The day the UN put Israel and Hamas in the same moral sentence

There are moments in history when an institution reveals not merely its bias, but its moral collapse.

The recent effort at the United Nations to effectively place Israel alongside Hamas in the same category of condemnation is one of those moments.

Think about what this means.

On one side stands Hamas, a terrorist organization whose charter has openly embraced antisemitism, glorified murder, targeted civilians, raped women, kidnapped children, and livestreamed atrocities with celebratory pride. Hamas intentionally embeds itself among civilians, uses hospitals and schools as military infrastructure, and treats Palestinian suffering not as tragedy, but as strategy.

On the other side stands Israel, a democratic nation defending its citizens after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

And yet, in the halls of the United Nations, these realities are increasingly flattened into moral equivalence.

This is not nuance. It is not diplomacy. It is not “balance.”

It is moral inversion.

As both a rabbi and psychologist, I find myself thinking not only politically, but psychologically, about what happens when hatred becomes so normalized that people lose the capacity to distinguish aggressor from victim.

There is a well-known cognitive distortion in psychology called splitting, where complex realities are reduced into simplistic moral caricatures. In many corners of international discourse, Israel has become the symbolic repository for projected global rage, colonial guilt, political frustration, and historical resentment. Facts become secondary. Context disappears. Jewish vulnerability becomes invisible.

The result is something deeply dangerous: the gradual normalization of antisemitic thinking under the language of human rights.

Of course legitimate criticism of Israeli policy exists and should exist. Israelis themselves argue passionately and endlessly about politics, military strategy, leadership, judicial policy, religion, and ethics. That is what democracies do.

But what we are witnessing now is something entirely different.

When the world’s only Jewish state is singled out obsessively while terrorist barbarism is minimized, excused, relativized, or psychologically contextualized, we are no longer in the realm of principled criticism. We are witnessing the oldest hatred on earth wearing the modern costume of international legitimacy.

And Jews notice.

We notice when hostage posters are torn down in Western cities.

We notice when crowds chant for “global intifada” days after massacres.

We notice when Jewish students are harassed on campuses while administrators debate semantics.

And we notice when international bodies seem incapable of uttering moral clarity about Hamas without immediately pivoting to condemn Israel in the same breath.

History teaches Jews to pay attention when the world begins redefining Jewish self-defense as uniquely criminal.

The psychological impact of this constant delegitimization should not be underestimated. Chronic exposure to threat and social hostility changes the nervous system. Research on discrimination and trauma consistently shows elevations in hypervigilance, stress physiology, sleep disruption, anxiety, depressive symptoms, and inflammatory responses. Collective trauma is not metaphorical. It becomes biological.

Many Jews across the world today are exhausted. Not only by war, but by the disorienting experience of watching people rationalize atrocities committed against them.

There is a particular loneliness that emerges when moral reality itself feels unstable.

What makes the UN’s posture especially disturbing is that it risks rewarding terrorism’s underlying strategy. Hamas does not need military victory to succeed psychologically. It merely needs enough international institutions to blur distinctions between terrorism and self-defense. Once that happens, truth itself becomes negotiable.

And yet Jews have seen this before.

We have seen societies explain away violence against Jews as somehow understandable.

We have seen intellectual elites discover elaborate moral frameworks that mysteriously collapse when Jews are the victims.

We have seen international silence before.

The lesson of Jewish history is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition.

The deeper issue here is not only about Israel. It is about whether civilization still possesses the moral confidence to distinguish democracy from terrorism, murder from self-defense, and hatred from justice.

Because when those distinctions disappear, everyone becomes less safe.

The UN may believe it is advancing human rights by placing Israel and Hamas into the same moral frame. In reality, it is eroding the very meaning of human rights themselves.

And Jews around the world are watching carefully.

Again.