The problem isn’t Israel’s wars. It’s how the West thinks about war.
Long before the 20th century, ancient Jewish texts recognized what much of the modern West still refuses to accept: Not every enemy can be reasoned with.
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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.
There is a persistent temptation, especially among Israel’s critics, to explain its conduct in war as a kind of historical pathology.
The argument runs like this: A people that endured the Holocaust internalized a permanent sense of existential threat, and that trauma now expresses itself in a harsh, uncompromising approach to warfare. Israel, in this telling, fights as it does because it cannot escape its past.
It is a neat theory. It also misses a big part of the story.
It relieves its advocates of the burden of taking Israel seriously on its own terms. It allows them to reduce a coherent moral framework to a psychological aftershock. It is, in short, an argument that explains everything while understanding nothing.
Israel’s no-nonsense approach to warfare is certainly shaped in part by the Holocaust. However, it is far older, more deliberate, and more intellectually coherent than that. It is rooted in Torah thinking — a worldview that takes evil seriously, understands the fragility of civilization, and places moral responsibility on intentions and outcomes.
To understand Israel’s military doctrine, the place to begin is not in the ashes of Europe, but in the foundations of Jewish civilization. The Torah does not romanticize war; it regulates it, distinguishing between different kinds of enemies and demanding peace when possible and decisiveness when necessary. It recognizes that some conflicts can be resolved through negotiation and others cannot be resolved at all, only ended.
It begins not with denial but with recognition: “When you go out to war against your enemies…” (Deuteronomy 21:10). Not if; when. Civilizations that pretend otherwise tend not to last very long.
This is not the language of trauma, but of realism.
Modern Western thinking, by contrast, has drifted toward a very different assumption: that all conflicts are, at root, misunderstandings. That violence is a failure of communication. That if grievances were addressed, dignity affirmed, and economic conditions improved, enemies would become partners. This assumption survives only in the absence of serious enemies. It collapses at the feet of adversaries whose goals are not negotiable.
Israel has spent decades confronting precisely such adversaries — groups that do not seek compromise but elimination, movements that define victory not as coexistence but as the destruction of the Jewish state, and organizations for whom civilian death (on both sides) is not a tragedy but a tactic. In that environment, the Western model of conflict resolution is more delusional than humane. It mistakes sentiment for strategy and hopes that good intentions might one day substitute for deterrence.
They do not, so Israel fights differently.
Israelis fight with clarity about ends, urgency about threats, and a willingness to impose decisive costs on those who initiate violence. Critics describe this as excessive force. What they are reacting to is not excess, but finality. Wars, in this view, are not managed; they are ended.
The Torah contains a concept that modern discourse struggles to process: Failing to confront evil decisively is itself a moral failure. Restraint, when misapplied, does not produce peace; it prolongs suffering. Mercy toward those who weaponize mercy is not compassion; it is complicity.
The tradition is explicit in the Talmud: “If someone comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first” (Sanhedrin 72a). This is not a slogan of aggression; it is a doctrine of responsibility. The obligation is not only to avoid wrongdoing, but to prevent it. A moral system that cannot defend the innocent is not moral, only decorative.
This is where the Holocaust matters — yet not in the way critics suggest. The Holocaust did not create Jewish realism; it vindicated it. For centuries prior, Jews lived as a minority dependent on the tolerance of others. They developed ethical systems that emphasized justice, restraint, and the sanctity of life, often under conditions where they had little ability to defend themselves.
When that restraint was met not with reciprocity but with annihilation, the lesson was not that Jewish ethics had failed; it was that ethics without power are easily ignored, and eventually extinguished.
The Holocaust provided empirical confirmation of what the Torah had long assumed: that evil exists, that it is not always persuadable, and that failing to confront it decisively invites catastrophe. If Torah thinking is the theory, the Holocaust is the most devastating data point.
The State of Israel represents the reintroduction of power into a moral framework that never assumed it would remain powerless. That combination produces discomfort, especially for those who prefer a world that measures virtue by visible restraint rather than by the protection of the innocent. It is easier to admire restraint from a distance than to live with the consequences of its failure.
