The Delusion of Being 'Anti-War'

There is a dangerous confusion between opposing violence and refusing to confront those who initiate it.

The IDF Chief of Staff saluting members of the Israeli Air Force (photo: IDF/X)

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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In much of the Western world today, “anti-war” has become a kind of moral identity. It is worn as a badge of virtue — proof that one stands on the side of humanity, compassion, and peace. To be “anti-war” is assumed to be enlightened.

But there is something strange about the way this mentality works.

In many cases, the modern Western version of “anti-war” does not actually oppose violence. Instead, it opposes the use of force by societies that are defending themselves. The target of the moral outrage is not aggression; it is retaliation.

Nowhere is this contrast clearer than when you compare the mentality of much of the West with the mentality of Israelis.

One of the great confusions in modern political language is the assumption that the opposite of anti-war must be pro-war. But this is a false binary. The real opposite of anti-war is not pro-war; it is self-defense.

Most wars in history have not begun because a society woke up one morning craving bloodshed. Wars happen because someone attacks, threatens, or refuses to accept the existence of another society. At that point, the attacked side faces a simple choice: Defend itself, or submit.

Framing this dilemma as a choice between “peace” and “war” is misleading. Often the real choice is between defense and surrender.

Yet the modern “anti-war” mentality frequently refuses to acknowledge this distinction. Instead, it treats all violence as morally equivalent, regardless of who initiated it. A terrorist attack and a military response are collapsed into the same category: war.

Or let’s get more specific: Israel and Iran actually had peaceful diplomatic relations once upon a time. Iran recognized Israel and maintained economic, intelligence, and military cooperation with it. That all changed in 1979 when Islamists seized power during the Iranian Revolution, unilaterally removed relations with Israel, and made “Death to Israel” one of its trademarks — while pursuing nuclear weapons and other military capabilities that could turn that slogan into reality. After 46 years, Israel, unsurprisingly, takes those threats seriously.

Yet when Israel acts to stop a regime openly calling for its destruction, it is often the one accused of being “the aggressor,” all derived from a worldview in which defending yourself becomes morally suspect.

This is both perverted and absurd.

For one thing — and it is remarkable that this even needs to be said — Israelis are not “pro-war.” Judaism is not “pro-war.” Jews are not “pro-war.” But we cannot foolishly be “anti-war” either, especially when it comes to Israel, and especially when we have savages on Israel’s borders — Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah — which openly call for Israel’s destruction while arming themselves to the teeth, and when we have their chief patron, the Islamic Republic of Iran, aggressively backing them with funds, weapons, training, safe havens, and other support.

Hence Israel’s longstanding doctrine of self-defense, which is the only respectable doctrine any country should ever have. Self-defense is not just waiting to be attacked and responding after the fact. It also involves a concept that has largely disappeared from Western moral discourse: deterrence, or making the cost of attacking you so high that your enemies think twice before trying. It is not about loving war; it is about preventing the next one. A country that refuses to deter its enemies is not peaceful; it is inviting aggression.

This is why Gaza lies in ruins today.

Israel’s post-October 7th policy in Gaza has been painstakingly clear and absolutely necessary: You don’t get to slaughter 1,200 Israelis (the equivalent of roughly 41,000 Americans, 8,400 Britons, or 3,360 Australians) and walk away with your territory untouched.

But Israel also learned something important from October 7th: We no longer wait for our enemies to take the fight to us, a reversal from decades of the opposite.

One of the most famous examples of this earlier restraint occurred on the morning of Yom Kippur in 1973, when Prime Minister Golda Meir and other Israeli officials met at 8:05 a.m., six hours before the Yom Kippur War began. Some of the officials supported a preemptive strike against Syria, but Meir came to a clear decision. There would be no preemptive attack, since Israel might very well need U.S. assistance and it was imperative that Israel not be blamed for starting the war.

Prior to the conflict, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon had explicitly and repeatedly warned Meir that she must not be responsible for initiating a Middle East war. On that same morning as the Israeli officials met, Kissinger sent a further dispatch discouraging a preemptive strike. According to Kissinger, had Israel struck first, it would not have received “so much as a nail.”

Egypt and Syria eventually launched the first attack to start the Yom Kippur War, and it went on to become one of the worst disasters in Israeli history.

This is why, on the morning of February 28th, Israel and the United States preemptively struck the Iranian regime. Since 1979, that regime has not just been preaching and working toward its chant of “Death to Israel,” but also “Death to America.” In much of the West, this is often dismissed as rhetoric — a slogan, a piece of political theater.

But rhetoric matters, especially when it is backed by action. The same regime that encourages crowds to chant “Death to America” has supported groups responsible for killing Americans across the Middle East. From kidnappings to terrorist bombings to attacks on U.S. soldiers, these threats have not been hypothetical. They have already taken hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives.

Imagine the reverse scenario: a crowd of Americans chanting “Death to Iran.” Not as a fringe protest, but as a state-sanctioned chant broadcast regularly on national television. How long would such rhetoric be tolerated?

In reality, it wouldn’t last a single day. Anyone publicly leading such chants would be condemned, canceled, and likely investigated. Western societies have built powerful norms against language that openly calls for the destruction of another people.

When people chant for your destruction and build weapons to make it happen, the debate about war changes. It becomes less about ideology and more about survival. Israelis understand this. Many Westerners do not.

Instead, they are often hamstrung by the lingering trauma of past military failures, which has hardened into a reflexive belief that war itself — rather than the circumstances that lead to it — is the problem. In this mindset, the lessons of earlier misadventures are overgeneralized into a sweeping doctrine: Because some wars were costly, misguided, or poorly executed, future wars must therefore also be wrong.

But this reasoning collapses under basic logic. The failure of one war does not invalidate the necessity of another. By that standard, no country could ever fight again after a single military mistake. History is full of disastrous wars, but it is also full of necessary ones. Few people today argue that the Allies should have remained “anti-war” in the face of Nazi expansion during World War II simply because earlier conflicts had been catastrophic.

Bad wars teach lessons about strategy, leadership, and restraint; they do not eliminate the fundamental right of societies to defend themselves when genuine threats emerge. Treating every new conflict as illegitimate because previous ones were mishandled is not wisdom; it is historical paralysis.

Thus, the irony is that the mentality often labeled “anti-war” is frequently the one least focused on preventing war. Deterrence works precisely because it discourages conflict. When potential aggressors know that attacking you will lead to devastating consequences, they often choose not to attack at all. And when regimes learn that violent “rhetoric,” especially rhetoric paired with weapons programs and proxy militias, will trigger preemptive responses, they may begin to reconsider how casually they issue such threats. Strength, when used to establish clear consequences, can create stability.

This principle has been understood throughout history. The long peace between major powers during the nuclear era — the Cold War — was not achieved through universal goodwill, but through the logic of deterrence. Israel applies a similar logic on a smaller scale. The goal is not endless war, but preventing the next one by ensuring that enemies understand the cost of aggression.

Western anti-war activists often interpret this mindset as militarism. But to Israelis, it is simply realism.

None of this means war should be celebrated. War is tragedy. It destroys lives, families, and communities. But refusing to defend yourself does not make war disappear; it simply shifts the advantage to those willing to use violence.

The strange mentality of modern “anti-war” politics lies in its inability to distinguish between aggression and defense. It condemns war in theory, but in practice it often condemns the side responding to violence rather than the side initiating it.

Israelis, shaped by a different reality, reject this confusion. They do not aspire to war. But they do not apologize for self-defense. And in a world where threats are often real, that clarity may be one of the most honest forms of being pro-peace there is.

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