Those Scary Zionists

You may remember that a while ago I tried to set up a joint Arab-Israeli blog, as a place for civil disagreement, and then straightaway had to shut it down because my interlocutor probably wasn't an Arab, which sort of put a dent in the premise.

At the time, I issued a challenge to any other anti Zionists to come forward and engage in such a duel. I had only two conditions: that the discussion be civil, and that it be between two identified people - what I called "Google-able". Given the fiasco of the first attempt, this seemed reasonable to me.

No one has stepped forward so far. Yet there was one individual, who called itself "The Debater. This person claimed "I do possess degrees, have taught, and am a serious writer". Indeed, in the following exchange of e-mails, whoever it was demonstrated intelligence, learning, and the ability to disagree civiliy. What it refused to do was give any indication of its identity. I don't know its gender, country of domicile, anything.

It gave two reasons for this adamant refusal. The first was that identity should have no bearing on arguments. At first glance, this is a reasonable assertion. I might even wish, a bit wistfully, that it were true, and that arguments be won on the merits of their logic or strength of their factual basis. Moreover, my willingness to engage in such a joint blog experiment is grounded, I admit, in my expectation that I'll be able to demonstrate that in order to be seriously anti-Zionist one has no choice but to prefer value judgments over rational ones. Still, it takes a high degree of credulousness to believe that anyone sees the world in some objective mode, irrespective of their identity. No-one does that. The best one can (and should) strive for is the ability to reconcile objective facts and rational thought processes with the subjective perspectives we inevitably have.

This, however, is intellectual word chopping. At one point The Debater gave its real reason for insisting on remaining anonymous:

[I]n commenting about identity, try putting yourself in the shoes of an anti-Zionist who's being told to reveal his true identity. The charge of "anti-semitism", though undoubtedly true in specific cases, has been used as a weapon of character assassination to silence any form of opposition to Israel. I don't believe you do this but others who read the blog certainly can...... The blog opens us both not only to fair-minded Palestinians and Israelis who wish to learn in the spirit of intellectual and decent debate as we do, but also to emotion-driven fanatics who are not in the least interested in meaningful debate but in ad hominem, smear attacks. As an Israeli Zionist, you're immuned to this and is perhaps why you have not seemed to understand this sensitivity at the other side of the fence. I think you should be understanding and take into account these sensitivities in your debater. The repurcussions to a serious and scholarly anti-Zionist has been seen time and again, as you well know.

In other words: Being an anti-Zionist can be dangerous, because one will be smeared as an antisemite. I'll let that statement stand unanswered, because of the volumes it speaks on its own.

Thoughts on Migration to Israel in the 1940s and 1950s

This new job I have at LeverEdge gives me opportunities to meet all sorts of interesting people. Last week I had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Esther Meir-Glitzenstein of Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva. Dr. Meir-Glitzenstein focuses much of her attention on the story of the Jews from Arab states who came to Israel since the creation of the the state, and she's quoted in this article in Haaretz, about a conference on the subject. Her forthcoming book tells the story of the Iraqi Jews - something like 120,000 people most of whom arrived here at the very end of the 1940s, and once here did better than most of their brethren from other Arab lands, though not as well as most of the immigrants from Europe.

The single most important reason for the relative success of the Iraqis, so my understanding of her thesis, was their relative well-developed "human resources", by which I understood her to be referring to the comparatively modern education and training of the Jews of Iraq, which enabled them better to integrate into Israeli society which was essentially modern.

Yet there were also other things that influenced the outcome. One, which surprised me, was the timing. It turns out that arriving in Israel at the peak of the chaos of 1948-50 was ultimately better than arriving in the mid 1950s, counter intuitive as it sounds. The chaos, you see, was all-pervasive. A very bloody war had just been won, the state was broke, the national institutions were fledgling, and a large chunk of the population was destitute and effectively homeless. The Iraqis, in that context, didn't have it worse than anyone else, and were forced to use their wits to forge new lives, just like many of the people around them. So they did, as best they could.

