Israel and the Neighbor Who Wants You Dead

The wolf at the door, part three: notes from the Israeli frontier

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Israel and the Neighbor Who Wants You Dead

The wolf at the door, part three: notes from the Israeli frontier

How should a decent person act toward a neighbor who has announced, repeatedly and in writing, that he intends to kill you and take your land? A neighbor who has both the means and the apparent intent to carry out that threat. How should an entire sovereign nation act when confronted with the same dilemma?

There is no simple, clean answer. No textbook of political ethics where you can look it up. No Wikipedia page to consult. Most of what gets written about this problem, from either direction, is an attempt to make it stop being hard. It does not stop being hard. Our institutions and our laws are remarkably reliable at the scale of one man and his neighbor. They begin to fail somewhere on the way up to the scale of a sovereign state.

This question stopped being theoretical for me during our recent journey through Israel, Judea and Samaria, and the communities bordering Gaza. We stood in homes where families had been murdered. We spoke with people who survived October 7. We looked across fences into territory governed by an organization whose founding charter openly called for Israel’s destruction, and whose leaders have repeatedly reaffirmed that objective in one form or another. I came home realizing that the moral framework I instinctively carried with me was built for disputes between individuals, not for nations living beside neighbors committed to their elimination.

That realization became the seed for this essay. It is not an argument for one government or another, nor an attempt to justify every action taken in war. It is an attempt to answer a question that has haunted me since returning home: What does a nation do when the wolf is continually at the door?

One Man and His Neighbor

Suppose the man across the fence has told you he intends to kill you and take your farm. He has already tried once. Now he is raising his sons to finish the job.

Anglo-American law is clearer here than most people expect, and more restrictive than instinct might suggest. You may use deadly force against an imminent threat, and imminent means now, not someday. You may use force proportionate to the threat, and no more. In many jurisdictions, you must retreat if you can do so safely, though generally not from your own home (American Law Institute 1962, sec. 3.04; LaFave 2017, sec. 10.4).

The law does not permit the rest. You may not kill him today because of what he said last year. You may not kill his sons because of what they have been taught. You may not burn his house to make an example for the rest of the county. A threat may be genuine and terrifying, but if it is not imminent, preemptive killing is not self-defense. The law calls it murder.

All of this assumes a sheriff. It assumes that if you call, someone comes. It assumes the man who kills you will be arrested by a third party with no stake in the quarrel. Every constraint described above is acceptable because that third party, the law backed by the lawman, exists.

Take away the sheriff and the structure begins to collapse. Richard Maxwell Brown traced how American law gradually diverged from English law on precisely this point, abandoning much of the duty to retreat during the nineteenth century in a society where the nearest lawman might be days away (Brown 1991). Remove the enforcer, and the standard of imminence becomes increasingly difficult to apply. By the time the threat is unmistakably imminent, no one is coming to help.

There is no sheriff above sovereign states. America is its own sheriff. Israel is its own sheriff. So is China. The difference is that Israel's nearest existential threats are measured in miles rather than oceans. That is the first thing an American must absorb, and it is harder than it sounds because we have lived for generations under the protection of one. We mistake it for the natural order. It is not. Looking back to the American frontier reminds us that it was not always so here. It is certainly not so on Israel’s frontier.

To the extent that a supranational sheriff exists, it would presumably be the United Nations. A sheriff, however, is expected to enforce the law impartially. The UN Human Rights Council has long been criticized for doing the opposite. Resolution 5/1, adopted in 2007, created Agenda Item 7, devoted exclusively to “the human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.” It remains the Council’s only permanent country-specific agenda item.

Every regular session must include debate on Israel, while every other country in the world is considered only under general procedures or special resolutions (United Nations Human Rights Council 2007). Whatever one thinks of Israeli policy, the existence of a permanent docket for one nation and one nation alone is difficult to reconcile with the notion of an impartial referee. Israel is the only member state with a permanent agenda item requiring discussion at every regular session of the Human Rights Council. No other country, regardless of its conduct, is subject to the same standing requirement. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said as much the day after its adoption, expressing disappointment that the Council had singled out one regional situation despite serious allegations elsewhere in the world (United Nations 2007).

Nor does the institutional structure exist in a political vacuum. In the General Assembly, the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation frequently coordinates positions on resolutions involving Israel. It is often joined by many members of the 53-nation African Group, together with other developing countries and regional allies. The result is not a permanent voting bloc, nor unanimity, but a coalition that often commands comfortable majorities on Israel-related resolutions. In that environment, many do not view the United Nations as a neutral sheriff standing above the dispute, but as a political institution in which outcomes are shaped by enduring diplomatic coalitions as much as by legal principle.

When One Man Becomes a Nation: The Limits of Individual Morality

Reinhold Niebuhr confronted this problem almost a century ago. In Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), he argued that the moral standards available to individuals cannot simply be scaled to groups. Nations must exercise power, yet the greatest danger is not merely the misuse of power but convincing themselves that whatever they do is therefore righteous.

The threat stops being episodic. A man may come at you on Tuesday, and by Wednesday the danger has passed. A hostile population or political administration is a standing condition rather than an event.

