Israel's ground forces "expanding operations" targeting Hamas in Gaza leads Saturday's front pages.

The UN General Assembly has called for an immediate humanitarian truce between Israel and Hamas.

Israel and Hamas were discussing a possible ceasefire and exchange of hostages.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Two friends, Petra and Rodrigo, are having an argument.

Petra thinks the world is best if people stay in their lane and do their job as best they can, narrowly construed. CEOs should try to maximize profits within the law. Emergency-room doctors should do their best to save the life of every patient. Lawyers should represent every client to the utmost of their ability. Scholars should publish their findings as accurately as possible. And parking-meter attendants should write citations without regard for who is getting them.

Rodrigo thinks the world is best if everyone is not only doing their job, but taking a broader view in an attempt to improve society. CEOs should feel a social responsibility to donate some corporate profits to good causes. Emergency-room doctors should triage in a way that treats shooting victims before shooting perpetrators. Lawyers should try less hard when their clients are morally odious. Scholars should withhold findings that cut against social justice. And parking-meter attendants should give a break to,say, the shift worker who always refills her meter but is regularly five minutes late because at her job, she must clock in and out on the hour.

Which approach do you agree with? Or if, like most of us, you have no universally consistent answer, how do you want people to decide whether to apply Petra’s approach or Rodrigo’s approach?

When should institutions or the people within them do their particular job as best they can, construing them narrowly, and when should they instead try to better the world through their job?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

If I policed parking meters, I would give that shift worker a break.

Among college administrators, I have long thought that Petra’s approach is extremely underrated, something I was reminded of while watching college presidents respond to recent news events.

To illustrate the point, here’s a sort of email that almost no college president ever sends, but that I regard as ideal (setting aside valid concerns about consistency with regard to administrators who spent years commenting on every little thing yet stayed silent when Israel was attacked by Hamas):

Dear students and faculty,

As events in Israel and Gaza dominate the news, I am refraining from any official comment on the substance of matters, despite following them closely, because no matter how strong my views are on any subject as a scholar or a person, it is inappropriate to marshal my power and influence as president of this institution to overshadow the voices of individual faculty or individual students. My job is to help you to discover, improve, and disseminate knowledge––not by pronouncing on what is true, but by conserving an environment where you can seek truth.

Such environments are never more important, and never more threatened, than at times of conflict or upheaval, when fashions, passions, and pressures tend to impinge on freedom of inquiry.

To guard against that threat, I am taking the following steps:

1. Any administrator who acts to suppress, punish, or chill speech protected by the First Amendment, thereby violating the civil rights of students or faculty members, will be terminated with cause. Any student who infringes on the free-speech rights of classmates will be suspended.

2. Together with the board of trustees, which I have already consulted on this matter, I hereby reaffirm our unanimous and enthusiastic support for academic freedom.

3. Everyone’s physical safety is sacrosanct. Campus security is on alert against even threats of violence, which will not be tolerated from anyone inside or outside the university community.

4. Wherever one stands on Israel, the Palestinian people, and related conflicts, it is useful to be more informed about history, geography, politics, all parties involved, the full complexity of their beliefs, and more. Though I am a longtime student of the Middle East, I doubt there is a department in this institution that couldn’t teach me something about it. But that knowledge and the subject-area experts who possess it are dispersed and difficult for almost all of you to identify, let alone access. So my office is creating an online resource where relevant scholarship from our faculty will be featured. And I am sponsoring a related lecture series. In-person attendance will be limited to students, but all lectures will be recorded, transcribed, fact-checked, and released via podcast for public consumption.

5. I hereby announce the president’s $100,000 prize for modeling constructive public discourse across substantive disagreement on a matter of widespread contestation. Any faculty member is eligible to enter by organizing any campus event that is advertised, attended by 10 or more students, and posted online. The first prize will be given by an independent, ideologically diverse jury next semester and must be on the subject of Israel and Palestine. Future prizes will be given each semester with no subject restriction.

6. Cognizant of statements at other institutions that anticipate faculty or students so traumatized by geopolitical events that they are unable to excel as learners or teachers or scholars, I want to emphasize my contrasting position: that everyone here possesses the resilience to carry on, knowing just how important the work that we do here is.

7. I am confident in your capacity for resilience partly because our institution has invested in teachers and other helpers to assist anyone who needs help summoning it or building it up anew. Several of the bravest people I have known at this institution have made use of those resources. They include residential and academic advisers, department heads, doctors, psychologists, and more––indeed, they are so varied that navigating them can be tricky, so I’ve created a new resource to make things easier. Going forward, text my office, anonymously if you wish, and a person I trust will direct you to the best helper for you.

This institution is blessed with extraordinary resources: a talented faculty, an endowment that exceeds the wealth of some nations, a campus more lavish than many cities, a multimillion-dollar library, and staffers dedicated to taking care of your needs––your meals, your medical care, your recreation, and more––so that you may better focus on our vital mission. With those privileges comes the responsibility to diligently engage in truth-seeking. If you honor that obligation but find yourself confronting obstacles, let me know how I can help to eliminate them.

Sincerely,

President X

P.S. Be good to one another.

Deaths Abroad, Mourning Next Door

So many people are suffering the loss of loved ones due to faraway events, whether violent conflicts or natural disasters, in the Middle East or elsewhere. I’m so sorry if you’re among them.

Former Representative Justin Amash, the child of Palestinian and Syrian parents and one of the most principled lawmakers I’ve ever covered, announced the deaths of some of his family members on Twitter:

In this video, provided to me by a relative on site, you can see the destruction at Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church in Gaza. The ancient sanctuary remains standing, but the church annex, which includes offices and meeting spaces for the Christian community, collapsed from an Israeli airstrike, killing multiple members of three connected Orthodox Christian families, who are my relatives. They are my dad’s first cousins and their spouses, children, and in-laws. May their memories be eternal.

