Must We Take Sides?

In times of war, someone said, people tend to take sides. In this war, perhaps more so than in others, it feels difficult to take sides. Or rather, it comes too easily. Taking sides takes no imagination at all. Big words are at hand, accusatory ones, that cast the enemy as the enemy not only of a people but of the entire human race. Accusations of crimes of war were flying almost before the first rockets landed on either side. The prize in this war is not victory but victimhood. Who has the greater claim to it? Whose cause is just? This, at least, is not a new question. 

As always, the price of war is paid by ordinary people. War never distinguishes between good and bad people; like an ancient god, it kills the good along with the bad. Our cry for an end to this war should ring out loudly and it should ring out on behalf of all those many men and women, old and young that have no part in it. Why should the innocent suffer with the guilty? Why should the innocent suffer, while the wicked masters of this war prosper in safety and abundance? The wicked are casting this as a war between nations, a war of national self-defense against a nation and a movement that guns for the erasure of the other. Who, in such a war, is innocent if it is a matter of them or us? In such a war, they say, there is no innocent civilian protected by the laws of war. The entire nation is guilty and responsible, by their very existence, for one's own suffering. What does it mean to defend oneself against a mortal threat that emanates from another people, not just from their army or their leadership, where such even exists? It means total war. This, too, is not a novel idea in the history of war mongering. Where this narrative prevails, taking sides inevitably means to own the rhetoric of annihilation as well. Taking sides means to tar an entire people with one brush. 

Taking sides without aiding and abetting the rhetoric of annihilation and total war requires surgical precision in one's perception and in one's words. Such precision comes dearly in the heat of passion. But surgical precision is for analysts. What matters more than context and the long view, more than sociological or political perspectives, more than any intellectual answer at all, is our very human ability to relate to one another as human beings. Our resistance to demonization. Our ability to defy the pressure to identify with only one side; to defy the pressure to take sides.

This is not an argument for neutrality. It is not an argument at all. It is more of a reminder of the many times before when people of good will on both sides of a conflict were silenced by the drums of war. Where individuality was erased, and groupthink took over. Where personality was suffocated by slogans. I understand the urgency. I just don't feel that taking sides is what we should be doing right now. We don't need more realism. What we need is a kind of miracle. An uprising with one another, not against one another. A cross-border revolution, not a cross-border incursion, violent rectification, or revenge. A removal of the cancerous forces that poison the minds on both sides. In other words: imagination and resistance to being cast as actors in an interminable conflict. Where there are no sides to take, there will be no more war.