A few years later the state had lifted itself by its bootlaces, and immigrants arriving were greeted by a bureaucracy that knew what it was doing, that had set itself goals and knew how to reach them. Many of these goals were plausible, such as the attempt to spread the population out of the center of the country, to reinforce the borders with population, to block the return of Palestinian refugees, and so on. So new immigrants were loaded onto trucks, sent away from the center to newly invented "development towns", and dumped off there. (As I've written here and here, this was reinforced by an almost super-human can-do ethos of the 2nd- and 3rd-Aliya immigrants, steel-hard people who had done the same a generation earlier to themselves, had watched their sacrifice succeed, and had no patience for anyone's weaknesses or human frailty). In the short term, achieving such goals was important, even if it wasn't helpful to integrating the immigrants into Israeli society, since they were shunted off to it's margins. In the long term, the marginalizing of the immigrants of the 1950s created issues that have yet to be resolved more than 50 years later.

Esther also made another comment about those development towns. Since some of them never did very well, the officials kept sending new immigrants to them each time there was a wave of immigration, even into the largest wave of them all from the disintegrating Soviet Union in the the early 1990s. In each case, strong immigrants either never asked the officials and went where they chose, or, if they were slightly less strong they were sent to the development towns but climbed out of them as soon as they learned the Israeli ropes. Meaning that the weaker development towns functioned (inadvertently and unintended) as negative filters. The only people left in them were the weakest of each wave of immigrants, until they became self-perpetuating reservoirs of some of the weakest elements in Israeli society, with no chance of improving themselves. A fact we can all attest to, in that we all know successful individuals who come from those places - and they live near us, in Jerusalem or in other flourishing cities, but not where they were born.

Hamas Against the Palestinians

Maariv (Hebrew, paper version) points out that since the beginning of April, 6 weeks ago, Palestinian forces in Gaza have attacked every one of the border crossings between Gaza and Israel. Such peace loving humanitarian fellows, trying to do what's best for their people.

Fed Up With the Palestinians

Bradly Burston, an Israeli Journalist of the Left, explains why he's fed up with the Palestinians.

Finding a Picture

Remember the picture of Miriam posing on the beach with the Altalena burning behind her? Here's the story of another picture from that same Haaretz picture supplement of ordinary people in the national story. This one is of the Breuer family (mother and daughter on the right) who accompanied Leonard Berenstein on a tour he took through Israel in April 1977. This particular snapshot was taken on the Jordanian border.

It's a bit odd, in that from the perspective of the cameraman the officer is the center of the picture, yet the supplement identified him merely as "an accompanying soldier" since the Breuer family didn't recognize him.

The supplement was published on the morning of Wednesday, May 7th, which was Memorial Day for our fallen soldiers. As the Zahavi family was on their way to the military cemetery to visit the grave of their son Nir, killed in battle with PLO forces in June 1978, they began receiving phone calls from friends: "Go look at page 32!"

And so, 30 years after his death in battle, the family stood around the grave of captain Nir Zahavi with a fine picture of him they'd never seen before. "It was highly emotional; sad, but also good".

(The follow-up story was published in the Haaretz magazine of 16 May)

The Stuff News is Made of

Another Palestinian has killed himself in an attempt to make certain no provisions reach the Palestinian population and that the Israelis take the blame.

"Israel must not let such attacks halt the flow of goods into Gaza," said John Ging, the Gaza director of the UN organization in charge of Palestinian refugees. "If you hand the agenda over to the extremists, then they are very happy about it. If it only takes one rocket to derail everything, then that's massive power," Ging said.

Four tons of explosives in a truck that approached the Erez crossing under cover of mortar fire by the driver's fellow thugs. But hey, these are only the extremists and their one rocket; we can't let them have any impact can we.

Template

I find I've been writing longer posts than I used to; this format is better suited to them. Since it only takes a minute to change, I can always go back.

Muhammad al-Durra: The Blood Libel

A French court has quashed the slander charges against Phillipe Karsenti, who claims on his website that the famous broadcast from the beginning of the 2nd intifada was staged. The court seems not to have ruled on what did happen that day, but accepted that some of the film seems doctored. Doctored, one might add, is more serious than merely confused or inept. Doctored means intent to lie.

So far as I know, no-one seriously claims the little boy didn't die, or wasn't killed. Yet there's a world of difference between a story of Israeli soldiers purposefully shooting down a child, as the story was presented at the end of September 2000, and a story of a Palestinian gunman murdering a Palestinian child because a camera was focussed on him and it would be only too easy to blame the Israelis for his death - those are the two extreme narratives that now seem possible. There are two slightly more moderate narratives: that Israeli soldiers under fire were so careless that their fire killed a child while his father pleaded for their lives, vs. the possibility that it was Palestinian "friendly fire" that killed the child, as was claimed in the French court. The disparity between these two narratives is also great.

