Post #76: The Tao and the Dogs of War (Israel)

3 Nov. 2023

“The difficult things of the world

Can only be tackled when they are easy.

The big things of the world

Can only be achieved by attending to their small beginnings.”

—Tao Te Ching, chapter 63

     Before ethical quandaries as momentous and unfathomable as having to fight, though half-Jewish, in the Wehrmacht (#74), or perhaps those of weighing up the respective horrors of slaughtering peace-minded young partygoers by the hundreds, or raping wives in front of their husbands, or killing parents before the eyes of their small children—against those of laying siege to an urban area of two million, cutting off electricity and water supplies, and bombarding a city in a way that cannot possibly strike at combatants only: before such daunting prospects, our ethical intuitions may well fail us.

     Of course we can resolve our difficulties by resorting to tribal thinking—my people, right or wrong—or we may simplify the question until a clear answer takes shape, though one of much smaller scope than the question. (On the one hand, do Israelis have a right to protect themselves; on the other, are their policies towards the Palestinians unjustifiably cruel and high-handed? Neither is equivalent to the question really before us, but it may have to do under pressure.) Yet, even as we do what we perhaps must, we may be at least dimly aware that we are not doing the question justice. At bottom, it is far too complex for our approximate and interested calculations.

     I had an exchange about this difficulty with an Israeli acquaintance at my café yesterday, in which he expressed a great concern that I might expose myself to all manner of fake news. Only ask him, he proclaimed, and he could answer any questions I might have, “one hundred percent.” I flinched at such talk and could not help feeling that the butchers of Hamas did their demonic work with precisely this kind of moral certainty. He did not much like to hear me say that, obviously, and immediately assumed that I must be an enemy of Israel, or at least an unreliable friend, and was only conciliated when, as a last resort, I reluctantly played the Jewish card and showed him my menorah. (To present him also with the Iron Cross seemed inopportune under the circumstances.)

     Suddenly, as if by the touch of a magic wand, I was transformed from an obvious know-nothing to one who understood everything perfectly. “If you are Jewish, then you know what I am saying.” Mind you, I had never said that I was, only that I had a biographical connection to the conflict, both on my German and on my (slight) Jewish side,* and that one should be careful about judging anyone’s qualifications by this crudest of all criteria. But no such nuances got through. For him, perhaps understandably, it was a matter of which side one was on, little more; and there I must insist (though I gave up on doing so with him) that such thinking, on all sides, looks like the root of the problem to me.

     Not that I am drawn to untenable moral equivalencies, as if to say, going back a little further in time, that because of how the Americans put the torch to the cities of Japan long before the atomic bombs that everyone thinks of first, or because of what “Bomber” Harris did to Dresden, a city of no strategic value whatsoever but chock-full of cultural treasures and refugees in the final days of the war, the Allies can be set at the same moral level as Hitler and his henchmen. No, no, a thousand times no! What I am saying is nearly the opposite: whatever wrong you do, even in the right cause, must be answered for, and the more conflicts escalate, the more inevitable great evils become on all sides. The notorious Curtis LeMay was more clear-sighted in this respect than many of his more civil peers: “If we’d lost the war,” he told Robert McNamara, who had a part in designing the Japanese campaign, “we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” McNamara could not help agreeing, at least in retrospect.**

     My Israeli acquaintance was quite wrong to question my sympathies in the conflict: they are almost entirely with the Israelis, not because they are my tribe, but on civilizational grounds. It makes all the difference to me that the IDF makes a point of not targeting civilians, while for Hamas and ISIS and their ilk it seems almost a matter of pride and principle to do so. The stench of a death cult hovering over it all reminds me of Hitler’s orders, in the last days of the “Third Reich,” to destroy what remained of the country’s battered infrastructure because the Germans had proved themselves unworthy of the great cause he had once intended them for. One cannot sink lower as a human being, so far as I am concerned, and the scenes Hamas unleashed make me forget, temporarily, that there are, after all, human beings on both sides.