This is my second cousin George being pulled from the rubble at Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church in Gaza. This beautiful baby committed no crimes, harmed no person. May his memory be eternal.

… Please remember the thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians, in unbearable circumstances, who simply want a life of peace. So many of the people suffering are just children. They don’t deserve violence and death.

In The New York Times, the author Dara Horn argues that diaspora Jews are having a hard time right now.

As was true in ancient times, the ties between global Jewish communities and Israel are concrete, specific, intimate and personal. My New Jersey Jewish Federation has institutional ties with the southern Israeli town of Ofakim and its surrounding communities, sharing annual home stays with a place whose death toll from the attacks already exceeds that of the notorious Kishinev pogrom of 1903, in which 49 Jews were murdered. Millions of American Jews, not to mention Jews in Britain, France, Australia and elsewhere, have friends and relatives in Israel. Even if Hamas hadn’t made it clear that they see all Jews as targets, our connection is personal and all too real.

We spent days desperately scrolling to learn who among our acquaintances was dead, maimed or captive, connecting American hostages’ families with State Department contacts, attending panic-stricken online briefings and pooling resources and supplies for victims — all while fighting obtuse official statements from our own towns, schools, companies and universities that refused to mention the words “Israel” or “Jews” in referring to the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, lest some antisemite take offense at the existence of either.

We have tried to get our children off social media, shielding them from images of the violence. We’ve held mass fasts, recited psalms and sung ancient prayers for the rescue of captives. And as we gather by the thousands despite our many contradictory opinions and despite the extra security required for our gatherings even here, we have returned to the words of our ancestors that have carried us through thousands of years: Be strong and courageous. Choose life.

Provocation of the Week

In The Hedgehog Review, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn makes a broad case against what she calls “pastlessness”:

Fantasies of freeing ourselves of the baggage of the past run aground on the fact that humans are history-bearing animals. Since we are beings in time, history includes lives being lived as well as lives lost, with all of their expressions, their constructions, and their communications. The loss of human beings is a personal and social loss, but it is also a historical loss. The killing and destruction of war is the ultimate abuse of history. Even in war, chances for ultimate survival, if not victory, reside in our sources of meaning and the traditions and practices that embody them. Only from these can new life hope to spring forth. Our traditions and practices alone allow us, if given that chance, to rebuild.

But war is only the most obvious assault on the past. We have seen how so many today desire to live without history, even in times of relative peace. The Cult of the New ravages in manifold ways, reducing hard-won works to rubble. Creative destruction—or disruption, to use the Silicon Valley buzzword—has been the governing mantra for so long that it is hard to retrieve memories of an alternative. To live without traditions of moral grounding is to cut ourselves off not only from the past but from the future. If we proclaim ourselves masters of the universe, abolish the demarcation between the self and other people and the world we live in—everything outside the self—and between what happened before and what is yet to happen, we might liberate ourselves. But we would also obliterate reality in the process.

Are the stakes of history really so high? After all, the exploration of the past, especially in its academic and professional forms, might seem like a leisurely pursuit. Students learn to select a topic that has not been done—lacuna is a favorite term—as though idly just trying to finalize the details of a corner of the canvas. It seems as though we have all the time in the world to fill in the parts of the past whose vivid details are not already engraved on our minds. A quick look at the world of higher education would lead one to believe that at least many university administrators think that history is, at best, an optional pursuit. Schools shrink history faculties and offerings, along with those of adjacent fields that hold the very record of our humanity, and the past is sidelined for present political or financial pursuits.

But we would be better off seeing history as a matter of urgent need. We should recognize the cultivation of a historical disposition that combines stewardship and moral inquiry as one of our most pressing endeavors, after feeding, clothing, and sheltering ourselves, precisely because it is a necessity if we are to succeed in all of the endeavors of this life. In the best of times, history is a mad race to grasp what we can before the evidence crumbles. In the worst, it is a matter of cultural survival. In more ways than one, we find ourselves today in a historical emergency.

That’s it for today—see you next week.

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

Peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict had already been difficult to achieve before Hamas’s barbarous October 7 attack and Israel’s military response. Now it seems almost impossible, but its essence is clearer than ever: Ultimately, a negotiation to establish a safe Israel beside a safe Palestinian state.

Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.

[Franklin Foer: Tell me how this ends]

How can educated people justify such callousness and embrace such inhumanity? All sorts of things are at play here, but much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, “decolonization,” which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states—the only real solution to this century of conflict—and is as dangerous as it is false.

I always wondered about the leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler. Today’s Hamas apologists and atrocity-deniers, with their robotic denunciations of “settler-colonialism,” belong to the same tradition but worse: They have abundant evidence of the slaughter of old people, teenagers, and children, but unlike those fools of the 1930s, who slowly came around to the truth, they have not changed their views an iota. The lack of decency and respect for human life is astonishing: Almost instantly after the Hamas attack, a legion of people emerged who downplayed the slaughter, or denied actual atrocities had even happened, as if Hamas had just carried out a traditional military operation against soldiers. October 7 deniers, like Holocaust deniers, exist in an especially dark place.

The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.

