On War

Michael Walzer comments on the series by Elder of Zion

Between March 3–8, just after the United States and Israel jointly attacked Iran, the pseudonymous blogger known for two decades as “Elder of Ziyon” posted to his Substack four essays on war. The series wrestles with the disconnect between two fundamentally incompatible approaches to armed conflict. On the one side stand modern states that have pledged to uphold the body of international humanitarian law (IHL) established after WWII. On the other side stand revolutionary ideologues committed to achieving their ultimate vision no matter the cost to civilian populations. The global rules-based order aims to mitigate as much as possible the devastating consequences of contemporary warfare but rests on outdated assumptions about how hostile players conceive the relationship between war and peace. Actors operating under revolutionary military doctrine methodically exploit the architecture of IHL; procedural norms and principles of ethical conduct that constrain combat turn into opportunities to advance strategic goals. Elder considers how this state of affairs came about and offers a skeletal proposal for structural reform. The four pieces offer a serious and ambitious critique of an edifice that has given cover to its own systematic deformation.

But how sound are Elder’s arguments? Are his historical analyses correct? Are his comparisons apt? To help evaluate Elder’s claims in a broader consideration of the questions that his discussion raises, I have invited Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus of Social Science at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, as my guest in this issue of “Breaking through.”

Professor Walzer is well-known for his work at the intersection of political theory and moral philosophy. Especially famous, his book Just and Unjust Wars long formed part of the curriculum at West Point. He served as co-editor of Dissent for some three decades and has overseen, as senior editor, the publication of the multi-volume series, The Jewish Political Tradition (Yale University Press); a fourth volume is in progress. His most recent book The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On Liberal as an Adjective was published by Yale University Press in 2023. His articles on the “asymmetry trap” in Gaza and on the left’s responsibility to both Palestinians and Israelis have appeared in Quillette. The April 1, 2026 issue of K. Jews, Europe, the XXIst Century featured a reflection on Walzer’s thought in relation to his Zionism and republished his January Haaretz interview in which he spoke very critically of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

Before I begin my exchange with Professor Walzer, let me provide a bare-bones précis of Elder’s essays. The first piece examines the premises of revolutionary theory from Marx (who “reframed all of history as a continuous class struggle”), through Lenin (who equated “bourgeois peace” with “armed struggle”) to Mao (who, in his 1938 On Protracted War, “formalized” Marxist theory “into explicit military doctrine”). Mao admitted that he would accept the loss of half the population of China if that’s what it took to prevail. He saw the willingness to sacrifice one’s own people as a powerful weapon, anticipating the later practice of using civilian populations and infrastructure as human shields. Along other lines, the Italian antifascist Antonio Gramsci (d. 1937) conceptualized the transformation of “legal systems, cultural frameworks, civil society” into war zones.

Islamist movements adapted revolutionary theory to their own purposes, creating a theologically driven cycle of perpetual war. Thus (here I extrapolate from Elder’s argument as a whole), for the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel’s elimination is a sacred cause worthy of imposing involuntary mass martyrdom on the civilians over whom they rule. Theirs is a zero-sum calculus. Negotiated agreements like cease-fires are merely feints to enable regrouping and rearming in preparation for a return to active fighting. “Peace” demands enemy submission; compromise is not an option. Meanwhile, from within Western liberal democracies, coalitions of academics, public intellectuals, celebrities, and politicians apply cultural and social pressure concordant with the Islamist telos of ending Jewish sovereignty on any parcel of Dar al-Islam.

In his second piece, Elder briefly surveys “the conflicts that define the modern era of asymmetric warfare.” Besides those that fall under the Israel/Palestine rubric, he considers the case of Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers (inventers of suicide wearables for maximum terrorist efficiency). Sri Lanka finally defeated the Tigers only by wiping out the fighters and their civilian support networks; the state ignored IHL and the world ignored the scale of the atrocities, now consigned to oblivion.