Apply the doctrine of imminence, which allows deadly force only when the threat is immediate rather than merely anticipated, to a permanent threat, and it ceases to distinguish one day from the next. Is the danger real? Yes. Is an attack underway at this moment? Usually not. A rule that gives the same answer every day cannot tell a government when it should act.

The adversary stops being a person. He becomes a population containing combatants, sympathizers, the indifferent, the coerced, and a great many children. Proportionality is calculable against one man. Against a society, it becomes an estimate about people who have done nothing.

The decision binds people who did not make it. A man who chooses to fight accepts the consequences for himself. A government sends other people's sons into battle and shapes the world their grandchildren will inherit.

Individual self-defense law recognizes one important exception. A man is generally expected to retreat if he safely can, but not from his own home. The law recognizes that there comes a point where retreat means surrendering the very thing being defended. Nations eventually reach the same point.

And the sheriff is absent. Or worse, the sheriff consists of foreign governments whose willingness to intervene rises and falls with elections, headlines, alliances, and conflicts of interest.

Niebuhr's conclusion was not that nations are free to ignore morality. It was almost the opposite. A nation under existential threat must sometimes choose between bad options, but it should never pretend that choosing one of them makes it innocent.

The Name for the Hard Case

Political philosopher Michael Walzer confronted perhaps the hardest question in the ethics of war: what should a nation do when following the ordinary rules of war appears likely to bring about its own destruction? He called this the problem of supreme emergency (Walzer 1977, 251-268).

A supreme emergency is not ordinary war. It is the circumstance in which a political community faces not defeat but extinction. Walzer insisted the exception be narrowly confined. The threat must be genuine, imminent, and existential rather than merely severe. The measures taken must be necessary rather than merely useful. And even then, necessity does not transform a wrong into a right. The wrongdoing leaves what Walzer called a moral residue.

Walzer takes it seriously and constrains it. The threat must be imminent and genuinely existential rather than merely severe. The measure must be necessary rather than useful. And the wrong done does not stop being wrong because it was necessary. He called this fact of war - the moral residue.

His principal example was Britain's carpet bombing of Germany. In 1940, Britain stood alone. A German invasion seemed entirely possible, and the country faced a genuine risk of defeat. Walzer believed those circumstances qualified as a supreme emergency. By 1942, however, the strategic situation had changed. Germany was still dangerous, but Britain was no longer fighting for its immediate survival. The bombing continued anyway. Walzer's point was not that Britain had acted in an emergency. It was that it failed to recognize when the emergency had ended.

Walzer's argument leaves no comfortable refuge. Governments cannot invoke existential danger indefinitely. Every extraordinary measure demands continual re-examination. But critics have no easy escape either. If they reject the claim that a nation faces an existential threat, they must say what evidence would persuade them otherwise. Moral seriousness requires both disciplines. That question is no longer theoretical. It is the question Israel has been forced to answer since its founding.

What Rome Did, and What it Accomplished

One fact is often overlooked in modern discussions of Israel. The Jewish connection to this land is not merely a matter of religion or modern politics. It is a historical relationship that has already survived one of history’s greatest attempts at erasure.

The Roman Empire had done this before. After three wars spanning more than a century, Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 BC. The city burned for seventeen days. Many survivors were sold into slavery, and the site itself was symbolically cursed (Polybius 38.19-38.22; Appian, Punica 127-132). Contrary to popular legend, the Romans did not salt the earth. No contemporary source records such an act. Instead, they eventually returned, rebuilding Carthage as a Roman colony because its location was simply too valuable to abandon (Ridley 1986; Miles 2010, 363-373).

Jerusalem proved to be a different kind of problem.

Following the Bar Kokhba revolt in AD 132-135, Emperor Hadrian attempted something far more ambitious than military conquest. Jerusalem was leveled and rebuilt as the Roman city of Aelia Capitolina. Jews were barred from entering on pain of death. The province of Judaea was renamed Syria Palaestina (Cassius Dio 69.12-69.14; Eck 1999). Whether intended primarily as punishment or administrative reorganization, the effect was unmistakable: to sever the historic connection between the Jewish people and their ancestral homeland.

It did not work.

The Roman campaigns devastated Judea and dispersed much of the Jewish population across the empire. But they did not empty the land of Jews. Jewish communities remained continuously in places such as Jerusalem, Galilee, Tiberias, Safed, and Hebron through Byzantine, Islamic, Crusader, Mamluk, and Ottoman rule. The diaspora became the larger story, but it was never the only story.

Nor had Rome understood what it was trying to destroy.

The destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70 had already forced Judaism to adapt. Under figures such as Yohanan ben Zakkai, Jewish religious life shifted from a system centered on one temple, one priesthood, and one place to one centered on Torah, law, and study (Neusner 1970; Cohen 1987, 214-231). Rome could destroy buildings. It could not destroy a civilization that no longer depended upon them. What appeared to be a fatal blow instead accelerated the transformation that made Judaism portable and remarkably durable.

Nearly two thousand years later, the Roman Empire exists only in books and archaeological ruins. The Jewish people, despite exile, persecution, and repeated attempts at elimination, reestablished a sovereign state in the very land from which Rome had tried to erase them. The strongest historical argument against annihilation as a political strategy belongs to the Jews, and it was purchased at a price that no people would willingly pay.

