Truth, Reality, And Lies In Times Of War
You Can Have Your Own Opinion, But Not Your Own Facts
In 1918 US Senator Hiram Warren Johnson is purported to have said: The first casualty when war comes is truth.[i]
Understandably, the moral outrage has been quick after October 7. Some of the outrage has been perversely misguided, especially when people demonstrated against Israel in response to Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians. From the beginning, my solidarity and compassion has been very much with Israel and the world’s Jewish population. It still is, but not in striking contrast to the civilian population of Gaza or the West Bank. A dead child is a tragedy, regardless of ethnic, religious, or national affiliation[ii].
For the purpose of this writing, I will abstain from expressing my own moral outrage. There is plenty of that across the whole spectrum of protests. I am interested in facts as the basis for truth, and moral judgements that come from knowledge. The lack of factual information, the deliberate ignorance of it, or the willful manipulation are all fueling many of the current protests.
It’s become somewhat fashionable to reject claims or even the concept of truth (which admittedly has been abused a lot), but that doesn’t mean any conspirative or sloppy statement has the same validity as a carefully researched one. We know something about the conflict in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank by extension, and the facts are changing as time goes by — just a snapshot:
The numbers point to a humongous tragedy, no matter which perspective we have. As much as I would like to be a principled pacifist[iii], I cannot. Israel is dealing with the dilemma of having to weigh unavoidable war casualties against the loss of the lives of hostages and within its own population. Hamas stated (Ghazi Hamad) that it would repeat the attacks of Oct 7 over and over again without hesitation and Iran’s Alireza Panahian, the spokesman for the office of Iran’s Supreme Leader, said that the Israeli and Western civilization will be destroyed in a war of attrition (some of this may be typical Iranian hyperbole). Israel’s situation evokes the 9/11 related question of whether to shoot down an airplane with hundreds of innocent passengers in it to save the lives of thousands of potential victims on the ground. The moral dilemma is unsolvable.
The dilemma of what is right and wrong in this situation is better discussed from a practical angle, so I would like to offer an alternative view of the situation here. Hamas is not only holding 242 people (Israelis and some foreigners) as hostages, but also the civilian population of Gaza. Hamas has about 30,000–40,000 fighters and an unknown number of supporters in the population, but many civilians in Gaza are also victims of Hamas’ brutal rule of 16 years which makes it a suicidal exercise to resist it.
I am not a war strategist (I recommend Lawrence Freedman’s books “Command” and “War”), but it seems ineffective to me to kill the hostages in the wake of rooting out the hostage takers. Israel will breed a new wave of terrorists, antagonize the rest of the world, and lose the support it badly needs in its fight against bigger actors like Iran. History shows that a complete “rooting out” of the enemy is impossible, as the US or France can attest to.
The same applies to Palestinian “liberation” efforts that involve displacing or eliminating all Israelis in Israel[iv].
Often, the most dangerous people are the ones that are driven by convictions and pursue their actions regardless of the outcome.
The Search For Truth
An aide to George Bush, very likely Karl Rove, was quoted saying this:
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’[v].”
George Bush’s government gets credit for the start of the post-truth area during the Iraq war, but he certainly didn’t invent the concept. Twisting or creating ‘facts’ to establish a casus belli is not just an American thing but also popular with other governments like the Russian. Steadfast denial in light of overwhelming evidence is a Russian specialty, whether it’s the poisoning of opponents or the downing of civilian airplanes:
Thanks to the Bellingcat investigation of the downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine we know the truth[vi]: “Based on the information above, it can be concluded that on July 17, 2014 a Buk missile launcher, originating from the 53rd Brigade near Kursk, Russia, travelled from Donetsk to Snizhne. It was then unloaded and drove under its own power to a field south of Snizhne, where at approximately 4:20 pm it launched a surface-to-air missile that hit Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 as it flew over Ukraine. On the morning of July 18, the Buk missile launcher was driven from Luhansk, Ukraine, across the border to Russia. Alternative scenarios presented by the Russian Ministry of Defense and Almaz-Antey are at best deeply flawed, and at worst show a deliberate attempt to mislead using fabricated evidence.”