The third essay pivots to theorists and traditions of thought that provide tools for both confronting revolutionary nihilism and preserving our humanity in the process. Elder seeks to “recover” John Locke’s understanding of war “not as active hostilities but as declared hostile intent combined with the power to act on it.” At what point does the package of explicit eliminationist intent plus real potentiality mandate a military response? The Islamic Republic of Iran, for instance, has not only globally publicized its religious dedication to the erasure of Israel, but has also developed weapons systems and proxy armies to realize that vision, incrementally if necessary. Acquisition of a nuclear weapon will obviate any possibility of deterrence. Elder looks to the ethics of war from within Jewish political thought: a state “has not merely the right but the duty to defend itself and its citizens;” enemy lives are sacred but “the lives of one’s own people being defended” take priority. He lays out a set of diagnostics for guiding judgment on military action. Moral constraints in the prosecution of war (military targeting only, minimizing civilian harm, proportionality) and strict standards of accountability must be maintained. The fourth piece roughs out the basis of an international legal framework that better resists weaponization by cynical operators.

Thank you so much, Professor Walzer, for agreeing to comment on Elder’s essays.

MK: Elder begins his series with the famous, oft-quoted statement by the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, “war is a continuation of politics by other means” (On War, 1832). What is the relation between war and politics as Clausewitz understood it, and has that understanding since changed?

MW: It’s almost half a century since I read Clausewitz, but I think he believed that the aggrandizing ambition of every nation-state was expressed in repeated political efforts at territorial expansion and resource acquisition. These efforts would normally be pursued by non-violent or semi-violent means: diplomacy, economic pressure, colonization, etc. But at some point, one or another of the rulers of these states would decide that things were not going well and that military force might do better. War would then be the continuation of the aggrandizing project “by other means.”

Note that states that don’t have aggrandizing ambitions might be among the victims of these “other means.” Their self-defense couldn’t be called the continuation, it would rather be the interruption, of their own politics, focused on domestic well-being. Clausewitz seems to assume a world of competing states, each state continually on the verge of moving from politics to war. That’s not a good account of how Poland, say, found itself at war in 1939—or of the politics of states like Canada or Norway today, most of whose citizens would oppose any aggrandizing use of force.

Looking ahead in this conversation, let’s consider another version of the maxim: War is the continuation of theology by other means. Universalist religions that aim at the world’s conversion come into conflict with infidels and with each other. The conflict is normally conducted non-violently, by missionary activity, say. But some believers, claiming to know what God wants, turn to violence and launch a holy war, a jihad or crusade—missionizing by other means. Obviously, the objections I briefly sketched above still apply: not all of these religions are equally committed to conversion; many believers in every religion oppose the use of force, and so on. But something is different here. The replacement of politics by theology signals a sea change.

Clausewitz usefully describes Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but not Ukraine’s response. What is far more important, however, is that he has little to say about wars that are not fought for aggrandizement or self-defense but for higher ends—crucially for our purposes here, for God’s kingdom. But Elder starts with secular versions, so I will do that, too.

MK: How would you evaluate Elder’s account of the way that revolutionary theory, turning Clausewitz’s proposition on its head, developed a doctrine of perpetual war? Elder observed that the Soviet Union eventually transitioned from revolutionary ideals to straightforward imperialist politics, of which war was always an integral part. One could say the same, perhaps, for China. What does Elder get right, and perhaps wrong, about the historical trajectory of revolutionary theory as it relates to the conduct of war?

MW: Elder’s account begins with Marx’s argument about class struggle—which isn’t in fact a military argument. Occasional violence, yes, when striking workers fight with scabs or when police repress a strike. But the class struggle has never involved armies. Socialism would emerge from the contradictions of capitalism and the growth and political organization of the working class. The Socialist International was an anti-war alliance. In 1914, it appealed, unsuccessfully, to the “workers of the world” to reject warfare and refuse to fight for any of the warring states. But national and state loyalties triumphed over class and revolution. World War One nicely fits Clausewitz’s maxim.

