To what extent is the war in Gaza justified?

Introduction.

I am starting this blog with probably the hardest topic I will discuss, but given the extraordinary levels of suffering in Gaza, it also feels like the most urgent. It is also timely in a much less important way. I was recently one of over 700 signatories to a letter to the organizers of the International Mathematical Olympiad (mentioned in this article) that called for Israel to be treated in the same way as Russia was treated after the invasion of Ukraine: that is, that while there would still be Israeli contestants, they would compete as individuals and not be part of an official team. I signed another open letter a few months ago that called for the academic community to boycott Israeli institutions that were not criticizing their government’s actions in Gaza. That letter too was careful to stress that this did not mean boycotting the members of the institutions in question, but just the institutions themselves. (Exactly what this means in practice I don’t really know, but the kind of thing it certainly does not mean is not collaborating with Israeli academics, or not welcoming them at conferences, or not publishing their papers, say. But it might mean not accepting an invitation to an event that was clearly associated with an institution that was complicit in the war in Gaza.) I received some emails then from Israeli mathematicians expressing their disbelief that I would sign such a letter, to which I did not reply because I simply didn’t have time to write a reply that would do justice to the question. But I hope that this post will serve as the reply that I did not provide back then, and also as a reply to anybody who feels shocked and hurt that I would sign the more recent letter as well. (For what it’s worth, I think the chances that the IMO will actually stop Israel competing as a team are close to zero.)

There is so much to say that it’s difficult to know where to start, so before diving in let me say a bit more about the intended readership of this post. I’d say the rough audience I have in mind is people who broadly support the war in Gaza, though they may well strongly criticize many aspects of how it has been carried out, recognise that it has had some terrible consequences, and disagree with the rhetoric coming from the extreme factions of the Israeli government. If you would like to see Gaza completely cleared of Palestinians, if you refer to the West Bank as Judaea and Samaria and dream of it being entirely settled by Jews, if you think all this is right because God gave Israel to the Jewish people, then your premises are so fundamentally different from mine that there is no point in your reading this, except perhaps as an exercise in understanding where a different set of premises leads.

I am also not writing for people who find the assertion that Israel should be condemned for its actions in Gaza since October 7th 2023 too obvious to be worth discussing. If you have read the introductory post to this blog, you will know that my aim is to approach the issues I discuss as mathematically as I can. My tone will therefore probably come across as rather detached, even when I am discussing consequences such as the deaths of thousands of children. Obviously I am not detached about these consequences, or I probably wouldn’t write anything at all, but if I write something like, “How could anyone possibly support the killing of all these children?” then the people I hope to engage with will immediately switch off, as I will be accusing them, almost certainly unjustly, of not caring about the deaths of Palestinian children.

I am also keen to use the steel man technique as far as I can, so I will try to present the strongest case for the war in Gaza that I can think of (largely assembled from comments and posts of various kinds that I have read online) before arguing against it. This cannot be done properly if the tone is sneering and disrespectful, so if you are strongly opposed to the war, you may again find my academic tone hard to take as I set out the pro-war case.

A complaint that I have seen many times is that people who criticize Israel seem strangely uncritical of Hamas. In the interests of symmetry, I will look later at the parallel question to the main question of this post: to what extent can the Hamas attack on October 7th be justified? Again, I will be considering in a detached way a question about which I do not feel detached at all. I hope it is not much of a spoiler to say that I will conclude that that attack was totally unjustified.

However, I will devote far more space to discussing Israel, for the following reasons.

Arguing that October 7th was wrong is an easier task.
My country is not selling weapons to Hamas.
Hamas makes no claim that it is behaving according to the norms expected of a western-style democracy.
I don’t see any realistic possibility of engaging with anybody who supports the October 7th attack.
Although Hamas killed over a thousand Israelis on October 7th, that atrocity is now over (apart, obviously, from the continued presence of hostages, but that situation is at least fairly stable), whereas the killing of Palestinians continues at a rate of dozens per day.

A final remark is that I will not discuss Israel’s attack on Iran in this post. That is partly because the post was written before the attack took place, but mainly because I have not sufficiently thought about the issues raised by that attack. I do mention Iran in a couple of places, however.

The case for the war in Gaza.

I don’t have a way of presenting the pro-war case as a coherent whole. Instead, I want to summarize a number of arguments that combine to form the case. (The summaries will be brief, and for now I won’t mention any counterarguments.)

Hamas started it.

Above, I described a letter calling for Israel to receive the same treatment at the IMO that Russia received after invading Ukraine. But this ignores a crucial difference: Russia very clearly started the war in Ukraine, while Hamas very clearly started the war in Gaza.

Israel cannot do nothing while Hamas is holding large numbers of Israeli hostages.