The name Hadrian imposed also endured. Syria Palaestina became the root from which the modern term Palestine eventually developed. Hadrian did not invent the word. Herodotus had used Palaistine centuries earlier to describe the Philistine coastal region (Herodotus 7.89). What Rome did was extend that name across the Jewish heartland. Through Byzantine administration, Arabic Filastin, Ottoman governance, and finally the British Mandate, the name survived long after the empire that imposed it had disappeared.

History is full of peoples who vanished after conquest. The Jewish people are remarkable not because they escaped conquest, but because they did not disappear. They maintained both a continuous presence in the land and an enduring attachment to it across nearly two millennia. That history does not resolve the modern political conflict, but it explains why so many Israelis reject the suggestion that they should simply go somewhere else. From their perspective, history demonstrates that they have already tried leaving once. It lasted almost two thousand years.

Diodotus, and the Argument That is Not About Mercy

In 427 BC, Athens had voted to execute every adult male in the rebellious city of Mytilene and enslave the women and children. A ship left with the order. Overnight the assembly reconsidered, and Thucydides gives us both speeches (Thucydides 3.36 to 3.50).

The influential Athenian politician, Cleon, argued for the killing. His case was deterrence. Anything less than maximum severity invites the next rebellion, and mercy toward enemies is cruelty toward your own citizens who will die in the next war.

Another Athenian statesman, Diodotus answered him and refused to argue from compassion. He said so explicitly, because in that assembly a moral appeal would have been fatal to his case. His argument was practical. Annihilating a defeated enemy removes any incentive to surrender. If rebellion and surrender carry the same penalty, every future city fights to the last man, and Athens will pay for its severity in Athenian lives.

Athens reversed itself. A second ship rowed through the night and arrived in time.

The argument survives because it does not depend on the goodness of the person making it. A policy of no quarter converts every subsequent enemy into one with nothing to lose. That is a claim about arithmetic, and it is available to people who are not feeling generous.

This history lesson does not tell Israel what to do. It tells Israel what to ask. What incentives will today's decisions create for tomorrow's enemies? A nation that ignores that question may win the present war while making the next one more likely. A nation that answers it badly may invite the very destruction it hopes to avoid.

Gibeah, and the Argument Nobody Made

The Hebrew Bible puts the same question to a different assembly, and that one does not reconsider.

A Levite, one of Israel's religious officials, was traveling with a woman who was legally his concubine, a recognized secondary wife under the customs of the time, and stopped overnight in Gibeah, a town belonging to the tribe of Benjamin. Men of the city surround the house, the woman is pushed out to them, and she is raped through the night and dies at the threshold. The Levite cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends one to each tribe (Judges 19).

Israel assembles and demands that Benjamin surrender the men of Gibeah. Benjamin refuses and musters to defend them. Two battles go badly for Israel. The third is won by feigned retreat and ambush, and what follows is not a battle. The towns of Benjamin are put to the sword, the people and the livestock together. Six hundred men escape to the rock of Rimmon (Judges 20).

No Diodotus stood up in that assembly. There was no second ship.

The morning after is worse. Israel looks at what it has done and says that one tribe is cut off from Israel today, and then sets about undoing it by means worse than the crime that started it. Having sworn to give no daughter to Benjamin, they destroy Jabesh-Gilead for failing to attend the assembly and spare four hundred virgins, then instruct the remaining two hundred men to abduct girls dancing at the festival at Shiloh (Judges 21).

Athens found a Diodotus before it was too late. Israel did not. The near destruction of Benjamin is the result.

The Bible does not celebrate what happened. It condemns it. Later generations of Jewish readers did not point to the destruction of Benjamin as a model to follow, but as a warning about what happens when justice gives way to vengeance. The prophets would later invoke “the days of Gibeah” as shorthand for national moral failure, not national righteousness (Hosea 9:9; 10:9). Rabbinic commentators were equally uneasy. Some observed that Israel mobilized an entire nation to avenge a terrible crime committed against one household while paying comparatively little attention to the deeper moral decay, idolatry, and lawlessness that had already spread throughout the nation. They had become zealous about punishment while losing sight of justice itself.

The Book of Judges drives the lesson home with a refrain repeated four times, including its final sentence: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” The point is not simply the absence of a monarch. It is the absence of a trusted authority capable of restraining violence before it consumed everyone involved.

A crime committed by a handful of men ended with the near destruction of an entire tribe. That warning is nearly three thousand years old, and it forms part of the moral tradition that Israel inherited long before the modern state existed.

The Middle Path, and its Author

Not every existential struggle ends with annihilation or surrender. During the Cold War, American diplomat and historian George Kennan proposed a third path.

Writing in 1946 and 1947, Kennan argued that Soviet hostility was not primarily a response to Western policy. It arose from the nature of the Soviet regime itself. The Kremlin needed an external enemy to justify its dictatorship, so no concession by the West could permanently satisfy it (Kennan 1947). If the hostility was structural rather than negotiable, then neither appeasement nor total war offered a solution.

Kennan’s answer was containment.