Consider the asymmetry embedded in much of the criticism directed at Israel. When Israel acts forcefully to neutralize threats, it is accused of disproportion. When it exercises restraint and suffers attacks, that suffering is treated as unfortunate yet expected. The underlying premise is clear: Israel, because it is stronger, must absorb violence rather than decisively end it. It demands that Israelis take risks others would never accept for themselves, in service of standards those same critics would quietly abandon the moment their own security was at stake.
Torah thinking rejects that premise outright. It does not assign moral responsibility based on relative strength, but on actions and intentions. If one side initiates violence and the other responds to stop it, the distinction is not murky. It is clear: “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:20). Not merely intend or proclaim. Pursue.
That clarity is deeply unfashionable in a Western culture where postmodern habits of thought have run amok. It speaks of “cycles of violence” as though causality were circular rather than directional. It obsesses over immediate outcomes while ignoring the incentives those outcomes create. It treats civilian casualties as the ultimate metric of morality without asking who placed those civilians in harm’s way — and why.
Israel’s approach cuts through that ambiguity. When Israelis target military infrastructure embedded within civilian areas, they are accused of recklessness. When they warn civilians to evacuate before striking — through leaflets, calls, and evacuation corridors — they are accused of psychological warfare or ethnic cleansing. When they refrain, Israeli civilians pay the price.
The problem is not what Israel does. It is that Israel refuses to participate in a moral game whose rules are written by those who will never have to live with the consequences.
At the same time, the caricature that post-Holocaust thinking alone drives Israeli policy collapses on contact with reality. A purely trauma-driven state would behave very differently. It would interpret every threat as existential, respond with maximal force at all times, and show little regard for proportionality, restraint, or humanitarian considerations.
That is not what Israel does.
Israelis calibrate, debate, and restrain themselves in ways that few countries facing comparable threats consistently do. They provide humanitarian aid to enemy populations, subject their military to legal scrutiny, and operate under rules of engagement that seek (often at real cost) to minimize civilian harm. These are not the behaviors of a state driven by unprocessed trauma. They are the behaviors of a state attempting to apply moral framework under increasingly amoral conditions.
Torah thinking does not eliminate moral tension; it structures it. The same tradition that commands, “Seek peace and pursue it” (Psalms 34:14), also recognizes that peace cannot be pursued at the cost of survival. The same legal framework that permits war imposes limits on its conduct. Even in siege warfare, the Torah prohibits wanton destruction: “Do not destroy its trees…” (Deuteronomy 20:19) — a striking constraint at the very moment of maximum force.
Nor does the tradition pretend that all enemies are reconcilable. Some forms of hostility are not situational; they are structural. The concept of Amalek reflects a recognition that there are adversaries whose defining characteristic is irreducible enmity. Not every conflict can be negotiated. Some must be ended.
This is a difficult framework for modern minds to accept. It denies the comforting fiction that all conflicts are solvable through dialogue and diplomacy. It insists that moral responsibility includes not only the desire for peace but the willingness to confront those who make peace impossible. It is far easier to adopt cleaner positions. Pacifism avoids the burden of force. Militarism avoids the burden of restraint. Both avoid responsibility.
Israel does neither, which is one reason it is so often misunderstood.
The other is simpler and less flattering: A world accustomed to judging morality by appearances struggles with a framework that judges it by consequences. A culture that prizes intention over outcome finds it unsettling to encounter a system that insists the two cannot be separated.
Israel’s no-nonsense approach to warfare emerges from that system. It is not about indifference to suffering; it is about refusing to normalize it. It is not about privileging force, but about ensuring that force, when necessary, is decisive enough to make its repetition unnecessary. The Holocaust reinforces Israel’s determination to survive. It does not define the ethical framework through which such determination is pursued.
That framework is much older and grounded in a worldview which understands that some enemies cannot simply be wished away; they must be confronted honestly. It recognizes that moral clarity is not the absence of difficult choices, but the willingness to make them with a clear understanding of their consequences.
The modern world does not misunderstand Israel because it lacks information. It misunderstands Israel because it prefers moral comfort to moral clarity — and Israel refuses to provide it.