Does it all matter, the Israel bashers (including the homegrown ones) will ask. After all, Israeli fire has killed hundreds of Palestinian children since the death of Muhammad al-Dura. Israelis do things like that, and the full veracity of this one case is neither here nor there.

Well, yes, it does matter.

It matters because the image was about Israeli murderous blood thirst, and no matter what the Israel-bashers say, this doesn't exist. Indeed, too many Palestinian die in the wars the Palestinians insist on waging, but that's a very different story.

It matters because of the power this particular image had, and still has, to inflame feelings against Israel. Less than a week after it happened no less a person than the French President himself, Jacques Chirac, threw the incident in the face of no less than the Prime Minster of Israel, Ehud Barak, as justification for blocking an agreement to stop all violence which had just been crafted by the American Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, Yasser Arafat and Barak. (This is a true and fully documented story).

It matters because it now seems that media the world over colluded in a false narrative (best-case version) or perhaps a cynical lie designed to defame Israel (worse-case narrative).

It matters because the Palestinians on-site had to know that the Israeli soldiers couldn't be doing that particular shooting; worse, as the father pleaded for their lives, the Palestinian gunmen continued shooting, consequences for the father and son be damned. Afterwards, until this very day, they did their utmost to disseminate the lie. Some of the disseminators had to know it was a lie; others simply never cared. When you're willing to sing the praise of your people who blow themseles up to kill Jews, you certainly will have no compunctions not to lie.

It matters because truth is better than lies.

Finally, it matters because the story of the tragic death of the child Muhammad al-Dura fits so exactly into the centuries-old motif of the blood libel. Yes, this is a case where the standard protestations of the antisemites that they're merely criticizing Israel, with no taint of antisemitism about them, hit reality.

(James Fallow wrote an interesting article about this in The Atlantic).

PS. Will the Guardian run the story from the French court? So far they don't have it on their website.

Wandering all Over the Landscape

Those of you who are uneasy about the way Ruminations has been a bit unfocused recently might want to know that this is a sign of encroaching wisdom.

A Letter I Wrote

Here's a letter I wrote recently. Honestly. (Take that, Ibrahim).

السيد المحترم،

نشكرك على رسالتك القيمة، التي أثرت فيها، حسب ما فهمت، النقاط التالية:

1. إن اليهود لا يهتمون بمعاناة غيرهم.

2. قبل مجيء الصهيونية عاش العرب واليهود سوية لقرون من الزمن وكانت تجمعهم علاقة ودية، بما يختلف عن الأوروبيين الذين كانت علاقتهم باليهود علاقة مشحونة.

3. كان رد فعل النازيين على جرائم ارتكبها بعض اليهود مبالغا فيه جدا، وكان من الخطأ قتل العديد من اليهود لجرائم قلة منهم.

4. يفعل الإسرائيليون نفس الشيء، إذ يقتلون العرب الأبرياء لهويتهم الجماعية وانتمائهم العرقي.

5. على خلفية التاريخ الإيجابي العربي اليهودي المشترك، ألا ينطوي سلوك اليهود على نكران فظ للجميل؟!

أقول بكل صراحة أنني اختلف معك في النقاط المذكورة جميعا.

1. إن لليهود تاريخا حافلا بمساعدة الآخر، إذا كان أكثر ضعفا منهم. وعلى سبيل المثال، قد يهمك زيارة موقع Joint Distribution Committee حيث ستلاحظ أن البندين الأولين يتناولان المساعدات المقدمة لكل من ميانمار والصين اللتين تعرضتا لكارثتين طبيعيتين مؤخرا، علما بأن الأمر ليس استثناء بالنسبة لنا، انما هو القاعدة.

2. إن التعايش اليهودي العربي كان فعلا أفضل من التعايش بين اليهود والمسيحيين الأوروبيين، ولكنه من الخطأ القول أن اليهود والمسلمين ربطتهم علاقات من الصداقة من منطلق كون اليهود شركاء للمسلمين، لأن اليهود باعتبارهم من "أهل الذمة" كان وضعهم يعتبر أدنى بحكم الشرع. وإذا كانت تجليات ذلك قد اختلفت من مكان إلى آخر ومن حقبة لأخرى، إلا أن واقعا من المساواة التامة لم يكن له وجود قط في يوم من الأيام.