Truth is a logical or mathematical concept, as in 1 + 1 = 2, so it cannot be 3. There are either weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or not. Going to war (in self-defense?), based on convincing (but fake) evidence — as it happened to the British — puts the attacker in the category of lesser evil. Conducting a war against better knowledge raises some serious questions about the attacker’s true motivations. Democratization and nation building may count as honorable targets but look like very delusional thinking in hindsight.
When it comes to Hamas, we have evidence that they attacked Israel to lead the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) into a trap in Gaza and trigger a victorious war against Israel, helped by Iran’s satellite forces in Lebanon and Syria — a Jihad. The way the attack was conducted (rape, executions, mutilation and burning of victims, kidnappings etc.) was truly evil, without doubt. The motivation for the attack has elements of logic, although flawed and it will not achieve its goals. If the goal is to make the country of Israel Arab again — as stated by the Free Palestine Movement — it’s just racism and based on the false and ahistorical conception that non-Arabs have no right to a home in Israel.
A disregard for the truth, especially when combined with religious concepts, becomes a dangerous cocktail in the hands of everyone. Netanyahu just appointed Zvi Sukkot as head of the Knesset’s West Bank sub-committee, and the opposition leader Merav Michaeli likened this to pouring 700 liters of fuel on a third front. Religious ideology is driving about half of the West Bank settlements, and it’s a serious impediment for a 2-state solution that is commonly regarded as the best possible option (at least by reasonable people).
People Have Lost Their Language
Obtaining the truth requires arduous analytical efforts. Expressing the truth requires the ability to use language in differentiated form. Facts, assumptions, limitations, and views need to be expressed with care. The careless use of words (i.e, genocide, war-crime, fascism, decolonization etc.) creates just noise. If the creation of noise is the objective, protesters in the West are doing a great job.
“Free Palestine, from the river to the sea” is a battle cry that has so many implications, most of them blatantly racist and inhuman, and I doubt that its propagators see through them.
The abundance of conflicting information contributes to people’s general distrust of (properly researched) information and makes them turn to more dubious sources:
Celebrities like the infamous, somewhat deranged Roger Waters (former Pink Floyd member) found a new topic post Covid and he is now an expert on the events of Oct 7: “We don’t yet know what happened; maybe there were some individual cases of civilians getting killed; Israel is making up stories”
And there are the open letters, signed by artists, academics, intellectuals or politicians — often channeling their own grievances. This one for instance:
“The Palestinian struggle and the struggles for Black liberation, LGBTQ liberation, and the struggle for working-class power have been intertwined throughout history. Palestinian people have demonstrated solidarity with other oppressed people, and it is only right for that solidarity to now be shown to them.” Palestinian support for LGBTQ liberation? What?
Not all is bad though. On a recent visit to Princeton, I was prepared for a yelling show by infuriated Ivy League students. On campus, I saw the usual flurry of posters and statements, but without zealous students competing to rip them off. I also saw a friendly older woman in the street, waving an Israeli flag and collecting donations, without interference. A pleasant place.
[i] The Guardian
[ii] Some of this is wishful thinking. We are surprisingly unaffected by tragedies in remote areas that we know little about. Examples are Sudan (9,000–10,000 people killed as of Oct 2023), South Sudan (400,000 people killed in South Sudan between 2013 and 2018), 7M Afghan refugees currently getting forcibly expelled by Pakistan and Iran, 377,000 victims in the war in Yemen until 2021 (of whom an estimated 250,000 died from hunger and diseases), 24,000 Rohingya killed by the military of Myanmar in 2018. The list is endless, but our compassion is not. (https://www.facebook.com/TerribleMaps/photos/tragedy-world-map/1778026662441715/)
[iii] Sir Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician and pacifist, regarded wars of self-defense as generally illegitimate because he thought there were almost none and self-defense was a much abused excuse. While I agree with him on Russia claiming to defend itself against NATO in Ukraine, Israel is clearly acting in self-defense against Hamas.
[iv] Many people (Palestinians, Arabs, Western protesters) like to refer to the land as Palestine, willfully ignoring the fact that Israel has been a recognized state since 1948 and Palestine was never a state.
[v] Suskind, Ron (October 17, 2004). “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush”. The New York Times Magazine. (Found on Wikipedia)
[vi] Zaroshchens’ke Launch Site: Claims and Reality — A Bellingcat Investigation, July 13, 2015, MH17, Ukraine
