Hamas vs. Israeli Killing: Is There a Moral Equivalence?

I was going to write an argument on the moral equivalency of the Muslim killings versus the Israeli killings in the current conflict, a topic that’s been debated daily on the Internet since Hamas attacked and slaughtered Israeli citizens on Oct. 7.

I was going to say that, whereas I agree with something one of my colleagues wrote (“The grief a Palestine mother feels over the murder of her child is no greater or less than the grief that an Israeli mother feels about the murder of her child”), one cannot reasonably argue that the purposeful beheading of an infant in front of its mother is morally equivalent to the death of a child killed by an Israeli rocket that hits a nearby “military target” of some kind, even if the Israeli commander that gave the go-ahead to bomb that building knew that some number of non-combatants, including children, would be killed as “collateral damage.”

Further, I was going to posit that there is a difference (an important difference) between the morality of an individual’s actions and the morality of the actions of an organized group.

One of the differences is that organized groups often have beliefs, principles, and codes of conduct that are definitively stated in declarations, constitutions, mission statements, and the like. Using this moral compass, I don’t see any moral equivalency between Hamas’s position in this war and that of the State of Israel because Hamas’s stated belief is that Jews are, by the nature of their infidelity, sub-human. And that a good and virtuous Hamas Muslim is one that murders Jews in a holy effort to vanquish Israel and rid the world of Jews.

I was going to say that self-defense is as close as one can get to a “human right” that virtually every state, and even every religion, agrees on. That principle justifies Israeli’s retaliation for the attack, but it doesn’t give Israeli carte blanche to eradicate not just every Hamas soldier but every Palestinian man, woman, and child living in Gaza. And although there have been some reactionaries on social media taking that stance, the State of Israel has not. Quite the contrary. It is making a public effort (if only for its own sake) to try to reduce the “collateral damage” done to Palestinian non-combatants.

And finally, I was going to recount a few things I witnessed when I was living in Africa that made me understand, in a way I will never forget, that there is a great range in terms of human decency between some cultures and others. That at one end of that range there are cultures one could fairly describe as civilized, and at the other end cultures that can be justly described as barbaric.

That was going to be the thrust of my argument. But just before getting to it, I read the following essay in the WSJ about what Dostoevsky might say. It provides yet another layer of ethical complication in trying figure out what is or is not morally justified behavior in war.

Click here.