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Gaza Is Gen Z's First Real War
(Wall Street Journal) Walter Russell Mead - Even if Hamas' initial Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel was itself a war crime, a student asked, isn't the larger loss of civilian life in Israel's subsequent attacks just as bad? Being a professor, I turned the discussion to the history of war. One night in March 1945, U.S. planes dropped incendiary bombs over Tokyo, killing tens of thousands of Japanese civilians. Incomplete estimates from Japan put the total death toll from allied bombing raids as high as 500,000. As for the treatment of enemy civilians, at the 1945 Potsdam Conference, the U.S. agreed to the forcible removal of 12 million Germans, again largely civilian and many children and elderly, from lands their ancestors had inhabited for centuries. One reason the news from Gaza has so massively affected the younger generation is that they have grown up considering peace to be normal and natural. For younger generations, war was passe. Gaza introduced Gen Z to the true horror of war. In the short run, Hamas' propaganda machine is enlisting images of suffering Palestinians to foil Israeli efforts to break its power in Gaza. The writer, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, is Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College.