Fought over the course of only three days in 1863 (July 1 to 3), the Battle of Gettysburg had the largest amount of casualties in the American Civil War. The death toll on both sides was just under 8,000, with another 27,000 seriously wounded and 11,000 captured or missing – all of this in less than 72 hours.

As sobering as those statistics may be, what is perhaps more noteworthy is one other fact. Jennie Wade was 20 years old and engaged to be married when the Battle of Gettysburg commenced. At 8 a.m. on July 3, while kneading dough in her kitchen, a stray Confederate musket ball ricocheted off of two doors in her house and lodged beneath her shoulder blade. She died instantly, the only civilian death from Gettysburg. Her demise was considered a deep tragedy and was mourned on both sides. Her body was carried out by Union soldiers, and she was buried in a coffin fashioned by Confederate soldiers.

How much the rules of warfare have changed can be easily discerned when one turns to recent events  in Gaza. Detractors fiercely criticize Israel for the number of children killed over the course of three weeks, and defenders of Israel not only point out that the country was long overdue in responding to Hamas rocket fire, but that Hamas fighters were deliberately embedded among the civilian populace, thus guaranteeing the deaths of innocents.

Whatever one’s politics, it has become clear to everyone that the strictly enforced battle lines of wars past are – literally – history, and that to engage in military conflict today means to recognize that, for a whole variety of reasons too lengthy to rehearse here, civilians will die.

Israel gets preached to from all ends of the spectrum. Those on the right will sanctimoniously bemoan what they see as the Israeli government’s reticence in “not finishing the job” – destroying Hamas completely, regardless of the civilian cost. The self-righteous consciences on the left will remind Israel about proportionality, as though Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hamas leader Khaled Meshal could be likened to Robert E. Lee, and that the genteel codes that governed the reaction to Jenny Wade’s death are telecast daily on Al-Jazeera.

Often, the pragmatic solution is the one least satisfying to all sides of the ideological divide. But one must be wary of the alternative, the reversion to “purer” and less-compromised attitudes.

One such ideal was expressed in its quintessential form by Gandhi, who wrote to Martin Buber that rather than counter the Nazis through violent means, the Jews should have practised satayagraha (soul-force), a version of non-violent resistance, even if would mean every last Jew were to be massacred. Gandhi’s position was idealistic and consistent. It would make the champions of international law very happy. But had it been followed, none of us in the Jewish community would be alive today to discuss its benefits.

On the other hand, if one advocates for the other purity, one must be prepared, given how Hamas almost seems to relish its own civilian casualties, for the carnage of tens of thousands of dead children.

 Sometimes the world is as it is rather than how we would like it to be, and perhaps, for the moment, that may be as good as it gets.