Predictably, world sympathy for Israel is ebbing already. The recent Big Lie that Israel bombed a Gaza hospital only accelerated this sadly familiar process, even as it proved how quick the media is to blame Israel first. Admittedly, the Gaza situation is messy in both moral and military terms, but liberal democrats worldwide must wake up and grow up. If the Constitution is not a suicide pact, civilization cannot be a suicide pact either.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t compare those who harm innocents and delight in their suffering with those who unintentionally harm them, especially when your enemy hides behind civilians. Don\u2019t confuse totalitarians who start a war with their democratic victims, who must then defend themselves or die. Israel tried restraint and lost 1,400 lives and counting. Every death, every casualty, in fact, all the harm radiating from Oct. 7, is Hamas\u2019s fault.<\/p>\n
What else can Israel do? In 2014, when a\u00a0reporter interviewed\u00a0<\/a>Israel\u2019s legendary leftist Amos Oz about Israel\u2019s Hobson\u2019s choice regarding a ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza, Oz chose to interview the interviewer. Oz said, \u201cQuestion 1: What would you do if your neighbor across the street sat down on the balcony, put his little boy on his lap and started shooting machine-gun fire into your nursery? Question 2: What would you do if your neighbor across the street dug a tunnel from his nursery to your nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your family?\u201d<\/p>\n Back then, although obvious to some of us, the Hamas threat was theoretical. Fourteen hundred murders and countless abominations later, the questions are more pointed. The dilemmas remain painful, but the two-pronged moral case that justified Allied actions in World War II justifies Israel\u2019s actions now.<\/p>\n Both cases posed a \u201csupreme emergency\u201d against a supremely evil foe. In\u00a0Just and Unjust Wars<\/em><\/a>, Michael Walzer explains the philosopher\u2019s \u201csliding scale\u201d that holds \u201cthe more justice, the more right.\u201d I would add \u201cand the more might it is moral to unleash.\u201d<\/p>\n The Nazis and the Japanese started World War II. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain\u2019s umbrella symbolized his delusional \u201cappeasement.\u201d Many Americans tried dodging the conflict too until Pearl Harbor. Both the Nazis and the Japanese, like Hamas, were totalitarian enemies, violators of civilizational norms who targeted innocents while cowering behind their own.<\/p>\n Faced with such enemies and, like Israel today, having paid dearly for their delusions, the Allies\u2019 campaign was relentless until victorious.<\/p>\n If a democracy can\u2019t finish what its enemy started, it\u2019s finished. But if a democracy starts acting as brutally as the enemy, it\u2019s finished too. Clearly, whenever a \u201cjust war\u201d is imposed on you, the most \u201cjust\u201d thing you can do is win.<\/p>\n Still, the occasional wrestling over what to do also helps make the war just. Winston Churchill, who replaced Chamberlain in 1940, agonized over civilian deaths. Initially, he explained to an MP demanding unrestricted bombing, \u201cYou and others may desire to kill women and children. We desire (and have succeeded in our desire) to destroy German military objectives.\u201d<\/p>\n But the Nazis were so vicious and the need to defeat them so obvious that there was no choice. Churchill escalated. By 1945 he deemed \u201cthe massive achievement of Bomber Command \u2026 an example of duty nobly done.\u201d<\/p>\n Professor Gil Troy is an American presidential historian and, most recently, the editor of the three-volume set,\u00a0Theodor\u00a0Herzl: Zionist Writings,\u00a0the inaugural publication of\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Library of the Jewish People<\/a><\/p>\n