Addicted to War: When the State Becomes the Enemy of Peace and Humanity!

By: Dr. Nazim Nassar/Araba/Australia

War, they say, is a necessary evil. But what happens when that “evil” becomes the very breath a state inhales?

What if war transforms from a reluctant necessity into an identity, an economy, and a source of national pride?

In Israel, and in the empires that support it, foremost the United States, war is no longer a political tool; it has become an existential addiction.

Addiction begins with a feeling of power and ends in dependence.

War-addicted regimes don’t fight for survival; they fight because they know nothing else.

Their educational systems are stuffed with myths of superiority; their media indoctrinate the public to equate patriotism with violence, dignity with oppression, and the enemy with the “other.”

In Israel, war has become the official language.

History is not a space for healing, but a perpetual stage to re-enact the Nakba, not to confront it, but to justify its repetition.

This addiction reproduces itself in four stages: stimulation through existential fear; euphoria through symbolic victories; anxiety at the mere thought of peace; and bloody relapse every time hope draws near.

But what happens when a state like Israel loses a war, not just militarily, but morally?

A society built on dominating the other cannot survive without an enemy.

If the enemy is no longer Palestinian, it will be manufactured from within: Arab, leftist, migrant, or even anti-Zionist Jew.

The American empire, feeding this addiction with weapons, vetoes, and dollars, is not saving Israel from its dangers.

It is merely postponing its implosion.

This is not an alliance, it is complicity in a crime: against the ethics of peace, and against the very idea of humanity.

Defeat, here, is not only the loss of land or power, It is the collapse of meaning itself.

What remains of a culture that only knows how to live through the barrel of a gun?

Of a generation raised on siege, not on dialogue?

Of art turned into propaganda, and literature punished for asking a question about mercy?

This is the tragedy of a state addicted to war:

It does not know how to heal.

To lose a war is a tragedy.

But to lose the capacity for peace, that is civilizational suicide.