What Starts A War?

October 7th, 2023. In an unprovoked attack, Hamas forces fire somewhere between 2-5000 rockets at targets in southern and central Israel. At the same time, Hamas gunmen attack civilian targets, slaughtering over 1500 people and taking around 150 more hostages. 

And while Israel were the ones to officially declare it, it should go without saying that Hamas started this war.

---

June 23rd, 2002. Israel begins building the West Bank barrier, a part wall/part fence that not only encroaches on Palestinian territory, violating the borders defined in the Oslo Peace Accords, it cuts many Palestinians off from their jobs, their places of worship and cultural amenities, and even their families. 

Four years later, following the rise of Hamas, Israel also enforces a military blockade of Gaza, restricting the flow of food, fuel, and people into (and out of) an area where around 2 million Palestinians live in conditions described as an “open-air prison.” 

Given all this, any fool can see that Israel started the war.

---

May 14th, 1948. Following Israel’s declaration of independence from British rule, Egypt, with the support of several other Arab and Muslim nations, invades Israel. In the resulting conflict, which lasts for almost 10 months and claims at least 14,000 lives (6,000 of them Jewish), Israel takes control of around 60% more land than it previously owned. Land that has been a source of strife and violence ever since.  

And while Israel has since freely given up some of that land, there can be no doubt that this coalition of Arab countries started the war.

---

November 2nd, 1917. Arthur Belford, foreign secretary for the United Kingdom, sends a letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, conveying King George V’s “sympathy” with his plan to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. 

According to the letter, this is to be done without “[prejudicing] the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country,” but it ends up fuelling anti-semitism in other countries and prejudicing the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine.

Wait...did England start this war?!

---

It’s easy to figure out who started a war. You just pick a point in history, focus on whoever committed the most recent atrocity, and ignore everything that happened before. 

This one weird trick allows Palestine to claim that Israel started the conflict, Israel to argue that Palestine is to blame, and thousands of newly minted political experts on Twitter to yell at each other about which side is worse. Best of all, both sides can use the misdeeds of the other to justify everything they do from now on.

Well, almost everything. 

As the world looks on in horror at the blood-soaked vengeance we’ve somehow accepted as inevitable, we, and Israel, have been diligently reminded about the importance of a proportional response.

“We support Israel taking necessary and proportionate action to defend its country and protect its people,” says National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson. “[I] expect that of course when we see Israel's response it will be proportionate…,” says Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s Secretary General. “We support Israel exercising its right to self-defence and to taking proportionate action to bring an end to the violence,” said the spokesman for U.K. Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. 

This principle is so important that it even made an appearance in Bassem Youssef’s viral interview with Piers Morgan. And in amongst the constant interruptions and blistering sarcasm and this iconic Superman/Homelander reference, Ben Shapiro outlined an answer that both Jews and Muslims seem to agree on.