Impossible Dilemmas, Imperfect Outcomes

Tokyo, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Gaza, and the Politics of Surrender (Part Four)

This is the final part of a four-part series, and it’s highly recommended to read the other parts first. For part one, click here; part two, click here; and part three, click here.

The firebombing of Tokyo, the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan’s agonizing path to surrender haunt the world to this day. The United States justified its actions by pointing to Japan’s refusal to capitulate, its fanatical resistance, and the spectre of massive invasion casualties. Yet even then, as Richard Overy’s book emphasizes, the reality was more complex: the bombing campaigns were as much about breaking a political deadlock within Japan’s fractured leadership as they were about raw military necessity. Today, as Israel wages war in Gaza against Hamas – an enemy that, like Imperial Japan, glorifies martyrdom, rejects surrender, and doesn’t care about sacrificing its civilians – the same questions resurface. How far can a state go to secure legitimate military outcomes? What distinguishes necessity from excess? And when does the pursuit of “total victory” become indistinguishable from the infliction of collective punishment? The parallels are imperfect, but the lessons are unavoidable. Should a decisive military outcome be prioritized over diplomatic and humanitarian costs, or an off-ramp that neither empowers Hamas (but doesn’t necessarily destroy them) nor perpetuates the suffering of Gaza’s civilians? If World War II offers lessons on the limits of violence, Gaza exposes their fragility in the face of an enemy that rejects those limits entirely.

The current war was started by Hamas when it invaded on October 7, making it the equivalent of Pearl Harbor. While Hamas lacks Japan’s industrial might or state apparatus, its capacity for sustained aggression – and willingness to sacrifice Gaza’s civilians – has created a similarly intractable dilemma. This does not mean, though, that there should be no restraints on Israel’s actions. Despite the genocidal rhetoric of Amichay Eliyahu and too many others like him, few people really think that Israel should be permitted to do whatever it wants in Gaza. Indeed, Israel has consistently said that it does all it can to avoid harm to civilians, implying that deliberately harming them would be wrong, irrespective of October 7 or the rhetoric about “no innocent civilians in Gaza.” In short, most people have limits, irrespective of abstract discussions about morality and justice. The question is what those limits are. In World War II, these limits were stretched because of the unprecedented brutality of German and Japanese conduct and the development of new technology like the atomic bomb.

Take the firebombing of Tokyo, which as mentioned in part one killed more civilians in a single day than any other twentieth-century war. Does Japan’s warmongering and subsequent reluctance to surrender mean that the people of Tokyo deserved to be burned to death? If it did, then why not other cities? Why not the entire country? Or imagine it another way. What if, instead of dropping incendiaries that led to massive fires, the US army had marched through Tokyo shooting those 83,000 (or more) people instead? Would that have been justified?

What about Gaza? When an Israeli airstrike kills a Hamas commander along with 40 civilians, the IDF spokesperson says the civilian casualties were unavoidable because of Hamas’s human shield strategy (you can read a new report about this strategy here). This, though, is only possible because of the functional division of labor which, in the words of the sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, “creates a distance between most of the contributors to the final outcome of collective activity, and the activity itself. What such practical and mental distance from the final product means is that most functionaries of the bureaucratic hierarchy may give commands without full knowledge of their effects.” In short, bureaucracy sanitizes killing. A pilot pressing a button feels less culpable than a soldier pulling a trigger – even when the outcome is identical. In the case of the IAF, as discussed here, this is achieved by a division of roles between those who identify a target and improve it, those who determine how many civilian casualties will be tolerated, those responsible for legal oversight, and the pilot who drops the bomb. Because if the pilot was instead told to personally shoot the 40 civilians between him and the commander, he would be significantly less likely follow the order, irrespective of the target’s supposed importance.

Acknowledging this point, though, doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of an enemy that doesn’t care about its own civilian losses. What can you do in this situation, given the restrictions of international law, which were clearly designed with sovereign armies in mind, rather than terror organizations for whom no laws apply? Here it’s important to distinguish between Japan and Gaza. In the former case, there was a faction led by Emperor Hirohito that wanted to reduce the people’s suffering even if it meant losing the war. While voices like this can be heard on the margins of Palestinian discourse, there is no such faction within Hamas. Just as Japan’s leaders prolonged suffering by clinging to honor, Hamas’s strategy depends on Gaza’s devastation to fuel global outrage, a strategy that evokes little criticism among supporters of Palestinians around the world.

