Henry Imler July 17th, 2006

Kyle’s post, Naïveté, responded to an article
I had linked to on the amount of force that should be used by Israel.
Kyle maintained that Israel at the most should be going by Moses’ adage
of “an eye for an eye”. What they (and the US) should be doing is
implementing a little more of Jesus’ teaching to love one’s enemies.

While nonviolence is a very charitable thing, it does not necessarily make for good foreign policy. Kyle maintains that “escalated retaliation does nothing but perpetuate violence.”
I would venture to say that in some cases he is correct and in other
cases he is incorrect. While WWI was started via escalated violence, it
was also won via escalated violence. WWII and our own Revolutionary War
were won not with tit for tat measures, but with the use of
overwhelming force.

In Israel’s case, Hezbollah, Ha-mas, and Israel have been engaged in
this tit-for-tat warfare for decades. Where has it gotten them? Ha-mas
and Hezbollah still want to drive the Jews into the Sea and Israel is
forced to impose on the Palestinians an oppression that is necessarily
tied to Israel’s survival. In tit-for-tat warfare, suffering only
increases with time.

Should nations practice what is good for the individual? Often
times, yes. Nonviolence is often the correct answer. There are times
when it is horribly wrong. Take WWII and the Six Day War
as examples. German would be much more prevalent in Europe if the
Allies had chosen nonviolence as an answer to the conflict. An entire
country would have been murdered if Israel had backed down in June of
‘67. There would be no Arab-Israeli conflict nowadays because there
would be no Jews.

Lastly, it should be noted that the reason that the nonviolent
movements of Gandhi and King were successful is that they were waged
against two of the brightest of Western lights. Western governments
with their infantile commitments to liberty and equality and the rule
of law enabled those movements to succeed. I think that the same
nonviolent protests would not have been successful against Hussein or
Ha-mas.

In sum, while nonviolence is good in and of itself, it is not the
be-all or end-all to conflicts, especially on the international level.

I leave this post with some wisdom from King Solomon of Israel:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;

a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3

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