What Barack Obama’s Belfast Remarks on Israel Miss

In the weeks after September 11, 2001, the philosopher Michael Walzer took up a question that has lost none of its urgency: can the weakness of those who resort to terror excuse what they do? In his essay “Excusing Terror,” he examined the arguments most often offered on terrorism’s behalf, among them that it is a last resort and that it is the only weapon available to the weak. He rejected each of them. The deliberate killing of civilians, he argued, is wrong whoever commits it and whatever their circumstances.

Few public figures today defend terrorism outright. The excuse Walzer confronted survives in a subtler form, not in arguments that justify violence but in the vocabulary used to judge it. When the violence of the strong is measured against moral standards and the violence of the weak chiefly against its effectiveness, weakness has again become relevant to judgment. Barack Obama’s recent remarks in Belfast on October 13 offer a clear example.

Those remarks included a critique of Israeli policy that many Israelis would recognize: military superiority cannot replace a political horizon, and Palestinians are not going anywhere. When Obama spoke about Israel, his language was normative. If Israel’s position is that, as the strongest power in the region, its security depends on “taking whatever we want” and “not making any concessions to anyone,” then, he said, “you have ceded moral ground.” He allowed that such a policy might work in the short term. His objection was not that it is unwise, but that it is wrong.

When he turned to the Palestinians, his language became instrumental. Because Israel is strong, he argued, they need “a strategy that is not premised on beating their military.” Of Hamas’s October 7 attack, he said that “you could not have designed something that was less likely to produce meaningful change.” Here the objection is that the attack failed to serve its ends. Obama has condemned the attack on other occasions, and nothing in his Belfast remarks suggests otherwise. But condemnation and excuse are not mutually exclusive.

Obama judged Israel by moral standards and Hamas by its effectiveness. That asymmetry revives an old excuse for terror: that the weakness of those who commit it should shape how we judge it.

The two kinds of argument have different structures. An instrumental argument is conditional. It holds that a means should be abandoned because it does not achieve its end, and it implies that the objection would weaken if the means succeeded. The prohibition on deliberately targeting civilians is not conditional in this way. In both the just war tradition and international humanitarian law, it applies regardless of a party’s military capacity and regardless of whether violating it would prove effective. The killing of some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and the abduction of 251 on October 7 would not be more acceptable had they advanced Hamas’s political aims.

Northern Ireland, where Obama spoke, offers an illustration. In August 1998, four months after the Good Friday Agreement, the Real IRA, a small splinter group with no prospect of defeating the British state, detonated a car bomb in the market town of Omagh, killing 29 people and injuring some 220. No serious observer described the bombing as a strategic miscalculation, or located its wrongness in its failure to advance Irish unification. It was condemned across communities as the deliberate killing of civilians, including by Sinn Féin’s president, Gerry Adams, who did so “without equivocation.” The group’s weakness relative to the state it opposed played no part in that judgment. It is difficult to see why a different standard should apply to Hamas.

The framework underlying Obama’s remarks appears to be that responsibility grows with power. This is partly true. Greater power brings a greater capacity to cause harm and a wider responsibility for its consequences, a principle recognized in both ethics and law. But that principle describes the scope of responsibility, not its minimum. A weaker party’s obligation to refrain from deliberately harming civilians does not diminish because it is weaker. When an asymmetry of power becomes an asymmetry of moral evaluation, the weaker party ceases to appear as a moral agent. It appears only as a strategic actor responding to its circumstances.

Walzer identified a further problem with the appeal to weakness. “The terrorists are weak,” he wrote, “not because they represent the weak but precisely because they don’t.” Their weakness often describes their relationship to their own society more accurately than their relationship to their enemy. Describing Hamas’s decisions as miscalculations, rather than as choices for which its leaders are accountable, blurs the distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian society that has borne the consequences of decisions it did not make. Recognizing moral agency and assigning moral accountability go together.

Obama’s framing is not idiosyncratic. It reflects a broader tendency in international discussion of the conflict to treat Palestinian violence first as a symptom of circumstances and only then as a choice. When UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council in October 2023 that the Hamas attacks “did not happen in a vacuum,” he did not justify them, as he later stressed. But the order of emphasis was telling: the attack was presented first as something to be explained, and only afterward as something to be judged.

The same habit of thought shapes the history Obama told, in which Jews “understandably sought a refuge” and then “took land off people.” Palestinian loss, particularly in 1948, is real. But this account omits the Jewish connection to the land, which long preceded modern antisemitism, and compresses purchase, wartime displacement and post-1967 settlement into a single act of taking. Here too, each party is assigned a role in advance, and judgment follows the role rather than the act.

One might reply that Obama was addressing a particular audience, and that a strategic argument is more persuasive to those already sympathetic to armed struggle. That is a reasonable rhetorical choice. But the framing a public figure adopts shapes how a conflict is discussed well beyond the room in which he speaks. When moral language is applied consistently to one side and strategic language to the other, the cumulative result is a discourse in which only one side’s conduct is subject to moral judgment.

Obama said that Israel’s government appears to have ceded moral ground. What his remarks miss is that moral ground can also be ceded in language: in the decision to judge an atrocity by whether it worked.