WHEN MORAL JUDGMENT BECOMES SELECTIVE

 

One of the most troubling aspects of the public debate surrounding the Israel–Hamas war is not disagreement itself. Disagreement is both inevitable and healthy in any democratic society. What is troubling is the increasing tendency to reduce moral judgment to visible outcomes alone, while ignoring intention, agency and the sequence of events that produced those outcomes.

Images of destruction in Gaza evoke horror, compassion and outrage. They should. Every innocent life lost is a tragedy. Every child killed is a wound to our common humanity.

Yet moral judgment cannot stop there.

A society that judges solely by outcomes risks abandoning one of the oldest foundations of ethical reasoning: the distinction between deliberate aggression and legitimate defence, between intention and consequence, between those who initiate violence and those who respond to it.

This distinction is hardly new. From Aristotle to Kant, from Roman law to contemporary jurisprudence, intention has played a central role in how human beings evaluate responsibility. A murder and an accidental death may produce the same outcome, but they are not morally equivalent because intention matters. Likewise, a war of conquest and a war of self-defence may both result in casualties, yet the motives, choices and responsibilities involved are fundamentally different.

The current debate often ignores these distinctions.

Many commentators speak as though history began on the day the first images of destruction emerged from Gaza. The events of 7 October are reduced to a footnote or omitted altogether. The massacre of civilians, the murder of children, the systematic sexual violence, the hostage-taking and the deliberate targeting of non-combatants are treated as secondary details rather than the initiating event of the conflict's current phase.

This is not merely an omission of facts. It is a distortion of moral chronology.

The sequence of events matters because causality matters. To ignore who initiated violence while focusing exclusively on the consequences of the response is to analyse effects while pretending causes are irrelevant.

At the same time, there exists another troubling phenomenon: selective empathy.

Many who describe themselves as defenders of human rights, women's rights or minority rights found little to say about the atrocities committed on 7 October. Some questioned the evidence before investigations had even begun. Others remained silent. Still others quickly shifted the conversation away from the victims and towards geopolitical explanations.

Yet the same voices often speak with great passion about Palestinian suffering.

Compassion for Palestinians is entirely legitimate. What is difficult to understand is why that compassion sometimes appears unavailable when the victims are Israeli.

A moral principle that applies only to certain victims is no longer a principle. It becomes a political preference.

This inconsistency is particularly visible in parts of the contemporary left. Historically, the left presented itself as a defender of universal values, human dignity and critical thought. Increasingly, however, some sectors appear to evaluate conflicts not through universal principles but through ideological categories: oppressor and oppressed, coloniser and colonised, powerful and powerless. Once these labels are assigned, moral complexity disappears.

The result is a strange inversion. Acts that would be condemned in any other context become excusable if committed by those perceived to belong to the "right" side of history. Violence is not judged according to what it is, but according to who commits it.

This is not moral reasoning. It is tribal reasoning dressed in moral language.

The tragedy is that such thinking ultimately fails everyone, including Palestinians. A framework that cannot condemn the atrocities of 7 October without hesitation, while simultaneously grieving for innocent lives in Gaza, is incapable of offering a coherent path towards peace, justice or reconciliation.

Moral consistency demands something more difficult.

It requires us to hold two truths at the same time: that the suffering of Gaza's civilians is real and heartbreaking, and that the atrocities of 7 October were real and indefensible; that innocent Palestinians deserve protection, and that innocent Israelis deserve protection; that compassion should not depend on nationality, ethnicity, religion or political utility.

The true test of moral character is not whether we defend those whose suffering aligns with our political preferences. It is whether we can defend universal principles even when doing so is inconvenient to our preferred narrative.

Once we abandon that standard, we cease to practice ethics and begin merely to practice partisanship.

And partisanship, unlike morality, is rarely interested in truth.