Seismic waves continue to radiate outward from the Gaza war epicentre to rattle Syria,Jordan, Iran, the Arabian peninsula, and the Red Sea. The obvious solution to the instability and danger to life is to stop the war. But the contending parties vow to not stop the war until their objectives are met. But if the objectives are mutually incompatible (the destruction of Hamas vs. the survival of Hamas as the legitimate governing power in Gaza, freedom for Israeli hostages vs. freedom for all Palestinian prisoners, Israeli security vs the creation of a Palestinian state) only the complete destruction of the other side can secure the victor’s demands. But if neither side can be destroyed, permanent conflict must ensure, unless …

… both sides realize that maximalist positions guarantee conflict, conflict guarantees periodic eruptions of violence, and violence destroys the lives that both sides claim to want to protect and improve. Unfortunately, compromise requires leadership of a sort that is rare at moments of severe crisis. The typical response– on abundant display in the current crisis– is adolescent male chest-thumping, posturing, and head-butting. Israel digs itself into a hole by promising the total destruction of Hamas– a goal that it cannot accomplish because Hamas is not an army, but a political movement deeply embedded in the lives of 2.3 million Gazans. Hamas responds by promising the total destruction of the “Zionist entity,” an even more preposterous goal, considering the overwhelming military power of Israel, unflagging US financial and military support, and the legitimacy of the pre-1967 borders of Israel under international law. Peace seems unimaginable under these political conditions.

On the periphery are a host of equally tough-talking actors. Iran and Hezbollah keep threatening unspecified catastrophic consequences for Israel and its supporters if the war continues. The US bombs Iraq, Syria, and Yemen in reprisal for the deaths of three US soldiers. The Houthis vow to respond to the response. Meanwhile, people across the region continue to suffer not only the immediate effects of violence but the economic and social consequences of instability and war. Yemen and Gaza are amongst the poorest places on earth, Iraq and Syria have riven by decades of hot and cold civil war. Iran’s highly educated youthful population chafes under the impact of sanctions and a sclerotic theocracy. The racist venting of Israel’s far right and the pitiless ferocity of its war alienates elements of even its staunchest allies.

Presumably, the point of this conflict, like any conflict, viewed from the perspective of any of its protagonists, is to improve the lives of the people the contending sides represent. While Hamas must certainly have counted on an Israeli ground invasion in response to October 7th, they probably did not bank on the level of destruction that Israel has inflicted. Beneath the rhetoric of destruction lies the positive value of Palestinian self-determination. And beneath the rhetoric of extermination that the Israelis have voiced lies likewise the positive goal of security and life-protection. The idea that the Israeli state as such is illegitimate has no basis under international law. Thus, those who would invoke international law to criticize Israeli tactics in Gaza as genocidal and decry the on-going denial of Palestinians their right to national self-determination must not ignore international law when it comes to the legitimacy of the pre-1967 borders of Israel.

There is war, there is resistance, there is rhetoric, but there is no security, no life-protection, no self-determination, just war setting the stage for more war, if not ad infinitum, then at least as far as the eye can see.

Commentators on the left typically focus on the objective causes of conflict in order to insist- not wrongly– that unless objective causes are addressed, conflict and violence will continue.

This insistence is not wrong but, I would argue, it is one-sided. It matters, I think, how objective causes are addressed. The left favours the language of smashing, liquidating, and destroying, but this language betrays, to my mind, the universal value that underlies its criticisms of capitalism and colonialism: the harmonious development of human capacities in a world no longer riven by class conflict, atavistic nationalisms, and fundamentalist obscurantism. Achieving that goal presupposes the satisfaction of both the objective and subjective conditions for the creation of a world of self-determining peoples sharing the wealth and joys of our world. Resistance and struggle are not ends in themselves.

Until leaders that thrive on tough talk and demonization of the enemy are replaced with leaders who can argue, listen, respectfully acknowledge the legitimacy of the interests of the other side, and work out pragmatic but honourable compromises, the realization of that universal value is impossible. Objective conditions matter, but so do subjective conditions. Imagine had Stalin and not Gorbachev been the leader of the Soviet Union in 1989. How many millions more bodies would he have piled up in a doomed attempt to save a dying system? Good leadership does not depend upon superior moral virtue, but on the capacity to discern what the historical moment requires. Gorbachev understood that the Soviet economic model could no longer compete with the West. He also understood, more importantly, that no heroic efforts on his part could save the system. His people were done, fed up, no longer willing to be ruled in the old way, as Lenin said. The people of Eastern Europe were even more disillusioned. Wisely, instead of trying to murder his way to political security, he simply let the empire go.

How different, then, was he from Ben Gvir, or Netanyahu, or Yahya Sinwar. Their main failure as leaders is that they they believe that sheer force of will, determination, courage, and ruthlessness can alter the basic structure of the problem that they face. But the problem that they face is precisely that neither one side nor the other can achieve their goals without compromise from the other side.

The adolescent boy challenged to a fight thinks that backing down is weakness. But refusing to fight a futile battle is not weakness (or strength), it is intelligence. In daily life we do not celebrate the person who responds to an insult by kicking the offender in the head. We do not erect statues to parents who beat their children to death. But political leaders are celebrated as decisive and tough-minded for being willing to pay the price of victory, even if that price runs to millions of lives destroyed.

The world does not need saints. It needs intelligent leaders who can study a conflict dispassionately and see the deep structures that prevent resolution on their terms only. Rational understanding can then furnish the political strength needed to tell one’s own side that the old ways cannot work, that the legitimacy of the interests of the other side must be acknowledged, and that a workable compromise, one that creates space for new forms of peaceful self-development, is needed. As new forms of peaceful self-development evolve, new forms of peaceful interaction between formerly mortal enemies can evolve. We know they can because they already have, many, many times in the past.

Justice can be the enemy of peace when it is asserted in absolute terms against an opponent who can be expected to also invoke it as their justifying value. However, if justice is a universal value, then it demands that all people have access to the natural and social resources that free self-development requires as well as effective political institutions through which that collective control can be organized and managed. No one has exclusive right to what we all need, but until leaders are in place who recognize and act on this simple truth in the simplest of ways– through negotiation and comprise– war will continue to destroy the very lives in whose name the violent struggles are justified.

Security, national self-determination, and whatever other political value statespersons invoke to justify themselves are only good if there are people alive to enjoy them.