by Ashutosh Jogalekar
Once again the world faces death and destruction, and once again it asks questions. The horrific assaults by Hamas on October 7 last year and the widespread bombing by the Israeli government in Gaza raise old questions of morality, law, history and national identity. We have been here before, and if history is any sad reminder, we will undoubtedly be here again. That is all the more reason to grapple with these questions.
For me, a particularly instructive guide to doing this is Errol Morris’s brilliant 2003 film, “The Fog of War”, that focuses on former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s “eleven lessons” drawn from failures of the United States in the Vietnam War. Probably my favorite documentary of all time, I find both the film and the man fascinating and the lessons timeless. McNamara at 85 is sharp as a tack and appears haunted with the weight of history and his central role in sending 58,000 American soldiers to their deaths in a small, impoverished country far away which was being bombed back into the stone age. Throughout the film he fixes the viewer with an unblinking stare, eyes often tearing up and conviction coming across. McNamara happens to be the only senior government official from any major U.S. war who has taken responsibility for his actions and – what is much more important than offering a simple mea culpa and moving on – gone into great details into the mistakes he and his colleagues made and what future generations can learn from them (in stark contrast, Morris’s similar film about Donald Rumsfeld is infuriating because unlike McNamara, Rumsfeld appears completely self-deluded and totally incapable of introspection).
For me McNamara’s lessons which are drawn from both World War 2 and Vietnam are uncannily applicable to the Israel-Palestine conflict, not so much for any answers they provide but for the soul-searching questions which must be asked. Here are the eleven lessons, and while all are important I will focus on a select few because I believe they are particularly relevant to the present war.
Lesson #1: Empathize with your enemy.
Lesson #2: Rationality alone will not save us.
Lesson #3: There’s something beyond one’s self.
Lesson #4: Maximize efficiency.
Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
Lesson #6: Get the data.
Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
Lesson #9: In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
Lesson #10: Never say never.
Lesson #11: You can’t change human nature.
Let’s start with what I consider to be the most important learning.
Lesson #1: Empathize with your enemy.
The world came closest to nuclear annihilation in October, 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union almost went to war over the Soviet Union’s installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba. McNamara recounts the story of Llewellyn (Tommy) Thompson, an advisor to President Kennedy, who convinced Kennedy that he must let Nikita Khrushchev save face in order to escape with his country’s self-respect from the crisis. That was the ultimate example of empathizing with your enemy, according to McNamara.
Empathy seems to be in short supply on both sides of the Israeli-Palestine conflict. A primary reason for this, as I see it, is because many people mistakenly confuse empathy with sympathy. They feel they should feel bad for their adversaries or, worse, give in to their demands. But empathy and sympathy are very different things. Empathy, as McNamara describes it, is looking at the world through someone else’s eyes: “We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes, just to understand the thoughts that lie behind their decisions and their actions.” You don’t need to agree with their world view or feel bad about them, but you do need to understand them, understand what the causes are that propel them to behave the way they do. The United States won the Cold War because we could empathize with the Soviets. The United States lost the Vietnam War because we could never empathize with the Vietnamese, never understand that what we thought was a proxy war with communist China and Russia was an internal civil war for self-determination.
I think there’s a similar lack of empathy on all sides of the Middle East conflict, whether it’s the Israeli government or the student protestors on campus. For one thing, empathy requires truly understanding your adversaries’ history, religion and culture, and I see very few discussions of these aspects of Israeli and Palestinian identity around. You cannot understand the conflict, for instance, without understanding Israel’s origins, without understanding how both David Ben-Gurion who was Israeli’s first prime minister and the Arabs in the region were at loggerheads and in an uneasy peace at best right from the beginning. And going centuries further back, you cannot understand the conflict without understanding the elemental role that religion – Jew vs Muslim – even more than land has played in the relationship. Understanding these historical, religious and cultural elements of a country or people is critical in developing empathy for them. And empathy not only plays a big role in taking a more human view of your adversaries, but it is also a practical tool. Good strategy flows directly from empathy. The lack of empathy is what crippled American efforts in Vietnam and Iraq, and they threaten to cripple peace in the Middle East.