Indeed, it requires an astonishing leap of ahistorical delusion to disregard the record of anti-Jewish racism over the two millennia since the fall of the Judean Temple in 70 C.E. After all, the October 7 massacre ranks with the medieval mass killings of Jews in Christian and Islamic societies, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1640s Ukraine, Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1920—and the Holocaust. Even the Holocaust is now sometimes misconstrued—as the actor Whoopi Goldberg notoriously did—as being “not about race,” an approach as ignorant as it is repulsive.  

Contrary to the decolonizing narrative, Gaza is not technically occupied by Israel—not in the usual sense of soldiers on the ground. Israel evacuated the Strip in 2005, removing its settlements. In 2007, Hamas seized power, killing its Fatah rivals in a short civil war. Hamas set up a one-party state that crushes Palestinian opposition within its territory, bans same-sex relationships, represses women, and openly espouses the killing of all Jews.

Very strange company for leftists.

Of course, some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may have no idea what they’re calling for; they are ignorant and believe that they are simply endorsing “freedom.” Others deny that they are pro-Hamas, insisting that they are simply pro-Palestinian—but feel the need to cast Hamas’s massacre as an understandable response to Israeli-Jewish “colonial” oppression. Yet others are malign deniers who seek the death of Israeli civilians.

The toxicity of this ideology is now clear. Once-respectable intellectuals have shamelessly debated whether 40 babies were dismembered or some smaller number merely had their throats cut or were burned alive. Students now regularly tear down posters of children held as Hamas hostages. It is hard to understand such heartless inhumanity. Our definition of a hate crime is constantly expanding, but if this is not a hate crime, what is? What is happening in our societies? Something has gone wrong.

In a further racist twist, Jews are now accused of the very crimes they themselves have suffered. Hence the constant claim of a “genocide” when no genocide has taken place or been intended. Israel, with Egypt, has imposed a blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over, and has periodically bombarded the Strip in retaliation for regular rocket attacks. After more than 4,000 rockets were fired by Hamas and its allies into Israel, the 2014 Gaza War resulted in more than 2,000 Palestinian deaths. More than 7,000 Palestinians, including many children, have died so far in this war, according to Hamas. This is a tragedy—but this is not a genocide, a word that has now been so devalued by its metaphorical abuse that it has become meaningless.

I should also say that Israeli rule of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank is different and, to my mind, unacceptable, unsustainable, and unjust. Settlers under the disgraceful Netanyahu government have harassed and persecuted Palestinians in the West Bank: 146 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were killed in 2022 and at least 153 in 2023 before the Hamas attack, and more than 90 since. Again: This is appalling and unacceptable, but not genocide. The Palestinians in the West Bank have endured a harsh, unjust, and oppressive occupation since 1967.

Although there is a strong instinct to make this a Holocaust-mirroring “genocide,” it is not: The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; callous neglect by their brethren in more than 20 Arab states; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others—is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organizations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximizing the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest. (Put aside all of this and consider: The world Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939, because of the damage done by the Nazis. The Palestinian population has grown, and continues to grow. Demographic shrinkage is one obvious marker of genocide. In total, roughly 120,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed in the conflict over Palestine and Israel since 1860. By contrast, at least 500,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian civil war since it began in 2011.)

If the ideology of decolonization, taught in our universities as a theory of history and shouted in our streets as self-evidently righteous, badly misconstrues the present reality, does it reflect the history of Israel as it claims to do? It does not. Indeed, it does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

In this narrative, Israel is tainted by imperial Britain’s broken promise to deliver Arab independence, and its kept promise to support a “national home for the Jewish people,” in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But the supposed promise to Arabs was in fact an ambiguous 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who wanted his Hashemite family to rule the entire region. In part, he did not receive this new empire because his family had much less regional support than he claimed. Nonetheless, ultimately Britain delivered three kingdoms—Iraq, Jordan, and Hejaz—to the family.

The imperial powers—Britain and France—made all sorts of promises to different peoples, and then put their own interests first. Those promises to the Jews and the Arabs during World War I were typical. Afterward, similar promises were made to the Kurds, the Armenians, and others, none of which came to fruition. But the central narrative that Britain betrayed the Arab promise and backed the Jewish one is incomplete. In the 1930s, Britain turned against Zionism, and from 1937 to 1939 moved toward an Arab state with no Jewish one at all. It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state.

Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in. The idea of a Jewish “homeland” was proposed in three declarations by Britain (signed by Balfour), France, and the United States, then promulgated in a July 1922 resolution by the League of Nations that created the British “mandates” over Palestine and Iraq that matched French “mandates” over Syria and Lebanon. In 1947, the United Nations devised the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish.

The carving of such states out of these mandates was not exceptional, either. At the end of World War II, France granted independence to Syria and Lebanon, newly conceived nation-states. Britain created Iraq and Jordan in a similar way. Imperial powers designed most of the countries in the region, except Egypt.   

Nor was the imperial promise of separate homelands for different ethnicities or sects unique. The French had promised independent states for the Druze, Alawites, Sunnis, and Maronites but in the end combined them into Syria and Lebanon. All of these states had been “vilayets” and “sanjaks” (provinces) of the Turkish Ottoman empire, ruled from Constantinople, from 1517 until 1918.    

The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars. Think of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 or the partition of India in 1947. In this sense, Israel-Palestine was typical.

At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations.  

