Israel has no shortage of critics claiming that its conduct in its current war with Hamas is “disproportionate.” They’ll grudgingly admit that Hamas broke a ceasefire, slaughtered more than a thousand Israeli civilians, and took dozens of hostages.
Then, after implying that such behavior is to be expected from a supposedly oppressed people, they move on to say that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has been far too harsh in its response, as if the point of a conflict is to ensure that body counts on both sides neatly balance out.
If a civilized nation chooses to fight a war, there’s no better objective than to ensure it doesn’t have to fight a particularly cruel, evil enemy again. There’s no safe or polite way to accomplish that end. As William T. Sherman said: “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
One can try to avoid civilian casualties, as the IDF surely does, but one can’t avoid them when one fights an enemy determined to hide behind women and children, as Hamas does.
There’s no doubt that Hamas could have evacuated great numbers of non-combatants from Gaza. They won’t because each innocent civilian is a potential corpse that they can point to when they whine that Israel is being way too mean by actually trying to win the war and eliminate a vicious, uncompromising enemy.
They say that there’s nothing new under the sun, and this is surely true in this case. Incompetent commanders have hidden behind the skirts of women and children for as long as armed conflict has been around. As we process the propaganda that Hamas is pushing, consider an example of similar behavior that occurred during the American Civil War.
“Atlanta is no place for families or non-combatants, and I have no desire to send them North if you will assist in conveying them South,” he wrote.
In his reply, dated Sept. 9, 1864, Hood agreed to the plan, but under protest, writing: “Permit me to say that the unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war. In the name of God and humanity, I protest, believing that you will find that you are expelling from their home and firesides the wives and children of a brave people.”
Sherman was never one to back away from a challenge, on the battlefield or off, and he fired back at Hood with a literary broadside as devastating as any fired by any battleship in history. In the last paragraph of his Sept. 10 reply, Sherman snaps off charge after charge against the South and against Hood. It’s a paragraph worth remembering, for it says much about Sherman, about the Civil War, and about the way Americans view military conflict.
“In the name of common-sense, I ask you not to appeal to a just God in such a sacrilegious manner,“ Sherman wrote. ”You who, in the midst of peace and prosperity, have plunged a nation into war—dark and cruel war—who dared and badgered us to battle, insulted our flag, seized our arsenals and forts that were left in the honorable custody of peaceful ordinance-sergeants, seized and made ‘prisoners of war’ the very garrisons sent to protect your people against negroes and Indians, long before any overt act was committed by the (to you) hated Lincoln Government; tried to force Kentucky and Missouri into rebellion, spite of themselves; falsified the vote of Louisiana; turned loose your privateers to plunder unarmed ships; expelled Union families by the thousands, burned their houses, and declared, by an act of your Congress, the confiscation of all debts due Northern men for goods had and received!
“Talk thus to the marines, but not to me, who have seen these things, and who will this day make as much sacrifice for the peace and honor of the South as the best-born Southerner among you! If we must be enemies, let us be men, and fight it out as we propose to do, and not deal in such hypocritical appeals to God and humanity. God will judge us in due time, and he will pronounce whether it be more humane to fight with a town full of women and families of a brave people at our back, or to remove them in time to places of safety among their own friends and people.”
Almost 170 later, Sherman’s words ring as true and powerful as ever. Israel’s critics should heed that message from across the years and consider that the best thing that could happen to the Palestinian people is for Israel to defeat the corrupt and evil organization that put them on the front line in the first place.