     The trouble with letting oneself be pulled too far into such morasses is that even the most hideous moral deformations do not arise out of thin air, but from conditions. Hitler and his fascist colleagues throughout Europe were not born monsters; they became what they were in the trenches of the First World War and the maddening dislocations of the inter-war years. That is not to excuse them, and I do not excuse Hamas. I would not stand in the way of the deadly rage coming their way; they conjured it up too deliberately. But I repeat: there are human beings on the other side, and there are reasons why they became what they are. It is in the nature of asymmetrical conflicts that the weaker party will resort to dirtier means. There was a time, under the British mandate, when some of the founders of Israel played the other part. Again, that is not equating things; it is an uncomfortable historical fact, as are the less presentable aspects of what happened in 1948, and since, to justify Palestinian memories of “the catastrophe.” Scrupulous Israeli historians who dare point out such things, like Tom Segev for example (no ideologue he), court hideous accusations; all the more credit to them for braving the blowback. That Israeli society, too, along with its accomplishments and distinctions, should have some serious birth defects, merely puts it on a par with other nations and can sound like an outrageous accusation only to those who are intent on setting it above.

     My point is not to play arbiter or judge over these kinds of outsized troubles, but quite the contrary, to insist that the more aggravated conflicts become, the more intractable the questions of right and wrong. One may still be able to pick a side, but the temperature would need to be brought down before clearer and more satisfying calculations become possible again. With a cooler, though no less empathetic head, surely it is legitimate to ask whether the lesson the Israelis have drawn from history—to be forever defending the Warsaw Ghetto—is really so conducive to keeping the peace, in the Middle East or anywhere else. Could anyone but the combatants themselves fail to recognize that now it is no ragtag band of starvelings armed with rusting rifles pitted against the most fearsome military establishment of the day, but very nearly the reverse—a society of latter-day Spartans, armed to the teeth with the best weapons money can buy, backed by the world’s most powerful allies, and holding the nuclear option in reserve? Where is the ghetto now? To note such tragic ironies is not to draw up charges; it is a murky, terribly fraught political and historical constellation that functions almost like a Rorschach test, where what you see reveals more about you than about the picture. One thing we can say for sure, however, heavily as the fog may lie over the scene: this is not 1943.

     It is not our squeamish sentimentalists, but the great teachers of mankind—Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Jesus, among others—who remind us most insistently that the force of arms, however well-justified, has a way of turning against its wielders. Even the most righteous victories create new hatreds and make new mortal enemies among the vanquished; we would do well, say the sages, if instead of rejoicing about our triumphs in battle, we mourned that we were not able to avert the war. (Lao Tzu’s appraisal that “victory is a funeral” would be heeded more reliably if the dead had not lost their voices along with everything else. Their cries from the grave would silence much that we have to say about war.) Whether mercy does indeed win wars, as the old master also professed, may be doubtful; that its absence has often lost the peace is not. “No country has ever benefited from prolonged warfare” comes to us from the master of the art himself, Sun Tzu, and would be apparent if we ran the accounts more soberly, valuing life more and battlefield honor less, and focusing more sharply on whether we are really coming out ahead of where we were before the fighting began, rather than ahead of the other side, whatever the cost. Those who live by the sword shall die by it. (Compare Lao Tzu chapters 30–31, 42, 67; Samyutta Nikaya 3:14–15; Matt. 26:52; The Art of War II.6, etc.)

     If all this be dismissed as mere dovish dreaming and outdated history, and Haaretz brushed aside for good measure as little more than a Palestinian propaganda rag (my Israeli acquaintance at the café once more), then one might at least ponder what the former heads of Shin Beth have to say. They cannot see everything coming, as recent events have shown; but last I heard they were not known for their soft heads, their bleeding hearts, or the feebleness of their commitment to the cause.***

     That this is not the time for turning the other cheek, anyone can see. Still the thought of all those Israeli boys heading into the mazes and tunnels of Gaza, perhaps never to emerge alive, looks far from ennobling to me, but horrifying. Much as I admire their courage, and much as I would say my prayers for them, I cannot help despairing that such things should be unavoidable. I would not know how to dispute the necessity, given where things stand, but this is not the stuff of glory as I understand it, but of nightmares. The boys on the other side, I do not see as clearly; but most of them would not, I hope to God, turn out to be fiends upon closer inspection, but more likely young men hoping, above all else, to prove themselves and earn the respect of their peers, much as anywhere else. The masks look very different; the faces beneath, when we do not content ourselves with the grimaces, much less so.