Most migrants to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States are regarded as British or American within a lifetime. Politics in both countries is filled with prominent leaders—Suella Braverman and David Lammy, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley—whose parents or grandparents migrated from India, West Africa, or South America. No one would describe them as “settlers.” Yet Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as “settler-colonists” ripe for murder and mutilation. And contrary to Hamas apologists, the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims never justifies atrocities. They would be atrocious anywhere, committed by anyone with any history. It is dismaying that it is often self-declared “anti-racists” who are now advocating exactly this murder by ethnicity.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

If the “settler-colonist” narrative is not true, it is true that the conflict is the result of the brutal rivalry and battle for land between two ethnic groups, both with rightful claims to live there. As more Jews moved to the region, the Palestinian Arabs, who had lived there for centuries and were the clear majority, felt threatened by these immigrants. The Palestinian claim to the land is not in doubt, nor is the authenticity of their history, nor their legitimate claim to their own state. But initially the Jewish migrants did not aspire to a state, merely to live and farm in the vague “homeland.” In 1918, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met the Hashemite Prince Faisal Bin Hussein to discuss the Jews living under his rule as king of greater Syria. The conflict today was not inevitable. It became so as the communities refused to share and coexist, and then resorted to arms.

Even more preposterous than the “colonizer” label is the “whiteness” trope that is key to the decolonization ideology. Again: simply wrong. Israel has a large community of Ethiopian Jews, and about half of all Israelis—that is, about 5 million people—are Mizrahi, the descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands, people of the Middle East. They are neither “settlers” nor “colonialists” nor “white” Europeans at all but inhabitants of Baghdad and Cairo and Beirut for many centuries, even millennia, who were driven out after 1948.  

A word about that year, 1948, the year of Israel’s War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”), which in decolonization discourse amounted to ethnic cleansing. There was indeed intense ethnic violence on both sides when Arab states invaded the territory and, together with Palestinian militias, tried to stop the creation of a Jewish state. They failed; what they ultimately stopped was the creation of a Palestinian state, as intended by the United Nations. The Arab side sought the killing or expulsion of the entire Jewish community—in precisely the murderous ways we saw on October 7. And in the areas the Arab side did capture, such as East Jerusalem, every Jew was expelled.

In this brutal war, Israelis did indeed drive some Palestinians from their homes; others fled the fighting; yet others stayed and are now Israeli Arabs who have the vote in the Israeli democracy. (Some 25 percent of today’s Israelis are Arabs and Druze.) About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes. That is an enormous figure and a historic tragedy. Starting in 1948, some 900,000 Jews lost their homes in Islamic countries and most of them moved to Israel. These events are not directly comparable, and I don’t mean to propose a competition in tragedy or hierarchy of victimhood. But the past is a lot more complicated than the decolonizers would have you believe.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

It is bizarre that a small state in the Middle East attracts so much passionate attention in the West that students run through California schools shouting “Free Palestine.” But the Holy Land has an exceptional place in Western history. It is embedded in our cultural consciousness, thanks to the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the story of Judaism, the foundation of Christianity, the Quran and the creation of Islam, and the Crusades that together have made Westerners feel involved in its destiny. The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the real architect of the Balfour Declaration, used to say that the names of places in Palestine “were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.” This special affinity with the Holy Land initially worked in favor of the Jewish return, but lately it has worked against Israel. Westerners eager to expose the crimes of Euro-American imperialism but unable to offer a remedy have, often without real knowledge of the actual history, coalesced around Israel and Palestine as the world’s most vivid example of imperialist injustice.  

The open world of liberal democracies—or the West, as it used to be called—is today polarized by paralyzed politics, petty but vicious cultural feuds about identity and gender, and guilt about historical successes and sins, a guilt that is bizarrely atoned for by showing sympathy for, even attraction to, enemies of our democratic values. In this scenario, Western democracies are always bad actors, hypocritical and neo-imperialist, while foreign autocracies or terror sects such as Hamas are enemies of imperialism and therefore sincere forces for good. In this topsy-turvy scenario, Israel is a living metaphor and penance for the sins of the West. The result is the intense scrutiny of Israel and the way it is judged, using standards rarely attained by any nation at war, including the United States.

But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians. As these past two weeks have shown, decolonization is now the authorized version of history in many of our schools and supposedly humanitarian institutions, and among artists and intellectuals. It is presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims. And it only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed and in which all Western democracies are bad-faith actors. Although it lacks the sophistication of Marxist dialectic, its self-righteous moral certainty imposes a moral framework on a complex, intractable situation, which some may find consoling. Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase “settler-colonialist,” you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history.  

Ultimately, this zombie narrative is a moral and political cul-de-sac that leads to slaughter and stalemate. That is no surprise, because it is based on sham history: “An invented past can never be used,” wrote James Baldwin. “It cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay.”

Even when the word decolonization does not appear, this ideology is embedded in partisan media coverage of the conflict and suffuses recent condemnations of Israel. The student glee in response to the slaughter at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and other universities; the support for Hamas amongst artists and actors, along with the weaselly equivocations by leaders at some of America’s most famous research institutions, have displayed a shocking lack of morality, humanity, and basic decency.

One repellent example was an open letter signed by thousands of artists, including famous British actors such as Tilda Swinton and Steve Coogan. It warned against imminent Israel war crimes and totally ignored the casus belli: the slaughter of 1,400 people.

The journalist Deborah Ross wrote in a powerful Times of London article that she was “utterly, utterly floored” that the letter contained “no mention of Hamas” and no mention of the “kidnapping and murder of babies, children, grandparents, young people dancing peacefully at a peace festival. The lack of basic compassion and humanity, that’s what was so unbelievably flooring. Is it so difficult? To support and feel for Palestinian citizens … while also acknowledging the indisputable horror of the Hamas attacks?” Then she asked this thespian parade of moral nullities: “What does it solve, a letter like that? And why would anyone sign it?”   

