rapidly growing danger. Places that used to be safe—the grocery store, the way to the school or playground, the bus, coffee shop—are suddenly threatening. Things that seemed important—a family dispute, an exciting new job, a final exam, a date with someone you like—become negligible. One yearns for that which, until a moment ago, was taken for granted. Everywhere you go, you encounter people who feel that things cannot go on like this, that something (security, respect, deterrence) must be restored. And it is completely clear to everyone that whatever has been undermined can only be reinstated through violence.

Ukraine reminds us that giving up nuclear weapons is a very bad fucking idea. The question now is whether Israel will use them on Iran before it is too late.  

When everyone around you succumbs to this “necessity,” to this call of violence, it is very difficult not to surrender to it yourself and even harder to publicly disown it.

Unless you teach worthless shite.  

It is as if everyone has lost their minds all at once and made you into a madman, or worse, a potentially treasonous madman. When everyone around you thinks you are crazy, then you really must be crazy to believe you are sane. You must be crazy to think you are the only one to see clearly, even if you are in fact the only one who does.

This guy has a romantic conception of himself. The trouble is that nobody cares whether a stupid person sees clearly or not. All we ask is that they don't masturbate in public.  

You then have to choose between alienating yourself from the social relationships that give meaning to your life and alienating yourself from the meager, silent truth of war’s futility.

War is futile only in the sense that taking a dump is futile. Why fight simply in order to survive? Why take a shit when you'll need to take another shit sooner or later? We always have a choice not to take a dump. The moral insanity of Neo-Liberalism is revealed by the fact that wealthy, bourgeois, Westerners refuse to recognize that shit comes out of their arsehole on a regular basis. What happens to that shit? Is it not true that poor, dark skinned, people- many of whom may be disabled or homosexual- are having their faces smothered in that shit?  

By holding on to this truth you are losing everything you care for—you are losing your mind.

Not to mention your shit which ends up being piled on to the suffering faces of poor, dark skinned, disabled homosexuals.  

Unless you find others who see reality as you do, you are bound to capitulate; you will support the war.

Not to mention the ghastly bourgeois habit of shitting on a regular basis. 

The necessity of war is simply stronger than you. It descends upon you as a force of nature.

just like needing to take a shit- or 'answer a call of nature'.  

This is its own “fog of war,”

not to mention the foul stench that emanates from the shit you took causing you to pull the flush and then pull it again.  

this sense of necessity that clouds the collective mind until it embraces the insanity of war.

and the insanity of taking a dump. 

Conviction

In the early 2000s, when I was a soldier in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, my comrades and I took no interest in politics. Occasionally we had political arguments—I thought the occupation should end and that the Palestinians should have a state of their own—but we held no clearly articulated views about the justification for the military rule we were enforcing. We did not really care whether things could or should be otherwise, because things were not otherwise. The occupation was—it still is—a fact, and we were in the middle of it.

Why did this guy not simply emigrate?  Sadly, some Western countries have become so dangerous for Jews that they are having to make aliyah. 

We did understand, however, the internal logic of the occupation. We considered every non-Israeli a potential enemy, a potential terrorist, and knew that the only way to control 2.5 million Palestinians who lacked citizenship and basic civil rights

Some Israeli Arabs have committed terrorist crimes. Earlier this year Israel passed a law which will permit stripping citizenship from and deporting 'pay for slay' terrorists.  

was to make them fear us. We “showed our presence” by using force, sometimes in unpredictable ways. Any use of force, arbitrary as it may have been, was called “prevention”: by intimidating the civilian population with arbitrary violence, we diminished the risk of violent resistance to our rule, thereby preventing attacks.

It is now clear that the Israelis need to up-their game in this respect. Raw conscripts aren't going to be able to do the counter-intelligence the country clearly needs. 

Almost any person or action could be, or could be portrayed as, a threat warranting punishment. Decisions about who posed a threat and what punishment the threat merited were all determined by our “clear-headed judgments,” which were in turn supplied by our gut reactions. These reactions became more impulsive the longer we endured this predicament of complete uncertainty. As we harmed and injured more and more innocent people in order to prevent conceivable attacks, we felt the hatred toward us intensify and the threats multiply. We knew the danger we sensed was, at least partly, a reflection of our brutality, but knowing this did not make the danger any less real or alarming.

Gaza is not policed in the same way. Israel has paid a heavy price for its complacency. Will they occupy Gaza? If they don't, its people will continue to suffer. The hope was that China would broker a deal between Hamas and Israel. It appears that Hamas planned this attack precisely to prevent a Pax Sinica in the MENA.  That seems to have succeeded. An Israeli diplomat has been stabbed in Beijing after Israel criticized China's response to the Hamas atrocities.  

