Israel

There is a particular kind of comment that surfaces the moment any war begins, and it always arrives dressed as wisdom. It says: both sides are killing, both sides are spilling blood, so a curse on both their houses. It presents itself as the view of the calm, unbiased observer who refuses to be dragged into partisanship. In the case of Iran and Israel, this reflex has been everywhere, and I want to say plainly that it is not wisdom at all. It is a refusal to think. The instinct to flatten the two warring sides into mirror images is false, and beneath its pose of fairness it is a quiet form of moral cowardice. To equate the aggressor and the one defending himself is not neutrality. It is a failure to look at the facts. ...

There are moments in history when evil stops being an abstraction and acquires a face, a pulse, a fixed address. Most of the time the malice that drives a war is genuinely distributed — across institutions, ideologies, bureaucracies, the cold inertia of millions of people doing their small assigned part. You cannot point at it. You cannot, in any literal sense, end it. But occasionally the architecture of a regime tightens around one man so completely that the distinction between the man and the machine collapses. When that happens, a question arises that polite society prefers not to ask aloud: if the war flows from a single living person, is killing that person a legitimate way to stop the war? I want to take that question seriously, because I think the honest answer is yes — and because the reasons we treat one such man as a candidate and another as untouchable have nothing to do with morality and everything to do with fear. ...

Every few weeks a reader writes to me with some version of the same hopeful question. Tell us, they say, what does the ideal electoral system look like? Which country has solved the problem of government? Sketch us the perfect constitution and we will fight for it. I understand the impulse completely. After living under a regime that is lawless to its marrow, you crave a blueprint — a finished design you could lift off the shelf and bolt onto your own ruined country once the tyrant is gone. But I have come to believe this craving rests on a mistake, and a dangerous one, because the search for a universally perfect system is structurally identical to the search for a perpetual-motion machine. Both promise something the world does not permit. There is no ideal electoral system, no ideal state structure, no ideal model of government, for one stubborn reason: none of these things can be separated from the society it is supposed to serve. ...