As Elder writes, Lenin’s Soviet Union was theoretically committed to world revolution (and had Trotsky won, the commitment might have been turned into practice), but state interests took precedence very quickly. The Communist International was transformed into an instrument of Soviet foreign policy, and the few communist parties reluctant to be instruments evolved, slowly, into national parties with only local ambitions—in principle, to advance working class interests. Internationalism consisted in supporting each other’s efforts politically, morally, sometimes materially, but never militarily. Spain in 1936 might be an exception here; the International Brigade did represent revolutionary ideals, but those ideals were betrayed by the Soviet Union and its agents. Read George Orwell.

The story of Mao’s China is similar. Maoism was briefly an international movement; there were French and even American Maoists. Mao himself wrote about protracted war (basing his arguments more on ancient Chinese texts than on Marx), and as Elder reports, he did say that he would sacrifice half the people of China for the sake of victory. But his “Eight Points for Attention,” his code for guerilla war, pretty much tracks just war theory. And once in power, Mao broke with Soviet communism, and therefore with world revolution, for national/political reasons. Only a few years later, triumphant Vietnamese communists insisted on their independence from the Chinese. International revolution took second place to local politics.

The Cold War was an ideological conflict, but its military doctrines (nuclear deterrence, for example) were statist in character and its proxy wars, in Korea and Vietnam, were really about achieving national unity rather than advancing the interests of the international working class. The Korean war ended in deadlock, so one could say that it didn’t actually end; but the ceasefire has held now for half a century. In Vietnam, the communists won definitively and now have near-normal relations with the US. I can’t see any commitment to “perpetual war.”

MK: Are theologically nihilistic movements susceptible to moderation, and if so, under what conditions? What do you imagine it would take for the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas to accept the type of peace agreement that, at least to date, has quelled active belligerence between Egypt and Israel/Jordan and Israel? Would the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza suffice? What would prevent a Palestinian state from Islamist capture as a way station toward the originary sacred goal of eradicating Israel? Alternatively, might regime change in Iran and the loss of the main state sponsor of Hamas and Hezbollah be a catalyst for a Palestinian state that can coexist with Israel?

On the other side of the equation, we can no longer sweep under the rug as a fringe phenomenon the presence within Israeli society of Jews whose distorted messianism is essentially a form of nihilism. To be sure, they are a minority, but their visibility has greatly increased since October 7^th. The agitators for settlements in Gaza and the pogromists on the West Bank are committed to a theological/theocratic vision irreconcilable with the Zionist principles underlying the establishment of the state of Israel. Theirs is also a zero-sum calculus, creating an irreducible obstacle to peaceful coexistence alongside Palestinians. Although these Jews are hardly interested in the survival of a democratic state formation, indeed they are actively working against it, they and their supporters exercise political muscle within the government; they have infiltrated the IDF and have changed its character. Do the hilltop youth and the settlements that give them cover meet Elder’s definition of revolutionary actors? Does Netanyahu’s partnership with Ben Gvir, who has given them free reign to terrorize Palestinian villagers, suggest that this movement has already captured the state apparatus? What will it take for Israeli voters to confront this problem?

MW: Now we are getting closer to Elder’s argument, which is inspired by and perhaps applies only to the Islamist war against Israel. But first I need to say something about asymmetric warfare more generally—I mean a war between a high-tech state army and a low-tech insurgency. The insurgents commonly claim to be ideologically or theologically driven; they fight from civilian cover, arguing that the “people” are (or should be) on their side. The high-tech army, responding, kills large numbers of civilians and, most often, loses or fails to win the war—which is always a political as well as a military struggle. The French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam lost to what were largely secular insurgents fighting wars of “national liberation,” and once the insurgents ruled the state, the war was over: nothing “perpetual” here. Actually, the victory of Algerian national liberation was soon challenged by Islamist zealots, and the result was a bloody civil war, which the secular forces (brutal, authoritarian) won—and which has not been renewed. The Taliban in Afghanistan are a theological movement, but again they aimed only at control of the Afghan state; right now, at least, they are not a model for other Islamist movements. Only the war against Israel seems perpetual, and that is because Israel is itself the triumphant product of national liberation, and its struggles produced a very strong state that fights, as the French and Americans never did, for its very existence—so far, successfully.