3. لم تكن جرائم النازية تمت بصلة لأي جرائم يهودية حقيقية أيا كان نوعها، مع أن النازيين كانوا يختلقون بين الحين والآخر قصصا تدور حول فظائع مزعومة اتهموا اليهود باقترافها، تأجيجا لكراهية الألمان لليهود. وباختصار شديد، اضطهد النازيون اليهود لأن مجرد وجود اليهود كانت تعتبره عقيدتهم النازية مضرا بالإنسانية وتهديدا لبقاء ألمانيا. لقد تم قتل اليهود قتلا عمدا لأن النازيين أرادوهم قتلى، بغض النظر عن أي شيء فعلوه أو كان بإمكانهم فعله.

4. يوجد الإسرائيليون لسوء الحظ في حالة حرب مع جزء كبير من العالم العربي، ولسوء الحظ أيضا، فإن القوات الإسرائيلية لا يحالفها النجاح دائما في مسعاها لقصر الحرب على المقاتلين، وحين يحدث مثل ذلك تحاول عادة استلهام الدروس من أخطائها كي تتجنب تكرارها في المراحل التالية من الحرب. لم تكن ثمة يوما سياسة إسرائيلية من القتل العمد للمدنيين العرب. أبدا.

5. أن موقف إسرائيل لا ينطوي على نكران الجميل، فحتى لو كان التاريخ كما وصفته، مع العلم بأنه لم يكن كذلك، فإن اليهود لا يدينون بالعرفان لأجيال عربية سابقة، على شهامة أبدتها في معاملة الأجيال اليهودية السابقة بشكل أفضل من الأوروبيين، فقد يجوز القول إن العرب كانوا أقل هدما في معاملتهم لليهود مقارنة بالأوروبيين، ولكن سلوكهم نحوهم لم يكن بناء بحال من الاحوال.

فكرة أخيرة نعرضها عليك: إن كل ما تريده إسرائيل فعلا، وكل ما أراده الصهيونيون يوما، هو أن يعيشوا حياتهم بسلام إلى جانب جيرانهم العرب. إن اليهود، بخلاف النازيين، لا نية لديهم ولا مخططات عندهم للتخلص من العرب. صحيح أنهم يصرون على أن يكون لهم وطن خاص بهم، كما يريد اللبنانيون والسوريون والمصريون والفلسطينيون. يقضي الموقف الإسرائيلي الرسمي الذي تكرسه انتخابات ديمقراطية، بأن يكون الوطن المشترك متقاسما مع الفلسطينيين، ليكون لكل طرف أكثر من لا شيء وأقل مما يطمح به. أما النازيون فلا يمكن بشكل من الأشكال أن يكون مثل هذا القول قد انطبق عليهم.

A Fundamental Misunderstanding of History?

In half a nutshell, my day job at LeverEdge consists of capturing knowledge that resides in people's minds, and making it easily accessible to users of user friendly software systems. This means I've given some thought and have a degree of awareness of what works and what doesn't on websites that offer information. The reason I mention this is that the website of Haaretz is unusually aggravating. If you've read an article in the dead-tree Hebrew version, and wish to find it on the English website, perhaps so as to blog it, it is rarely easy, and too often simply impossible.

The reason I mention this is that in the weekend magazine of last Friday there was a very interesting interview with General Amos Yadlin, departing head of our military intelligence. I managed to find a promo published a few days earlier, with some of the highlights, but not the interview itself. Which is to bad, because the interview presented not only an analysis of the trends in the Mideast at the moment, it also offered some (limited) insight into how an intelligence organization works, and how its commander thinks. This always would have been of interest to some of us who know our lives depend at least partially on what those folks do; it is doubly interesting since the failure of the intelligence services regarding Iraq, back in 2003, and the massive conviction since then that such services exist only to make political positions tenable, and are thus illegitimate sources of information.

Amos Harel published a piece this morning that reflects much of what Yadlin said, so the two links give you sort of a summary of the interview I can't find. They are both worth reading.

