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Clausewitz’s well-known saying—“War is nothing but the continuation of policy by other means”—continues to echo in the public sphere. Researcher Gal Finkel (Ma’arachot, September 2021) and former Knesset member, researcher, and journalist Ofer Shelah, in several recent remarks, have underscored its relevance to Israel’s wars: War is not an end or a goal but merely a means of achieving a political objective.

Clausewitz wrote for his time, when war was conducted between regular armies and intended to realize monarchical interests of controlling subjects and conquering territories. By contrast, in modern Western democracies, war is no longer “the continuation of policy” and “another means” of achieving political goals. War is a last resort in a critical, crisis situation—a “war of no choice” against an aggressor.

And in Israel’s case, the IDF is a defense force, not an offensive one. In essence, Israel’s wars are defensive. The Six-Day War is an instructive example.

The American scholar, Prof. Gary Bass, holds that the West rejects wars of choice. In his book Judgement at Tokyo, he argued that the show trials in Tokyo of Japanese war criminals at the end of World War II were partly intended to instill in Japanese public opinion the recognition that war is not a legitimate instrument of statecraft but rather a first-order international crime. According to him, the American prosecution in Tokyo borrowed the concept of “conspiracy” from US criminal law. The defendants in the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials were charged not only with specific war crimes but also with criminal conspiracy to commit war crimes.

Defense attorneys, Bass argues, hate conspiracy charges for the same reasons prosecutors embrace them. Since it is a separate offense, it is easier to convict defendants of conspiracy than to convict them of committing the crimes themselves. Conspiracy charges became a distinctive component of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. They were intended to punish the aggression of the Axis states and to deter states from embarking on wars of choice.

Conspiracy and the crimes of dictatorial regimes also exist in the present. Reuters recently published, on October 17, 2025, a report titled “Assad-era conspiracy to hide thousands of bodies turned Syria’s remote desert into a mass grave.” The bodies discovered there were those of prisoners who had been tortured to death in prison. During 2019–2021, the Assad regime secretly excavated a mass grave near the prison to conceal atrocities it had committed and transferred the bodies to a new mass grave at a military facility in the desert. Those who carried out the transfer kept the secret for six years. Only after the grave was discovered was the regime’s conspiracy to conceal the truth exposed.

The International Court in The Hague accuses Israel of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation, during the war in the Gaza Strip. It does not accuse Israel of conspiring to commit war crimes. It is clear to the entire world that the “Swords of Iron” war is a defensive war, in response to the massacre of October 7. Still, relying on calls by Israeli political actors to establish settlements in the Gaza Strip, anti-Israel bodies around the world may sway global public opinion and accuse Israel of conspiring to occupy the Strip and annex it to Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu identified the danger. In an interview with an American television network, he stated that Israel has no intention whatsoever of establishing settlements in Gaza. The very fact that the prime minister found it necessary to publicly deny any intention to establish settlements in Gaza indicates that such a trend exists in Israeli public discourse.

The government must firmly adhere to his statement and avoid turning a defensive war into a war of conquest.