What does empathy look like on the Israeli and the Palestinian side? For Israel it’s understanding that not every Palestinian is a supporter of Hamas and that collective punishment won’t necessarily win them the peace they want. For the Palestinians, it’s understanding that they cannot be at peace with Israel unless Hamas, their supposed benefactor, has Israel’s extinction explicitly written in its charter and is a bonafide terrorist group. Palestinians should understand that Israelis with their deeply ingrained cultural memories felt a trauma second only to the Holocaust when Hamas brutally murdered so many of them on October 7. Israelis should understand the trauma and damage they are inflicting on an entire generation of Palestinians by destroying hospitals and universities and killing so many children, children whose parents and brothers and sisters will grow up determined to avenge what they see is the wholesale destruction of their communities. Unless both sides understand these basic facts about each other there will be no empathy, and consequently no progress toward peace.
The next two lessons are closely related and should be considered together in my view.
Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
Lesson #9: In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
Perhaps the most profound question raised in any kind of conflict is the contrast between means and ends. In World War 2 McNamara was an officer in the U.S. Army Air Forces serving in Japan under General Curtis LeMay, a notoriously ruthless, almost brutal commander. LeMay led the firebombing of Japan in which between 50% and 90% of 62 Japanese cities were completely destroyed and hundreds of thousands of civilians killed. Most notoriously, in the single night of March 9-10, 1945, 100,000 Japanese civilians were burned to death in Tokyo. After the war, LeMay strikingly admitted that had his country lost he would have been tried for war crimes. McNamara acknowledged that he would have been considered a war criminal as well. And this is in spite of the fact that the end goal – the defeat of Japan – was considered an essential goal and a good one. In other words, decent men like McNamara committed what even they themselves would consider war crimes in service of a moral goal. They committed these war crimes because they thought that their response was proportional to Japanese aggression. Japan, after all, had started the war, so the gloves were off.
But these lessons raise profound questions about means and ends and about proportionality. Let’s apply them to the current conflict. Hamas brutally murdered and mutilated more than 1100 Israelis on October 7. Since then, Israel has killed more than 30,000 people in Gaza, two-thirds of whom are women and children. Most of its universities and schools have been destroyed, its cultural landmarks decimated. Before the conflict began, Israel gave more than a million of Gaza’s residents 24 hours to evacuate with all their belongings. We might well ask two important questions: Are Israel’s actions in Gaza proportional to what Hamas did? And do these actions constitute a war crime?
There has been a huge amount of discussion especially about the first question. Supporters of the bombing have pointed out that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are much more careful than other armies in making sure that the ratio of civilian to combatant casualties is minimized and that enemy residents, at least in their minds, are given prior warning. To them this makes the response proportional. They also point out, rightly in this case, that Hamas which has no pretense of protecting either enemy civilians or their own, uses its own people as human shields and hides not just in underground tunnels but in hospitals, schools and houses, structures which should be legitimately considered civilian and not military installations. Hamas also refuses to hand over the hostages it has unconditionally.
There is no doubt that the special nature of Hamas as a non-state terrorist group that cares minimally even about its own people makes the job of the Israeli army incredibly hard. And let’s reiterate that Hamas denies the very existence of Israel whereas Israel has at least tried to peacefully co-exist with Hamas and the Palestinians. There is also no doubt that Israel has a judicial review process in initiating army operations that is more careful and sophisticated than that of many other countries. In terms of intentions there is no doubt which side is better. But as Dwight Eisenhower once asked, if a driver of a school bus drove into a ditch, would we excuse his behavior by saying that he had good intentions? Ultimately outcomes matter, and in terms of outcomes the arguments made by the advocates of bombing Gaza inch uncomfortably close to the arguments made by LeMay in bombing Tokyo. In those cases, as in Hamas’s case, the Japanese (and the Germans) had concentrated their war-marking capability very close to civilian housing. Civilians were deeply integrated in war production in all countries including the United States. And just like Hamas, the Japanese in particular were considered fanatic soldiers who wouldn’t give up.
Thus, the aims in both cases – defeating Japan in World War 2 and defeating Hamas in the case of Israel – could be legitimately considered to be good aims. But the means can still be questioned. Did killing 100,000 Japanese in one night and destroying 62 of their cities justify the ends the United States was fighting for? Does killing 14,000 children in Gaza, many of whom have nothing to do with Hamas’s attacks, and destroying 60% of all civilian housing justify the ends Israel is fighting for? Had the United States in 1945 and Israel until 2023 tried every non-violent tool at their disposal, every diplomatic strategy, every backchannel, to bring about peace? More importantly, when does this stop? When 100,000 children are dead? Half a million? In other words, when do these actions become evil and how much evil should you do in order to do good?