The idea was deceptively simple. Do not try to destroy the Soviet Union. Do not expect to persuade it. Instead, prevent its expansion wherever it threatens to spread, apply sustained political and economic pressure, strengthen the societies around it, and allow the regime’s own internal contradictions to weaken it over time.

Kennan imagined this might take ten or fifteen years. It took nearly forty-five.

At first glance, the doctrine seems to fit modern Iran remarkably well. Iran is a functioning state with an economy, governing institutions, and a ruling elite whose legitimacy depends upon maintaining power. Those are precisely the kinds of regimes containment was designed to outlast.

Israel’s situation is different.

The difference is geography.

The United States could afford strategic patience because it had two oceans and thousands of miles separating it from the Soviet Union. If one crisis was mishandled, America would survive to confront the next. Israel does not possess that luxury. A country scarcely wider than New Jersey, with hostile forces only a few miles from major population centers, cannot easily absorb even one catastrophic failure. A doctrine whose success required forty-five years is a far more difficult proposition for a nation that must survive every Saturday morning in the meantime.

Kennan himself later warned that many Americans had misunderstood his doctrine. He believed policymakers, particularly Paul Nitze, had reduced containment to military confrontation while neglecting the political, economic, and cultural tools that were meant to do most of the work (Kennan 1967, 354-367; Gaddis 2005, 87-124). The Marshall Plan, educational exchanges, broadcasting through Radio Free Europe, and patient diplomatic pressure were not supporting efforts. They were the strategy. Military strength existed primarily to buy time.

The Helsinki Accords demonstrated why Kennan believed those instruments mattered.

In 1975, thirty-five nations signed the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The agreement appeared to favor Moscow. The Soviet Union received long-sought Western recognition of Europe’s postwar borders, effectively acknowledging its domination of Eastern Europe. In return, the West obtained commitments on human rights, freedom of movement, family reunification, and the free flow of information, provisions that came to be known collectively as “Basket Three.”

Many Americans regarded the agreement as a capitulation.

Almost nobody in America thought this was a good trade, and most regarded the agreement as a capitulation. The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial against it. Ronald Reagan said it put an American stamp of approval on Russia’s enslavement of the captive nations. Senator Henry Jackson called the agreement one-sided. White House mail on the subject ran better than fifteen to one against (Snyder 2010).

Critics argued that the United States had traded moral principle for diplomatic convenience. President Gerald Ford signed it anyway.

The unexpected consequences emerged inside the Soviet bloc.

Because the Soviet government celebrated the agreement as a diplomatic triumph, it published the text for its own citizens. Dissidents suddenly possessed something they had never before enjoyed: an official document, signed by their own government, promising rights that the government itself routinely violated.

The character of dissent changed overnight. Citizens were no longer demanding revolutionary change. They were demanding that their governments honor commitments they had already made. Yuri Orlov founded the Moscow Helsinki Group to monitor Soviet compliance. Charter 77 emerged in Czechoslovakia. Helsinki Watch was founded in the United States and later became Human Rights Watch. Poland’s Solidarity movement followed. International review conferences repeatedly forced Soviet officials to answer for promises they had voluntarily made. As historian Daniel Thomas argues, provisions that many diplomats dismissed as symbolic gradually became one of the legal and moral foundations of the movements that helped bring the Soviet system to an end (Thomas 2001).

The mechanism was surprisingly simple. The strategy worked because the Soviet Union had willingly signed the document.

Israel has no equivalent instrument aimed at Palestinian society, and there is a structural reason it cannot easily have one. There is no agreement capable of creating the same dynamic within Palestinian society because any comparable effort would immediately be dismissed as an instrument imposed by Israel itself. That may be the hardest problem in this entire conflict. Containment succeeded in the USSR because it encouraged change from within. Israel has struggled to find an equivalent path, and I do not know what one would look like.

Why the Germany Analogy Almost Never Applies

Modern discussions of Gaza often reach reflexively for Germany or Japan after the Second World War. The comparison is understandable. It is also usually incomplete.

Germany and Japan are among the few modern examples in which populations immersed for years in expansionist or eliminationist ideologies were successfully reoriented toward peaceful democratic societies. But those transformations followed extraordinary circumstances: total military defeat, unconditional surrender, years of foreign occupation, complete political reconstruction, and populations exhausted by catastrophic war (Dower 1999; Jarausch 2006). Rwanda after 1994 offers another example, although one achieved under an authoritarian government that continues to exact a significant price in political freedom (Straus and Waldorf 2011).

Those conditions are rarely available.

Israel cannot realistically occupy Gaza for a decade at an acceptable cost in lives, resources, international support, or domestic cohesion. Nor can it simply rewrite a society’s educational system without becoming the object of the very resentment it hopes to overcome. Whoever controls the schools inevitably inherits the legitimacy problem.

History offers other examples of governments choosing overwhelming military force instead.

Sri Lanka destroyed the LTTE in 2009. The insurgency ended, but only after a campaign that the United Nations Panel of Experts estimated killed tens of thousands of civilians and that generated credible allegations of war crimes against both sides (United Nations 2011). France won the Battle of Algiers through systematic torture, later acknowledged by General Paul Aussaresses himself, yet ultimately lost Algeria while inflicting lasting damage on the moral authority of the French Republic (Aussaresses 2002; Horne 1977).