Bottom line: things may well get worse. And the main reason is that Iran wishes it so and is working hard at making it so. Now I know that in many circles this is pure blasphemy, for a variety of reasons. What puzzles me about all those people who can't get their minds around the concept of a long-term scheming Iran is, why can't they? After all, there is nothing new, nor anything surprising, in a group setting predatory goals and doing their best over long periods to attain them, irrespective of the amount of requisite violence. It's an ever-recurring theme in the history of mankind, one that first appeared many millennia before the birth of Gaorge Bush the 2nd, or even before the advent of the Jews in history - and the Jews have been around longer than anyone else.

Why is this so unacceptable to so many people?

Checkpoints Save Lives

A young woman serving in a military police unit near Nablus identified a Palestinian teenager who was about to detonate an explosive belt.

He will now go into the statistics of dead Palestinian children, and the checkpoint will continue to be counted in the statistics of cruel Israeli measures of repression.

I'm not even being facetious. These are all facts.

Born to Kvetch

The Y-net homepage has a caption (I can only link to the article behind it) that comes straight from a Yiddish Weltanschauung: "Tourism up 41%, Hotel Crisis Looms".

Don't come, tourists! Stay away!! Shooh!!! Shooh!!! We've got a crisis looming here!!!

What will you do while you're staying away, you ask? You can read this fine book, for starters.

The Green Messiah

Wouldn't it be nice if a team of Israeli scientists invented a way to create cheap energy that can be produced on a massive scale without pouring gook into the air by the mega-ton? This would have many benefits:

1. Save the world.
2. Force the Saudis, Iranians, Russians and Venezuelans to finally start being productive rather than pumping money out of the ground.
3. Since they won't (be productive), and also won't have any more income, the rest of the world will be able to stop cringing, bowing, licking boots, etc.
4. The Guardian will have to publish an article about how it was Israelis wot saved the world, even tho they're colonialist imperialist fascist thugs who mistreat the noble Arabs all the time because they're evil. (But the article will be on page 26, at the bottom, and the part about saving the world will be in the 12th paragraph).
5. We'll all be able to turn on the lights in our living rooms each evening without feeling guilty for drowning the polar bears and flooding the Bangladeshis, not to mention Manhattan.
6. The term carbon footprint will be taken over by a teenager rock band in Arizona.

Ah what sweet dreams. Well, dream on.

Carribbean Silliness in Israel

Full disclosure: where I live, we don't own a television. So I can't fully explain the following.

Lest readers of this blog get the mistaken impression that Israel is somehow any less silly a place than anywhere else, here's a description of a TV event that sealed the season of perhaps the most popular series in 2000 years.

Olmert's Scandals for Dummies

Remember the conundrum of the two crooks who have been arrested and are being interrogated separately? If they both keep mum, they'll both walk free. If one squeals he'll sit for 5 years, which is unpleasant, but the other one will sit for 20, which is really tough luck for him. However, if one keeps mum but the second squeals, one sit for 20 years - uggghhh. Especially as if he'd known his buddy was such a bastard he himself would have spilled the beans first and sat only five years. But then, the entire five years he'd have been able to kick himself for not shutting up, in which case he'd now be free, and sipping herbal tea or something in this place.

It's a tough life, being a crook.

Anyway, until recently the Olmert saga has been rather like that story except there have been three crooks, not two: Olmert himself, his former law partner Uri Messer, and his extremely loyal assistant, Shula Zaken. (By the way, according to all sources, the three of them are all highly capable people. Crooks, perhaps, but intelligent ones). The trio were rock-solid in their loyalty to each other, and the poor police never had a chance.

What has now changed is that the police have caught this Talanski fellow. He's not part of the Band of Brothers and Sister. Whether he's a crook or not I can't say, but if he is, he's not a card bearing and trusted member of our gang who can be relied upon. I can't say how they did it, but the police apparently have manged to plant uncertainty in the mind of Uri Messer, who has been doing all sorts of calculations about 5-years vs. 20 and that sort of thing.

Shula, by the way, still seems rock solid.

Disclaimer: Ruminations has no information beyond what has been splashed all over the media these past 15 years. All of the above is pure speculation and bears no relation to any real characters or actual people.

You Need an Education to Become Educated

What happens when a society (the US, in this case) decides that everyone should be able to have a college education? It's an admirable goal, no doubt about it. Except that some people don't have the tools to acquire a college education. Then what?

