We see it all over the internet, on people’s profiles and posts: “I stand with Israel!” “I stand with Ukraine!” Pick your champion; someone’s standing with them. Safely outside the line of fire, mind you, but still.

Don’t mistake me: It takes courage to make a moral stand, even online. You lose friends, families get torn apart. People like me, who use their internet accounts to promote their writing/art/business, get blocked and lose customers. As a result, it’s usually also a stupid thing to do, especially since your brave stand with Ukraine doesn’t kill a single Russian soldier.

The difference between courage and stupidity is often so fine a line as to be nonexistent.

And yet…

And yet.

I mentioned in conversation that, in the case of Israel, I’m finding it hard to locate solid moral ground on which to stand. Someone asked what I meant by that, which I didn’t expect. Probably I should have.

I’ll start with first principles and go on from there.

Morally, on every issue, we all stand somewhere. The most usual position is, “It doesn’t concern me”, but as Donne pointed out, we’re all involved with humanity. That bell tolls for all of us. So yes, it does concern you no matter what it is.

This doesn’t mean we all need to act in every crisis, or even to take the trouble to be informed on every situation. Those we can have some effect on, however, if we have the capacity to take a meaningful stand, we should when we can. Nobody expects you or me to change the whole world, but we can at least say what we think is right.

In the present Gaza conflict, it’s easy to condemn both sides. Israel keeps killing civilians; Hamas keeps sheltering behind civilians; other countries keep lobbing artillery at random into Israel and whining when Israel hits them back.

But the actions of Hamas in this conflict are almost uniformly ineffective at anything apart from directing Israeli counterfire against civilian refugees. They rarely kill an Israeli soldier, and only on occasion does their random rocket fire (still ongoing somehow!) ever strike an Israeli civilian even though they keep shooting at cities.

Here’s a principle that applies. It’s absolute, inviolable, always true regardless of circumstances:

War is evil.

Evil can never be justified; it can never be transformed into good. It is always and only ever what it is, which is evil. It is never right to do evil.

Nevertheless, sometimes a people, whether Palestinian or Israeli or anyone else, finds themselves engaged in a war. In war, there is only one moral course: End the war as swiftly as practicable. Some methods are always immoral; aside from that, it’s got to be like surgery: get in, do what you must, get out, let the patient heal.

Israel isn’t doing this. I’m not sure how they could; I’m a student of military history, but I’m not perfect. Hamas also is not doing this.

Here’s a second principle:

When confronted by a choice between evils, choose neither. To do so is to choose evil.

When there are two evils, choose to oppose them both. Sometimes, you can’t win. You can stand and then fall, or you can bide your time and plan and prepare. You can even place your trust in the Divine if you’re able.

In this situation, I see no ground on which I could stand, no position I could take that is stable. This war is evil; neither side is acting morally. All I can do is oppose the war, but — what action can I take to do so? Only this, what I’ve just done: I can take a moral stand against all war. I can state, simply and unequivocally, that war is evil, that this one is being prosecuted immorally by all sides, and that it must end. I can state too that the pre-war situation was untenable and led inevitably to war, and thus must be changed.

Unfortunately, that option’s not on my ballot this year.

When I do this, will I stand alone, and suffer the consequences of taking a stand against overwhelming opposition? Probably, yeah.

But someone asked. What am I gonna do, lie?

When faced by two evils, I choose neither.

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