The (Shameful) Privilege of Being 'Anti-War'

Working to prevent Israel from effectively defending itself does not make you "anti-war." It makes you anti-Jewish.

In the Israel-Hamas war, the terror group is the only party with a well-documented genocidal agenda. (photo: Janne Leimola)

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This is a guest essay written by Mallory Mosner.

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

Share this essay using this link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/the-shameful-privilege-of-being-anti-war

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No one “likes” war.

Well, maybe the CEO of Lockheed Martin does, but aside from a few rare examples like that, saying you love and desire war is like in Nacho Libre when Esqueleto says he hates orphans — it is a laughably absurd repudiation of universal human values.

And yet, while we can eternally debate about the degree to which it is human nature or fabrication, war has been a widespread reality of the human experience for tens of thousands of years.

There is almost no corner of this globe that it has spared, and despite political tendencies to romanticize certain groups of people as having been fundamentally peaceful, most groups of people across time and space have also at some point participated in violent warfare.

The chronic existence of war obviously does not mean that it is “good” or even always (or usually) necessary. And yet, as the ironic cries of those “anti-war” protesters calling for a “permanent ceasefire” in the Israel-Hamas war while calling for Intifada “by any means necessary” demonstrate, the potential of organized violence in forcibly shifting history and culture remains a captivating prospect.

When I was entrenched in activist spaces, any justification of the “military-industrial complex” was met with stern condemnation of hawkishness. (Of course, this too seamlessly coexisted with the narrative of “by any means necessary” which glorified violence when it was on sociopolitical terms they agreed with.)

During this proudly “anti-war” period of my life, I did one of the only things that I have ever regretted doing: I watched all of the HBO television series, “Game of Thrones.” If you are one of the few strong-willed holdouts who missed that show, it was a perverse fete of extreme, graphic brutality, incest and rape glorification.

One particular episode lodged itself in my mind in this grisly series, called “The Broken Man.” A beautiful, pacifist farming community with unwavering commitment to compassion and resilience is ultimately burned, with every member tortured and slaughtered in cold blood. It was harrowing, and it also left me furious.

I very much considered myself a pacifist at the time, and I felt confident that this was nothing short of propaganda. Sure, violence exists, I thought, but this episode in one of the most popular television shows of all time felt like a conclusive statement of the teleological inevitability of violence and domination in the human experience. I bristled at what I perceived as nihilistic cynicism. 

Living beings are wired for survival, and the “reptilian” portion of our brains works to ensure that we remain safe. It’s true that humans have generally moved beyond the part of our existence where we need to worry ourselves with outrunning lions and bears, but we are never entirely free from physical dangers, and our brains know that.

That is not a bad thing — it fuels the lightning instincts that help us move out of the way before we get hit by a car, to avoid a rattlesnake near the path we are walking on, and, depending on your values, get you to either promptly call the police and/or retrieve a weapon if you know there is an intruder in your home.

One of the most common debates regarding civilian gun ownership in the United States, for instance, is whether guns make people safer. While confirmation bias affects attitudes (and data) on either side of the debate, many opponents of gun ownership argue that having a gun in your home predisposes you to increased violence, even if it stems from a valid fear.

That might be true, except that violence itself does not function so much as a chicken-and-egg situation, and much as we would like to perfectly control or predict it, there is always a risk of random violence beyond our control. And it is not fundamentally wrong to desire or take action to protect yourself from that (though it is also not explicitly clear that having guns at home is the best way to do this). 

I am a student of yoga and Ayurveda, and I believe there is a lot of merit to the notion: “Where attention goes, energy flows.” Meaning, if you are invested in peace (in yourself and around you), you should focus your attention on peace, instead of impending or potential violence and reaction.

This principle is closely linked to the concept of “neuroplasticity” in the field of cognitive science; if you have ever heard the saying, “Neurons that fire together wire together,” then you understand that our brains and cognition are capable of becoming (to an extent) what we desire them to be with continued practice.

On one level, this reinforces the notion that peace is a universal state that is merely waiting to be tapped into, experienced, and reinforced through practices like mindfulness. On an existential and spiritual plane, I feel that to be entirely true. And yet, even the Eastern traditions from which many of our contemporary understandings of peace are inspired from are not so cut-and-dried.

The “Baghavad Gita” is a seminal text of Hinduism, and encompasses a narrative of dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna, about a war that must be fought. It contains some of the most critical, poetic and nuanced contributions to Hindu and yogic philosophy, which have reverberated across the globe.

Krishna, an avatar of the god Vishnu, encourages Arjuna to fight a necessary war, despite Arjuna’s grief and misgivings. He explains that this is Arjuna’s dharma, his moral obligation, and that liberation (moksha) is not possible without it.

However, it would be foolish to write off the “Baghavad Gita” as simply being “pro-war.” It would also be imbecilic to conclude that the teachings of the Gita render extremist, violent, barbaric causes like “jihad” as “holy wars” with any kind of virtue. 

There is a reason the “Baghavad Gita” is considered a literary and spiritual masterpiece across the world, and the nuanced and conflicted portrayal of coping with the existential realities of war is an essential part of that. 