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

The problem in our countries is easier to fix: Civic society and the shocked majority should now assert themselves. The radical follies of students should not alarm us overmuch; students are always thrilled by revolutionary extremes. But the indecent celebrations in London, Paris, and New York City, and the clear reluctance among leaders at major universities to condemn the killings, have exposed the cost of neglecting this issue and letting “decolonization” colonize our academy.

Parents and students can move to universities that are not led by equivocators and patrolled by deniers and ghouls; donors can withdraw their generosity en masse, and that is starting in the United States. Philanthropists can pull the funding of humanitarian foundations led by people who support war crimes against humanity (against victims selected by race). Audiences can easily decide not to watch films starring actors who ignore the killing of children; studios do not have to hire them. And in our academies, this poisonous ideology, followed by the malignant and foolish but also by the fashionable and well intentioned, has become a default position. It must forfeit its respectability, its lack of authenticity as history. Its moral nullity has been exposed for all to see.  

Again, scholars, teachers, and our civil society, and the institutions that fund and regulate universities and charities, need to challenge a toxic, inhumane ideology that has no basis in the real history or present of the Holy Land, and that justifies otherwise rational people to excuse the dismemberment of babies.

Israel has done many harsh and bad things. Netanyahu’s government, the worst ever in Israeli history, as inept as it is immoral, promotes a maximalist ultranationalism that is both unacceptable and unwise. Everyone has the right to protest against Israel’s policies and actions but not to promote terror sects, the killing of civilians, and the spreading of menacing anti-Semitism.

The Palestinians have legitimate grievances and have endured much brutal injustice. But both of their political entities are utterly flawed: the Palestinian Authority, which rules 40 percent of the West Bank, is moribund, corrupt, inept, and generally disdained—and its leaders have been just as abysmal as those of Israel.

Hamas is a diabolical killing sect that hides among civilians, whom it sacrifices on the altar of resistance—as moderate Arab voices have openly stated in recent days, and much more harshly than Hamas’s apologists in the West. “I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians,” the Saudi veteran statesman Prince Turki bin Faisal movingly declared last week. “I also condemn Hamas for giving the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned even by half of the Israeli public … I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.” In an interview with Khaled Meshaal, a member of the Hamas politburo, the Arab journalist Rasha Nabil highlighted Hamas’s sacrifice of its own people for its political interests. Meshaal argued that this was just the cost of resistance: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany,” he said.   

[Read: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology]

Nabil stands as an example to Western journalists who scarcely dare challenge Hamas and its massacres. Nothing is more patronizing and even Orientalist than the romanticization of Hamas’s butchers, whom many Arabs despise. The denial of their atrocities by so many in the West is an attempt to fashion acceptable heroes out of an organization that dismembers babies and defiles the bodies of murdered girls. This is an attempt to save Hamas from itself. Perhaps the West’s Hamas apologists should listen to moderate Arab voices instead of a fundamentalist terror sect.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself— because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

So the war unfolds tragically. As I write this, the pounding of Gaza is killing Palestinian children every day, and that is unbearable. As Israel still grieves its losses and buries its children, we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians just as we deplore the killing of Palestinian civilians. We reject Hamas, evil and unfit to govern, but we do not mistake Hamas for the Palestinian people, whose losses we mourn as we mourn the death of all innocents.   

In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.

Hamas denies Israeli claim that it uses hospital for military purposes, warns of potential attack targeting al-Shifa.

Sharone Lifschitz is calling on the Israeli government to prioritise the release of hostages held by Hamas.

An explosion was seen on the skyline in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv as a rocket fired from Gaza hit an apartment block.

The war between Israel and Hamas has progressed at such speed, with body counts mounting by the hour, that it can feel like the chasm of human grief it is leaving behind has gotten relatively little attention. In Israel, the society I know better, every individual seems to be connected to someone who was murdered or has been kidnapped. In Gaza, death surely feels inescapable. I have been worried about this reverberation of pain almost from the moment I learned what Hamas had done—that a grief this overwhelming will harden people such that generations will have to pass before any political resolution feels remotely possible.

“The whole country has PTSD,” was the first thing the Israeli writer Etgar Keret texted me a week after the attack. I realized that he was the person I most wanted to speak with. Keret has long been an impish figure on the Israeli literary scene, writing very short, absurdist stories for three decades, contemporary fairy tales that are allegorical and often gut-punching. What Keret hasn’t tried to do is be the voice of Israel. Unlike a generation of writers before him who were comfortable with this role—famously, Amos Oz, David Grossman, and A. B. Yehoshua—Keret is more concerned with how humans survive being human. Possibly, this is why his stories have had such universal appeal, regularly featured on This American Life.

Since the October 7 attack, Keret has been writing what he calls “war notes”: short thoughts, observations, and outlines of stories jotted down as if on scraps of paper meant to be shoved deep in a pocket or thrown away. One of them, “Signs of Life,” found its way onto the front page of Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest paid daily newspaper, and a version even appeared in English on the actor Molly Ringwald’s Instagram feed. Keret composed the paragraph-long text for a young girl whose father had been killed. “Close your eyes, and allow yourself, just for a moment, to simply feel the pain. To hesitate. To be confused. To feel sorrow. Remorse,” he wrote. “You still have your whole life to spend persecuting, avenging, reckoning. But for now, just close your eyes and look inward, like a satellite hovering over a disaster zone, searching for signs of life.”

I spoke with Keret about how to find these signs of life. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: Israelis are used to dealing with terrorist attacks—it’s been a part of their reality for a very long time. But this felt different, and I’m curious if you can articulate why.