Israel is threatened by religious zealotry, not only from outside but also from within. So we need to think about the worldwide revival of religious zeal. Islamists in Algeria, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza are the prime example of theological commitments that produce wars, one of which, against the “Zionist entity,” goes on and on. But we see similar commitment among Hindus in India and Buddhists in Myanmar and Sri Lanka—the last of these is a key example for Elder. The struggle between the fervently Buddhist Sinhalese state and the Tamil Tigers went on for a long time, partly because the Indian government provided (not steady but periodic) support for the Tigers. But Elder is most interested in the eventual Sinhalese victory—and in the violations of international law that the victory required. He doesn’t endorse the violations, but he does learn from them. I will come back to the legal and ethical issues he raises.

The religious revival is also evident in Christian nationalism in the United States, which doesn’t yet take crusading forms. And in Israel, where messianic Zionism and religious nationalism have produced a Jewish version of crusade— most visible in West Bank pogroms. The Israel-Arab conflict, in its early statist version, began with the campaign of Arab states against the UN partition plan and the new Israeli state; they aimed at what Abba Eban called “policide.” The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) joined that campaign and was patronized and supported by states like Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The campaign was secular; the PLO took inspiration from the Algerian FLN and the writings of Franz Fanon. All this was before the religious revival reached full bloom, and you could say that that campaign and the wars it produced ended with the peace treaties between Israel and Egypt and Jordan and with the Abraham Accords. The holy war was well begun by then; it was something altogether different.

MK: I found Eder’s series most useful in thinking not so much about the current round of the American war with Iran, but rather about what we observed post-October 7^th. Hamas and Islamic Jihad had not merely invaded Israel and sadistically butchered 1200 civilians, raping at every opportunity, but had abducted 250 civilians among whom were small children and the elderly. The militant groups refused to permit Red Cross visitation, and they simply murdered hostages at will for no reason, Noa Marciano by injecting air in her veins, Shiri Bibas and her babies with their bare hands. Fighters operated from hospitals and mosques. Hamas weaponized Gazans as human shields, preventing them access to shelter in the tunnel system; it diverted the food supply. Its strategy was to invite mass civilian death. Hamas held the entire civilian population hostage to its own will rather than surrender or even lay down arms and accept exile. Hamas flouted the most elemental precepts of IHL, to the accolades of armchair revolutionaries conducting a Gramscian war of position in manifestos and encampments. Protesters against the Gaza war in any forum not even once demanded that Hamas abide by IHL, not even with respect to releasing the hostages. Together, Hamas and its Western allies vitiated the logic of the post-WWII rules-based order that, as Elder argues, never evolved to theorize the stakes of asymmetrical warfare. In U.S. criminal law, a willing participant in the commission of an armed felony that results in homicide (e.g., the driver waiting in a getaway car) can be prosecuted as if he or she pulled the trigger. But when it comes to the laws of war, there is no doctrine of co-responsibility. Israel alone will be held to account for its violations. Why shouldn’t I give up on IHL in disgust, for the farce that is? Elder lays out an alternative to the current system in his fourth essay. What do you think?

MW: Neither international law or just war theory has a very good record at regulating conventional warfare. Some states, some armies, some of the time, fight according to the rules. We might better think that the law and the theory serve to shape judgements rather than practice. They make possible a critique (and sometimes a defense) of military conduct. They aren’t reliable there either, but I will be relying in what follows on the version of just war theory that I have been defending for a long time. I am not a lawyer and I can’t speak for the lawyers, but international law derives from and is close to just war principles. I think that I can speak to Elder’s arguments.

In asymmetric warfare, the insurgents simultaneously violate and exploit the ethics of warfare. By fighting from civilian cover, using human shields, they invite, they actually aim at, the killing of their own people—and then the political defeat of the army that does the killing. I wrote long ago that when American soldiers took fire from Vietnamese villages and fired back, responsibility for civilian deaths lay with the Viet Cong fighters hiding in the village. But if the Americans set fire to the village or called in an air strike, they would share responsibility—and help their enemy win the war. The key issue here is the deliberate decision to put civilians at risk, which is morally and legally wrong. Then the soldiers must do what they can to minimize the risk—which is right and also smart.