That is what we knew, or thought we knew, and that was enough. We did not feel the need to defend the legitimacy of the military rule we were enforcing. We were simply sons and daughters of our society. We wanted to please our parents and our friends; we wanted to be respected, esteemed, and desired. We wanted to be good Israelis, salt of the earth. For most of us, refusing to serve would have meant giving up all of this, becoming failures in the eyes of those we cared for, those who cared for us. Back home we were decent people, but the occupation was different; it required harshness. We planned to return to decency once we finished our three years of service. We were involved in a nightmarish break from reality, to be endured before returning victorious to our society.

It must be said, many young Israelis become disillusioned after military service. My impression is that the best and brightest are more interested in tech stuff or glamorous foreign assignments.

Whatever the shortcomings of the Israeli military, it must be said that Israel's enemies have became utterly barbaric. Hamas appears determined to become 'hostis humani generis'- the common enemy of all mankind. Gaza City may meet the fate of ISIS ruled Mosul and nobody will shed a tear.

Social necessity, not conviction, made possible my morally impermissible service as an enforcer of Israel’s military rule.

Is social necessity is a real thing, so is military necessity.  

Still, I should not have done it.

Doing it could have gotten this dude killed. We honour him for his service.  

Today I know others who, unlike me, refused to serve as occupiers. It was they who responded to war with conviction.

 Or with cowardice. Israel's Bench has ruled that unqualified pacifism is acceptable but 'selective refusal' (e.g. refusal to serve in the Occupied territories) is punishable. Perhaps some discretion could be used in such cases

Conviction need not be war’s ally and might well be its foremost adversary. By “conviction” I mean what John Locke described, in A Letter Concerning Toleration, as the life and power of true religion. “The care of Souls cannot belong to the Civil Magistrate, because his Power consists only in outward force,” Locke wrote. “But true and saving Religion consists in the inward persuasion of the Mind; without which nothing can be acceptable to God.” The point was that force cannot, and therefore should not, be used in order to influence or change the faith of individuals.

Why mention Locke? We don't believe anybody at all should have 'the care of Souls' and would certainly object to paying such a person's salary through our taxes. 

Locke also wished to bar religious leaders from using religious beliefs as instruments of political power.

He had no power to do so. Religious leaders are welcome to stand for election or to tell their acolytes how to vote.  

The alignment of religious conviction and political interest, he believed, was the source of religious strife in seventeenth-century England. By restricting political power to the civil interests of “life, liberty, health, and indolence of body,” Locke hoped to protect the innermost self—the place of conviction—from political power.

Emigration to America was the better alternative. England was peaceful in the long eighteenth century when Catholics and Dissenters faced various legal disabilities.  

The self whose convictions Locke defended is the self compelled by war’s necessity.

No it isn't. You can be as religious as you like while in the trenches. The 'Woodbine Willies' of the Great War (Army chaplains in the trenches) kept the faith and spread the Gospel under horrendous conditions.  

If conviction is kept separate from civil interests, then individuals may rely on it to resist the lure of war.

why not also the lure of shitting? I suppose the answer is that opposing war is sexy because war is sexy. Saying no to shitting seems silly. Yet, is it not a fact that people in affluent societies who take a dump are causing shit to be spread over the suffering of poor, dark skinned, disabled homosexuals in the Third World? Wake up sheeple! Neo-Liberalism is far more evil then the naive folk who run the Boston Review can ever imagine.  

For, in making up their minds about war,

or shitting 

individuals may resort to a worldview removed from the perspective of their political institutions. Religious communities and other ethical communities lacking direct political power may counteract collective madness.

and put an end to shitting 

The separation of state and church can protect us from the tyranny of politics as much as it protects us from the tyranny of religion.

also it can put an end to shitting. Obviously, the rich people who control the sewage industry are paying off the Boston Review to suppress this information. Personally I blame Julius Caesar. Either him or that rat fucker Spinoza.  Who hides my TV remote? It is the ghost of one or the other. I'm the only person who sees this clearly. Yet I am shunned and considered insane! How very convenient for Big Sewage!

Conviction can be nurtured in an ethical community of one’s neighborhood,

Not if its members regularly take a dump 

but equally by one that extends across time and place, such as a religious or artistic community—

Shakespeare used to take prodigious dumps. Then he stopped and became the 'immortal Bard'. I suppose that should be 'the immortal Brad' but back then peeps didn't spell so good. I've often pointed this out to I'm-in-the-John Milton.  

even when we have no physical contact with other members of the community.

probably because they are shitting 

The important point is that, for conviction to endure, there need be no immediate recognition of its validity, only the real possibility of recognition.

It is really possible that everybody will recognize I'm a fucking moral genius for my principled stand against defecation. 

We need to address someone who might actually listen, even if at present they cannot hear.

Would this guy really like me to call him up in the middle of the night to get him to listen to my views on defecation? 

