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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Peace has excellent public relations.
Nobody marches demanding more war. Politicians do not receive prizes for prolonging conflicts. Diplomats are not photographed shaking hands beneath signs reading “A Sustainable Framework for Continuing Hostilities.”
The dove gets the branch. The hawk gets the bad reputation.
Consequently, we treat peace not just as something desirable, but as international affairs’ supreme moral objective. It is not. Sometimes there are things more important than peace. Freedom is one, survival is another, justice occasionally qualifies. So does preventing a psychotic, murderous enemy from becoming sufficiently powerful to murder you more efficiently next time.
These are the obvious points that Israel to explain to Washington, which is pressuring Jerusalem to sign on to U.S. President Donald Trump’s injudicious 15-point plan for peace in Gaza that foolishly leaves Hamas with some arms and does not leave Israel secure. Hamas will never disarm of its owns accord and anyone who thinks it will is in need of a lobotomy.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said that Hamas can disarm the easy way or the hard way, but that they will be disarmed. This should be uncontroversial. History is filled with peaceful arrangements that were abominable. Slavery, occupation, and tyranny can be peaceful. A prison is generally peaceful if the prisoners understand what happens when they resist.
Peace describes the absence of conflict, but it does not tell us whether the arrangement producing that absence is good.
Yet when Israel is involved, peace has acquired an almost theological status. Israel is continually urged to make sacrifices “for peace,” take risks “for peace,” accept restraints “for peace,” withdraw territory “for peace,” negotiate “for peace” and stop fighting “for peace.” The word ends arguments because nobody wants to announce himself against it.
So let us announce it: Sometimes peace is the wrong objective and war is preferable. That sounds barbaric only because comfortable societies have forgotten why wars are fought.
The Second World War could have ended considerably earlier had Britain been sufficiently committed to peace. After France fell in 1940, Britain could have sought an accommodation with Hitler. There were people who thought it should. Think of the lives that might have been spared: no Blitz, no years of bombing, no enormous British military losses, and peace. It would also have left Nazi Germany dominant across Europe.
Winston Churchill’s moral achievement was not that he loved war, but that he understood there are circumstances in which peace becomes synonymous with surrender.
This distinction has become particularly difficult for Western societies to grasp because they have spent several generations experiencing war principally as a policy choice. Afghanistan could be entered and exited. Iraq could be debated. Libya could be bombed and forgotten. For most Europeans, war became something governments did elsewhere. It was optional, distant, and increasingly regarded as evidence that diplomacy had somehow failed.
Israel has never enjoyed this luxury. For Israelis, war is not an expedition; it arrives at home. Rockets land in cities, terrorists cross borders, hostages are dragged from bedrooms, and reservists leave spouses, businesses, and children. The Jewish state’s enemies do not seek alterations to Israeli policy alone; they seek Israel’s destruction.
This creates a different understanding of peace. Israelis want peace, but they have learned to ask what comes after it. That question is frequently absent from Western diplomacy.
A ceasefire stops shooting. Excellent. Then what? Does Hamas disarm? Does Hezbollah surrender its missiles? Does Iran abandon its ambition to destroy Israel? Does Islamist ideology disappear? Do the tunnels collapse from embarrassment? Or does “peace” simply provide the weaker military actor time to recover?
A pause in violence is morally valuable when it reduces suffering and creates the conditions for something better. A pause that allows an aggressor to rearm may only postpone suffering while increasing its eventual scale. That is little more than an intermission.
Israel has experienced several of them. This is why the phrase “cycle of violence” is so intellectually lazy. A cycle has no beginning and no direction. It just turns. One side attacks, the other retaliates, the first retaliates against the retaliation. Round and round we go.
So everyone is implicated and everyone must de-escalate. It sounds sophisticated because it eliminates the crude vocabulary of aggressors and victims. It also frequently eliminates causality.
If someone repeatedly punches you and you eventually break his nose, you are technically participating in a “cycle of violence.” Who keeps throwing the first punch matters greatly, though. International diplomacy is increasingly reluctant to ask. Its highest priority is stopping the fight. That instinct, however understandable, can be disastrous. If aggression reliably produces international pressure for a ceasefire before the aggressor is decisively defeated, aggression acquires a strange strategic advantage.
Start war, inflict spectacular violence, absorb retaliation, allow civilian suffering to generate international outrage, demand a ceasefire, survive, rebuild. Rinse and repeat.
Sound familiar? This is the international community’s recipe for Israel and the Palestinians, and it is one reason the conflict remains unresolved after almost a century. The international community then congratulates itself for stopping the bloodshed, which returns several years later even worse.
