Sorry, Jews Are Normal Human Beings

Judging Israel Fairly

It has been difficult to see the situation in Gaza, for critics and supporters of Israel alike. The destruction and suffering are enormous, and it is hard for any Jew to see it and acknowledge that Israel has done it. Here is what helps me deal with this.

I have spent many hours reading reports from the UN, international and local human rights organizations, humanitarian and aid agencies, and state and military prosecution services. I came away with deep concerns and suspicions of wrongdoing by individual IDF soldiers and officers, but I was not persuaded that war crimes were systematic or planned. I also came away with a way of thinking about it. Underlying the situation, both morally and factually, are some complicated processes and two very simple, fundamental principles: Israel’s right to defend itself, and the fact that Jews are normal human beings.

The conflict in Gaza has deep roots going back decades, but the current catastrophe is clearly the result of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. Whatever one may think about the motives or justification of Hamas, the plain fact is that they crossed the Israeli border, killed about 1,200 people (men, women, and children, many in their beds), took some 250 hostages, and committed numerous atrocities. The vast majority of people around the world acknowledge this as fact, and acknowledge that it required self-defense. Israel’s military response was not only justified, it was an obligation. No country allows its citizens to be slaughtered without doing its best to stop and prevent such attacks. This principle of self-defense underlies both the moral and the factual examination.

Israel’s formal position is that all its actions and military operations are directed at Hamas in self-defense. Scrutinizing Israel’s military actions is absolutely justified, and extremely complicated. I will come back to that later.

In contrast, examining the claim of self-defense from a moral point of view is easy and straightforward. The principle of self-defense is accepted by every major religion and culture in the world. Even those who cynically began accusing Israel of overreacting only a few days after October 7 acknowledged that Israel had a right to self-defense. At its core, then, the disagreement is whether Israel is still acting in self-defense, or whether, at some point since October 2023, Israel eliminated the threat that justified its actions.

The feeling of being threatened is inherently subjective, but the test is not. Is there an ongoing threat? Is force aimed at legitimate military targets? Is it proportionate? No one can reasonably claim there was no need for self-defense on October 7. A few days later, all Hamas terrorists in Israel had been either killed or driven back to Gaza, where they continued to fight and to declare their intention to keep attacking Israel until it is annihilated. Most reasonable people would agree Israel was acting in self-defense. In the following weeks and months, more and more Hamas terrorists were killed and more of their rockets and explosives were destroyed. But to this day, Hamas remains a fighting force. Sporadic fighting continues, Hamas still has weapons, and it still declares its intention to keep attacking Israel until it is annihilated.

Sitting comfortably at my desk near Boston, it would be very easy for me to say there is no more need for self-defense. But as comfortable as I am near Boston, I can imagine that had I been living in Nir Oz or Sderot, I would feel very threatened by the Hamas terrorists still sheltering in their tunnels only a few miles away, still standing up to the mighty Israeli army after nearly three years, and still declaring their intention to keep attacking Israel until it is annihilated. I’m not claiming that every one of Israel’s actions was purely self-defense. I am claiming that the most fundamental principle underlying the Gaza situation is Israel’s need to defend itself.

Some sympathizers of the Palestinian cause claim that Israel’s oppression justifies a Palestinian right to “resistance.” And if the feeling of threat is subjective, why can’t the Palestinians claim self-defense too? The answer is that the Palestinians were not the ones attacked. It was Hamas that crossed the border on October 7, with the stated goal of annihilating Israel. Israel’s government has never adopted any similar goal toward the Palestinians, and Israel attacked Gaza only after its towns were bombed from Gaza.

With attacks and counterattacks going on for so long, it can be confusing to determine who is the initiator and the aggressor. Yet Hamas’s founding charter makes it crystal clear that it is committed to the complete destruction of Israel and rejects any peace or territorial compromise. Its 2017 policy document softened some of the language, but it still refuses to recognize Israel or renounce armed struggle. This foundational fact makes it easy to summarize the situation in one simple sentence: Hamas wants to destroy Israel, while Israel wants to be left alone.