They might be distant, but we must believe, if our conviction is to make sense to us, that there is a real chance they will receive our message. Conviction relies on a community, real or really possible, that subscribes to different standards than those of the majority. To be sure, I do not mean to support Glaucon’s cynical view, according to which we act justly merely in order to seem just, as a means of acquiring social status. But I believe Glaucon’s view is a caricature of an important truth: that the real possibility of seeming just to others is essential to our ability to act justly and understand ourselves as doing so.

But this real possibility applies equally to the anti-defecation activist. True. war is sexier but once one accepts that the Sewage Industry is dumping our turds on the faces of poor, disabled, homosexuals in Third World countries- coz that's how Neo-Liberal Globalization works- then it is genuinely possible that I will be recognized as a freakin' moral genius by people who run away on seeing me approach. 

A possibility of recognition offers an external point of view on the necessity of war and on politics more generally; it may account for individuals’ resilience in the face of social pressure.

Sadly, it the possibility of recognition as a freakin' moral genius which drives onward every crazy Hitler or Hamas. 

Conviction of this sort allows individuals to recognize themselves—their souls—even when no one else actually does. Those who act from conviction can rebel against what they think they know by siding with what they know without thinking.

We can just as easily give up shitting as we can give up violence, thinking dirty thoughts and pretending to be a cat when your g.f asks you to do the washing up. 

But the capacity to reject the seemingly indisputable has a dark side, too. It is the capacity Abraham exercised when he conceded to God’s demand to slaughter his beloved son, Isaac.

Back then, it was common for certain communities to sacrifice their first born to the tribal deity. Abraham would not have conceded to God's demand to shove a radish up his bum and run around the place bollock naked. 

Somewhat against rabbinic tradition, I interpret the Binding of Isaac (Akedah) as a reminder that when conviction is abused, it may facilitate evil. Abraham’s boundless love of God morphs into his unfathomable betrayal of his son.

Not really. The sacrificial victim attains Heaven. Back then Hindus were sacrificing cows so that they would attain Indra's Heaven. Naturally, only the best and most beautiful cows were sacrificed. Then the Jains and the Buddhists pointed out that Society had degenerated. Animals were being sacrificed because they tasted good. God had nothing to do with it. 

Isaac’s question for his father—“Where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”—is the question of common sense asked against the backdrop of absolute devotion. There are horrors only conviction can bring about.

It is lucky Isaac hadn't been commanded to smash in Abraham's skull with a rock. 

Our convictions are deeply and inevitably fallible and yet they are what we are most certain of.

Unless we are paid a little money to believe some other shite. There's a Kavka toxin type problem here.  

This certainty in the face of fallibility makes conviction dangerous,

Not unless the guy with the conviction is doing dangerous shit. Nobody really cares what my convictions are because I'm lazy, stupid and people run away when they see me coming.  

but can also make it a safeguard of our political conscience.

The conscience of elected politicians might matter. Nutty voters tend to cancel each other out. That is the beauty of the Condorcet Jury theorem.  

To the same degree that conviction can prevent us from yielding to good common sense, it can also be what keeps us sane when engulfed by insanity.

No. If somebody put LSD in your tea, your convictions won't prevent you doing crazy shit. 

Conviction does this by making possible a point of view removed from our immediate social environment.

Training in economics has an even better effect. Convictions don't matter. Economic analysis of an ideographic, quantitative type is something Governments and big Corporations actually pay for. I may be convinced that I look like a beautiful teen ager, but as an economist, I have to admit people won't pay to watch me play the role of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when, if there is a God, the franchise reboots. 

For example, some of the most influential right-wing politicians and activists in Israel are religious or of religious background. Yet, equally, some of the main activists in Israel’s anti-occupation movement are religious or had religious upbringings.

Hamas wants to kill both types of Jew. I think they are making a mistake by killing non-Jews of various nationalities. Sooner or later, the financial plug will be pulled and even if Gaza is rebuilt, its economy will be shit.  

Let me offer an anecdote to illustrate what I mean. Hebron, or al-Khalı̄l in Arabic, is a large Palestinian city in the West Bank and the only Palestinian city with a Jewish-Israeli settlement at its center. The Jewish settlement in Hebron is one of the most extreme in the West Bank. Its residents aim, explicitly, to expel all Palestinians from Hebron and thereby hasten the coming of the Messiah. About 215,500 Palestinians and 600 Jewish-Israeli settlers reside in Hebron. The settlers attack their Palestinian neighbors, invade their property, and enjoy the protection of the IDF while doing so. The Palestinians are not Israeli citizens and therefore do not have the benefit of IDF security. But there have also been Palestinian attacks on the Jewish community in Hebron. In response, the IDF makes a regular practice of evacuating Palestinian houses and businesses near Jewish houses. The settlers take advantage by occupying vacated structures. The IDF then steps in to defend the occupying settlers from possible retaliation and expels more Palestinians from the surrounding area. This has become a method of expansion for Hebron’s Jewish fundamentalists.

