Death Wish

by | Oct 15, 2025 | The Truscott Chronicles

Milford Cemetery

Death Wish

by | Oct 15, 2025 | The Truscott Chronicles

Milford Cemetery

I’m sure that as a species we are not born with a death wish, but we have lived our lives for thousands of years as if we are, and that characteristic of human beings is a real tragedy.

Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

Thinking that I would write about the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas over Gaza, the working title for this column until a few moments ago was, “Does land matter more than people’s lives, or do lives matter more than the land?” And then I read a story about Hamas coming out of the tunnels after the ceasefire, and the first thing they did, according to the account I read, was hunt down and arrest people whom they had identified as traitors and execute them.

This, of course, followed the attack almost exactly two years ago by Hamas fighters on Israeli settlements and a music festival near the border with Gaza, when they killed more than a thousand Israelis and took over two hundred people hostage and escaped back into Gaza. Then came the two years of war between Israel and Hamas, which consisted, in the main, of Israel bombing Gaza towns nearly flat in an attempt to root out and destroy Hamas, causing the deaths of at least 67,000 Palestinians and the wounding of another 170,000, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

Over two years, 80 percent of the buildings that stood in Gaza before the war have been either severely damaged or flattened entirely. Nine out of ten homes have been destroyed. Now that the fighting has stopped, aerial photos show almost unknowable destruction, seemingly nothing left of the place 2.1 million people called home.

While a meeting of international leaders yesterday discussed how the place may be rebuilt, Gazans streamed north from camps in South Gaza, returning to their destroyed homes in towns from which they had been banished. Gaza, largely in rubble, is still their home.

Sitting here in a country that is about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of its founding, what is to explain the attachment of people to this ancient land that has been fought over for nearly three millennia? Jerusalem, the capital of what is now Israel, was ruled over by a series of ancient civilizations, beginning with the Israelites, more than 1,000 years BC—Before Christ, as historians have agreed that ancient and modern time is measured. Then came the Assyrians, who ruled for a couple hundred years before being conquered by the Babylonians, followed in quick measure by the Persians. Another couple hundred years would pass before Alexander brought his Greek army to run the Persians out. The Romans were next, followed by the Byzantines, and then several hundred years of Muslim rule before the Crusaders invaded from Europe and controlled things until the Ottomans arrived around 1500 and took over Jerusalem and all of what is now Israel until the 20th Century brought modern wars and partition by Great Britain, followed by World War II and soon thereafter, Jews displaced the British and a whole lot of Palestinians and established modern Israel.

All of this over a piece of land about the size of New Jersey at the time Israel declared its independence.

I wrote a sentence above about “civilizations” controlling Jerusalem and what is now Israel. Civilization is just a word for the people who went to war against other people and won the right to say they controlled that land. It’s hard reading history or even studying the history of war as I did at West Point, to see what we’re talking about. I was in Israel and Lebanon in 1974-75 to write about terrorism, and during that time, I visited the Old City of Jerusalem and went to the Western Wall and the Temple Mount. There was a large plaza that you crossed to reach the Western Wall at that time. To the left of the Wall, an archaeological dig was in progress. You could pass through an opening in a wall and look down into a hole in the ground and see the progress of the dig, lit by electric lights. There was a footpath that crossed another footpath about fifty feet down.

A few years later, I was in Jerusalem on another story and visited the Old City again. This time, they had dug up the plaza in front of the Western Wall and exposed the history of the place. At the bottom of the dig, you could see some of ancient Jerusalem, from the time of the First Temple. Rooms of a house, made of stone and mud, were visible, and a little to the right of those rooms, about 20 feet higher, was the vaulted bedroom of a Roman home. You could clearly see that one civilization—one conquering people—had built their homes on the ruins of the homes occupied by people who predated them by hundreds of years.

Today, the plaza is flat again, but you can visit the rooms of the ancient city underground. They have uncovered a ritual Jewish bath from Herodian times that was supplied with water carried by an ancient aqueduct from Bethlehem, miles away from Jerusalem. The same aqueduct was the primary source of water for Jerusalem until the British Mandate 2,000 years later.

That is how long Jerusalem, and other parts of the Middle East, have been fought over….

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Lucian K. Truscott IV

Lucian K. Truscott IV

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.

You can read Lucian Truscott's daily articles at luciantruscott.substack.com. We encourage our readers to get a subscription.
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