When War Stops

"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."   

-- E.M. Forster

Along somewhat similar lines, Albert Camus once published an essay in which he wrote that if it were his duty to set off a bomb that would destroy important Nazis but also his mother, he would not trigger the bomb. That position got him ejected (to this day) from the Stalinist part of the French Left.

Camus worked in the French underground in World War Two.    

Do you owe your primary loyalty to kith and kin or to a nation, a religion, an ideology? Should you first be loyal to what Sartre called  "a leap of faith"? A leap that makes your life meaningful. You can dedicate your life to Christianity or to MAGA. You can make that leap. Or are friends and family more important? 

In real life I suppose the issue isn't clear. Hamas recently raided inside Israeli homes where they murdered children, old women and so on. Did they murder them for Islam or Palestine or for their kith and kin? 

Suppose, for the sake or argument, you live in a large universe with billions of stars and planets. The giant universe exists for no purpose you can determine. The universe exists, as far as you can tell, without a goal. But life seems good enough. That was Camus' view. No leap of faith.

Israel is about to invade Gaza. Some predict the war will last ten years. The Israelis say that the war will make Israel safe forever--that claim can't be serious.

So far in the Hamas-Israel war, about 5,000 people have been killed. Camus might ask if that number is enough. Or would 50,000 lives, mostly children and teenagers, be a better place to stop.