Even if there was a Palestinian Hirohito, though, the other side would still need to make a credible offer to them. The American demands of Japan were remarkably like Israel’s of Hamas, but with one key difference. Both included disarmament and war crime trials (in Israel’s case this is broadly equivalent of Israel’s demands that Hamas’s surviving leaders go into exile), but ultimately the Americans did not demand the end of kokutai, the concept of the “sacred homeland” and the rule of the emperor. In other words, the Americans sought a radical change in Japanese conduct, but not the end of the Japanese people.

Here, though, the government seems to be seeking the occupation of Gaza and increased settlement and control. Mass displacement, rhetorical dehumanization, and absolute rejection of Palestinian statehood suggest collective punishment. The government prefers a long quagmire and the fantasy of reoccupying the Strip over the only pragmatic option available – the replacement of Hamas by the Palestinian Authority, with support from Abraham Accords countries and in exchange for normalization with Saudi Arabia, an outcome October 7 was partially designed to prevent. This option could break the cycle – but only if the government prioritizes long-term stability over short-term survival. Many on the right cite the example of denazification and the end of the war with Japan, without mentioning that neither country was treated punitively, instead emerging as stable democracies (obviously not including the GDR). They do not really think the Palestinians can be reformed. As I’ve written before, they view violent Palestinian-Islamist rejectionism as a kind of permanent, metaphysical condition, when reality (which they think they have such a great grasp of) consistently teaches that any successful counter-insurgency strategy must offer a better alternative to the civilian population. The only dissenting voice on this issue seems to have been Ron Dermer, who recently said, sensibly: “We must be magnanimous in victory, then link the development of Gaza to the deradicalization.” This dynamic, with neither a Hirohito faction or an Israeli offer of a better future than further displacement and immiseration, is one of the key reasons that the war continues.

There’s no reason to think, though, that an Israeli offer of a better future would placate Hamas if the price was its disarmament. And in Japan the Hirohito faction was in the minority, resulting in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But with the benefit of hindsight, it’s questionable whether these attacks were necessary. Using the atomic bomb had implications that went far beyond the war in the Pacific, and there should have been far greater caution shown. A few weeks before America’s first atomic bomb test, Leo Szilard, the Hungarian-born physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933 and patented it in 1936, gave a memorandum to James Byrnes, soon to be secretary of state, to give to the new president, Harry Truman, asking for a demonstration bomb explosion to be witnessed by Japanese officials. The memorandum was never delivered. General Leslie Groves, who oversaw the Manhattan Project, ordered a poll of his scientists and found that 83 percent supported a demonstration of the bomb to Japanese officials before using it; these findings were only declassified in 1961. Hiroshima has often been presented as a zero-sum decision, but this was not the case; like the plague of the firstborn in Egypt, it should only have been used once all other options – including warning the Japanese of the consequences of their actions – had been exhausted.

Just as alternatives to Hiroshima were ignored, Israel dismisses diplomatic options – not because they’re unworkable, but because the government lacks the will to explore them. America wanted to end the war as quickly as possible to avoid massive casualties in an invasion of the home islands. Here, our government has shown less urgency. This week’s dramatic announcement about Operation Gideon’s Chariots needs an asterisk placed next to it given Trump’s upcoming Middle East visit and the increased difficulties Israel has in calling up reservists, due both to burnout and the government’s unwillingness to draft Haredim in significant numbers. And, of course, Netanyahu always places his own interests ahead of the country’s, in this case by being dragged along by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir in the direction of nihilism.

In his recent book Question 7, which explores the paradox that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima saved his father, who was a POW, Richard Flanagan writes: “Tragedy is the conflict between what is perceived to be a lesser evil against what is perceived to be a greater evil. Tragedy exerts its hold upon our imaginations because it reminds us that justice is an illusion.” Unfortunately, much of the discourse about Gaza ignores this reality. One the one hand, those who have called for Israel to halt its attacks since the start of the war either deny that this would result in a Hamas victory or ignore the fact that such an outcome would embolden future acts of war like October 7. On the other hand, those who call for “total victory” often act as if October 7 means that there should be few if any limits on Israeli conduct. Both view the world as a jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces are waiting to be fitted together, rather than one in which the pieces don’t match. The suffering of innocents cannot always be avoided but this does not mean that it should have no limits. In the case of Japan, however abhorrent Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, America sought to end the war as a prelude to a better future, a fact proven by Japan’s peaceful rise during the second half of the twentieth century. The tragedy of Gaza is that no path is bloodless, but some are less futile than others. Israel’s strategy would make greater sense were it aimed at addressing the problems that have plagued us since the start of the conflict. Until it does, the steps it takes against an implacable enemy must be judged in this light.