Much More Harm

The mutual protection that people of a group provide to one another, protection from transgressors inside and aggressors from outside, is one of the most basic principles without which no human being can live a peaceful life.

The principle of having empathy for people from another group is also fundamental.

In wars, those two principles seem to clash.

The only possible solution seems to be finding the point where these two principles meet: you don't attack peaceful neighbors, and when you have to strike in self-defense you never aim at civillians, and do the best you can to mitigate civillian harm.

There will still be collateral damage, but the moment you take away the right of a group to fight to defend itself trying to balance those two principles, you are rewarding the leaderships that promote aggression and don't care for their own people.

Because we will be "forgeting" who started situations and releasing them from the responsibility to provide safety for their own.

Collateral damage is always tragic, but rewarding aggressive and careless leaders will have evil consequences that are neither hipotetical nor abstract. Nor are they new.

This logic of how things work in our planet should not feel so counterintuitive. It only goes to show that the concern for human life should not be limited to seeing war casualties and suddenly being outraged.

There is a part of the World where life is not valued. We just can't magicaly make life on that side of the fence to have the same logic that it has in peaceful places.

But we can, and must, be clear with leaders that don't value the life of their own people.

And we certainly must be ready to show some kind of response when the resources of some region start being alocated for ideologies, capacity and plans of aggression.

Why are we hesitant in considering tyrants as enemies, and then want people under their rule not to be subject to the consequences of those ideologies?

There is nothing gained in being blind to diferences in human Societies. Each people have their own traditions that obviously must be respected, but the valuation or devaluation of human life must be seen as a primordial and not abstract aspect of reality.

We can't go all the way and suddenly protect everybody in the World as if their were our own children, but the more firm we are with our standards, the more we make them clear, not being friends with people who treat human life as disposable, suspecting them, and, honestly, being always against them, always fighting them in some form, the more we will be acting in favor of life.

Until then, each and every sudden outburst of global "concern" can and will be used to cause much more harm than relief.

Enter Into The Picture

 "The Syrian Civil War (2010s) killed ten times more Arab Muslins then the current War between Israel and Hamas".

"Oh, you are changing subject"

Really?

This is the territory of France projected, in scale, over the Middle East.

This is Texas.

This is the region where you expect Israel to make miracles.

Ladies and gentlemen, activists, journalists, UN, say Hi ...

to the most careful gun of Texas.

Human Safety, Principles, and the Present Opportunity

Since the beginning, humans have been forming groups. Tribes, Nations. That's how we organized societies. A group of people that provide each other some safety. Protect each other from transgressors inside the group and from agressors from outside. Cultures have formed, with shared values and a sense of mutual protection. That's just how it is. Besides this group protection, is there any other way in which any human being can feel safe and build a peaceful life?

Countries came to be. We have to agree that this group protection is a fundamental principle of human life.

Now, of course, we learned, our moral sense evolved, and we developed another principle: the necessity of caring for all humanity, the necessity of having empathy for people in the other groups. This is a very good principle, and necessary for building a better World. I believe it must be considered fundamental, too.

Well, in a war, these two principles pose complex questions for each other. Even when a country goes to war to eliminate a source of threat after being attacked, as is the case of Israel in their war against Hamas, there is going to be colateral damage, there will be loss of civillian lives, even when you do your best to minimize it. 

But you can't totally give away the right of a group to protect itself. So, how to balance these two principles?

People talk about "proportion". But I think it is a wrong idea of proportion. They compare numbers of civillian casualties. But it is not so simple. In fact, you don't hurt one single civillian on the other side to "match the number" of your hurt civillians. That would be wrong.

Once you go to a war because the other ways to bring safety to your people didn't work, you fight for a goal - namely, to eliminate the source of the threat - and you make the best to achieve the necessary goal with the minimal damage possible.

Journalists like to talk about numbers. But how do you calculate what would happen if the Israeli forces haven't destroyed so many missile launchers, both in Gaza and in Lebannon - remembering that Hamas and Hezbollah started firing missiles immediately after October 7th, the massacre that started this war? How do you calculate what would happen if Hezbollah launched the operation "Conquer the Galilee" - a plan to invade Israel by the North killing people, a plan that was in advanced stage? How to calculate what would happen if the terrorists managed to totally take Israeli small towns and communities, gaining terrain, as was their plan?

And moreover, how do you calculate what would be the future of Muslin Arabs if Terrorist Organizations backed by Iran were allowed to grow freely and completely destabilize the region, considering that just the Syrian Civil War caused ten times more Muslin Arab casualties than this Israel-Hamas War?

Well, since you don't have an Omniscient Computer, able to calculate perfectly the exact mathematical outcome in the future of every single human decision, human beings act guided by principles. What else if left for us?