     How it is that the atrocities committed during the incursion would meet with admiration is beyond me. To celebrate such abominable deeds is to slam shut the door to amity and communion with mankind, and to throw open the gates of hell. But is such demented hatred an independently existing fact, as some would say? Or is it the result of a long trail of humiliations that the conflict itself has spawned in the concrete jungle, both mental and material, of refugee camps that are as old as the state of Israel? Or again, is it something that the witch-masters of the region have been deliberately fomenting for decades, the vile regime of the mullahs especially, but not only they?

     The invaders desecrated your homes, defiled your women, littered your streets with the bodies of the young and old alike. So you paint their walls red with blood, and reduce the rest to rubble. It is one of the oldest and saddest human stories, going back to the beginnings of recorded history, and beyond, if we could see that far; but so is the warning about what must come next. If you exact an eye for an eye (or rather ten for one, or a hundred), and you sow dragon’s teeth, you will reap a harvest of future warriors with murder on their minds. Over such scenes have the furies beat their dreary wings since time immemorial, blood crying out for ever more blood. It is not a matter of telling embittered neighbors how they must conduct their fatal feuds, for it is they, not the spectators, who must live with each other, or set against each other in deadly enmity. But what the onlookers may say, with the benefit of speaking from a safe distance, is that the cycle can never be broken this way, certainly not by force of arms alone, and probably not by it predominantly. It is the lovers of Israel, not its haters, who have most cause for shuddering at how many recruits for Hamas are made by every child, every wife or husband, every parent and every friend brought before desponding doctors who must do what they can with no reliable electricity and no anesthetics even.

     What would I do, if it were up to me? I don’t know, that is just my point; I thank the gods that such judgments are not mine to make, since I am not convinced that there are any good answers left when things have come to such a desperate pass. Then all reverts to the primitive default position, the stark equation of us against them, and we might as well be back to armies of ants battling one another, save for the refinements of our cruelty and our rarefied destructive powers. What I would ask is a different set of questions, namely how we got here and whether it really had to go this way; whether this is what we want for the next 75 years as well; and if not, how we can get on a different path. It is not for nothing that Gaza is so widely referred to as an open-air prison—schools of crime and mental derangement everywhere in the world, fertile soil and fertilizer for all the worst weeds and creepers that choke off the light and air for better growths. I cannot see clearly in such darkness; I do not think many can. We shall see, over the next few months, how far the talk of “solving the problem once and for all” by military means will take us. The tune is nothing new; the refrain will be nothing very new either, I fear.

     But enough of this, which risks making me sound, despite all my protestations to the contrary, as if I thought I could untangle the threads of a conflict long spun out of control. Let me take things in a different direction, towards what academic teachers of moral philosophy tend to do with these tangled skeins. Going by the textbook, one is usually presented with three dominant schools of ethical thought—the utilitarian, deontological, and virtue-based approaches—as if real moral decision-making ever operated in so tidy and systematic a fashion. Utilitarianism tends to find particular favor with the secular-minded academic of the Harvard type, while to lesser mortals it tends to look, and feel, especially unsatisfying. As commonly taught in university courses, utilitarianism is such a stale and sterile proposition because it proceeds on a premise that in real life is no more than a conceit, nay a colossal presumption, namely that we can reliably foretell the consequences of our actions. Artificial scenarios can easily be constructed in which the alternatives and their ramifications are clearly seen; but in presenting us with such tidy choices the designers are simply defining away the greatest practical difficulty, which is the sheer complexity of causal webs and the shadow of unintended consequences that looms many times larger in real life than the foreseeable consequences of which the textbooks make so much.

