Gaza: Morality and Logic

The mistakes that people make

As two months passes since Israel has blocked aid from entering Gaza, with Hamas refusing to even enter talks, controversy rages as to whether it should be allowed in. The government approved a proposal to allow a limited amound of supplies, with controls to attempt to prevent it being stolen by Hamas, while Ben Gvir voted against allowing anything in.

There’s lots of people weighing in on this, with very firm views on the topic either one way or the other. In this post I’d like to point out three particular mistakes of logic that are being made in the framing of the issues by people on both sides of the spectrum.

“There are no innocents in Gaza”

Many people insist that there are no innocents in Gaza, based on the following:

• Hamas was democratically elected.

• We all saw the horrible videos from October 7th of thousands of Gazans cheering in the streets.

• Nobody in Gaza helped rescue hostages.

• Freed hostages have spoken about how they were passed around families and have stated that there are no innocents in Gaza.

Yet it doesn’t take much thought to realize that none of these actually demonstrate in the slightest that there are no innocents in Gaza:

• Hamas was democratically elected - but they didn’t receive 100% of the vote!

• We saw thousands cheering Hamas. We didn’t see those who stayed at home and did not cheer Hamas, because there was no reason for anyone to film them.

• Most people in Gaza were not in any position to rescue hostages.

• The hostages only came into contact with people in Hamas’ circles. They are not in a position to testify about everyone in Gaza.

We know that the culture in Gaza is poisoned against Israel and the Jewish People. Still, this does not mean that every person has been poisoned. I know of people in Gaza who have not been poisoned, and that’s aside from the matter of children. (Also, even if someone hates you, it doesn’t mean that you can starve them to death!) There is absolutely no evidence that there are no innocents in Gaza, and there is plenty of reason to believe that there are innocents, even if they are relatively few in number.

Now, the fact that there may well be plenty of innocents in Gaza does not mean that the war against Gaza is wrong. Wars are fought between political entities, not between individuals, and innocent people always die in wars. But it’s nevertheless important to clarify the facts, because a war fought against a mixture of guilty and innocent people uses different strategies than a war fought only against guilty people.

“People who want to inflict a siege upon Gaza are moral monsters”

Anyone making this accusation needs to realize two things. First is that people have very different perceptions of the situation. As noted above, many people believe that there are no innocents in Gaza. They are mistaken, for the reasons that I discussed, but they don’t realize that they are mistaken! Likewise, many people outside of Israel do not sufficently grasp the reality and horror and insiduous danger of what Israel is facing with Hamas (and see my post Israelis Are Not Moral Monsters).

Second is that morality is nowhere near as black-and-white as many people assume. It’s absolutely crucial to read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. There are all kinds of differing moral principles, some of which sometimes conflict with each other. Consequently, different cultures and subcultures come up with very different ideas as to what morality is. This can be seen across many areas of morality. Is it moral to deprive people of legal rights to marry whoever they want, whether male or female, third or second degree relatives, monogamous or polygamous? There’s no objective answer to these questions (and even within Judaism things have not stayed the same with the latter cases).

And this is the all more true with moral questions involving warfare. To what extent do you prioritize your own citizens’ wellbeing over that of another? Every nation in the world does it to some extent, and appropriately so. But where do you draw the line? And what about prioritizing human rights over national security?

There are no objectively correct answers to these questions. As discussed in a previous post, “ethnic cleansing” is considered an absolute moral crime by many today, and yet forced population transfer was seen as the morally preferable solution to conflict in the mid-20th century and is still considered appropriate with regard to Sudetenland Germans and Judean Jews. The sanctions against Iraq of the 1990s, instated by the UN Security Council, were absolutely devastating, but at the time were considered perfectly moral. Who’s to say that moral standards of just thirty years later are superior?

There was a fascinating and important article in The New Yorker recently, which surveyed the attitude of law professionals in the US military to the war in Gaza. It noted their view that Israel is actually going beyond what international law requires in terms of protecting civilians (and what concerns them is that Israel is still losing dramatically in the court of public opinion, which does not bode well for any future US large-scale war involving far greater numbers of civilian casualties). The difference between the views of professionals in military law and ethics versus ordinary folk is striking.

I’m not saying that besieging Gaza is moral. Not am I saying that it’s immoral. I’m not weighing in on this issue; I’m just pointing out that people can legitimately have very differing perspectives.

“It’s perfectly moral to inflict a siege upon Gaza, and therefore that’s what Israel should do in order to get Hamas to surrender.”

I would love to think that everyone would be able to instantly identify the problem with the above statement, but unfortunately this does not seem to be the case. So let me spell it out. The problem is that even if you believe that something is morally appropriate, that does not mean that it is strategically effective!

Historically, sieges were often (though not always) a good method of getting the enemy to surrender rather than starve. But this situation is different. Hamas has stockpiles of supplies to last for many months, even years. And they would perfectly happily let two million Gazans starve to death before they’d even think of surrendering. But what would happen to Israel while the Jewish state starves two million people to death? This is the 21st century, where the horrors of war are televised worldwide. The political fallout, and the resultant economic and military consequences, would quite simply mean the end of Israel. Anyone who says otherwise simply hasn’t thought it through, and/or is as delusional as the Jewish zealots of 2000 years ago who thought they could hole themselves up in Jerusalem and defeat the Roman Empire.

Furthermore, just as I pointed out regarding the Trump fantasy about moving all the Gazans out of Gaza, it’s simply not going to happen. (Note that many people disagreed with me being dismissive of the idea that the Trump plan would happen, and insisted that I was being unreasonably negative and that Trump would do it. Who was right?) Bibi has enough sense not to starve two million people and the international community would never allow it to happen anyway. All that talking about it does is to reinforce the idea that Israel is guilty of war crimes and render such a verdict more likely to happen. No gain, plenty of loss.

Good strategy means taking all factors into account, domestic and international, military and political and economic, along with being open-eyed and honest about Israel’s limitations as a tiny country with a tiny population. The idea that Israel will starve Hamas into surrender fails spectacularly on all these fronts. Nothing more clearly illustrates the problem with Ben Gvir, and why, as Bibi’s newly appointed IDF chief Eyal Zamir said last week, Ben Gvir is a danger to us all. Delusions might make people feel powerful, but they do not bring security.