You put the fundamental principles side by side. Like the principle of self-defense of a people and the principle of empathy for all people. Then you try to find the balance. You try to serve each one the best you can without abandoning the other.

You protect your people. You don't aim at civillians on the other side. Even in strikes against military targets, you do the best you can to minimize colateral damage.

Asking someone to do more than that, is asking them to abandon the right of self-defense. And that is like asking someone to sacrifice their own people. Can't you see this kind of sacrifice can't be the guarantee of any good?

What is left, is to find the meeting point of those two fundamental principles. Which is fighting with ethics, minimizing the damage.

Israel has shown their consistent focus on the Terrorist Organizations.They have eliminated pratically all of the main leaders, the most protected people.

This World has always been full of wars. The World we want, a World without war, will come with the cooperation between peoples, between Nations. It can't be brought to be by Israel alone.

To move forward towards a better World, we need to ascribe the right responsibilities. If in this sequence of events - Hamas promotes a massacre on Israel - Israel fights back - Hamas uses their people as human shields - if in this sequence of events you place the responsibility on Israel, you are rewarding both aggression and carelessness.

Some people seem to be guided by this idea: Israel is a Country, Hamas are terrorists, you can demand things from a country, you can't demand things from a terrorist organization. Wait... are you sure of that? What if you can?

People who value life want a World with no wars. But there is an other kind of people too, have you realized?

The other side exist, too. And it's alive and manouvering. And the exact moment you reject the pursuit of a meeting point between the principles of self-defense and consideration for all peoples, you reward carelessness and aggression.

In other words, when we think of the future of humanity, we either balance those two things, or we will end up with none.

Now there is a ceasefire, and the agreements say Hamas must disarm. Instead of pressing for that - which would bring a better time for the region, including for Gazans, most leaders of the World prefer to demonize Israel.

Some even talk about a Palestinian State, when it was precisely the rejection of the Two State Solution by the Arab leaders that caused all this - and they still didn't say "Israel is legitimate".

On excuses like "sovereignity of Gaza" - bullshit talk about the sovereignity of a people who lives under a tyrannic Terrorist Organization for decades, people seem comfortable to lose the best opportunity we had in a long time to start erasing Terrorism.

I don't know. Maybe they don't want to see how Israel would act without Terrorism. Maybe they've been talking about "genocide" for so long that they are afraid to give Israel a chance to show that all they want is peace.

Prints

 

Clarity

I say to look to natural reserves as a source of power not for bringing hatred, but for clarity about power.

I don't want any Global War - God forbid. But the vocabulary of "oppression" is being perverted for political agendas.

Africa was raped? Yes, and it was a bloody shame.

India was mistreated, and so were native americans and some others.

But China and the Arab Nations had Strong Empires along most of History.

This in no way means we should consider all chinese people or arab people as inherent enemies. That would be untrue and morally wrong.

But extending the oppressed condition to Nations who aren't victims of oppression is a historical mistake.

And leads us to strange inversions.

Like calling the Jews colonizers. Jews are not colonizers of other peoples. As a people - because of course there are bad individuals everywhere - but as a people, they've just been carrying on.

And Israel is the only country they ever had - back there, and now.

IDF

 

Defense and The Absence of It

If you care for human life, you should go a little deeper than the television news and social media, and understand that what happens in the World is a bit more complex than what the slogan people want us to think. You can't go around reducing everything to a mathematical question, making simplistic calculations about human life and death with the numbers you see on the News, and throw away foundational values of civilization, like the right of a country to defend itself, just because it is not your country.

In the current war Israel is in, there are losses on both sides, but the fact that the number in gaza is bigger - although i repeat: since when 1200 is a small number? - it shouldn't erase the order of things, of causes and consequences, who started it, and the cruelty of a diabolical attack purposely random.

It is all very tragic, like wars always are, but we must understand that what many people are demanding - a total restraint on the israeli side - brings no peace. No good development to the region.

While people in the West can feel temporarily satisfied with Israel giving up its strength, the situation in the region will just keep gradually getting worse, with more violence brewing.

How can I say that for sure? Well, because in reality, October 7th was the culmination of a long story, not the start. People who just get it all from the News, may feel that October 7th was the start of something, then Israel's response made it worse. But for the Israelis, it was the result of many, many years of a Terrorist Organization growing just beyond the border, making attacks and preparing to do more and more. It showed that, if that enemy can do evil, it will do, every time, and nothing will "convince" them not to. It was when Israel decided they can't wait anymore for a peaceful solution with Hamas. Or Hezbolah.

After the October 7th massacre, Israel was left with two possibilities. In one, you do nothing and just watch Hamas grow their capabilities of doing harm. In the other, you go to War, and it will have colateral damage, which is tragic.