Ironically, this narrative seems to have been forgotten by many of the “progressives” who have spent the last several months engaging in “anti-war” protests so that more Jews can die at the hands of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists.

That said, the nuances of war should not only be contemplated in a spiritual or philosophical sense. It is critical that the collective consciousness actively remembers the very urgent, practical causes that warrant or in some cases even necessitate war.

Being “anti-war” in an absolutist sense is a bizarre paradox; if every person is expected to abide by an absolutist non-violent principle, then should Ukrainians merely sit down and allow themselves to be either butchered or conquered by Russia?

It is “resistance by any means necessary” for so-called “pro-Palestinians” — but “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and “colonialism” when Jews defend themselves. (photo: Shai Davidai/X)

The world is a dangerous place for many people, though much less so for people in the West. It is almost inconceivable how many people are marching in the streets, chanting genocidal slogans and rabidly advocating for the surrender of the only democracy in the Middle East; the only Jewish state in the world — which was thrust into a war that it did not want when terrorists stormed into the country and in one day raped, kidnapped, tortured and slaughtered over 1,000 civilians (including babies, children, and elderly).

Most of these people marching in the streets have never seen or even thought about what it is like for Israelis (or anyone else) who live under constant threats of rockets and terrorism, yet they rabidly fight for an end to the Jewish state (and call for random attacks on Jews around the world through “Intifada”) above anything else happening in our massive world.

They ignore the actual genocides in Sudan, against the Uyghurs in China, and pretty much any other violent conflict that exists on this planet that does not involve Jews. (As they say, “No Jews, no news.”) These privileged ignoramuses simultaneously hold signs in front of Jewish students that say “Al-Qassam’s (Hamas’) next target” while calling themselves “anti-war” protesters.

Israel has not only a right, but a moral obligation to defend itself. Much of “the West” exists literally on stolen land, and I can say with great confidence that if any of these students endured rape, kidnapping and/or massacre at the hands of Native Americans who decided to “resist” the occupation that they have endured, they would quickly change their tunes.

These students are comfortable with the dystopian irony of sitting in so-called ivory towers, some of them students at educational institutions where one year of tuition costs enough to rescue innumerable starving children in Yemen — all so they can achieve a façade of intellectual supremacy while they aim to make their way to the top of Western society while blithely chanting “death” to the West.

These beacons of privileged ignorance tout the rage they feel as women, queer people, people of color, or any other tenet of identity politics in order to assert that the West is an inherently more evil, less safe place than anywhere in the world where people are routinely bombed, slaughtered en masse by their own governments, tortured and executed for being gay, forced to cover themselves, legally get raped and be subservient if they are women, and are left without any real resources in abject poverty, to the point that even children die of starvation in startling numbers.

I am certainly not saying that life is easy or equally easy for everyone in the West, or that there are not violent, systemic issues in Western countries. But it is critical that the issues in the West be examined through a productive, iterative, and inclusive lens, rather than privileged nihilism. 

Much of many Western societies have descended into such a quagmire of guilt, self-victimization, and moral bankruptcy that a celebrity child of a wealthy celebrity politician can garner an onslaught of compassion for comparing her self-inflicted temporary suspension from her elite university housing to the plight of a person with no home, no money, and no guarantee of their next meal — merely because she is Black and Muslim.

I wish there was an end to the Israel-Hamas war, too. Every single Jewish, Zionist person I know yearns for this with every fiber of their being. And yet, the so-called “anti-war” activists have never called for actions that would actually ensure a lasting end to war — never have they called for the release of the hostages that remain in Gaza (including a baby) or for the terrorist organization of Hamas to surrender.

Instead, they steadfastly denounce Israel, and despite their hateful condemnation of America for meddling in global politics, they seek the destruction of the entire Jewish state, and the displacement and/or murder of all its population — which, not coincidentally, comprises half of the world’s Jews.

Only a person possessing deep moral and intellectual rot would behave this way; these people are overwhelmingly not people who know the suffering of actual war, but instead self-victimizing, privileged morons who sip $8 cold brew, buy fast fashion through Shein, and carefully curate every aspect of their lives and identities in order to fit perfectly into a short TikTok video — all while they complain about their inconsequential problems and champion “death” to the West because they are bored and lonely.

And if you are one of those people who perceives yourself to be “an empath” and therefore have been fervently advocating for an unconditional Israeli ceasefire, please look within to get a deeper understanding of why the Israeli victims of October 7th and beyond do not deserve your empathy.

Hamas promised to commit October 7th “again and again” until Israel is destroyed. Working to prevent Israel from defending itself does not make you anti-war — it makes you anti-Jewish.

And if you think that you are somehow morally superior to the human beings who are Israeli, just imagine that your own baby was stolen or butchered, that you or your mother were raped, and had your breasts cut off, that your Holocaust-surviving grandparents were tied together and burned alive in their homes. Entire villages of people wiped out, in just one day.

Do not allow yourself to selectively forget the atrocities of October 7th, and do not allow yourself to forget that there was a ceasefire on October 6th.

Yet this did not prevent Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists from conducting one of the most devastating, barbaric attacks seen in modern history. If you insist upon ignoring or “contextualizing” mass rape and torture, then please know that your “anti-war” stance is meaningless.

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