Israel’s assault on Gaza can’t solve problems for Israelis or Palestinians. It intensifies them.

Too often, anger blocks reason, leading to military atrocities. Selective memory and blinkered research cause problems too, which former Japanese general Toshio Tamogami may have learned a hard way. Like U.S. president George W. Bush, he’s a weak history student.

More than 60 years have passed, but memories of Japan’s Second World War aggressions and cruelties remain raw for many thousands of Asians. The details can’t be forgotten. Nor should the Second World War suffering of European Jews, yet Israel, the modern Jewish nation, brazenly inflicts suffering on its neighbors.

Sixty-year-old Tamogami recently retired early when facing dismissal for contradicting his government’s stance by writing an essay that insisted Japan wasn’t a wartime aggressor. Neighboring nations, like China and the Koreas, who suffered badly in the Second World War, always react angrily to suggestions of Japanese military innocence.

Tamogami wrote that “many Asian countries take a positive view of the Greater East Asia War”. While arguing that treaties prompted Japan’s military actions in China and that Japanese occupation kept the Korean peninsula “prosperous and safe”, he blamed former U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt for luring Japan into conflict. Apparently, Japan’s surprise attack on the U.S. at Pearl Harbor shows what brilliant entrapment that was.

Israel’s explanations for its assault on Gaza ring hollow too. Military aggressions aren’t easily justified. Decades ago, Japan set a terrible example. Now Israel does too. If the lessons of history had been properly learned, then Tamogami would write differently, the U.S. wouldn’t occupy Iraq, and Israel wouldn’t alienate world opinion by pummeling Gaza.

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