Etgar Keret: I think the experience of every Israeli citizen on that Saturday was this terrible intimacy with the war. At first there was a real lack of information, which left two points of view. Either the point of view of a family trapped in a room calling live to the television channel, saying “Send help, I can hear them murdering someone outside; they’re entering; they’re throwing a grenade here; my daughter is already dead.” And you hear this live, so you’re in this point of view of somebody who’s being massacred. And the other point of view was on Telegram, where you could see Hamas massacring people. But this was at such a primal level—not about territory, not about ideology. This was the plan, to bring the killing to us. Many times, people say to the survivors, “I can’t imagine what you felt when you were there.” But in a weird way, when I go and meet families who survived the attacks on the kibbutzim, I almost feel that I was there with them.

The idea behind putting it all on Telegram as it was happening, it was almost like presenting the pilot episode of a genocide, that every Israeli who sees would think they’re next: I’m burning this house down. I’m murdering this woman. I’m coming for you. The people they massacred, among them were Bedouin, Israeli Arabs, Filipino workers who help elderly people, Thai agricultural workers. It was about murdering in the most horrible way all the people who are in this area.

Beckerman: This must be having a profound effect on people’s psyches right now.

Keret: That’s why I described it to you as the entire country suffering from PTSD. I was on the street and I saw someone’s kid imitating the sound of an alarm siren, and his father snapped at him, and you could see that the kid didn’t understand what his father wanted from him; he was just making a sound—woo woo woo. I heard a fight between a parent and their child, and the child said, “Daddy loves the soldiers more than he loves me.” You can really feel it with children that they are aware their parents are acting strange. They don’t understand where they are. Where is their open heart?

Beckerman: What other kinds of responses are you seeing from people you know?

Keret: There is this feeling that reality has changed and that we have to adapt. And the people I appreciate the most are doing it slowly. The right answers don’t jump out at them. Here’s one story, for example.

There is this guy on my street who I like. He works with kids and teenagers, where he teaches them robotics with Legos. And the other day he calls me, and he never calls me, and he starts speaking, and in the beginning, I didn’t even understand what he was talking about. And then gradually he says that he’d been volunteering with a group of teenagers who are Israeli Arabs—Palestinian citizens of Israel. So he had been working with them for two years, and they grew very close together. And he said they were one of the most amazing groups and they won a championship. They went overseas. And he was their coach, so they were a little bit like a family. And then he called me, basically, just as he was looking at those kids’ Facebook pages. And there were photos taken from Telegram of horrible, graphic things—I don’t even want to repeat—of people being murdered in horrible ways, and he says he sees them posting them and kind of saying, Haha, you know, Yeah, shows them. And when he talked to me, I felt that on some level, he could say, I’m an Israeli; they betrayed me. But he wasn’t talking like that at all. It was a little bit like a parent discovering that his child is a sex molester or something, or enjoys watching snuff films. It was really like this searching thing, like, What didn’t I understand? How do I explain this?

Beckerman: How do you approach this as a writer, as an artist? What do you see as your tools for helping?

Keret: My parents were Holocaust survivors. And I think in many ways, they almost trained me for this moment. I had learned that the world can turn and change really quickly. One of the things my mom told me, she said, when everything’s stable, you can lean on whatever you want. But when things start shaking, lean on yourself—connect to your emotions; be reflective. And another thing that my father told me has become a mantra, even when I speak with people in the kibbutzim. When I was a child, I wasn’t the smartest kid. They had taught us about the Holocaust in school, and one day I asked my father if the Holocaust was the worst time of his life. And he said to me, “There are no good times and bad times. There are only hard times and easy times.” And he said, “All my life, I ran after the easy times. But one thing I have to admit: It was the difficult times when I’ve learned about myself most.” And I think that there is something to that. This will never justify all the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians that are happening these days.

I haven’t been writing any stories. Instead, I write these crazy notes. One was a synopsis for a story about an alien world whose energy comes from the pain of human beings, and then suddenly one of their power plants shuts down, and they say, “We need much more juice.” So they release the October 7 attacks and then we’re bombing Gaza, and then, you know, all the dark parts of town are suddenly lit.

I’m thinking that the only thing we can win from this opportunity is to reflect, to reboot. When you look at Israel and Palestine, we’ve been in the same loop pretty much since [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu came to power. Netanyahu believed in this policy of divide and conquer. And the idea is, If I keep Hamas, if I give it a little strength, it will be a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority; maybe it will be a way of stopping a Palestinian state. But this is an idea that is like a pagan ritual in which Hamas attacks us, we attack them, then we shake hands and another suitcase with money comes from Qatar. He believed that he could dance with the devil, and now this exploded in our face.

Beckerman: It seems to me, though, that what has been special about your war notes is that they look past politics to the human beings who are suffering now, at their grief.

Keret: When I visit with the survivors of the kibbutzim, I don’t talk about politics at all. I feel as if I’m coming as a representative of humanity—failed humanity, but still, humanity—in the sense that I come there as somebody who has been left intact, a guy who can laugh at a joke, some proof of existence. And I really feel that I don’t have anything to give to them, you know, talent-wise, just this idea of trying to conduct some kind of dialogue or perspective that is not hatefully reductive, but that allows for ambiguity and confusion.

Beckerman: Was this the motive behind the war notes?

Keret: It started with me just writing things that I saw. I go to meet the kibbutz people, and the woman that shows us and takes care of us, she has a baby on her hip. And she keeps going around and doing stuff with the baby on her. I have a herniated disc, so I noticed this. We were there for more than four hours, and all the time she had the baby. And when she walked us to the car, I wanted to say something nice. So I said, “Oh, your baby didn’t cry even one time; you’re so lucky to have such a baby.” “No, no, it’s not my baby,” she said. “The baby belongs to a woman whose family was massacred, and she’s not functional. So somebody said, ‘Will anyone take the baby?’ So I took the baby.” So it’s basically kind of writing those things down. Just to be sure that, later on, I won’t think I made them up, you know?

