Another great post by Yaacov Lozowick

It's tough to keep writing good blog posts when others keep raising the bar.

OK. Here I am: a supporter of this war. The proud and fearful father of a soldier fighting this war. A man who hates violence, and shudders with horror at the sight of murdered children. I take upon myself responsibility for the deaths of those Palestinian children to the full extent a voting citizen is responsible for the actions of his government, his army: the ultimate responsibility, since I'm part of the sovereign. It's my country. I'm not a passerby, or a detached observer: I'm an actor in the events.

My justification is that it is a greater injustice to allow the evil to act unchecked, than to check them. Of course, we must take all reasonable measures that we not become equally evil ourselves; but once we've done so, and so long as we continue to do so, it is better to kill would-be murderers than allow them to kill.

This doesn't mean we must spend our days hunting down whoever might potentially be willing to kill us. I'm making a conceptual statement, not a political one. Of course using violence must be an act of last resource, and it must be calibrated to achieve its goals, and it must be done with the greatest of care, and so on. All those conditions must be met, and repeatedly questioned lest what was true earlier is no longer true now, and so on. Once those conditions exist, however, it is legitimate to go to war, even with the certainty that some number of innocents will die, because not going to war will create a greater injustice.

Read the whole thing. Hell, read his whole blog.