The historical lesson is not that force never succeeds. It plainly can. The lesson is that military victory alone rarely resolves the political problem that produced the conflict in the first place. Germany and Japan are remembered because military victory was followed by something far more difficult: years of reconstruction, institutional transformation, and the gradual rebuilding of political legitimacy. Those conditions are precisely what make the analogy so difficult to apply to Gaza today.

What Game Theory Can Tell Us, and What It Cannot

Political scientists and economists have spent decades trying to understand why wars continue when peace would seem to benefit everyone. Their conclusions are often uncomfortable because they undermine many of the slogans heard in public debate.

James Fearon transformed the field in 1995 with a simple observation. War is extraordinarily costly. If both sides truly preferred peace, some bargain should almost always exist that would leave each better off than continued fighting. The real question, then, is not why peace is desirable, but why bargaining fails (Fearon 1995).

Fearon argued that it usually fails for three reasons. One side hides its true intentions or capabilities. Neither side believes the other’s promises about the future. Or the thing being fought over is viewed as indivisible. Later scholars, particularly Robert Powell, argued that the last problem is often really the second. Even if both sides prefer peace today, neither can trust the other not to exploit a shift in power tomorrow (Powell 2006).

That insight lies behind many modern conflicts. The central question is often not whether today’s agreement is acceptable, but whether either side believes it will still be honored five years from now.

Robert Jervis added another layer to the problem. He argued that policymakers repeatedly make one of two opposite mistakes. They assume an adversary is inherently aggressive when it is actually acting from fear, or they assume an adversary is merely frightened when it is in fact committed to expansion. The two situations often produce the same observable behavior, yet they demand opposite responses (Jervis 1976; 1978).

History remembers both mistakes. The 1938 Munich Agreement, in which Britain and France accepted Hitler's annexation of part of Czechoslovakia in the hope of preserving peace, is usually remembered as the danger of mistaking aggression for insecurity.

The outbreak of the First World War is often cited as the opposite error, where mutual fear and miscalculation produced a catastrophe that few leaders actually wanted.

That question sits at the heart of Israel’s predicament. Does Hamas seek limited political objectives, or is its commitment to Israel’s destruction genuine? Does Iran seek deterrence, regional influence, or something more fundamental? Game theory cannot answer those questions. It can only show that everything depends upon getting the diagnosis right.

Robert Axelrod’s famous tournaments reached another surprising conclusion. Cooperation usually emerges not from kindness but from repeated interaction. The most successful strategies were neither relentlessly aggressive nor endlessly forgiving. They were initially cooperative, responded firmly to betrayal, forgave genuine cooperation, and made their behavior predictable (Axelrod 1984).

But that strategy contains an assumption that is often overlooked. It works only if both sides value the future enough for future rewards and punishments to matter. If one side embraces martyrdom, believes history is nearing its end, or simply discounts tomorrow far more heavily than today, then the incentives that normally sustain cooperation begin to disappear. Managing the conflict may become more realistic than resolving it.

Thomas Schelling extended the same logic to deterrence. A threat that no one believes is no threat at all. For deterrence to work, commitments must be visible, credible, and difficult to reverse (Schelling 1960). That uncomfortable reality explains why nations often adopt positions they hope never to carry out. The purpose is not to fight, but to convince others that they will if forced.

Game theory, however, has one profound limitation. It accepts people’s goals as given. It can model how rational actors pursue their objectives, but it cannot tell us what those objectives actually are. It cannot determine whether Hamas is fundamentally committed to Israel’s destruction or whether its goals are ultimately negotiable. Nor can it account for the competing factions, personalities, and political pressures that shape decision-making on both sides.

In the end, game theory explains why this conflict is so difficult. It does not tell us how to solve it.

Who can sign, and who survives signing

Political scientist Barbara Walter asked a deceptively simple question: why do civil wars end in negotiated settlements so much less often than wars between states?

Her answer was that the problem is structural rather than personal. In a civil war, the side that disarms first makes itself vulnerable. No trusted authority exists to enforce the agreement. Even if both parties negotiate honestly and in good faith, neither can safely take the first step because there is no sheriff to guarantee that the other side will keep its promises. Third-party guarantees are often the only variable that changes the outcome (Walter 2002).

That is the structure of today’s debate over Gaza. Hamas refuses to disarm before Israel withdraws. Israel refuses to withdraw before Hamas disarms. Whether any outside power can credibly guarantee either promise becomes the central question.

There is a second problem, and an American example illustrates it better than any Middle Eastern one.

The Treaty of New Echota, which authorized the removal of the Cherokee people from their ancestral lands, was signed in December 1835 by roughly one hundred Cherokees, none of whom held office in the Cherokee government. John Ross, the elected Principal Chief, submitted a petition opposing the treaty bearing approximately fifteen thousand signatures from a nation of only sixteen thousand people. The United States Senate ratified the treaty by a single vote. Four years later, three of its principal signers were assassinated by fellow Cherokees under a Cherokee law that made unauthorized land cessions a capital offense (Perdue and Green 2007, 69-116; Wilkins 1986).

