The Moral Weight of War
There is a claim about Israel that is often dismissed as propaganda: that the Israel Defense Forces fight wars in a more moral manner than any other military in the world.
That does not mean Israel or the IDF are perfect. No country or military is. But Israel’s record is far better than that of other nations, especially when one considers the extraordinary circumstances under which it has been forced to fight since the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in its ancestral homeland. When Israel’s conduct is compared with that of other modern militaries—and the unique challenges it faces are considered—the record is remarkable, even miraculous.
Consider what Israel is up against.
Hamas does not fight from conventional military bases separated from civilian populations. It embeds its military infrastructure among the very people Israel is obligated to protect: in homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and densely populated neighborhoods. It constructs tunnels beneath civilian communities and stores weapons in or near civilian facilities. Its fighters can operate without distinguishing themselves from civilians. In doing so, Hamas violates both the laws and moral principles of armed conflict.
Hamas also understands that civilians can be turned into a military asset. The more civilians are concentrated around military targets, the greater the political and moral pressure on Israel when it attacks. Civilian casualties then become a weapon against Israel itself.
This is the terrible dilemma Israel faces. Hamas hides behind civilians, while Israel is condemned for attacking the military infrastructure concealed behind them.
Yet Israel routinely takes extraordinary measures to reduce civilian casualties. It has dropped leaflets, made telephone calls, sent text messages and issued evacuation warnings. It has established evacuation routes and humanitarian pauses and repeatedly urged civilians to leave areas where military operations are about to take place.
Imagine the American military fighting an enemy that deliberately placed rocket launchers beneath apartment buildings, command centers beneath hospitals and weapons depots inside schools—and then encouraged or forced civilians to remain there because their presence provided protection against American attack.
That is the dilemma Israel has faced.
There is another distinction that is frequently lost in the debate: intent matters.
When Hamas deliberately plans to murder civilians, civilian deaths are not an unintended consequence of attacking a military target. They are the objective. October 7 demonstrated that with horrifying clarity. Hamas terrorists planned to deliberately enter civilian communities to murder, torture, rape and kidnap. They recorded much of what they did and proudly displayed their brutality to the world.
Israel’s objective is fundamentally different. Its stated military goal is to destroy Hamas’s military capability while minimizing civilian casualties.
The military should not be judged solely by the number of civilians who die. We should also ask why they died, who placed them in danger, what precautions were taken to protect them, whether violations were investigated and, most importantly, whether the enemy still retains the will and capacity to deliberately murder innocent civilians.
Israel cannot afford to wait until a threat strikes and then respond. It must often act beforehand to protect its citizens. It is better to prevent an infection than to wait until the disease has spread and then attempt to treat it.
Those who demand the highest moral standards from Israel often refuse to acknowledge that Israel attempts to meet them. They judge it by an idealized standard of warfare that few, if any, other nations could meet while fighting an enemy that deliberately exploits the laws and moral constraints of civilized warfare.
Israel is not fighting an army that meets it on an open battlefield. It is fighting an enemy that hides behind civilians.
Morality cannot insist that Israel accept defeat rather than attack an enemy that deliberately embeds itself among civilians. A government has a fundamental obligation to protect its citizens.
There is a profound moral difference between deliberately targeting civilians and targeting combatants while taking extraordinary measures to avoid civilian casualties—even when those measures cannot prevent every death.
That distinction is routinely erased in discussions about Israel.
Consider the simplest test: If Israel were truly indifferent to civilian life, why would it repeatedly warn civilians before attacks, establish evacuation routes, facilitate humanitarian assistance and investigate allegations of misconduct?
And if Israel’s objective were to destroy the Palestinian population, as the genocide accusation alleges, why did Gaza’s population grow substantially over the decades preceding the current war?
Accusations of genocidal intent must be reconciled with Israel’s actual conduct and stated military objectives.
Perfection is not the appropriate standard for judging warfare. No military can guarantee zero civilian casualties when fighting an enemy that deliberately operates among civilians. The appropriate question is whether a nation makes a genuine effort to fight according to moral and legal principles even when its enemy deliberately exploits those principles against it.
By that standard, Israel’s record deserves far more serious consideration than it receives.
Israel does not claim that war is clean. War is horrific. Civilians can be caught in the crossfire, and soldiers can make mistakes. But while fighting an enemy that deliberately makes civilians part of the battlefield, Israel continues to insist that there is a moral and legal line that must not be crossed.
That does not make Israel perfect. It makes Israel human.
And it may be one of the strongest arguments for the proposition that the IDF fights war more morally than any other military in the world
