Tag Archives: Hamburg

Readers over at Simply Jews are debating what Isaelis should do about the continued rocket bombardment from Gaza. The usual and, I think, easy, high-mindedness is in evidence–Jews don’t stoop to the level of the enemy–as well as realism that nothing will change until the cooperating Gazan civilians, young and old, pay a price along with the masked gunmen of Hamas. I side with the realists, just as did the so-called Greatest Generation–at Hamburg, Dresden, Yokohama, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as Bret Stephens relates. High-mindedness is good, but the cost of keeping your conscience clear will be the certain deaths and cripplings of young soldiers who would no more lob rockets at a daycare center than strap on a bomb belt and detonate themselves in a crowded supermarket. Ethics in warfare have to be situational, as Stephens also seems to be saying, and the deciding factor must be the probable results. In Gaza, that would be an end to the rockets and, quite possibly, something approaching the German and Japanese surrender.