Inverting Moral Responsibility is Dangerous
The day after Israel was reestablished as a Jewish state, the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded the territory of the newly established state. Israel was less than 24 hours old, surrounded by enemies determined to prevent the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.
The odds appeared overwhelming. Israel had no established army, no air force, no navy, and few of the resources normally associated with a sovereign nation. Yet the fledgling Jewish state survived. The invading Arab armies were defeated, and Israel emerged from the war with its independence intact.
But the defeat did not end the conflict. The fundamental objective of many of Israel’s enemies remained unchanged: the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state.
That objective has appeared in different forms and under different names throughout the decades. Arab nationalism, Palestinian nationalism, Islamist ideology, terrorism, rejectionism and, more recently, the genocidal ambitions of Hamas and other Iranian-backed organizations have all contributed to the continuing struggle against Israel.
Some Arab governments eventually recognized the reality that Israel could not be destroyed and chose a different path. Egypt and Jordan made peace with Israel, and the Abraham Accords brought additional Arab states into formal relations with the Jewish state.
But peace treaties between governments did not magically eliminate hostility toward Israel among significant segments of their populations, nor did they extinguish the ideology of those organizations committed to Israel’s destruction. Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Iranian regime have continued to proclaim, in words and deeds, their determination to destroy Israel or end its existence as a Jewish state.
And that brings us to the extraordinary double standard applied to Israel.
War is ugly. War is brutal. War inevitably produces death, destruction, displacement and suffering. Civilians are tragically caught in the crossfire, and even the most disciplined armies make mistakes. These are not uniquely Israeli phenomena. They are the tragic realities of every major war in human history.
Yet Israel is routinely judged by a standard that has little relationship to the standards applied to other nations engaged in warfare.
Consider the history of World War II. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by atomic bombs. Dresden was devastated by Allied firebombing. Cities throughout Europe and Asia were subjected to massive bombing campaigns that killed enormous numbers of civilians. These actions remain subjects of legitimate historical and moral debate, but they are examined within the context of a total war against enemies whose defeat was considered essential to ending the conflict.
Israel, however, is denied that same historical context.
When Israel responds to attacks by organizations that deliberately embed themselves among civilian populations, launch rockets from residential areas, construct military infrastructure beneath civilian neighborhoods, and use civilians as shields, Israel’s military response is often judged as though it were fighting an ordinary conventional army on an empty battlefield.
It isn’t.
Israel’s enemies have repeatedly turned civilian areas into battlefields. That creates an agonizing dilemma: Israel must either strike military targets concealed within civilian environments or allow those targets to operate with virtual immunity because their perpetrators have deliberately placed civilians in harm’s way.
That does not mean every Israeli military action is automatically justified. Israel, like every nation, must be held accountable for genuine violations of international law. Civilian deaths should never be dismissed or trivialized simply because they occur during war.
But accountability is not the same thing as demonization.
There is a profound difference between investigating a legitimate allegation of misconduct and declaring that Israel is inherently genocidal, racist, colonialist or apartheid. The latter accusations have become political weapons, detached from the historical and military realities in which Israel has been forced to fight for its survival.
And some of the most inflammatory accusations are simply astonishing.
Israel is accused of genocide while repeatedly fighting organizations whose leaders have openly called for the destruction of Israel and whose founding documents and statements have included eliminationist rhetoric. Israel is accused of deliberately killing babies while Hamas terrorists murdered and kidnapped Israeli civilians, including children, on October 7. Israel is accused of apartheid even though its Arab citizens vote, hold political office, serve as judges and physicians, attend Israeli universities, and participate throughout the country’s political and economic institutions.
The accusation of genocide should never be casually transformed into a synonym for “too many civilians have died.” Genocide has a specific legal meaning involving the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Civilian casualties, however tragic, do not by themselves establish genocide.
The same principle applies to every other accusation. A military error is not automatically a war crime. A civilian death is not automatically murder. A military campaign is not automatically genocide. And defending a nation’s existence is not automatically aggression.
The irony becomes even more disturbing when the very crimes Israel is accused of committing are compared with the explicit conduct and stated intentions of organizations fighting against it.
Hamas deliberately targeted Israeli civilians. It celebrated the massacre of Jews. It took hostages. It has repeatedly rejected Israel’s right to exist. Its October 7 attack demonstrated with horrifying clarity what its perpetrators can do when given the opportunity.
Yet somehow the international conversation frequently focuses less on the ideology and actions of those who initiated the violence than on the methods Israel uses to defend itself.
That inversion of moral responsibility is dangerous.
Israel should be held to the same standards as every other democratic nation. But it should not be held to standards that no other nation is expected to meet. If civilian casualties in war are evidence of genocide, then much of modern warfare would have to be redefined. If military operations in densely populated areas are inherently criminal, then the same principle must be applied universally—not selectively to Israel.
Israel’s enemies understand this double standard. They exploit it.
They know that placing weapons among civilians creates impossible choices for Israel and produces devastating images that can be used against the Jewish state in the court of world opinion. The battlefield is therefore not merely physical. It is also political, psychological and informational.
And Israel is fighting on all those fronts.
Seventy-eight years after five Arab armies invaded the newly established Jewish state, Israel remains surrounded by organizations and regimes that openly challenge its existence. The names, tactics and political circumstances have changed, but the fundamental struggle over whether the Jewish people have the right to a sovereign state in their ancestral homeland has not disappeared.
Israel did not choose the necessity of defending itself; it inherited it. That is the historical context too often missing from today’s debate. Before Israel is condemned for how it fights a war, one should ask a more fundamental question: why is Israel fighting in the first place?
That question does not excuse Israeli wrongdoing. It does, however, demand that Israel be judged by the same moral and legal standards applied to every other nation fighting for its survival.
Anything less is not justice; it is the inversion of moral responsibility. It is a dangerous double standard—one applied with remarkable consistency to the world’s only Jewish state.
