How to End a Just War

WHEN DOES A JUST WAR BECOME a warmonger’s desperate war? When does it really happen, the moral obligation of the original victim turns into a blind pursuit of eternal justice, as if nothing else matters except the indefatigability of its own will? The war in Gaza began, almost two years ago, after Hamas’ genocidal rampage within Israel. Some hostages were returned to Israel; many died in captivity. By one estimate, 60,000 Palestinians were killed in the war; and Gaza has become rubble. As famine looms, children in food queues stare at the world’s conscience. Prime Minister Keir Starmer threatens that the UK will recognise a Palestinian state in next month’s General Assembly. Not to speak of even traditional Conservative sympathisers questioning Israel’s continuing occupation of Gaza where all of Hamas’ top leadership has already been decimated. Is the just war now the war of a politically vulnerable prime minister and his radical rightwing allies, its ultimate mission being a Hamas-free Gaza under permanent Israeli surveillance? The moral is still a dispute in Gaza’s wreckage.

We have been here before, when justness had a flexible moral definition. America invaded Iraq without any proof that Baghdad possessed weapons of mass destruction. The force of neocons’ moral politics was capable of defying borders and overcoming public cynicism. It was a time when ideological conviction could withstand the backlash against regime change. In the end, even as the chaotic Iraq without Saddam Hussein, with tribal and sectarian affinities nullifying the spirit of freedom, made American idealism look like a weapon of mass delusion, there was one reason for cheer. The removal of Saddam itself was as good a reason as chemical weapons, for the Ba’athist dictatorship was literally what Kanan Makiya had called the Republic of Fear. What America couldn’t manage was the challenges of nation-building. The war in Iraq lost its original justness in the quagmire of freedom.

When Joe Biden abruptly abandoned Afghanistan, America in effect dismantled the moral foundation of its war on terror. By leaving an Afghanistan that once hosted Osama bin Laden to the Taliban, Biden’s America disowned the best of Americanism in international morality. American intervention in Afghanistan was a just cause. The unjustness of it all came when Washington choreographed the return of the Taliban, leaving Afghanistan to the medieval Islamists of unfreedom, succumbing to the fallacy of good Taliban and bad Taliban. The alternative to nation-building is not a half-made nation. The evolution of just war doesn’t follow the same moral script.

On Gaza too, the moral question was answered differently, and anti-Semitism, veiled and brazen, coupled with the undying romance of Palestinian struggle, influenced the answers. Even as the attack of October 7, 2023 was universally condemned, some instances of the outrage were balanced by the thinking that Israel’s origin and Palestinians’ enduring struggle for freedom made the genocide inevitable. It was this equalisation of terror and struggle that made Israel’s reaction a larger crime than what necessitated it. The war against Hamas was unarguably just, for Israel was fighting against an organisation that not only denied it the right to exist but used Gazans as armoury. It didn’t care for human rights or Palestinians’ freedom; its real purpose was the perpetuation of jihad, with assistance from Tehran. The struggle for Palestine has already been recast as an Islamic war.

And Hamas all along knew that it could not militarily defeat Israel. It could only win by turning Gaza into a humanitarian crisis that would turn the world against Israel. That heartbreaking frame of the child at the food queue is Hamas’ ultimate weapon. Not just in revolutions powered by ideologies, in Book-driven war against humanity too, ‘the masses’ are disposable in the higher pursuit of liberation, which, in Gaza today, is no longer about the Palestine Arafat campaigned for as a homeless statesman. The new liberator hides in tunnels or protects himself using Gazans as a human shield. Hamas hopes to defeat Israel in the battlefield of global perception. It is kind of succeeding.

Does it mean Israel should allow itself to be defeated in Gaza, where Hamas is still holding many hostages? Israel needs to win this war, and the reality of a badly crippled Hamas alone won’t ensure that. Israel should take the lead in the re-humanisation of Gaza and it can be achieved only by withdrawing from Gaza but not abandoning it. Only an Arab consensus on the nature of Palestinian struggle can ensure that rebuilding Gaza won’t mean rebuilding Hamas. The just war that began almost two years ago must end with the same moral clarity intact. Not with a second chance for Hamas but with the last chance for Palestine to redeem its struggle from radical Islam.

GazageopoliticsIsraelIsrael-HamasIsrael-Palestine conflictjihadPalestine