     Nor do we make our choices in the depersonalized manner that the utilitarians imagine, taking our measures by incorruptible moral scales, so to speak. What we do is mostly to choose our paths through life, seeing through a glass, darkly, often guided more by faith than understanding, and not so much by any sure sense of the outcomes as by probabilities only; and then life rolls the dice for us, and things unfold in a cascade of subtle effects that change not only external circumstances but the actors themselves in ways that no one could anticipate reliably. (Thus Arthur De Vany in his diet book, go figure (p. 144), and in a blog on “All you need to know about Zen and the Tao” that was viewed, he says, twenty thousand times on the day he first posted it. Oh what their joy and their glory must be…)

     Deontology may be found truer to life and more intuitive, especially by the religious, but raises difficult questions of its own about the authority behind the alleged duties, if that authority cannot be tacitly assumed. Who says? (Kantian categorial imperatives are meant to silence such insolent queries; with what success is debatable.) Virtue ethics, often running parallel to the school of duty, though in a less abstracted way, asks what kind of a person it would make me if I did this or that, and how worthy I would consider such an individual. A fairly robust approach so far as it goes, brought to considerable refinement by David Hume in his towering Treatise of Human Nature—one of the most indisputably intelligent books ever written, it seems to me, a model of how one ought to use the human mind, even if much of it goes over my head, alas. But how comprehensive the virtue-based scheme really is, for all its merits, remains an open question.

     In sum, wherever we turn for systematic guidance (we who are not academic moral philosophers, and perhaps even they), our ethical intuitions will pull us in different directions; far from exclusive or exhaustive, the elements of our ethical thinking that have been codified into the familiar schools seem, in real life, to mix and overlap in the most exasperating ways, while leaving egregious gaps at the same time. Rather than working out how to apply these schemes with more consistency, we reach for them casually, case-by-case, depending on which one happens to look best suited at any given time to making the complexity of our moral choices a little less daunting. Why so, if not because our moral thinking is not in fact a complete and coherent whole, but rather an evolved patchwork of intuitions, customs, and cultural adaptations that have worked, on the whole, well enough to be passed along, though they frustrate the rationalist’s demands at every turn.

     Behavioral Economics takes its cue from a similar dynamic around consumer choices, finding that even seemingly straightforward ones are in fact so complicated that if we tried to solve them by making proper comparative calculations of the options between us, they would overwhelm and paralyze us every time. What we do when we make such everyday choices with ease is to substitute much simpler questions, rules of thumb, and other mental shortcuts—heuristics, in technical language—that work well enough for our practical purposes, even if they could never satisfy an academic philosopher’s demand for rigor.

     Although I have not heard the same logic applied to ethics (as I am sure it has been), I suspect that we resolve our ethical difficulties in much the same manner, that is to say, not by the rationalist, systematizing exercises described in the academic textbooks, but by freely moving between intuitions that more analytical minds wish to keep neatly separated behind the fences of their respective schools. If we were no longer allowed to take these shortcuts, we might never arrive at practicable moral positions at all—assuming that we allow ourselves to be guided by considerations of right and wrong in the first place, rather than going by the more straightforward criterion of what we would prefer to do, perhaps the most common of all the substitutions of a different question…

     Proceeding thus, in the ordinary run of life, where our ethical difficulties remain at an everyday scale, we can usually manage well enough by such crude methods; but the teachers of moral philosophy have no great difficulty presenting and confounding us with elaborate puzzles where our intuitions fail or clash irreconcilably. As the scope of the issues expands, unresolvable dilemmas become more and more pervasive until, before true moral enormities, they are practically inevitable and retaining one’s ability to take a definite position may mean ipso facto narrowing one’s outlook and deliberately not giving weight to countervailing considerations.

     The key lesson I take from this descent into confusion is to mind the beginnings of moral difficulties, while our intuitions still serve and something can be done by our ordinary means. (Not only the Tao but the Pali Canon too stresses this angle: see Digha Nikaya 26:9–21, for example, on how the ills of the world spring from small beginnings and multiply from thence until they soon become unmanageable.) The natural home of human morality is here: concerned with the humdrum rights and wrongs of everyday life, not the enigmas over which we are made to obsess in classrooms, movies, and nightmares. Easily 95 percent of the moral issues we face are quite resolvable, even by something so simple as the golden rule of treating others as you would like to be treated by them; indeed they are usually so basic that we do not even recognize them as moral choices because the answers are so obvious and generally not too difficult to carry out. It’s the final 5 percent that present difficulties, and only a tiny subset involves us in truly impossible choices; these matter too, but they constitute the extreme and most hopeless end of the spectrum. They are, to be sure, legitimate cause for despair; but they are also, despite their terrifying appearance, mercifully rare exceptions, not the rule.

