Israel/Palestine

I think the difficulty is that you seem of the view morality has some place in war. It does not, moral judgements are beside the point. War is the forcing of another to bend to your will, and this is itself the quintessence of moral wrong. Nothing done in war is moral, no act of war displays virtue. A party at war may conclude its interests are best served by behaving in a manner which appears virtuous: treating prisoners well encourages surrenders rather than last stands, and refraining from undue harm to bystanders may be of value in cultivating allies and diplomatic support. But a party may make the opposite calculation, that its interests are best served by a policy of frightfulness, so that people are loathe to risk fighting at all, and come to see capitulation as the only way to avoid greater suffering. Neither choice is moral, or immoral: both are expedient, and may even be wholly unrelated to the moral character of the person who, in the world stripped of moral concern which is war, conceives one or the other best suited to attaining victory.


"They say war is an art but it's not. It mostly consists in outwitting people, robbing widows and orphans, and inflicting suffering on the helpless for one's own ends, and that's not art: That's business."