Please note: the issue isn’t that the insurgents don’t wear uniforms, though this is often an excuse for refusing POW status to captured insurgent fighters. Remember the Minute Men of the American Revolution who outraged the British by fighting in civilian dress. But they didn’t fight from civilian cover. They didn’t seek to benefit from the deaths of their own people.

I will have less to say about the insurgents’ choice of terrorism—the bomb on the bus, in the supermarket, in the cafe—which is obviously wrong and probably not effective. It is commonly justified as a “last resort”—though it has often been the first resort of insurgent groups like the IRA, the FLN, and the PLO. Recently, terrorism has been defended on the principle that oppressed groups can do anything that helps their cause—as if oppressed men and women are not moral agents with obligations as well as rights. Anyway, Mao’s “Eight Points of Attention” work much better.

And yet the attack on 7 October, an example of brutal and sadistic terrorism, was a political success—at least in the West; I doubt that it did much good for the Palestinian people. The reasons for the success have to do with the previous history of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict; the years of occupation and the left’s identification of the Palestinians as the world’s oppressed; the ready availability of anti-Semitic tropes to activists on the right and left; and the rhetorical response of incredibly stupid Israeli politicians who pretty much insisted that the IDF in the coming war should ignore all moral rules (and made the lie about genocide seem plausible). But I want to focus, as Elder does, on the war itself.

Hamas has proven itself masterful in the use of civilian cover. I should say, the religious use, for civilian deaths are not just politically useful; they are the occasion for the religious celebration of martyrdom. The more martyrs, the better. So Hamas embedded its fighters and stored its weapons in civilian Gaza, in apartment buildings, schools, and mosques; it designed a war that Israel could fight only by killing large numbers of ordinary Gazans, the human shields of Hamas’s fighters. But this is only part of the story. What the media called the “tunnels” is the other part. The “tunnels” were actually an underground city, built on three levels and containing shops for making weapons, rooms for storing weapons, dorms for fighters, apartments for leaders, cells for hostages—and command and control centers.

American journalists didn’t know how to cover a war like this. An example: Israel insisted that a Hamas center existed under the embattled Al Shifra hospital, but reporters and photographers who went down claimed that it wasn’t there. I think they were looking for something like NATO’s headquarters in Brussels. What was there was a solidly built room with ventilation and electricity—empty now, but add tables and computers and you have . . . a command and control center. The underground city was rough, but critically important in the war and not talked about anywhere near enough. Israel ‘s soldiers would clear a neighborhood and move on, and a week or a month later, Hamas fighters would emerge from below and retake the neighborhood. Some parts of Gaza’s cities were cleared three or four times—which accounts for some (not all) of the visible wreckage and the civilian deaths. The cities above were a collective human shield for the city below, which was military only; civilians could not take shelter there. Looking for martyrs, Hamas had not built shelters above.

After 7 October, Israel walked into the trap Hamas had set. It didn’t have much choice; a military response was just and necessary. But there were choices later on. I have been critical of some aspects of Israel’s war, chiefly the siege and the treatment of prisoners; I should have said more about the deliberate effort to make parts of Gaza uninhabitable, to facilitate ethnic cleansing. I also criticized the refusal of the Netanyahu government to look (with offered American help) for a political way to defeat Hamas—even when its own generals thought that the military way wasn’t working. I won’t repeat those criticisms here, since I want to engage with Elder’s arguments about how wars like this one should be fought.

Elder thinks, rightly, that this war extends beyond Gaza. It is the war of Iran and the “axis of resistance” seeking to destroy the State of Israel and deny the Jewish people any political presence in Islamic territory. It is a long war. Iran’s Islamist revolution dates from 1979. Hezbollah comes into existence after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in ’82; its initial purpose was to oppose the Israeli security zone in the South. Hamas is first organized in ’87; it takes control of Gaza in 2007. The “axis” was first mentioned by an Iranian spokesman in 2002; its “resistance” was directed against Arab governments that were on the way to peace with Israel as well as against Israel itself.

