On Innocent Civilians and Moral Relativism

Moral Responsibility in War: The Complexity of Innocence, Guilt, and Collective Participation.

Northern Italy, autumn 1944. In a city, a crowd of people from all walks of life gathers for an auction to purchase Jewish property seized by the Nazi-fascist puppet government. These goods had been taken from Jews who were loaded onto cattle cars, destined to be killed in death camps. Despite what they would later claim after the war, these Italians knew exactly what they were doing. They were buying stolen Jewish property—belongings of people who would likely never be heard from again.

We could categorize the buyers into three broad groups: the fascists and antisemites, eager to seize Jewish property for ideological reasons; the opportunists, who were neither fascists nor antisemites but saw a bargain and seized the chance; and the Italians who, in the final months of the war, were simply seeking useful goods that were otherwise scarce. So, who was innocent and who was guilty? The answer is that they were all responsible, though to varying degrees, in the theft of Jewish property from those deported to their deaths.

And along with them, they bore responsibility for the deaths of those Jews, in varying degrees and with varying awareness: the neighbors who looked the other way, the indifferent, the informers, the typists who typed up arrest orders for Jews, the workers who carried them out, railway employees, those maintaining the local Jewish registry, and all the way to the executioners in front of the gas chambers. Without the actions of these individuals—the small gestures of countless cogs in a morally corrupted society—the Holocaust would not have happened, or at least not with the same, horrific efficiency. This is true not just for Italy but for all of Europe.

This is also true for totalitarian regimes, and the societies that give rise to them. The freedoms of a society always die a slow death, and then we, in an effort to absolve ourselves, shift the blame to those who are nothing more than the executioners and gravediggers of those once-free societies: the tyrants. However, the responsibility of a society ultimately lies with its members, even if we prefer to think of a reality in which individual responsibility is more just. The truth is that when we accept the social contract, we bind ourselves to it—and in doing so, we bind the generations that follow us to it as well.

The difficult truth to accept is that innocence is a flawed category in war. Or rather, moral responsibility, understood in binary terms—black and white—is an impossible concept to apply in the context of a war against a totalitarian regime. This simplistic, yet deeply human notion of morality, grounded in empathy, does not hold up in the complex web of a totalitarian conflict.

Certainly, empathy is one of the core aspects of humanity, but as Kant pointed out, a truly universal morality cannot be governed by emotions and inclinations. On the other hand, the way we experience emotions is heavily influenced by our culture, which means it is inherently relative. The question of a morality based on empathy should, therefore, make us reflect on the state of society in the West.

No one, when Nazi Dresden was bombed, went on talking about the innocence of the civilians while millions of Jews were being exterminated. The world was in flames, immersed in the horrors of war. Yet, even then, it was clear, and it remains clear to us today, who the forces of evil were and who stood for the good. The forces of good were those who believed in life, not death, as the realization of their vision for humanity. I am not interested in the “whataboutism” of those who, today, citing the tropes of apologists for the defeated Nazi-fascism, tear their clothes over Allied war crimes or bombed cities. Because, in the real world—especially in wartime—even those on the side of “good” can commit terrible atrocities, and while the individuals who commit these atrocities cannot be morally excused, the side of good remains the side of good.

Certainly, the malice of the defeated, and how it permeated their society, should provoke reflection. It would be monstrous if it did not, above all about human nature. I am reminded of the story of Rav Yonatan in Masechet Sanhedrin, where G-d does not rejoice at the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea. Yet, G-d allows others to rejoice, because, once again, empathy toward the creature does not negate the consequences of its evil, nor does it guide the moral judgment of how that evil should be destroyed.

But in the present situation, we must first consider the facts: Hamas was elected, and those who voted for it were not ignorant. They knew precisely what Hamas intended, both as a “political” program and as an ideological and practical vision. In fact, the society that produced Hamas knew this better than anyone on the outside, because it had direct experience. Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip after the Israeli withdrawal and has enjoyed widespread support among Palestinians. Furthermore, Hamas built a regime that, like any regime, could not have survived without the direct or indirect participation of large segments of the population—indirect participation including indifference or passive acceptance of its rule.

Today, those who claim to be “friends of peace,” borrowing a term from Rosa Luxemburg, weep over the innocence of Gaza’s civilians, almost constructing a morally misguided equivalence with the deaths of October 7. I am not referring to those who believe it is essential to balance war with the protection of non-combatants, but rather to those who question the very morality of the war based on its tragic aspects. In other words, those who, today, insist that the moral responsibility for this tragedy lies with the Israeli army or the State of Israel as a whole, and not with the regime that created the conditions for the war—conditions that have resulted in the greatest massacre of Jews since the Shoah.

I do not believe in the utilitarian and consequentialist morality of simple souls, those who judge the morality of an action after the fact, satisfied with épater la bourgeoisie of a comfortable West in its late-capitalist heaven, far removed from the grim and brutal reality of daily violence. No, I remain Kantian in my conviction that the intention behind human action is the ultimate measure of the morality of a given event.

Yet, our certainty in judging intention—guided by empathy and an innate sense of justice—falters when we confront victims who had no part in Hamas’s regime, such as children killed during the conflict. Levinas would likely argue that it is in recognizing these victims within the moral calculation that we truly remain human, even in wartime. By seeing what Levinas calls the face of the Other, we build a phenomenological ethics, radically grounded in relation.

However, in Levinas’s framework, because it is still rooted in a morality of empathy, he cannot provide a response to the weight that society has on the individual—or, more precisely, the weight of societal decisions on our lives, especially when we cannot or do not participate in those decisions. The Indian concept of karma, the fruition of actions even beyond death, becomes applicable not only to the individual but also to the generations that follow and to the society of which one is a part. This is an unjust reality for our conscience, yet it is a truth in the human condition: we pay the consequences of those who came before us, and their responsibility becomes ours, too.

Still, this discourse can only be applied to a limited extent when considering the tragedy of those who suffer as a result of the decisions of others in the past, and who are powerless to oppose them. As for the rest, in terms of responsibility, morality, and innocence, the images of these days speak volumes: a public cult of death surrounding four coffins, accompanied by music, joy, and applause from the onlookers. In the face of this spectacle, the definition of the Bourbon dynasty of Naples, given in the 19th century by British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, applies perfectly to Hamas and its society: we are confronted with “the denial of G-d, the subversion of every moral and social idea, established as a system of government.” And in this case, “friends of peace,” here are your “innocent civilians.”