In his poem The War to Come, published on the eve of World War II, Bertolt Brecht offered an unsettling insight into the nature of modern warfare. Wars, he suggested, are not necessarily battles between absolute good and absolute evil. More often, they are clashes between rival systems of power – systems driven by interests, each presenting its struggle as a moral necessity.

Even when real differences exist between the sides, the social outcome of war rarely transforms the lives of those who bear its heaviest burden. Victors and vanquished may change places, but the suffering of ordinary people remains. As Brecht put it: “Among the defeated, the poor went hungry; among the victors, the poor went hungry too”.

Wars cannot be sustained for long if they are presented as struggles over interests – economic, territorial or geopolitical. No one goes to war for a “regional balance of power”. War requires a different language: a language of historical justice, destiny and redemption. It depends on organizing concepts such as an “Axis of Evil”, “Total Victory”, or an “Existential Struggle”. These are not merely interpretations of reality; they are conditions for mobilizing force. They impose a stark moral division in which doubt becomes betrayal and criticism becomes a blow to national morale – or even “aid to the enemy”.

The current war is conducted within precisely such a semantic field. Public discourse reduces a complex historical conflict to a narrative of total struggle: civilization versus barbarism, light versus darkness, good versus evil. None of this is meant to diminish the very real security threats facing Israel or its right to defend itself. But it does require us to recognize the moment when the language of security necessity merges with the language of political survival – and sometimes with personal interest.

For Benjamin Netanyahu, the war is not only a reality to confront; it is also a framework within which political and moral failure can be recast as historical necessity. The rhetoric of an “existential war” is not merely a description of objective conditions but a mechanism for consolidating authority. As the state of emergency drags on, it suspends mechanisms of oversight, delays democratic decision-making and deflects discussion of investigative commissions and political responsibility. Above all, it replaces the question of accountability with the question of loyalty. No longer: Who is responsible for the failure that brought us here? Instead: Who dares to ask questions in wartime?

At this point, a critical shift occurs. War ceases to be a political decision subject to scrutiny and becomes a moral imperative beyond challenge. When the continuation of war – “for as long as necessary”, in the words of Defense Minister Israel Katz – is no longer anchored in a defined political objective or timetable but framed as an ethical command, criticism itself is recast as betrayal. Investigations are postponed, elections deferred and the civilian agenda narrowed – not because there is no time to ask questions, but because this is said to be the wrong time to ask them.

The American side is not immune to motives that extend beyond immediate security concerns. For Donald Trump, seeking to position himself as the antithesis of his predecessors – particularly Barack Obama and Joe Biden – regional conflicts are not only crises to manage but arenas for signaling power. Unconditional support for allies, willingness to escalate indirectly and demonstrations of strength through peripheral theaters all serve a broader effort to reassert global leadership in an era of strategic competition with China. The present war thus becomes embedded in a logic of prestige and deterrence.

From this perspective, the question is not only who will win but what victory itself is worth. Victory is a political category; suffering is a human one. While leaders measure success in terms of domestic legitimacy or regional balance, civilians on both sides are left with devastated economies, shattered infrastructure and irreversible loss.

Acknowledging the necessity of self-defense is essential. But it does not absolve us of the responsibility to ask whether other motives are also at work. Precisely when war is framed as an absolute struggle between light and darkness, it is worth asking whether the moral language of necessity conceals political interests.

Wars are fought not only on the battlefield but in the realm of meaning. The civic task is not merely to bear the burden of war, but to ask who shapes the story in whose name that burden is justified.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)