The treaty was legally valid. It never possessed the political legitimacy needed to survive.

The same pattern appears repeatedly in the modern Middle East.

King Abdullah I founded the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and ruled it from independence. He also conducted quiet negotiations with Zionist leaders before and after Israel’s creation in 1948 and was widely believed to be pursuing a separate accommodation with the new Jewish state. In July 1951, while entering Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque for Friday prayers, he was assassinated by a Palestinian gunman. Standing beside him was his fifteen-year-old grandson, the future King Hussein, who survived the attack (Shlaim 2007, 1-40).

Anwar Sadat launched Egypt into the 1973 war against Israel. Four years later, he stunned the world by flying to Jerusalem to address the Knesset. In 1979 he signed the peace treaty that returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and permanently removed his country from the Arab-Israeli wars. The Arab League expelled Egypt in response. Two years later, while reviewing a military parade commemorating the very war he had begun, Sadat was murdered by officers from his own army because he had made peace with Israel (Kepel 2003, 191-218).

Yitzhak Rabin commanded Israel's army during the Six-Day War of 1967. As Prime Minister, he signed the Oslo Accords and shook Yasser Arafat's hand on the White House lawn. The Oslo process ultimately collapsed, ushering in years of renewed violence and leaving unresolved the interim arrangements in the West Bank. The division of the territory into Areas A, B, and C, intended as a temporary framework pending a final settlement, became the political and legal hellscape that still defines the conflict today. Rabin never lived to see that outcome. In November 1995, after leaving a peace rally in Tel Aviv, he was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an Israeli law student who believed religious law justified the killing (Ephron 2015). The square where he fell now bears his name.

None of these leaders was killed by the enemy. Each was killed by someone from his own side. Each possessed the military credentials necessary to make peace, and in each case those same credentials could not protect him from those who believed peace itself was betrayal.

Political scientists Andrew Kydd and Barbara Walter explain why this pattern repeats itself. Extremists attack precisely when peace appears possible. Their objective is not simply to kill. It is to destroy trust. Every successful attack convinces each side that the other either cannot or will not control its own extremists, causing negotiations to collapse under the weight of renewed suspicion (Kydd and Walter 2002).

Peace requires more than a willing partner. It requires a partner who can survive making peace. Those are not the same thing. Under exactly the conditions where peace is most desperately needed, they often become mutually exclusive. Anyone who explains the repeated collapse of negotiations solely as a product of bad faith is overlooking a structural reality that has claimed the lives of kings, presidents, and prime ministers.

Assimilation is Not a Security Strategy

The Cherokee Nation conducted an experiment that bears directly on Jewish history.

In the early nineteenth century, the Cherokee adopted many of the institutions of the young American republic with remarkable speed. Sequoyah developed a written syllabary in 1821, and within a few years literacy became widespread. The Cherokee adopted a written constitution in 1827 modeled on that of the United States, established a bilingual newspaper in 1828, embraced settled agriculture, founded churches, and, in some households, even adopted the slaveholding practices of their Southern neighbors (Perdue and Green 2007, 8-40). By every standard the surrounding society claimed to admire, they had become legible, civilized, educated, and familiar.

It made no difference.

Gold was discovered on Cherokee land in 1829. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act the following year. The Cherokee challenged Georgia in the United States Supreme Court and won. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the Court held that Georgia had no authority over Cherokee territory. It was one of the most significant victories an Indigenous nation ever achieved in an American court.

The ruling changed nothing.

President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce it. Georgia ignored it. Within a few years, the United States Army began forcing approximately 16,000 Cherokee men, women, and children from their homes. Escorted west at gunpoint over the winter of 1838-39, they walked nearly 1,000 miles to what is now Oklahoma. Disease, exposure, hunger, and exhaustion killed an estimated 4,000 people. The Cherokee remember it simply as The Trail Where They Cried. Americans know it as the Trail of Tears.

The lesson was brutal. Assimilation did not resolve a competing claim to the land. Legal victory did not protect them when no government was willing to enforce its own judgment. A right without an enforcer proved to be only words on paper.

Many Jewish thinkers reached a remarkably similar conclusion in nineteenth-century Europe.

Leon Pinsker reached that conclusion after the anti-Jewish pogroms that swept the Russian Empire in 1881-82. Theodor Herzl reached it after witnessing the Dreyfus Affair in France, where a decorated Jewish army officer could be publicly humiliated despite the ideals of the French Republic (Pinsker 1882; Herzl 1896). Germany provided perhaps the strongest test of all. By the early twentieth century, German Jews were among the most educated, patriotic, professionally successful, and culturally assimilated Jewish communities in Europe. Many regarded themselves as Germans first and Jews second. Their assimilation did not protect them. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany progressed from legal discrimination to exclusion, dispossession, deportation, and ultimately the Holocaust. Approximately six million Jews were murdered in what the Nazi regime called the Final Solution (Elon 2002).

The comparison is not that the histories are identical. They are not. It is that two very different peoples reached the same unsettling conclusion. Becoming accepted by the surrounding society did not guarantee security when the conflict ultimately centered on sovereignty, identity, or land.