On October 7th, Hamas took approximately 250 hostages. No country can be expected to abandon that number of hostages to the fate of an enemy that has already shown itself ready to kill Israelis in large numbers, as well as to carry out acts of torture and sexual violence.

Israel has a right to defend itself against a genocidal threat from Hamas.

Hamas makes no secret of the fact that it would like to see Israel destroyed completely. This does not just mean the dismantling of the Israeli state, but the killing of Jews.

Hamas makes it impossible to avoid large-scale civilian casualties.

For the reasons just set out, war in Gaza was unavoidable after October 7th. Unfortunately, Hamas operatives dress as civilians, use human shields, and put their headquarters under residential buildings, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, and so on. These are war crimes, because they make it far harder to avoid civilian casualties. Since the war was unavoidable, these practices have caused large-scale civilian casualties to be unavoidable as well, but the responsibility for them falls squarely with Hamas.

There was widespread support in Gaza for the October 7th attacks.

Polls show that a large majority of Palestinians supported the attacks on October 7th. For example, a poll in December 2023 showed that 72% thought they were “correct”, 22% thought they were “incorrect” and the rest were undecided. So it is not just the Hamas leadership that seeks the destruction of Israel: the broader populace wants it as well.

The problem of contested facts.

Before I examine the above arguments, I want to mention a difficulty I have, which is that many important details about what is happening in Gaza are hotly disputed. Both sides have very strong incentives to lie and to accuse the other side of lying. And since independent journalists are not allowed to operate in Gaza, sorting out the truths from the untruths is almost impossible, especially for somebody like me whose only sources are what I can find online.

When faced with a situation like this, I try not to let my opinion be swayed too much by any individual piece of evidence that might turn out to be wrong, but instead to take a more statistical approach. To give a few examples, nobody knows the extent of sexual violence that took place on October 7th. If you read the Wikipedia page on the subject, you will see that (at least according to that page, which itself one should treat with caution of course, but it refers to several external sources), making an accurate assessment is very difficult. But there is enough evidence out there, as it looks to me without doing a careful study, that even if each individual piece of that evidence is unreliable, there is a vanishingly small probability that no such violence took place.

As another example, in the early stages of the war, Israel destroyed a number of buildings on the grounds that they contained important Hamas infrastructure, weapons, and so on. But it was hard to avoid the suspicion that that was sometimes just an excuse, and the real purpose of destroying the buildings, in at least some cases, was different: revenge, perhaps, or part of a plan to make Gaza uninhabitable. For each individual building it was hard to know, but the scale of destruction is now such that it becomes impossible to believe that every single bombing of a building had a legitimate military purpose (whatever that might mean).

I have a similar attitude to a remarkable document called Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War, put together by Lee Mordechai, an Israeli historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It contains a huge catalogue of abuses perpetrated by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, with references for each one. In the interests of balance, I Googled “Debunking Lee Mordechai” and came up with a couple of articles, of which this was one. One of the main criticisms was the way Mordechai defines genocide, which is not really relevant to my purpose here, though I will mention it briefly at the end. Another was an ad hominem attack, which again is not too important. But there were also suggestions that Mordechai’s sources were by no means reliable, and that some of the awful stories that he reports on were outright false, and that matters more. I think it is almost inevitable that some of them were indeed false, but that is where statistics comes in: even if 70% of them are false, 30% of a large number is still a large number. (Here’s an example of the kind of story I’m talking about, this one not from Mordechai’s document.)

One other general consideration that I apply to this and other situations is that a country that suppresses the media is more likely to be lying than one that doesn’t. The fact that Israel has made reporting from Gaza almost impossible doesn’t prove anything about any individual story, but it suggests that in general Israel has something to hide.

Why I do not want to talk (much) about genocide.

A common approach to discussing the war in Gaza is to argue that Israel is committing genocide. If that can be established, it is then axiomatic that genocide is wrong, indeed one of the worst wrongs there can be, so we reach the conclusion that Israel’s actions in Gaza are wrong.

I shall avoid this approach (though I shall briefly discuss it at the end), because it risks getting into a distracting discussion of what the word “genocide” actually means. The use of the word inevitably calls to mind the Holocaust, but there are many important differences between Israel’s actions in Gaza and the actions of the Nazis during the Holocaust. Instead of worrying about whether the same word can possibly encompass both, I would prefer to argue that something terrible is happening in Gaza, and that that something should not be tolerated, whatever word we choose to use for it.

How I assess the war in Gaza.

I laid out my general approach to moral questions in my introductory post, but let me very briefly summarize it here. My starting position is to consider the consequences (or, in cases of uncertainty, expected consequences) of various courses of action, with a view to maximizing some kind of utility, or in a case like this, minimizing harm. I then qualify that somewhat, because bare consequentialism has all sorts of well known problems with it.