Why couldn't the Israeli Supreme Court put an end to this? I think this has to do with the nature of a particular military law. Perhaps if Israel had a written constitution, that law could be struck down. My point is, that convictions don't matter. Understanding the law and campaigning to change particular laws can make a difference. Pretending that 'war is a choice' is foolish. You merely bring your own academic discipline into disrepute by exhibiting your stupidity.

In 2007 Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist

a good man who promotes non-violent resistance rather than random knife attacks. Sadly, he was arrested by the Palestinian Authority for a Facebook post criticizing their arrest of a journalist. Following an international outcry, he was released. Apparently Israeli soldiers keep beating him up. Earlier this year he was stabbed by a soldier while giving an interview. 

and Hebron resident supported by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, rented a house in the middle of the Jewish settlement. The house was owned by a Palestinian family that had been forced out by the IDF. It stood deserted until Issa moved in. Fellow activists, myself included, half-jokingly called it “the first Palestinian settlement.” The house had to be repaired and renovated, and it was important to have Israeli activists on site in case settlers harassed or attacked the Palestinian workers. We took turns guarding the house with video cameras, ready to document any abuse.

Apparently, there was plenty of harassment and abuse. I suppose the real threat to the expansion of the settlements is non-violent, legal and political activism by a coalition of Arabs and Jews. 

One night three of us walked up a-Shuhada Street, on our way to take the midnight shift at the house. A-Shuhada Street leads to the Ibrahimi Mosque, which is built around the Cave of the Patriarchs, and used to be a thriving market. In 1994 after a Jewish settler massacred Muslim worshipers in the mosque, the street was closed to Palestinians in order to protect the settlers from retaliation. It remains a Jewish-only street. We climbed the hill to the Jewish neighborhood of Tel Rumeida, at the edge of which stood Issa’s house. It was close to midnight and everything was quiet save for a group of Jewish teens sitting around a fire, singing songs.

As we walked by them, they recognized us as Israeli Jews and asked where we were going. We said “Tel Rumeida” and kept on walking, trying to avoid further questioning. The kids persisted: “Which family are you visiting?” they shouted from behind us as we walked away. We ignored them. Then one of them had an idea. He whispered something in his friend’s ear and ran after us. “Hey! Are you crazy?” he said. “What are you doing walking here, in Hebron, in the middle of the night, without any protection? The Arabs will kill you! You will be slaughtered!” We were not alarmed. We knew we were not in danger.

So, the settlers would not kill or rape them because they were Jews. As for the Arabs, thanks to the IDF, they did not pose a threat.  

We were more worried about the settlers than the Palestinians. Observing our reaction, the kid turned to his friend and exclaimed victoriously, “I told you they are leftists!”

The kids wondered who these guys were. For some reason they were sure they were Jews. Were they visiting a particular family? If so, they would say so. Thus they must be with the Palestinian activist. Since Leftists wanted to 'exchange land for peace', these Jews must be Leftists.  

You see, as young as he was, the boy understood that, within Israeli society, only settlers and activists know Hebron for what it really is.

Nonsense! Even foreigners with little interest in the MENA are aware of the Hebron settlement.  It has certainly received extensive coverage on the BBC and other news channels.  

Neither group subscribes to the Israeli ethos of necessary violence.

Activists may be for non-violence. Why would 'Settlers' not want to resist people trying to kill them and take their property? How stupid is this Professor?  

The settlers condone and choose violence in the service of religious and ethnic causes;

So they do subscribe to 'necessary violence'. They don't subscribe to unnecessary violence which is why they aren't constantly poking each others' eyes.  

the activists condemn and reject it for moral and religious reasons. But both settlers and activists act from conviction rather than fear.

No. Both are afraid of something. People who are convinced that non-violence is the only path forward (incidentally, buying and selling stuff is the essence of non-violence) are afraid that violence is addictive and 'mind-altering'. It is the most dangerous of drugs. As for the 'settlers' they are afraid they will be killed and their property will be taken over by their killers.  

For only conviction—the inward and full persuasion of the mind—can withstand the capriciousness of politics.

Nonsense! Conviction may cause you to go into politics but to acquire and keep power you have to be pragmatic. You have to do deals or engage with repugnant people. 

On the other hand, it is true that there are people- e.g. Christian Scientists- who believe that you have inward and full persuasion of mind then you can't fall ill. Indeed 'man yields not unto the angels, nor yet to death utterly, save by weakness of the will' or lack of conviction. This is why we can put an end to defecation. Since few of us are exposed to the hazards of war but all have to answer calls of nature, surely our priority as a species must be to first get rid of defecation and then prevent death or vulnerability to disease of injury. After that, by all means we can chose not to have war or gravity or penises of under average size.