It is a war unlike any other in the world today. Russia’s effort to break Ukraine’s sovereignty comes close, but its ultimate aim is a satellite state or a Russian province, not the end of any Ukrainian presence in eastern Europe. Iran’s axis has a far more sinister goal: not only “policide,” but also the radical degradation of Israeli Jewry. The case is strange: how can the United Nations watch as one member state publicly and explicitly aims at the destruction of another? Surely the Charter was meant to deny this possibility—or require action to oppose it. Israel obviously cannot count on UN support, but it does have friends; the exilic maxim “All the world is against us” isn’t true; the Zionist creation of a state like the other states is a success story. So Israel can seek allies, form alliances, even as it acts in its own defense. Elder has ideas about the principles that should guide it and the policies it should adopt, which don’t, however, extend to alliance politics—a mistake, I think. He suggests a new version of international law, and I still need to address that suggestion.

MK: What might Israel have done to avoid falling into the trap that Hamas set for it on October 7^th? In retrospect, did the clear casus belli initiated by Hamas amount to a kind of checkmate? My assessment of the commentary published in the fortnight after that day in major media outlets, e.g. the NYT and the Washington Post, has led me to conclude that any Israeli response at all was bound to lead to accusations of war crimes and genocide. Opinion columnists, like Nicholas Kristof among others, were already hard at work minimizing the trauma—so you lost 1200 souls, get over it—and demanding equal “grievability” (an argument picked up from radical antizionist authors). The preset “narrative” was always going to cast the Israeli response as overreaction; the plot was always going to be about keeping score of the dead. Was there any way for Israel to “win” the peace short of submission to Islamist demands for self-annihilation?

MW: I do think that there was a way to win, not a way with guarantees or without risks; still, better than continued war. But this was not a way available to Netanyahu’s far right government committed to Greater Israel. Consider Israel’s assets as of mid-2024: its own military strength and intelligence capacity; the strong support of the Biden administration—military and political; the extraordinary coalition that US diplomats put together to oppose Iran’s first missile attack, including European and Arab states; the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and the close security ties with the Saudis and the Gulf states. There was never any Israeli effort to build on all this and seek the help of neighbors and allies to defeat Hamas politically. What would such an effort have required? First, to withdraw (slowly) from Gaza and support the creation of an Arab government there, fronted by the PA, with muscle supplied by Egypt and the Saudis, both of which hate Hamas—and perhaps by NATO, too. Second, and harder, it would have required Israel to agree to the (slow and qualified) establishment of Palestinian sovereignty on the West Bank—a state “protected” by Egypt or the Saudis, perhaps federated with Jordan.

A Palestinian state—it is hard to imagine Israelis agreeing to that after watching Palestinians everywhere celebrate the atrocities of 7 October. Wouldn’t Hamas or some similar party win the first elections? I have a story: sometime in the 1970s, when people were talking about the “Jordanian option,” an American diplomat asked King Hussein what would happen if there were elections on the West Bank. The diplomat (an old teacher of mine) told me the king’s response: “If I run the elections, I will win the elections.” Something like that would be necessary now. Democracy could come later.

A “peace” of this sort would obviously be opposed by an unreconstructed Iranian regime and whatever allies it has left. I think that Israel’s assets, listed above, would have made the defeat of any political or military opposition possible. But those assets have been significantly degraded by the current government. Israel’s military strength is uncontested, but it is now close to political and diplomatic isolation. So perhaps this “peace” is a pipedream. It would require a very different Israeli government, the defeat of Israel’s religious zealots, and the renewal of old alliances with friends in the US and Europe. The continuation of the long war does seem more likely.