We prefer this arrangement because peace feels morally clean. War implicates us in terrible choices. Once a war begins, innocent people die. Families are displaced. Soldiers make mistakes. Buildings collapse. People who had nothing to do with the decision to fight pay unbearable prices. Anyone who can look at such suffering without horror has lost something important.
But horror is not a strategy, and compassion does not relieve us of the obligation to ask what happens if the fighting stops before the political or military problem that caused it has been resolved. Sometimes fewer people die; other times more people die later. The West once understood this. The postwar international order was built not just on peacemaking, but upon the defeat of regimes that made peace impossible.
Nazism was not moderated into liberal democracy. It was destroyed. Imperial Japan was not persuaded through confidence-building measures to reconsider militarism. It took two atomic bombs to defeat it. Only afterward could durable peace emerge.
The principle is simple: There are political movements whose continued power makes peace impossible. In those cases, removing that power may be a prerequisite for peace rather than an obstacle to it. Hamas in Gaza, among other Iranian-backed actors, and the Islamic Republic of Iran itself present precisely this problem.
If Hamas were just demanding a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the conflict would be difficult but conceptually familiar. Borders could be negotiated, security arrangements devised, and prisoners exchanged. Diplomacy exists for such disagreements. Yet a movement committed to Israel’s elimination presents a different problem: You cannot compromise over your own existence. There is no sensible midpoint between Israel existing and Israel not existing.
Perhaps Israel could agree to exist on alternate Tuesdays. The absurdity reveals the problem: Peace requires some minimal agreement about the legitimacy of the other party’s continued presence. Without that, negotiations may produce pauses, arrangements, and tactical accommodations, but they cannot produce peace.
Yet Western policy often treats Israeli concessions as though they themselves generate moderation. Give territory and moderation will follow. Improve economic conditions and ideology will soften. Recognize political grievances and maximalism will decline.
Israel has tried all these things and all failed against the jihadism that infects Palestinian politics and dooms generations of Palestinians to misery. In the tribal Middle East, where strength equals respect, such concessions are often interpreted as weakness.
This is curiously difficult to discuss because it violates the comforting modern belief that conflict is the product of unmet needs rather than incompatible objectives. This is factual nonsense. The deeper confusion is between peace and goodness. Peace is not goodness; it is a condition under which goodness may flourish. That makes it enormously valuable.
Children should grow up without sirens. Palestinians should live without war. Israelis should live without massacres. Families should not spend nights wondering whether the knock at the door means their child has been killed.
The purpose of defeating violent movements is not war. It is the possibility of a peace that does not require one side to remain permanently vulnerable. That kind of peace requires courage and deterrence, committed institutions, and political cultures that can accept disappointment.
Most of all, it requires losers. That has become almost indecent in modern diplomacy. Everyone must emerge with dignity and have their grievances acknowledged. Nobody must feel humiliated.
It is tempting to say these are fine sentiments, but they are unadulterated gibberish. Wars usually end when somebody discovers that continuing them is worse than accepting the result. Germany and Japan learned this, as have countless other societies. Defeat can perform the morally useful function of destroying delusions and fantasies.
One of the great tragedies of Palestinian history is that defeat has repeatedly occurred without being allowed to become psychologically final. The dream of reversing the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 survives, the refugee status across generations survives, and the language of return survives. The complete delusion that sufficient “resistance” will eventually make Israel disappear survives. So every Palestinian is therefore invited to reopen a war that history has already settled.
True friends of Palestinians should be trying to close that door. Instead, too many hold it open in the name of so-called solidarity. Cruelty would be a more accurate description. A political culture that cannot accept defeat cannot build a future. It remains permanently mobilized against the past.
There is nothing humane about encouraging people to fight forever for an outcome they are not going to achieve. Compassion sometimes means telling a people that the war is over and they lost. Build something instead.
This is why peace cannot be the highest moral good. If peace only preserves the conditions that guarantee another war, it is not peace. If peace rewards aggression, then it incentivizes aggression. If peace requires a democracy to tolerate an armed movement committed to massacring its citizens, it is not a moral achievement. It is an arrangement.
The highest objective should be something harder: a political order in which people can live freely and safely without needing periodically to kill one another. Sometimes diplomacy, compromise, and forgiveness create that order. Sometimes, tragically, somebody has to lose first.
The dove is a beautiful symbol, but it can land safely only when someone has made the hawk afraid to eat it.
Beautifully expressed. Islam needs a “reformation” but that will never happen. Islam will give “peace a chance” only to strengthen their killing machines. 200 years, 1000 years …. They will wait.
I thought this was wonderful. Hamas have to give up their weapons forcibly. This cannot continue any more.
Whatever people do or don’t understand. It’s over