Two days ago, I spoke with an American-Israeli tech entrepreneur about the US-Israeli strikes on Iran and the deaths of over a hundred and sixty girls and staff at the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab. My interlocutor dismissed those deaths as unfortunate but inevitable collateral damage, serving the cause of the greater good. I had heard the phrase before. Last June, I watched Benny Morris, a historian whose rigor and courage in examining modern Israeli history I had long admired, speak publicly about Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza. He used the same words, delivered with the same calm detachment. What remained with me was not his statement but how effortlessly it arrived and how little it cost him to say it.

War has traditionally been described as an instrument of rational policy, a continuation of diplomacy. Strategic planning, operational doctrine, and legal regulation all presuppose that military violence can be directed by intention, rational calculus, and smart modern technology. But how does this correspond to the actual phenomenology of war?  Over two hundred years ago, Clausewitz introduced the concept of friction to describe the pervasive discrepancy between war as it is planned and war as it actually unfolds. Friction arises from the countless contingencies that constitute combat: miscommunication, human error, imperfect intelligence, logistical failures, weather, and the unpredictable reactions of the enemy. These forces are the dynamic environment of war, which transforms even the simplest operation once it enters the field of action. Once friction is understood as a permanent feature of war, the boundary between the planned and the unplanned begins to dissolve. What is intended and what emerges accidentally become intertwined within the same unfolding process, until the distinction between them is a matter of legal classification rather than operational reality.

War, in this sense, follows a logic closer to chaos than to rational design. It reveals a disturbing aspect of human reality: the attempt to control violence through rational design continually encounters forces that resist such control. Organized chaos is a contradiction in terms, and war lives inside that contradiction. There is an older vocabulary for this domain. In the language of Kabbalah, Sitra Achra, literally the other side, designates the realm in which meaningfulness dissolves, and destructive forces circulate outside the structure of meaning. War, in this reading, is the passage into Sitra Achra: the moment at which the categories designed to regulate violence enter a field whose dynamics continuously exceed them. Strategic strikes, misdirected weapons, destroyed infrastructure, systemic civilian casualties: all arise from the same operational environment. They are different expressions of the same dynamic process. The distinction between them belongs to the language of courts, briefings, and moral philosophy. Within Sitra Achra, that distinction is real as a normative aspiration and unstable as a........

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