The Gray Number and the Sealed Truth: “Acceptable Collateral Damage”

The Acceptable Number: Classified Arithmetic in Modern War

No Western or democratic government wants to acknowledge that its military operates with a number it is willing to accept as “collateral damage” during special military operations. These operations typically arise in “ticking time bomb” scenarios, a trap, an imminent threat, most often a terrorist attack in the making. In such moments, commanders must decide how many uninvolved people may die in order to prevent a greater catastrophe.

That number is not fixed. It slides along a scale determined by the level of threat and the potential danger of the attack. A low-level target may justify a handful of civilian deaths; a high-value target may justify more. But in every case, the acceptable number is kept small, a low single-digit figure, a decimal, something that can be defended later as “proportionate” or “tragic but necessary.”

What is never said aloud is that this number is a policy. It is not an accident, not a miscalculation, not the fog of war. It is a decision made in advance, by people who know exactly what they are authorizing. The bureaucratic machinery around it, target folders, legal reviews, approval chains, lends it an aura of rigor. But rigor is not morality. A carefully calculated killing is still a killing.

So let us call a spade a spade. “Collateral damage” is a deliberate euphemism for the outright murder of innocent people. The phrase exists precisely so that those who authorize it do not have to say what they are doing. It protects the decision-maker from the weight of the decision. It converts a body into a data point, a family into a footnote, a child into a rounding error.

“The Most Moral Army in the World”: A Contradiction in Terms

I am sick of the statement that we are the most moral army in the world. The two things are mutually exclusive. Yes, it is called the Israel Defense Forces, but no army is exclusively defensive. In both cases – defensive and offensive – people are going to be killed: both the guilty and the uninvolved.

How can anyone talk about morality in the same sentence as killing people? Does the attempt to kill fewer uninvolved people equal being a moral army? No. At best, it can be said that we are less immoral than other armies. That is not a moral achievement; it is a comparative measurement. It says nothing about the inherent character of the act, only about its scale relative to alternatives.

This is not semantic quibbling. The difference matters because the “most moral army” claim functions as a shield. Once a military has awarded itself that title, any criticism of its conduct can be dismissed as bias, ignorance, or malice. The label forecloses self-examination. It transforms accountability into betrayal. It turns every accusation into an attack on the nation itself rather than a question about specific actions.

Enough of the rose-colored glasses and euphemisms. The vocabulary of “precision strikes,” “surgical operations,” and “collateral damage” is designed to make the unthinkable sound clinical. But there is nothing clinical about a child pulled from rubble. There is nothing surgical about a family erased in a single blast. The language is part of the weapon.

NAZA and the Politics of Denial

There are so many in an uproar about the film NAZA (a Hebrew acronym for collateral damage). They deny the massive “collateral damage” claims of the film outright. With tens of thousands of non-combatants killed in Gaza, such flat denial is ridiculous. It would be laughable if we were not talking about so many deaths.

The naysayers argue that airing this dirty laundry gives our enemies and haters ammunition against us. They are absolutely right. It does give them ammunition. But that does not make it a lie. The truth does not become false because it is useful to one’s opponents.

This is the central fallacy of the denial strategy: it confuses the political consequences of a fact with the validity of that fact. If a claim is true, the fact that it damages our standing is not an argument against the claim – it is an argument against the conduct that produced it. The problem is not the messenger; the problem is the message.

And instead of hiding our dirty laundry, we need to do something to make sure we will not have dirty laundry in the future. That is not accomplished by hiding it. It is accomplished by doing better—so that we are not embarrassed by our actions, so that we have nothing to hide. Concealment preserves the conditions that produce the shame. Only reform eliminates them.

War Crimes and the Duty to Face the Truth

Obviously, admission of massive killing of non-combatants also provides ammunition to bring international charges of war crimes. Does that mean we do all we can to hide what may be true? I say we should face the truth and deal with it legally.

When do the international war crimes courts come into the picture? When the host nation shows that it cannot properly investigate and prosecute these crimes. That is the legal trigger. It is not a foreign conspiracy; it is a consequence of domestic failure. If a state demonstrates that it can and will hold its own accountable, international jurisdiction recedes. If it demonstrates the opposite, through obstruction, delay, or sham investigations, international jurisdiction advances.

This places the choice squarely where it belongs. A nation that wishes to avoid international courts must earn that avoidance through genuine domestic accountability. It cannot claim sovereignty as a shield while refusing to exercise the responsibilities that sovereignty entails. The path to legal safety runs through the courtroom, not around it.

Sealing the Scene: The Journalist Blockade

There is a reason the IDF has not allowed foreign journalists into Gaza since October 7. Even Israeli journalists have very limited access. They can only go in with the army and to the places the army allows them to go. The government has given the army very clear and explicit instructions as to who they allow and who they do not allow into Gaza.

And the question that is begged: “Why?”

The answer is simple. The government does not want the world to see the real picture: the massive destruction of most of Gaza, the displacement of two million refugees and their inhumane living conditions, and all the evidence of the tens of thousands of non-combatants who have been killed. Specifically, it does not want visual evidence of all the children, women, the elderly, and the infirm who were “collateral damage.”

A free press is not a luxury of peacetime. It is the mechanism by which the public—any public—can verify what is done in its name. When that mechanism is disabled, the state monopolizes the narrative. And a monopolized narrative is not a record; it is a defense. The blockade is not about security. It is about impunity. It ensures that when the denials come, there is no counter-evidence to meet them.

Conclusion: From Moral Self-Praise to Moral Responsibility

The classified number, the “most moral army” claim, the denial of NAZA, the obstruction of journalists, the resistance to legal accountability – these are not separate phenomena. They are layers of a single strategy: to make it possible to do certain things without having to answer for them.

The way out is not to keep arguing about which army is “more moral.” That question is built on a false frame. The real moral question is not “are we better than them?” but “what are we doing with the truth about ourselves?”

That requires acknowledging what “collateral damage” actually means. It requires facing, rather than denying, the scale of civilian death. It requires opening Gaza to independent reporting. It requires genuine domestic investigation and prosecution. And when domestic mechanisms fail, it requires accepting international jurisdiction rather than fleeing it.

Hiding the dirty laundry does not clean it. Only doing better, so that there is nothing to hide, can do that. The choice is not between silence and betrayal. It is between accountability now and catastrophe later. The truth is already known. The only question is whether we will be the ones to say it, or whether it will be said for us.

Final Summary

Every Western military secretly maintains a number of acceptable civilian deaths for high-stakes operations, calibrated to threat and concealed behind the euphemism “collateral damage,” which is, plainly, the deliberate killing of innocents. The claim to be “the most moral army in the world” is incompatible with this practice; at best, such an army is less immoral than others. Denial of the mass civilian deaths depicted in NAZA is not a defense of truth but a defense of reputation, and reputation is not innocence. The same logic drives the journalist blockade of Gaza: the government fears what the world would see. The legal path forward is clear – face the truth, investigate and prosecute domestically, and accept international jurisdiction when domestic mechanisms fail. Hiding the dirty laundry preserves the stain. Only changed behavior removes it.