But we must take away, from our minds, the idea of some kind of innocence in doing nothing. The idea that if you are not acting, you have nothing to respond to. In a situation like this, not taking action is a decision, and every decision has its consequences. If you make the decision of doing nothing, there will also be colateral damage to that decision - more attacks on your people - and you will be responsible for the decision you made.

So the two possibilities, doing nothing or going to war, then translate into two ways of seeing moral duty.

In one, you stick to the notion that when your loved ones are attacked, there must be something you need to do.

In the other, you are being complacent with evil for mathematical reasons.

That kind of mathematics never seem to bring any peace or any good at long term. For Israel and for the World.

See, when israel says that this terrorist activity destabilizes the entire region, they are not talking about simple political polarizations, or small political crisis. They are talking about a region where huge waves of violence are not rare at all, and where terrible dictatorships find their way into power and become very hard to be taken away. A region which is the stage for terrible Civil Wars and horrible massacres.

I am not saying this to defend an idea that Israel has the right to do "anything". It's obvious that, no matter what, they will always have the obligation to avoid colateral harm as much as they can. But I am saying that your numbers just don't have all the answers.

The Jews know that they deserve the safety they are building, after so many centuries of persecution.

Some people don't really get the idea of Peoplehood. It's hard to explain the Israeli point of view for people who don't understand this kind of connection. Peoplehood brings a shared sense of safety. Defending this safety is defending something that is necessary for the World.

We must stop pretending, for convenience, that the World was at peace untill the nation who is winning the current conflict started firing. That would make it so easy to find the solution, wouldn't it?

But then we risk to erase universal right and wrong. Which I believe some people would like.

Some people want to make us forget to ask who started a war, and other chains of cause and consequence. Including the moral imperative of defending your people.

When israelis hear the names of Terror groups, what comes to their minds is not simply a story they heard on the news. It's a danger that is right at their fence, a group of people who killed, raped, kidnaped, a whole lot of people, at random, and laughed all along, and all that very, very recently. A monster who promises to do more if it can.

A people is not obliged to deliver themselves to human sacrifice. This would be insane.

There are responsibilities that the World should have taken upon himself if we say we care so much for lives in the Middle East. We should not have just watched weapons being brought to Gaza, tunnels being built, children being indoctrined in Terror, Hamas becoming the government of Gaza, and so on.

There are always voices that raise themselves against any kind of "judgement" about what happens in other parts of the World. They say we can't "intervene with someone else's sovereignity". Well, we can't impose that people become exactly like us, but if we can't do anything when a weapon storage is being built, when a doctrine of destroying the neighbor is being established, then how can we change the natural consequences of it?

I do believe that, when a cult of death, when an ideology that clearly claims for the destruction of another country is developing, a line is being crossed, and some kind of action must be taken. Otherwise, it is only hipocrisy to say we care for life everywhere.

Now Israelis, and Palestinians too, are paying for the silence of the West while all this situation we have now was being created by insane leaders.

And if we become unable to respond to this insane leaders, then everybody, including Muslin Arabs, will be at their mercy.

It is not any secret that they use their own people as human shields, making the work insanely hard for Israel.

But we need common basic notions of good and evil, a good memory to remember who started the wars, a loud voice against cults of death, to know which side is the defender. Only then we can find our way in this World which is tragically always at war.

So we can allow the growing of the values that will make mankind free.

Is all this too abstract? Common values of good and evil, peoplehood, who started things, do this sound like "just talk" to you? Is cause and consequence an abstract thing?

I have a strange proposal: what if we joined our desire for peace with the possibilities of artificial intelligence and create a mechanism that makes impossible for any weapon, be it guns of missil launchers or fighter jets or whatever, to fire a single shot if there is any possibility of civilian damage? Imagine that we are so commited that we make this mechanism so powerful that no weapon in our country, existing or to be built, ever escape its surveillance, and it is absolutely impossible to ever, ever turn it off.

Now imagine that 3/4 of the countries in the World accept the proposal, but 1/4 doesn't. Now, what should we do? Imagine that the 3/4 are so willing for it that they activate their systems anyway, now just the other 1/4 doesn't have it. 

Which, of course, includes Iran... and Russia... North Korea... you got the picture.

Don't you think it would be insane from the start? Or do you think it would not be insane as long as the violence never gets at your door? God knows I hope it never gets here, but then, aren't we being a bit unfair to the Israelis?

Seriously, when you see the image of a masked and armed terrorist, does it feel abstract?

Your simplistic view is abstract. You rely on the false innocence of non action, while ignoring what it means in this Universe to erase the right of peoples to defend themselves.

And this will make us lose every oppirtunity that appears to end terrorism, this cult of death that already caused so much damage and just can't be tolerated.