Beckerman: But you’re sharing them, like the one that Molly Ringwald shared on Instagram and that Yedioth Ahronoth, the Israeli newspaper, ran on the front page?

Keret: This particular note, the first person I sent it to was a teenager whose father was murdered. And she read it, and then told me she read it at his funeral. And it’s strange, because, you know, when I looked at Molly posting, you know, there is something about this text, because it says Look inside you; try to see what you’re feeling. Everybody thinks it’s about him or her. But I was writing for a girl whose father was murdered.

[Read: I was a child in a war]

Beckerman: Do you think there’s something about ephemeral writing? It’s not meant to be published necessarily; it’s writing almost in its purest form, where it’s providing a kind of catharsis, but it’s not about polishing it or making it perfect for someone else.

Keret: Right now, these feel like notes in the sense that there is some kind of raw energy or an attempt to remind myself of this moment. But it’s all a bunch of thoughts and anecdotes. I can tell you one. Some of the kibbutzim were really hit hard, like places like Kfar Aza had a huge massacre. But there were kibbutzim like Nir Am that were attacked, but no one was kidnapped and the attackers were held off from entering the kibbutz. And when I came to read to the children of the kibbutzim, there was this really nice dad from one of the less affected kibbutzim, and he said to me that he basically moved to the kibbutz a very short time ago from the city. And he said that when he went with his wife, he saw a beautiful house he loved, in Kfar Aza. And his wife said, “No, I want to be in Nir Am; it’s easier with the car.” And he said, “Yeah, but this is a nicer house.” And somebody said to him, “Look, you know, a nice house. Every house is nice. But it’s nicer when the people living in it are happy. Do what your wife wants.” And then he said, “I listened to my wife, and all my family is alive. And if I would have moved to Kfar Aza, I’d be in hell right now.” I think of these things because my parents were Holocaust survivors; this arbitrariness was familiar to them, the things that you did that saved you, the things that you did that would cause your death.

And the thing about kibbutzim, these are communities that don’t always respect privacy. At one gathering, a group of kibbutz members said to a young girl, “Come on, come on, tell him what you said when you heard the terrorist, when you heard him outside.” And she said, “No, no, no, I don’t want to.” They said, “No, come on, tell him, it’s funny.” So this girl told me about the moment when she heard terrorists inside the house shooting. She whispered when she told me this, but her thought was, There are so many books that I haven’t read yet. I don’t want to die stupid.

There are dozens of stories like this. So for me, I think that all those stories that I collect, they’re kind of proof of humanity. Saying, like, these are not victims, they’re people living; they’re doing pranks; they’re making fun of each other.

Beckerman: They still have humor.

Keret: It’s not even humor, because it’s not funny, but it’s acknowledging some kind of humanity in an inhuman situation. And my mom, we lived in a city where everybody was of Iraqi descent. So my mom was really one of the only Holocaust survivors in our town. And whenever they would ask her to come to Holocaust-memorial ceremonies to speak as a survivor, she would say, “I think you got it wrong. I passed the Holocaust. I don’t work in the Holocaust.” She resisted this idea of the Holocaust as a grand event, a giant jigsaw puzzle, and that her role was to be a tiny piece. She said, “No, I’m a human being. I will not be reduced to these stories. You can shoot children in black-and-white; I’ll stay in color.”

We are again witnessing what a world without pity looks like. The invasion of Ukraine; Russia’s murder of civilians in Bucha; Hamas killers filming themselves murdering women, children, and retirees in kibbutz gardens; the pulverization of Gaza and mass civilian casualties. We’ve been catapulted backwards into the lawless universe Bruegel painted centuries ago in his Massacre of the Innocents.

When the internationally sanctioned system of rules collapses, the legal and ethical norms that regulate individual conduct begin to founder. Justifications of violence are hurled around, with all the righteousness that goes with identity claims and group loyalty. Mere bystanders rush to judgment in service of their prior political certainties.

Amid this moral storm, we have one piece of wreckage to cling to. The Geneva Conventions still figure prominently on both sides of the propaganda battle over the current conflict in Gaza, suggesting that they still have some vestigial authority. Hamas’s supporters cite these laws of war to justify its actions, and to claim that Israel violates the rules. For its part, Israel insists that it abides by them, because its military lawyers and commanders adhere to principles of proportionality and discretion, and take measures to avoid civilian casualties.

If this is the shred of law that is left in a lawless world, the question is: Why should Israel obey it when its enemies do not?

[Franklin Foer: The horror of Bucha]

The four Geneva Conventions, ratified in 1949 after the world’s last excursion into wholesale violence, established a de minimis code that accepted violent combat as a normal instrument in human affairs but sought at least to limit its horror.

The Geneva Conventions are law made for hell, the work of Swiss and European lawyers who’d watched the worst that human beings had done in World War II. Their conventions—especially the fourth, on the protection of civilians—command combatants to observe the principle of distinction, which confines fighting to soldiers and keeps civilians out of it. That means keeping violence proportional to a military objective. And it prohibits starving civilians or depriving them of water; attacking hospitals or civilian medical workers; taking hostages; raping women; expelling populations from conquered territory; destroying homes, churches, synagogues, mosques, and schools without an overriding military purpose. To do any of these things is to commit a war crime.