That realization became one of the intellectual foundations of political Zionism. It also explains something that many outsiders struggle to understand. For many Israelis, the lesson of history is not that coexistence is impossible. It is that coexistence, by itself, has never been enough to guarantee survival.

The Strongest Case Against Israel’s Position

Any honest examination of this question has to grapple with the strongest argument on the other side.

Its serious advocates do not begin with antisemitism or Hamas. They begin with statelessness. Their claim is that the conflict is fundamentally driven by dispossession, military occupation, and the absence of Palestinian self-government rather than by inherited hatred. In this view, the Palestine eliminationist rhetoric is largely a consequence of those conditions rather than their cause (Khalidi 2020). A population that has lived for generations without a sovereign state, while much of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) remains under Israeli military administration and subject to restrictions on movement and security, will predictably produce violent resistance. From this perspective, Hamas is not the origin of the conflict but one of its products.

The argument follows naturally. Security measures adopted by Israel to contain violence deepen Palestinian resentment, which in turn produces more violence, prompting still more security measures. This is Robert Jervis’s spiral model in practice.

Critics also point to developments in the West Bank. Israeli governments have continued to approve or expand Jewish settlements under administrations that have increasingly rejected the creation of a Palestinian state. To many observers, this appears less like a temporary security policy than a long-term territorial strategy. They also point to the enormous human cost of the Gaza war. Whatever disputes exist over the precise composition of the casualty figures, the scale of civilian suffering is undeniable.

Critics further argue that Israel has not consistently restrained violence committed by its own citizens. Israeli police opened 779 investigative files in 2025 involving alleged offenses by Israeli civilians against Palestinians in the West Bank, compared with 139 in 2019, yet indictments were filed in only 6.6 percent of those cases (Haaretz 2026). Critics see this as evidence of inadequate enforcement. Israeli authorities respond that many investigations fail because of insufficient evidence or because witnesses are unwilling or unable to testify.

Some of the most difficult questions come from within Israel itself.

Israeli governments knowingly permitted large transfers of Qatari money into Gaza for years, believing that a Hamas responsible for governing two million people would become more pragmatic and easier to deter. That judgment is now widely regarded within Israel as a profound strategic mistake (Pfeffer 2023).

Likewise, the history of the peace process remains genuinely contested. Many Israelis view the failure of the 2000 Camp David summit as proof that Yasser Arafat rejected an unprecedented opportunity for peace. Others, including American negotiator Robert Malley, argue that the Israeli proposal was less comprehensive than later public narratives suggested and that the subsequent negotiations at Taba came significantly closer to an agreement (Malley and Agha 2001).

There is also no single Israeli view of the ethics of war. Some of the sharpest criticisms of Israeli military doctrine have come from Israeli scholars themselves. Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin argued that a democratic state bears a heightened obligation to protect its own soldiers, even when that increases risk to enemy civilians in territory beyond its control (Kasher and Yadlin 2005). Michael Walzer and Avishai Margalit responded that this reverses a longstanding moral principle of warfare by shifting excessive risk onto noncombatants rather than onto combatants (Margalit and Walzer 2009).

None of these arguments can simply be dismissed. They represent the strongest moral and strategic challenge to Israel’s view of the conflict. Any serious attempt to understand the problem has to answer them rather than caricature them.

The Strongest Case for Israel’s Position

The strongest argument for Israel begins with a simple proposition: intentions matter.

Much of the public debate focuses on borders, settlements, and military operations. Israel’s defenders argue that these questions, while important, cannot be understood apart from the stated objectives of the organizations and governments confronting the Jewish state.

The documentary record is difficult to dismiss. The original 1988 Hamas Charter explicitly called for the destruction of Israel, invoked anti-Jewish conspiracy theories including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and framed the conflict not simply as a territorial dispute but as a religious struggle against Jews (Hamas 1988, arts. 7, 22, 32). In 2017 Hamas issued a revised political document that adopted more pragmatic language and accepted a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines as an interim stage. Hamas leaders, however, stated at the time that the new document did not replace the original covenant (Hamas 2017, arts. 20, 27).

Nor is Hamas alone. For decades, senior Iranian officials have repeatedly called for the elimination of the Israeli state while Iran has financed, armed, and trained multiple proxy organizations operating on Israel’s borders, including Hamas and Hezbollah (Levitt 2013; U.S. Department of State 2024). Qatar, meanwhile, hosted Hamas’s political leadership for years, illustrating how the movement has been sustained not only by local support but also by regional patrons.

For many, if not most, Israelis, October 7 changed the argument permanently.

Hostile rhetoric has always been abundant in the Middle East, and Israelis themselves often learned to discount it. Before October 7, many assumed that Hamas’s governing responsibilities, economic interests, and desire to remain in power would ultimately constrain its behavior. That assumption became known inside Israel as HaConceptzia or “the Conception.” October 7 destroyed that notion. The question was no longer whether Hamas intended mass violence. It had demonstrated both the intent and the willingness to carry it out.

Israelis also point to a longer-term concern that extends beyond today’s battlefield.