It also does not help that bombing is not just morally questionable but strategically doubtful. Certainly the bombings of London, Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo were not just ineffective in destroying the morale of the British, Germans and Japanese but only succeeded in hardening their resolve to fight. In case of Germany the bombing only became effective when bombers could be escorted deep into the Third Reich by P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft, and that development came too late during the war. In Japan, dispute continues to this day whether the atomic bombs forced the Emperor to declare surrender; the best evidence seems to indicate that while the Emperor might have invoked the bomb, it was a convenient excuse to avoid admitting that it was the Russian declaration of war on Japan that really convinced the Japanese that there was no way out.
In justifying its actions in Gaza as proportional, Israel has invoked rules of war which say that the gains will be bigger than the human losses. And yet Israel’s own commanders and leaders would be hard-pressed to tell us whether their actions will get rid of Hamas completely, and whether they will do so for a short time or long-term. We can also be sure that just like in Dresden or Tokyo, the bombing of Gaza would have only hardened the resolve of those facing the rain of destruction on the ground, and while Israel is hoping that the relatives of the children killed in Gaza will hate Hamas more than they hate Israel, this is by no means certain. All that Israel has succeeded in doing with the bombing is to incur the opprobrium of most countries and rack up a moral burden.
Other lessons from McNamara’s list above can also be applied to the current conflict. “Get the data” and “Belief and seeing are often both wrong” are calls to treat news pieces in the media skeptically and to comprehensively analyze all data on current events before reaching a conclusion. In a conflict as polarizing as this, many of us regularly fall prey to selective reporting and confirmation bias, and I am no exception. But if we realize that all sides including ourselves are subject to emotional reasoning, and that more than one side is keen on propaganda, we will do a better job of getting the data and questioning what we see, especially on social media.
Many of us including I think that between Hamas and Israel Israel is unequivocally the good guy, the sole true democracy in the Middle East which at least tries to achieve co-existence with a fractious partner locked in a conflict going back centuries, as opposed to a state ruled by a terrorist group whose explicit agenda is to wipe Israel off the map and which cares little about its own people in achieving this agenda. But in order to preserve not just the world’s goodwill and support but a long-term practical strategy with the Palestinians, many of whom are as much under the boot of Hamas as Israel, the country should “be prepared to reexamine its reasoning” when necessary (lesson #8), empathize with its adversary, realize that many Palestinians are interested in peace and will only be hardened by conflict, and constantly question the distinction between the ends it seeks to achieve and the means it seeks to achieve them with. Similarly the Palestinians should understand that Hamas is at least as big an enemy of theirs as they consider Israel to be, an enemy that has no qualms about hiding in hospitals and schools and willingly using them as cannon fodder. As hard as that will be, these learnings might constitute the only road to a lasting peace and a moral high ground.
Ultimately it may be easy to feel depressed by lessons 2 and 11: “Rationality cannot save us.” and “You cannot change human nature.” War sometimes seems to be the natural state of humankind. And yet it would be easy to miss the islands of light in the ocean of darkness. Consider the danger of nuclear weapons. While the world still has much to fear from the catastrophe of an accidental nuclear exchange, through treaties, cajoling and occasionally coercing, we have drastically reduced and secured most of the world’s nuclear arsenals; they are now a fraction of what they were at the height of the Cold War. Americans who found nuclear war with the Soviet Union inevitable and regularly participated in “duck and cover” drills in their schools no longer put a nuclear exchange between the two countries at the top of their list of existential threats.
Similarly a string of laws, conventions, treaties and institutions ranging from the Geneva Convention to the Nuremberg Trials to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court have tried to rein in humanity’s worst excesses (sadly, both the United States and Israel have withdrawn their signatures to the Rome Statute to make their solders and officials immune from accusations of war crimes). Although there have been a string of proxy and local wars and occasional horrific genocides like that in Rwanda, no major war has claimed the lives of tens of millions of people since World War 2. Thus, although rationality may be in short supply it still exists, and although human nature cannot change it seems to change just enough for us to keep our hopes and efforts alive.
And those hopes and efforts are what will continue to matter.