The conventions evoke an idea as old as the chivalric values of the European Middle Ages, the Bushido code of the Japanese samurai, and the rules of lawful holy war in Islam. Warriors are not supposed to be butchers or brigands. Soldiers are unworthy of their uniform if they violate women, steal from civilians, brutalize prisoners, or use gratuitous violence in the exercise of arms. From the creation of the Red Cross after the Battle of Solferino in 1859 to the Lieber Code governing the conduct of the Union Army in the American Civil War to the Hague Convention of 1907, lawyers working for states on all sides have codified the ideals of a warrior’s honor. That legacy has turned the Geneva Conventions into the most universally ratified body of international law we have.

[From the May 2005 issue: Fighting terrorism with torture]

The conventions give no one an alibi. The Geneva laws clearly distinguish between jus ad bellum (a country’s right to fight in self-defense, for example) and jus in bello (how a country conducts that fighting). The crux of this is that however legitimate self-defense may be, it can never justify barbarism.

A Palestinian may argue that Israel’s unjust blockade of Gaza and previous military actions, which give grounds for armed resistance, also justify the massacre of civilians at a music festival and in their homes and the taking of hostages. An Israeli may argue that Hamas’s atrocities in the October 7 attack justify the flattening of Gaza, despite the inevitable civilian deaths this entails. The Geneva Conventions say both positions are wrong. Nothing justifies the infliction of violence on noncombatants, neither a gruesome massacre in the desert nor the cruel confinement of civilians in Gaza.

When states ratify the conventions, it means, in principle, that superior officers face a charge of command responsibility for war crimes committed pursuant to their orders. The drafters of the law recognized that there are terrorists, insurgents, and irregular forces who don’t wear uniforms and don’t answer to a state or its laws. They were aware that terrorists will place weapons and forces close to civilian facilities such as hospitals in an attempt to exploit the reluctance of law-abiding forces to strike such targets. But the fact that one side games the rules does not relieve the other of the obligation to obey them. The Geneva Conventions are not voided in the absence of reciprocity between combatants.

Which brings us to the nightmare of Gaza. Both Israel and Palestine (an entity with nonmember status in the United Nations that includes the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem) are ratified parties to the four conventions; as the governing authority in Gaza, Hamas is bound to observe them. For its part, Israel has a legion of lawyers well versed in these rules, and it has always distinguished itself from adversaries by its status as a democracy. Because of that democracy, Israel’s army is politically accountable to its citizens, its military lawyers are accountable to a civilian Supreme Court, and its soldiers are accountable for war crimes in a court of law. Israel’s image as a bastion of democracy in a region of autocracies is intimately linked to its claim that its armed forces obey the conventions.

Under both the UN charter and the Geneva Conventions, Israel has a legitimate ad bellum goal: It was attacked by Hamas, and it has the right to defend itself, including by going into Gaza to prevent the enemy from attacking again. Israel’s difficulties begin with the in bello stipulations of the conventions. Besides discrimination in targeting, the conventions demand proportionality, which requires Israelis to minimize collateral damage to hospitals, schools, and civilian infrastructure. But because Hamas is likely to co-locate its men and matériel near what the conventions call “protected” objects, the conventions do allow Israel to strike civilian targets—but only when there is no other way to achieve a necessary military objective.

Israel has allowed aid convoys into Gaza; it has warned civilians of impending air strikes and urged mass evacuation from combat zones. Despite these gestures of compliance, the watching world can see on their screens, every hour of the day, the flattened streets and houses, the rescue workers and ambulances, the bloodied civilians borne into overcrowded hospitals. What we do not know is the extent and degree to which Israel is successfully targeting Hamas military personnel and assets.

[David Lapan: War-crimes pardons dishonor fallen heroes]

Respecting Geneva goes beyond good intentions and the mere gestures of legal compliance; it means ensuring that the actual results of military action comply with the conventions. Judging those results will depend on how many of the dead will turn out to have been Hamas fighters and how many were noncombatant civilians.

Some Israeli citizens, shocked and wounded to their very core by the October 7 attack, dismiss the law of Geneva as absurd in the face of an enemy whose stated aim is to destroy their state and murder Jews. Responding to its people’s rage, the Israeli government has demanded the resignation of the UN secretary-general after he said that Hamas’s attack “did not happen in a vacuum” and called on Israel to stick to Geneva’s rules despite “the appalling attacks by Hamas.” But that higher standard is what the Israeli government has signed up for, and what its military says it lives by.

For Israel, the war is a battle against a deadly and unprincipled enemy. But it is also a test of its values as a nation. Israel’s physical survival as a state is at stake, but so is its moral identity and its political reputation in the world. It can throw Geneva out the window in its attempt to destroy Hamas, but if it abandons the law, it may do lasting damage to its national ethos and international standing.

Adhering to Geneva is essential if Israel is to achieve its strategic objectives—which are to eliminate Hamas, not the Palestinian people, and to establish security on its borders. Israel’s leaders cannot achieve these objectives through military means alone. At some point, war must be followed by politics. If Israel adheres to the Geneva rules, that will help it attain its long-term political goals. If at least some Palestinians can see restraint in action, that will show them that Israel makes a crucial distinction between Hamas and the population it rules in Gaza.

Israel needs to send this signal, because it will need partners to help it rebuild Gaza after the shooting stops: It will need the Saudis and the Gulf States if it is to have any chance of securing peace on its borders. Not just the crushing of Hamas but the conduct of the war itself will determine what kind of peace is possible.

The law of Geneva is the sole remaining framework of moral universalism in which two peoples can acknowledge that they are both human beings. Holding on to Geneva, despite all the temptations to do otherwise, is a vital element of the politics that could lead, eventually, to peace.