A Call for Revolution: From Just Wars to Just Peace

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.

“The most moral army in the world” is responsible for the indiscriminate killing of innocents throughout the region around Israel. The Israel Defense Forces is also the army of occupation in Palestine, serving as the sovereign that enables and looks away from the crimes in the West Bank. Israel of all nations, the one that needs the shelter of “the just war” more than any other, is the one that has marked its end. For centuries Western thinkers, from Augustine through Thomas Aquinas, from Hugo Grotius to our contemporary Michael Walzer, built a conceptual edifice that sought to impose moral limits on war and its justifications. This conception stood between two extremes. On one side, pacifism, which holds that any use of violence is morally invalid, as expressed in the Quaker Peace Testimony, in Gandhi’s doctrine of nonviolence, and in the universal humanism of the twentieth century. On the other, political realism. The doctrines of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and even Hans Morgenthau, which hold that in the political arena moral considerations must yield to power, security, and the survival of the state. Between the two stood “the just war.” It agrees with the realist that war is a historical fact that cannot be ignored, and with the pacifist that war must be subject to moral law. The founding move of this conception split the question in two: when may war be initiated, and how may it be conducted.

Jus ad Bellum, the right to go to war, must include a just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, last resort, reasonable proportion between means and ends, and a reasonable chance of success. Alongside it stand the Jus in Bello, the laws of war. At their center, the distinction between combatants and civilians, and a proper relation between the force of fire and its consequence. All of these were meant to set red lines between permitted war and forbidden war, yet they have become just a rhetorical lexicon, a washing machine by which states attempt to launder violence and crimes in moral detergents and in the language of rights and justice.

The reality test in Gaza and in Iran shattered the just war. After October 7 Israel had a classical claim of self defense, of the kind that even rigorous antiwar critique would have struggled to reject. We had then a just cause, legitimate authority, and a real threat to civilians. The justness of the war was rarely ever more deserved, at least in the eyes of those who would justify it. Then, instead of necessary and legitimate self defense, Israel set out on a campaign of vengeance, killing, and merciless destruction, all driven by a governmental ideology that is criminal through and through, and with its own hands it erased every shred of legitimacy from its actions. Hamas’s crimes demand a response, yet they fall far short of justifying tens of thousands of civilian dead, the destruction of infrastructure on an unprecedented scale, planned starvation, and the uprooting of a population. The sum of Israel’s crimes in Gaza exceeds any possible definition of self defense. The justice of conduct is gone, the proportion between means and ends is lost, the distinction between Hamas and civilians has been erased, and collective punishment has taken the place of targeted military action. The Kosher certificate granted to the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran became, in the eyes of Netanyahu and his gang, became a license to kill in almost every kind of criminal conduct, of which there is no shortage.

Iran displayed the failure in its most distilled form. Israel’s Prime Minister and Washington’s leaders justified the attack on the nuclear facilities in the summer of 2025 as a preventive war, or as a preemptive operation meant to remove a future threat. Yet from Nuremberg to our own day international law has viewed with deep suspicion any attempt to legitimize war on the basis of a future danger that has not yet materialized. The legal debate over preventive wars and preemptive strikes has continued for decades, yet the very fact that any state can present its fears as justification for aggression exposes the flaw at the foundation of the system. The moment any state is permitted to attack another in the name of a presumed threat, everything collapses, because any war can then be presented as self defense. To my mind, presenting a preventive war as a just war is the final stop on the funeral procession of just wars. If even these counts as justice, almost anything can count as justice.

The collapse of the red lines stems from an inherent flaw built into the very conception. It imagined a neutral judge who would determine when the red line had been crossed, yet when Trump and Netanyahu are the judges, the outcome is known in advance. The termination of the just war is, for them, only part of their broader campaign of liquidating every domestic and international judicial institution. In place of morality against wars, they have adopted incitement to war. Any war that preserves their political standing has become just in their own eyes and in the eyes of their cult of followers; the deaf, the mute, and the blind. They have joined Putin, the third world thugs, and the crime barons, turning violence into the operating principle of choice. Instead of working to abolish war as a form of relations between peoples and human beings. The naive separation between the justice of going to war and the justice of its conduct held up for some decades, yet from the moment it granted figures like Netanyahu and Trump an almost unlimited space to violate its rules, the distinction meant to restrain violence became the mechanism that enables it.

The alternative is a shift from the conception of a just war to a conception of a just peace. A conceptual framework that places peace itself as a moral project with conditions, as a mirror image of the just war, which set conditions for the act of violence. A just peace differs from a negative peace, which is no more than a ceasefire that leaves the wrong in place. It is a positive peace, demanding a structural change of the relations that gave birth to the violence in the first place. It overlaps with the ancient Jewish principles of repair: with Teshuvah in its Maimonidean sense, which requires “regret for the past and acceptance for the future,” the return of stolen property before any request for pardon, and with the full and comprehensive meaning of the concept of Shalom, peace.

Four foundations constitute the just peace.

• Historical recognition of the wrong, an official public acknowledgment that what happened did indeed take place and that the perpetrator bears responsibility. This is a recognition that goes beyond an empty declaration or a polite apology.

• After it comes substantive compensation: restoration wherever possible, or monetary and territorial compensation where restoration is impossible, the return of full rights. Recognition and compensation lead to a structural change that prevents recurrence. Since to settle for compensation for the past while preserving the mechanisms of control and supremacy is to prepare the next round of violence.

• The just peace requires the dismantling of structures of supremacy, of constitutional discrimination, and of the regimes of control imposed on subject populations.

• The restoration of political dignity, full civic inclusion, voice in the arena of decisions, and equal partnership in shaping the shared future.

Applied to the Israeli Palestinian conflict, the meaning is sharp. A just peace will require the State of Israel to formally recognize the Nakba, to accept responsibility for the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 48’, to establish an agreed mechanism of return or compensation, to dismantle the occupation in its deep structures, to equalize rights between the sea and the Jordan, and to bring about a fair division of resources and land. These are the necessary conditions of peace itself, and they are not gifts or generous gestures. Any agreement that gives up on these foundations will remain an armistice, a temporary respite that will in time give birth to the next war. A hundred years of Israeli disregard for the deep structures of the conflict, and the tens of thousands of graves on all sides, will bear witness.

The shift from just war to just peace is a conceptual revolution. The first sought to legitimize violence and to bound it within moral limits, the second seeks to dismantle the conditions that give birth to it in the first place. The earlier one turned to aggressive sovereignty and asked it to wield its power with measure and restraint, the new one turns to that same sovereignty and demands that it give up some of its power for the sake of justice. Two different doctrines; one belongs to the world of bullies, the other to the world of those who know that there is no sustainable victory without moral commitment at its foundation. Only this way can Israel and the region as a whole be freed from the cage in which we have been imprisoning ourselves for more than a hundred years. We are the birds of Alejandro Jodorowsky, who said: “Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.”