The Guilt of Victory and the Virtue of Defeat

Death and suffering do not exist on a linear scale. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023, we in Israel felt an overwhelming helplessness amid the daily horrors of war. Later, the tenuous and dubious ceasefires that were announced did not stop the attacks on Israeli civilians, the destruction of life and property in Gaza, or the targeting of Palestinian villages and groves in the West Bank. The multiplication of tragedies put all of these horrors beyond what we could rationally process. This is the effect of war—everything we treasure loses the proportion of its value.

In wartime, leaders perpetuate aggression for their own ends, supported by some but far from all of the people under their rule. Most individuals yearn for peace but find themselves waking up to day after day of fighting. This crazy-making paradox methodically kills the souls of those who survive, everyone hoping that, long after all hope is lost, the bloodshed will somehow end.

Already, in the early days of the war, I was turning my attention to books that offered some perspective on our situation. Among them were Ryszard Kapuściński’s Another Day of Life (1976), on the transition in Angola from Portuguese rule to civil war, Albert Camus’s writings from the liberation of Paris in 1944, Czesław Miłosz’s 1953 book of essays, The Captive Mind, and Shulamith Hareven’s 1988 essay “Eyeless in Gaza,” on Israel’s blindness regarding Palestinians.

As the war dragged on—with consecutive ceasefires on the horizon—my focus turned to two different but closely related books: Stig Dagerman’s 1947 work German Autumn (tr. by Robin Fulton Macpherson) and Svetlana Alexievich’s 1985 oral history Last Witnesses (tr. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky). These books foreground the unquestionable horrors—but also uncomfortable ambiguities—of both war and survival. They show how quickly the tides of battle turn, blurring the roles of victor and vanquished, and exposing the pure human suffering at the core of armed conflict.