     (To my Israeli friends, with love.)

*Another Israeli acquaintance, whom I’ve known for longer (at the same café), once proclaimed to me that he thought German culture should have been eradicated without a trace after the Second World War. I did not wish to personalize things unduly by pointing out that he had just done away with me, a product of that culture (whether I like it or not, as he well knows, #105). So I answered instead that German Jews had made great contributions to what was after all their culture too; would he destroy all that was theirs as well? Of course, he said, away with it all. I told him that he was talking like a Nazi in reverse, and to leave me alone with it.

**The scene is recounted in The Fog of War (2003), a remarkable documentary about the moral quandaries of large-scale conflicts. Fog is so apt a metaphor not only because of the practical uncertainties, but even more because the rights and wrongs become so blurred as conflicts escalate. War starts where everyday morality ends, by systematically doing to others what we most dread having to suffer at their hands ourselves—and descends, from such bleak beginnings, deeper and deeper into the precincts of darkness with every step. It is incumbent on us to find our way out, and perhaps we really have been getting a little better at it over time; but that is small consolation when one is reminded how quickly we can revert to the old ways that have not, it seems, ever gone away, only receded from the surface.

***Witness The Gatekeepers (2012), another unforgettable documentary about hard-boiled decision makers who know their stuff.

PS (12 June 2024): Events since I first posted my text seven months have borne out, to my deep regret, the doleful presentiments I shared then. My expression of faith in the professionalism of the IDF, specifically my trust that they would not target civilians deliberately, may look naïve now to some. The tolerance for “collateral damage” that the Israelis have been displaying is such that even respectable commentators, John Mearsheimer among them, are interpreting it as evidence that the unacknowledged purpose of the campaign is to make Gaza uninhabitable and drive its residents out, never to return.

     I continue to have faith in the better angels of our nature, and I do not impute such dark motives to the Israelis. I believe them to be as tragically trapped, in their way, as the Palestinians are, in a cage to the making of which both sides have amply contributed. October 7th itself looks to me now as it did before, an abomination; the only thing I would add is that the Hamas leadership apparently did not, by their own professions and evidence that has emerged since, expect their operation to go as far as it did. What they were aiming for, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, was not an attempted prelude to genocide, which would have made little sense in the political context, but a commando-style raid, spectacular but limited, to mark the occasion and make their presence felt. It was designed as a grave provocation, to be sure, but on the crucial assumption that they would run straight into a perfectly prepared foe, well-informed about their movements, and awaiting them in full strength on such a historically salient day. This did not happen, for reasons that would require a separate treatment, and the operation, now without the determined resistance for which it had been calculated, took on a magnitude that was not intended, and spun out of control.

     The fact that October 7th was not meant, if I am not mistaken, to become as abandoned a sadistic rampage as it turned out, does not excuse anything; but it casts a somewhat different light on the matter. That the day marks another milestone on the road to hell seems indisputable to me; but more than that, it also illustrates, in darker shades than ever, what happens when enemies in so bitter and protracted a conflict misjudge one another and rely on military prowess to bear the brunt of their dealings with each other. Paradoxical as it may sound, both sides on that horrible day fell victim to the myth of the invincible IDF, to disastrous effect, and are doing so still, as the Spartans keep scrambling through a Red Sea of blood to recover their reputation, perhaps only to achieve the opposite in the end. If I am confident of anything in this heartbreaking and distressing picture, it is that there can never be a purely military solution to the problem. It is not a war that can be decisively won, given the complexity of its circumstances, no matter how loudly you cry for victory or how formidable a military establishment you roll out. Battles may be won that way, at the cost of frightful carnage in urban areas, but not the war, and never the peace.