A Lethal Cultural Malaise

Here's another description of how unfortunate it is to be a woman in the Arab world. According to The Independent - hardly a Zionist propaganda organ, they - may men in Iraq seem to think it's a fine thing to use the camera in their cellular phone to film themselves having sex; once they send out the pictures, the women are murdered by their fathers or brothers for having desecrated the honor of the family.

The whole thing is sick, from beginning to end.

An American President and Israel

Thomas Freidman discusses what makes an American president good for Israel. He starts with a literary gimmick:

Pssst. Have you heard? I have. I heard that Barack Obama once said there has to be “an end” to the Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank “that began in 1967.” Yikes!

Pssst. Have you heard? I have. I heard that Barack Obama said that not only must Israel be secure, but that any peace agreement “must establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people.” Yikes!

Pssst. Have you heard? I have. I heard that Barack Obama once said “the establishment of the state of Palestine is long overdue. The Palestinian people deserve it.” Yikes! Yikes! Yikes!

Friedman then goes on to "unveil" the fact that these statements have actually all been made by George Bush.

Well, I'm sorry to disappoint some of you folks, but in case you haven't heard, such statements have all also been made by Ehud Olmert, prime minister of Israel. And also by his predecessor, Ariel Sharon. As well as by his predecessor, Ehud Barak. Not only that, such sentiments (along with others) were all incorporated into the official Israeli offers to the Palestinians at Camp David, in summer 2002, and reiterated when Israel accepted (Bill) Clinton's dictated terms of December 24th 2000, and then again in the even more radical offers made at Taba in January 2001.

The problem is not Israel's willingness to live alongside a sovereign State of Palestine that will also be Judenrein; that has long since been agreed to by the Israelis (though you'd never know it from reading the Israel bashers). The problem is that the Palestinians haven't yet decided they're willing to live next to a sovereign Jewish Israel.

Which is why - back to Tom Friedman's column - what is important about the American president is less what he (or she) thinks about what Israel should do, and more about how he will deal with an Arab world that shares very little by way of moral assumptions and behavior with the rest of us. Friedman doesn't address this in today's column, but then, that wasn't his thesis this week.

Negotiations vs. War

Gitta Sereny once asked Franz Stangl, erstwhile commander of the Sobibor and Treblinka death camps, if there was anything the Jews could have said to him that would have influenced him to allow some of them to live. It was 1971, Stangl had already been convicted for mass murder and sentenced to life in prison, where Sereny was interviewing him. You might have expected him to have snapped out of the world of 1942 by then. But no, not really: Not only did Stangl have no satisfactory answer to the question, he couldn't understand it at all, and was quite incredulous when Sereny insisted. "What could they possibly have said to me that would have made any difference?"

So when President Bush states, in his speech before the Knesset the other day, that

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along"

this could have been accepted as a banal statement about one of the fundamental truths of human relations: that some differences between people or groups cannot be resolved by talking.

The Obama campaign responded sharply, and the American media seems to have spent an entire news cycle deliberating the pros and cons, and much hay was made by all sides. That's politics, and everyone had fine fun, which is OK. I'm not against politicians making hay.

My problem is with the underlying issue. With the assumption, by now it's actually an article of faith, that any international problem can be dealt with through intelligent diplomacy of some sort, and that anyone who says otherwise is a warmonger. Many otherwise reasonable people believe this claptrap, in spite of the fact that the history of the human race has been unequivocal: sometimes, group A wants X, and group B wants the opposite of X, and no compromise can be found to make either of them accept less.

Rather than denying human nature, better one should concentrate on the real challenge: how to tell when your enemy is implacable and cannot be bought off by words, and when he actually could? Because history is also full of the second form, when group A wants X, Group B wants anti-X, and some external impulse can change the equation without the need for any violence. That's the real art of diplomacy: figuring out the full possibilities of avoiding violence while never flinching from the use of force when there is no alternative. To complicate the matter further, it's people we're talking about, not mathematical equations, and since people make choices all the time, their implacable position of last year could theoretically have changed by now, or might change next year.

War is hell, and also a terrible waste. Refraining from it is always better than engaging in it - except where the alternative is worse. Figuring out which is when is one of the hardest tasks leaders, or their peoples, can be faced with. Pretending otherwise is foolishness.