The Costly History of Peace
European complaints about Israel ignore the Continent’s own bloody past.
By Walter Russell Mead
Israel’s brutal war against Hamas is the greatest ordeal for Israelis and Palestinians alike in more than 100 years of struggle between the Zionist movement and its opponents.
From the scenes of barbarity that gleeful Hamas terrorists uploaded to the web in October 2023 to today’s images of terror in Gaza as the Israeli counteroffensive grinds on, the war has broadcast portraits of human suffering to the world. Propagandists on all sides have sought to use the emotions the conflict and the suffering rouse to shape political realities in Gaza, Israel and around the world.
If the Israelis are winning the battles on the ground, the Palestinians have been more successful globally in the war for hearts and minds.
The announcements that key Western countries and American allies including Britain, France, Australia and Canada are recognizing a Palestinian state demonstrate the war’s effect on public opinion in those countries.
In the U.S., the war has contributed to increasing alienation from Israel among Democrats.
It also is stoking waves of ugly antisemitism across the left and the far right.
Friends of Israel argue that the global outrage is misplaced.
Hamas was the aggressor and can stop the war at any time by releasing the hostages and giving up its remaining control in Gaza.
Further, the outrage against Israel, fanned by a resourceful and utterly dishonest propaganda machine that often mixes fake news and biased reports to exaggerate and fabricate stories of Israeli cruelty, benefits from a global double standard.
The atrocities and horrors of the Sudanese civil war dwarf anything happening in Gaza, and the world yawns.
One doesn’t have to be a Jew-hating bigot to oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, or to support a cease-fire even if it leaves Hamas in place.
To be saddened by the human suffering in Gaza is neither immoral nor antisemitic.
And there are strong policy and prudential arguments against the course of action that the Israeli government has followed there on which reasonable people can and do disagree.
But the Western leaders who flaunt their self-perceived moral purity as they condemn Israel forget the foundations on which they stand.
Today’s liberal, rules-based Western order is the product of a far bloodier history than anything Israelis have done or even could do in Gaza.
The liberal world order whose fruits modern Europeans have enjoyed for so long is grounded on the Allied victory in World War II.
The Allies, like the Israelis, weren’t the aggressors in that war, but in their efforts to extirpate the scourges of Nazi nihilism and Japanese militarism, they killed as many as three million German and another one million Japanese civilians.
They created mass homelessness, destroyed some of the world’s greatest cultural and religious monuments, disrupted medical and educational services, and subjected millions to ethnic cleansing on an unprecedented scale.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and British Labour leader Clement Attlee scoffed at suggestions that the Allies provide humanitarian aid to enemy civilians while the war continued.
As the British Foreign Office reminded Lord Lothian, its ambassador to the U.S., “supplies admitted to the occupied territories either fall into enemy hands or release other supplies for the enemy.”
Those who criticize Israel for demanding the return of all hostages as the price of a cease-fire forget that Allied demands for unconditional surrender had much bloodier consequences in World War II.
Those demands were issued in the full knowledge that they would likely prolong the war and increase civilian suffering.
But FDR thought this might be a feature rather than a bug.
The Germans, in his view, had been willing to venture another world war because the first one had ended without any serious fighting inside Germany itself.
Real peace could come only if the Germans and the Japanese had the spirit of resistance beaten out of them.
As for ethnic cleansing, more than 11 million Germans were forced from their long-term homes in Poland and Czechoslovakia after the guns fell silent, often in winter amid terrible shortages of food, medicine and safe water.
“War is cruelty,” Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman wrote the mayor of Atlanta as he prepared to devastate the fallen city, “and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.”
Israel faces genuinely hellish choices in Gaza.
But Western leaders who insist that Israel’s actions are historically unprecedented and morally unjustifiable betray an ignorance of history and unseriousness of purpose that raise fundamental questions about their fitness for the offices they hold.
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