Whatchamacolumn: Uncertain outcome for 'war of survival'

It’s impossible to overstate the horror felt toward this week’s slaughter of Israeli citizens by Hamas forces from Gaza. It’s almost equally sad to contemplate the impending deaths of a great many non-combatant Palestinian men, women and children as Israel pursues revenge in the name of self-defense.

Progress toward Israeli-Arab “normalization” seemingly is destroyed, fulfilling one goal of Hamas and its sponsors. The world waits with bated breath, dreading the potential depravity to come.

Israel declared its independence in 1948, followed immediately by an Arab air strike on Tel Aviv and an invasion by armies from Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon. Up to this week, there had been 16 more wars or major military operations involving Israel and various elements of the Arab world.

Some referred to the assault by Hamas as Israel’s 9/11; American novelist/journalist Ashley Rindsberg, writing in the Wall Street Journal, said that description “ … misses the mark. Oct. 7 is our Dunkirk — the decisive start of a massive and prolonged war of survival, the beginning of a historic test whose outcome is still uncertain.”

Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups are demonstrating in America and around the world. Chilling, more private conversations casually ignore the lessons of history in suggesting the mass destruction of one side or the other. The wrong spark, some fear, could trigger a third world war.

We’ve witnessed the failure of a global War on Terrorism, but perhaps there needs to be a War on War. With that in mind, I checked on the availability of the website domain name “WarOnWar.org” — it can be purchased for $1,600.

From a far different perspective in “The Worth of War,” Benjamin Ginsberg argued that war “must be measured by the values it serves and the costs it entails … The worth of war is determined by the extent to which it advances the values of justice, peace, and freedom, and by the extent to which it avoids the costs of unjust, oppressive, and destructive policies.”

The cryptic tenets of that claim, I suspect, have been faint solace to families of an estimated 150 million to 1 billion people killed in wars throughout human history. The deadliest of those was World War II, with 50 to 85 million fatalities, including the genocide of 6 million European Jews.

Since it was founded in Gaza in 1987, Hamas has vowed to annihilate Israel. That threat, exposed by the malevolent acts of Oct. 7, might justify an investment of $1,600 for WarOnWar.org.

Jeb Bladine can be reached at jbladine@newsregister.com or 503-687-1223.