Multiple independent reviews of Palestinian educational materials, including studies by IMPACT-se and by the Georg Eckert Institute commissioned by the European Commission, found content that glorified violence, honored “martyrs,” or denied Israel’s legitimacy (IMPACT-se 2021; Georg Eckert Institute 2021). Whatever one’s view of those debates, one proposition is difficult to escape: the education of children shapes the politics of the next generation. No security arrangement is likely to outlast the beliefs of the people expected to sustain it.

Finally, there is a strategic reality that underlies every Israeli calculation.

The Holocaust also changed the arithmetic. During the Second World War, approximately one-third of the world's Jewish population was murdered. Today, there are only about sixteen million Jews worldwide, and roughly half live in Israel. For many Israelis, another national catastrophe is not simply another military defeat. It would threaten a substantial portion of the world's remaining Jewish population. Israel can afford very few catastrophic mistakes. Its adversaries need succeed only once. A country roughly the size of New Jersey, with major population centers only a few miles from hostile territory, cannot absorb repeated failures in the way larger nations can. That asymmetry shapes Israeli decision-making as profoundly as any ideology or political theory.

Whether one ultimately agrees with Israel’s conclusions or not, these are the realities that many Israelis believe any serious analysis must first explain before proposing an alternative course.

What History Suggests

History offers no resolution. It does, however, leave us with a handful of conclusions that survive comparison across very different times and places.

The first lesson is that what I have called a "total solution", the attempt to permanently eliminate a people or the problem they represent, works against states far more often than it works against peoples. Rome's destruction of Carthage in 146 BC is often cited as the classic example. It ended Rome's centuries-long rivalry with the Carthaginian state. Carthage ceased to exist as an independent power, and over time the Punic people, descendants of the Phoenician settlers who had built the city, were absorbed into the wider Roman world. The Jewish experience followed a very different path. Rome destroyed Jerusalem, scattered much of the Jewish population, and even attempted to erase the land's Jewish identity by renaming the province Syria Palaestina. Yet the Jewish people endured because their identity no longer depended upon a single city or a sovereign state. It had become portable across time and place. Anyone reasoning from Carthage to a modern people is reasoning from the wrong historical example.

The second lesson is that the instrument of a total solution is almost never the enemy's army alone. It is the civilian society that sustains it. Rome destroyed and enslaved the civilian population of Carthage. On the American plains, the United States encouraged the destruction of the great buffalo herds because they were the economic foundation of the Plains tribes (Isenberg 2000; Hämäläinen 2008). There is no version of a total solution that confines itself to combatants. Choosing such a strategy is also choosing to wage war against the society that supports them.

The third lesson is that restraint is not the same as passivity. Choosing not to wage total war does not mean choosing inaction. History suggests that the most successful campaigns against insurgencies rely less on overwhelming force than on patient intelligence gathering, infiltration of hostile networks, targeted operations, financial disruption, and persistent deterrence. Those approaches are slower and often less emotionally satisfying, but they have generally proved more durable.

Northern Ireland illustrates the point. Britain’s greatest strategic mistakes were not failures of military strength but failures of restraint. Internment without trial in 1971 and the killing of unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday in 1972 became two of the Provisional IRA’s most effective recruiting tools, strengthening the very movement they were intended to suppress (English 2003, 134-152). Intelligence penetration of the IRA, by contrast, ultimately proved far more consequential than indiscriminate force.

And a society under permanent siege has to defend its own institutions from its own security apparatus. South Korea lived beside an adversary committed to its absorption and took thirty-four years to get out from under the authoritarianism the threat justified (Cumings 1997, 337 to 393). That is the danger Niebuhr named, and it arrives from the inside.

Scipio Aemilianus, the Roman general who commanded the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC, watched the city burn and began to weep. Standing beside him was the Greek historian Polybius, who asked why a victorious commander would mourn his greatest triumph. Scipio replied that he was thinking of Rome itself and of the day another conqueror might one day do the same to his own city (Polybius 38.21-38.22).

The man carrying out the annihilation understood something his contemporaries often forgot. Every precedent created in war becomes a precedent available to someone else.

Israel's dilemma is not a simple choice between decency and survival. It is that the response which feels most proportionate to the horror of an attack is often the one most likely to strengthen the forces that produced it. Conversely, history suggests that the most successful long-term strategies rely on relentless intelligence, credible deterrence, carefully targeted force, and the discipline to resist measures that satisfy today's anger while making tomorrow's war more likely. The hardest decisions in statecraft are rarely choices between good and evil. More often they are choices between what feels emotionally satisfying today and what is most likely to produce a safer tomorrow.

One further complication receives too little attention. Incentives do not operate only at the level of governments. Decades of prisoner exchanges have demonstrated that hostages possess enormous strategic value. The 2011 exchange of more than one thousand prisoners for Gilad Shalit established a precedent that October 7 sought to exploit on a vastly larger scale. Once hostages become a reliable currency, future kidnappings become more, not less, likely. Any lasting settlement must therefore solve not only the political conflict but the incentive structure that has repeatedly rewarded hostage-taking.

I do not know how a nation lives in that position for eighty years without distorting its own moral compass. Watching Israelis do it, up close, for a week, I came away with more respect for the attempt than I expected and less confidence that I would be able to manage the tension myself.

RWM/JGM

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