The Delusion of Moral Superiority Fueling Israel’s War on Gaza

Israeli public discourse, and to a significant extent Jewish discourse abroad, reflects the assumption that we as Jews are facing barbaric implacable enemies, and that while we may have committed our share of sins, we are vastly better than they are. The logic goes: Since our lives are endangered by their inhumanity, and since if they were only reasonable like us we could co-exist, radical measures – like the war on Gaza – are justified.

People justify their positions through talk about security and geopolitics. However, if you pay attention, you can hear how the assumption that they are rationally and morally superior to the other side is woven into their thinking. Keep following that thread and you’ll see how it skews their picture of reality and their moral judgement.

It must be admitted of course that the actual barbarity of many of the powers we’re dealing with – such as the regimes of Hamas and Iran – is an important part of the reason Jews see them that way. It cannot be denied that that are powerful forces – both ideological and military – in the Muslim and Arab worlds that are genocidal in their attitude towards Israeli Jews. Their positions are characterized by dehumanization, racism, fundamentalism and militarism and they have murdered thousands of civilians.

It also needs to be acknowledged that important parts of the Pro-Palestinian solidarity movement and “progressive left” share in the politics of dehumanization. This was apparent in the voices that supported or refused to condemn the intentional mass extermination and kidnapping of civilians on Oct. 7. Here we got a chance to hear the Left rehearse its version of militaristic newspeak: Murdering families in their homes became “armed struggle” and “anti-colonial violence”. But just as with the rightwing rendition of these golden oldies (for the rightwing version, replace “armed struggle” with “warfare” and “anti-colonial violence” with “collateral damage”), the rhetoric does not alter the bottom line: If you do not deem it a crime to intentionally exterminate a civilian population, then you do not recognize those people as human beings.

However, this dehumanization of Israelis must not blind us to the reality of Israeli state policy. The state presently divides the Palestinian population into multiple legal categories characterized by increasing degrees of brutal violence and discrimination. First, there are Israeli Arabs/Palestinians, who face police brutality combined with indifference to crimes committed against them, political persecution and systematic discrimination on top of massive land theft and dispossession. But since this category affords citizen rights and social services, it is the least abusive of the legal statuses into which Israel divides Palestinians.

As we cross the green line into East Jerusalem, we leave behind any semblance of legitimate government. Palestinians in East Jerusalem, even as their homes and lands were forcibly annexed into Israel, were denied citizenship. They pay taxes, but many, such as the tens of thousands walled off from the city, are denied even basic social services. Subject to police brutality, home demolitions, family evictions and systematic discrimination, East Jerusalem Palestinians live under the control of a hostile array of “Jewish national” institutions which weaponize both government and law to subjugate and dispossess them.

Crossing beyond East Jerusalem, further into the West Bank, we are met with a threefold division of Palestinians into Areas A, B and C. All of them are characterized by massive systematic dispossession, settler and military violence and a near total denial of basic human rights. The worst treatment is reserved for Palestinians in Area C, and H2 in Hebron, who are subject to ongoing terrorism at the hands of settlers and soldiers and are fully subject to Israel’s mockery of government – its kangaroo military courts and “civil administration” – which shellac a thin veneer of colonialist “rule of law” bureaucratic-legalistic jargon onto racial discrimination and theft.

In defense of Israel, it is true that the monstrosity of legalized oppression and dispossession apparent in this multi-tiered Apartheid system was not fully premeditated. It reflects a bloody and chaotic history of wars and failed peace talks. The division into Areas A, B and C, for example, decades ago was ostensibly meant as a temporary part of a negotiated compromise. It’s also true that Israeli policy reflects the trauma and terror of a society facing forces which seek to destroy it, as described above

However, if we are honest with ourselves, we will concede that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians also reflects currents of Jewish supremacy, dehumanization and violence which run deep not only in contemporary Israeli society but also in Jewish religion and tradition. There exists a clear symbiotic relationship between the genocidal xenophobia expressed in some parts of the Tanakh and Jewish support today for Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinians. The ethnocentrism and religious intolerance that characterize parts of rabbinic tradition compound the problem, particularly when mixed with an unhealthy dose of Jewish nationalism. The partial truth told by the Jewish world’s great plethora of “experts on Islam”, that Islam educates Muslims to be war mongering predators, is also a partial truth in regard to Judaism. There is great spirit and holiness in these two sister religions, but their contribution to our destruction is also very real.

Since many of us don’t see Israel’s part in the cycle of violence, we perceive the other side as unhinged and inhuman. Our delusional sense of superiority festers until it so infects our rational and moral faculties that we become indifferent, or even support, the unimaginable cruelty of Israel’s attack on Gazan civilians.

Nothing could justify bombing Israeli cities until all of us are homeless and destitute, mourning the countless thousands of our dead children, siblings and parents lost in the wreckage. Nothing could justify bombing our hospitals and schools, electric systems and desalination plants, leaving us to die of exposure and disease. Nothing could justify closing our borders until we starve, and then gunning us down when we come to seek aid. Nothing could justify these acts because we are human beings, and even in war these acts constitute grave crimes against humanity. If we could liberate ourselves from our twisted picture of reality and consequent delusions, we would be better able to see the war on Gazan civilians for the barbaric atrocity that it is.

Israel’s destruction of Gaza is a response to Oct. 7, but it must also be understood as part of the state’s ongoing dehumanization and dispossession of Palestinians, which began long before Oct. 7. The current regime of starvation and mass killings is the final and most horrific status forced on Palestinians by the State of Israel. The ocean of blood Israel has spilled in Gaza already floods all of Israel-Palestine, and it may yet drown us all. Our delusion of moral and rational superiority not only leads to moral catastrophe, it is also a dire threat to our survival.