One argument often used to criticize Israel is the large number of civilian casualties and destroyed homes. I share the empathy for the innocent civilians in Gaza, but numbers alone cannot tell us whether an action was right or wrong. What makes the number “large”? Compared to what? By whose standard? Without that context, the number is an appeal to emotion rather than an argument. There is nothing wrong with feeling bad for the Palestinians in Gaza, but emotion alone is not a sound basis for a political judgment.

It is natural to see the casualties and destruction first, and it is human to be upset by them. But casualties and destruction in themselves are not necessarily morally wrong. What determines whether Israel’s actions are right or wrong is the underlying principle of self-defense. If every attack is carried out in self-defense, against legitimate military targets, proportionately, and after every reasonable effort to avoid and minimize harm to civilians, then it is morally justified, even when the cost is heartbreaking. This may be hard to accept for those of us privileged enough not to face existential threats, but we can still imagine how we would feel if we lived in Nir Oz or Sderot or anywhere in Israel. The point is not that only people in Israel know right from wrong, but that their point of view exists, that it deserves our consideration, and that it would behoove us to ask how we would feel in their position and what we might do.

That is hard to do, because the situation in Israel is so fundamentally different from the rest of the world. How could we possibly know what it feels like to have tens of thousands of rockets and other explosives rain down on our towns for decades? We can’t. But we can think of the nearest experience we did live through: the attack on 9/11. Remember the shock of being attacked at home? Remember how you felt when news came of the carpet bombing in Afghanistan? I bet many of you don’t know how many civilians, including women and children, the US and its allies killed in response. Yet nowadays all one has to do is type the question into a phone.

My aim is not to make you feel bad about America, but to help you see Israel more fairly. For that we need one more fundamental concept, which, like self-defense, is simple and straightforward: Jews are normal human beings. Try as we may, we are not the best little kid in class (which is fortunate, because good little kids don’t get to run a country). We are normal. Like any other human beings, in a large enough group of Jews there are some who are liars, crooks, murderers, bank robbers, rapists, and pedophiles. You get the point.

Now imagine what happens when a large group of normal humans are trained for months to kill and destroy (that is, basic training), are then given all kinds of machinery and equipment designed for killing and destroying, and are ordered to kill and destroy a specific target while risking their own lives. Imagine what happens when a group of twenty-year-olds, selected for being good at getting things done at any cost, are given command over hundreds or thousands of people to accomplish their mission.

All of this is to say that wars are extremely complicated in many ways, so much so that it seems impossible for a large group of humans to go through a war without causing not only enormous pain and damage, but unnecessary pain and damage. We can wish it weren’t so, and we can do our best to minimize it. Where individuals commit crimes, they should be investigated and punished, as they would be in any democracy. But in my opinion, we should not condemn as a whole those in the front trenches who risk their lives so we can have our comfortable lives, or feel bad that they may well have been less than perfect. The failings of some do not change the justice of the cause.

That brings us back to the need to scrutinize Israel’s military actions, specifically with respect to its claim of self-defense. The Gaza Strip is one of the most crowded places on earth, and beneath it Hamas has built an unprecedented network of tunnels, hundreds of miles long, running under and into homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques. Fighters emerge, strike, and vanish underground; weapons and hostages are hidden beneath civilians. There is no way to reach these legitimate military targets without destroying what stands above them. Furthermore, Hamas’s systematic use of buildings and civilian institutions for military purposes makes those buildings legitimate military targets as well, subject to the principle of proportionality.

The most serious charges in the media, such as excessive brutality, indiscriminate shelling, starvation, and genocide, all rest on one claim: that Israel’s actions were not self-defense against legitimate military targets, but deliberate efforts to harm civilians. In other words, they all hinge on intent. Yet beyond inflammatory statements by some Israeli politicians, which are not orders or policy, I found no convincing evidence of such intent.

The reports I read paint an unmistakable picture of the total death and destruction, and it is devastating. At the same time, the death and destruction caused by the US and its allies after 9/11 were significantly greater. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and that comparison is no comfort. But I believe Israel’s conduct should be judged against the conduct of other democracies in similar situations, not against an ideal no army has ever met. There is nothing wrong with ideal principles, and nothing wrong with striving to achieve them. But those who lecture Israel from a comfortable perch suffer from privilege blindness: they are judging people under an existential threat that none of us far away can possibly understand.