Is Killing Children Ever Justified?
Vietnamese children flee a napalm attack on their village in 1972. There can be no justification for dropping bombs on children. Ever. Therefore war must end. I found this famous photo by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut on Wikipedia.
December 10, 2023. Twelve years ago, a Jewish center in New Jersey asked me to give a talk on my book The End of War. After I gave my pitch for peace, a little old lady asked me, Okay, Mr. Smarty-pants, what’s your solution for Israel and Palestine? Or words to that effect.
I replied, It’s hard to see a peaceful resolution in the Middle East, but if there’s a will, there’s a way. Or words to that effect. I bailed, in other words. I’ve never written about Israel-Palestine, for two reasons. I’m daunted by the conflict’s complexities, and I fear that, whatever I say, I’ll upset people on both sides.
That’s why, since October 7, I’ve commented on the war only glancingly, in a cowardly, passive-aggressive way. But if only because my country is involved in this war, I must say something about it, even though I might upset people on both sides.
Here is how I see the conflict. On October 7, Hamas committed mass murder. Since then, the Israeli military has been committing mass murder, and people all over the world have been debating which side should be condemned.
Hamas should be condemned, some insist, because its mass murder triggered this war. Hamas militants killed 1,200 people on October 7, including children and women, and they sexually assaulted and mutilated victims. Hamas militants then hid among civilians in Gaza, so Hamas is responsible for Palestinian civilians killed by Israel, too. Plus, Hamas is an authoritarian group that disdains the rights of women and gay people.
No, the Israeli military should be condemned, others contend. The Israeli government started the war, by treating Palestinians brutally for decades. And Israel’s overwhelming military superiority forces Palestinian freedom fighters to resort to guerilla, hit-and-run tactics. Since October 7, Israel has killed more than 16,000 Palestinians, according to recent estimate, most of them women and children.
Israel’s defenders point out that the United States, responding to Al Qaeda’s murder of 2,977 Americans on 9/11, has killed lots of women and children. U.S. counterterror operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere have resulted in more than 4 million deaths, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
Critics of Israel retort that its military is killing civilians at a faster rate than the U.S. did in Afghanistan and Iraq; plus, Israel is killing more civilians per combatant.
These debates strike me as bizarre. It’s like arguing over which serial killer is worse, Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy. Their body counts are roughly the same, but you insist that Bundy is worse, because he kills females, whereas Gacy only kills males. You condemn Bundy, saying he deserves whatever punishment he gets. And you give praise, cash and weapons to Gacy, telling him privately that he should be more discrete in the future.
You might find my analogy offensive. Bundy and Gacy kill for fun, you point out, whereas states kill in the pursuit of goals such as national security and sovereignty. But when you resort to mass murder to achieve a goal, you lose your legitimacy. If you prevail, you prove not that your cause is legitimate but that you’re better at killing and terrorizing.
Whether or not they use the phrase, participants in recent debates over Hamas and Israel are invoking just-war theory, which attempts to establish what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior during war. Just-war theory is oxymoronic, because war is mass murder, and mass murder should always be unacceptable.
Are some mass murderers more deserving of condemnation than others? Sure. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan started World War II, so they are more deserving of condemnation than their Allied adversaries. Plus Germany slaughtered millions of its own Jewish citizens. Just-war theorists love World War II, the war that justifies war.
But does mass murder perpetrated by Germany and Japan justify mass murder perpetrated by the Allies, including the firebombing of cities? No. The lesson of World War II should not be, Incinerating children is acceptable if their nation started a war. The lesson of World War II should be, The mass murder of children is unacceptable and must never happen again.
I harp on children because even hardened war apologists usually grant that killing kids is regrettable. But I care about combatants, too, and not just those who are maimed and killed. I even care about Hamas militants who slaughtered Israeli civilians in the October 7 attacks and Israeli soldiers who have been slaughtering Palestinian civilians.
To get a sense of how mass murder devastates everyone involved, see Hearts and Minds, the gut-wrenching 1974 documentary about the Vietnam War. The film rubs your face in the suffering of Vietnamese civilians. You see a girl, her skin peeling off, running away from her village, which has just been napalmed. (The photograph above shows the same girl.)
The filmmakers also interview an American pilot who bombed Vietnamese villages. He was once proud of his skill as a pilot, he says, but now he is wracked with guilt. As he sits on the front porch of his home, he chokes up as he tries to imagine how he would feel if someone dropped napalm on his children.
This pilot committed mass murder, but I feel compassion for him. I have little compassion, however, for those in positions of power, who coldly issue the orders that result in mass murder. The old war criminal Henry Kissinger comes to mind. The more power you have to avoid mass murder, the more you should be condemned for choosing it.
I’ve been re-reading War and Peace, Tolstoy’s account of the war between Russia and France in the early 19th century. Tolstoy is a fatalist, who contends that no one, least of all Napoleon, could have averted this bloody war. War is inevitable, Tolstoy implies, because we lack free will. Bullshit. We can and must put war behind us once and for all. A modest first step toward this goal is recognizing that killing children is never, ever justified.
The United States, the world’s number-one warmonger and profiteer, bears more responsibility than any other nation for war’s persistence. The U.S. not only has the biggest military, by far; it is also the biggest weapons dealer. And every time the U.S. resorts to mass murder to pursue a goal, it justifies mass murder by others, such as Hamas, Israel and Russia.
The U.S. must therefore take the lead in creating a world without war. That will be a tricky process. How can nations who distrust each other demilitarize? How can groups with legitimate grievances obtain justice? These problems won’t be easy to solve. But if there’s a will, there’s a way.
Further Reading:
You’re Not Free If You’re Dead: The Case Against Giving Ukraine F-16s
Dear Feminists, Please Help End War!
The organizations World Beyond War and Costs of War provide excellent information on the costs of war and benefits of peace.