MK: Since mid-April, a spate of commentary in the press and on Substack has addressed the topic of perpetual war. Some argue that Israel has made military action a first resort and forever wars a matter of policy. Benny Morris depressingly predicts endless war, as the mortal threats to Israel from Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas have not as yet been neutralized. Elder’s third essay had already described the conundrum that bedevils the choices that Israel faces. One has to assess whether an adversary has “a defined political objective that, if achieved or abandoned, ends the conflict” or whether “the conflict itself is a defining part of the adversary’s self-view.” Ceding ground to “continuous-war adversaries” leads not to “resolution but deferral.” Unless one demolishes “the system that generated the conflict” in the first place, then one ends up not with victory but “intermission management. Knowing that at the outset changes what you fight for, what costs you accept, and what you are willing to call success.” Can’t one apply that insight to Israel’s war in Gaza? Was total victory against Hamas ever a realistic possibility? If not, wouldn’t settling for “intermission management” earlier that October 2025 have saved countless lives, including many of the hostages? “Knowing what kind of conflict you are in before committing is not merely a strategic obligation. It is a moral one.” At the same time, because Hamas has re-entrenched itself in Gaza and is highly unlikely to disarm, the current period of calm may well prove a prelude to another round of war. What can be done to break this pattern, not only vis-à-vis Hamas but Hezbollah and the chief antagonist, Iran? Will it require regime change in Iran? How can such a thing be realized?

MW: Assume the long war as Elder describes and criticizes it, cease fires interrupted by military engagements followed by new cease fires—no resolution, only repeated deferrals. I agree that it is important to recognize the long-term theological project of the enemy and the impotence of “mowing the grass” as the sole response. (But I should note that “mowing” might have been much more successful if the Netanyahu government had not been helping to fund Hamas and doing everything it could to weaken the Palestine Authority.) Instead of “mowing,” what does Elder have in mind? The enemy wants to destroy Israel, so Israel should destroy the enemy first. He derives this maxim from a Talmudic saying about a domestic predator, but he is actually joining an old argument about pre-emptive and preventive war. Many just war theorists (like me) defended Israel’s pre-emptive strike against Egypt in 1967: the immediate threat that Egypt posed, crucially by moving troops into the demilitarized Sinai peninsula, justified the Israeli attack. A preventive war, aimed at a more distant threat, seemed to most of us much harder to justify. There was time for deterrence, for diplomacy, for alliance politics. Elder argues that given the long war and the enemy’s commitment, this is time wasted. Israel should consider a decisive war-ending attack—which was, I think, the intention of its government in February of this year and now, as I write, in Lebanon. At this moment, success is uncertain, but unlikely.

Elder also seems willing to relax the moral and legal rules of engagement in justified preventive wars against enemies like Israel’s today. Calculating proportionality, for example, he would have Israel value its own citizens at a higher rate than enemy civilians. He disagrees with an old just war argument that Avishai Margalit and I made in Haaretz a few years ago: that innocent men and women on both sides of the battle have equal value. He is not abandoning the doctrine of civilian immunity, as the Sri Lankan government pretty much did, but only making it a little easier to fight against insurgents hiding among civilians. I don’t see a revision of international law here but rather a plea for exceptions—defended by invoking military necessity. The legal and moral rules, he says, should be followed whenever possible. I am not a moral absolutist so I cannot say that exceptions can never be justified. But it is important to note that military history is full of crimes justified by the claim of necessity. Beware of these arguments, and start worrying as soon as you hear yourself making them.

The argument about striking first and striking decisively seems crafted for Israel’s immediate situation, its long war. But consider another long war that we know a lot about: the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. There were tense moments in those years and repeated calls for preventive war: strike now before we are struck. Looking back, it seems a good thing that the war remained cold—that the Marshall Plan helped rebuild Europe, that NATO was formed, that the Voice of America encouraged opposition within the Soviet satellites, and that diplomatic contacts, direct and indirect, were maintained throughout. If communism ever inspired eternal war against Western capitalism, the inspiration had a beginning and an end. It was smart to wait it out. What this suggests is the importance of politics and diplomacy alongside the long war cycle that Elder wants to end militarily.