The most relevant qualification here is that in practice people will attach higher priority to the welfare of those who are closer to them — starting with loved ones and moving on to friends, colleagues, compatriots, people with a broadly similar outlook on life, more human-like animals, and so on. However, I also qualify that qualification. While some degree of prioritization of this kind is probably efficient and good for the world as a whole — for instance, we can probably agree that if I care about my children far more than I do about my next-door neighbour’s, and vice versa, then that is a sensible use of our combined mental resources — I also think that in general, coming to treat others more equally is a sign of moral progress. In a war between two countries (or other units, but I’ll go for countries here), we can measure this progress in a somewhat brutal way by what one might call a country’s “acceptable casualty ratio”. If country A is fighting country B, then A’s ratio is r if A is ready to sacrifice r people from country B in order to save one of its own people. At what point does such a ratio become morally indefensible? I don’t think that question has a clear answer: rather, my view is that all countries are likely to have a ratio greater than 1, and maybe a ratio slightly greater than 1 can be justified on the sort of efficiency grounds I mentioned just above, but in general reducing the ratio represents moral progress, and a large ratio is a sign of a serious moral problem.

So the main question I will consider in what follows is this. If Israel had responded differently to the October 7th attacks, would the consequences (not just now but in the longer-term future) have been substantially better? It may be that the answer to that question depends on the acceptable casualty ratio. In that case, the question is slightly modified: what casualty ratio would Israel need to accept in order to judge that its response to the October 7th attacks was better than any other? But in fact even that isn’t quite the right question. I doubt whether anybody would argue that Israel’s response was optimal, so really what I want to discuss is more like this: what casualty ratio would Israel need to accept in order to judge that its war aim of destroying Hamas was the right one to pursue, given the difficulty of pursuing it without heavy civilian casualties?

In order to make an assessment of this kind, some kind of consideration has to be given to how Israel might have responded differently. If I criticize the Israeli government, then a natural question arises: what would I have done instead if I had been in charge?

I do not pretend to have a fully satisfactory answer to this question, but that is largely because I do not believe that there is a fully satisfactory answer. However, I also don’t think I am obliged to give a fully satisfactory answer if my aim is to answer the question above. It is enough if I can propose a course of action that would have led to a less bad outcome. If that course of action is not ideal, but nevertheless a lot better than what the Israeli government has actually done, then I’ll have done my job. If somebody can propose a different course of action that would have been better still, then I will be very interested to hear about it.

What could Israel have done differently that would have led to a better outcome?

At the time of writing there is one very obvious answer to this question: it could let food and medicine into Gaza. That would relieve a huge amount of suffering and would not lead to any obvious (to me at any rate) strategic disadvantages to Israel. I am not going to dwell on this answer, however, because I am trying to argue for something stronger. I know that many people who broadly support the war are just as appalled as I am by the deliberate starvation of people in Gaza, and those who are comfortable with that aspect are very unlikely to be part of my target audience. Similarly, I do not want to talk about the many reports of torture, sexual abuse and pointless killings perpetrated by Israeli soldiers, as I am sure that people in my target audience would join me in condemning crimes such as these. There might be some disagreement about how many such reports are true — see above for my approach to dealing with disputes about factual questions — but I don’t imagine many people, other than extremists, would disagree that any that are true are to be condemned, and that the Israeli response to October 7th would have been hugely improved if no such crimes had taken place.

But that is the easy part, and it does not touch the central argument. Just to recap, the central argument (which I hope I am representing accurately) is that Hamas wants nothing less than the destruction of Israel, so Israel has to defend itself against an existential threat; that that means destroying Hamas once and for all; and that because Hamas has embedded itself so thoroughly into the civilian population and infrastructure of Gaza, it is not possible to destroy Hamas without approaching the levels of death and destruction that we have seen over the last year and a half.

I find some of the steps of this argument plausible. In particular, I do not see how the total destruction of Hamas could be achieved without something near to the total destruction of Gaza and the killing of large numbers of Gazans. And that is for exactly the reason given: Hamas leaders and soldiers, unsurprisingly, don’t operate from buildings labelled “Hamas headquarters” or walk about with badges saying “member of Hamas”. Nor, once Israel has declared its intent to destroy them completely, do they come out of their tunnels and say, “Look, do what you like to us, but please spare the civilian population.”

It also seems to me a substantially correct premise that Hamas wants Israel to be destroyed: indeed, it is in their charter. I use the qualifier “substantially” only because I think that if, extremely hypothetically, there were ever to be serious negotiations between Israel and Hamas, then there would probably be a range of viewpoints in Hamas, from those who still wanted Israel to be destroyed, to those who took a more pragmatic line, just as there is a wide range of viewpoints in Israel about what to do in Gaza and the West Bank. I’m necessarily speculating here: I looked online for explanations of what Hamas hoped to achieve on October 7th, and they range from full conquest of Israel (with the help of Iran) to deliberately provoking a disproportionate response from Israel that would increase the popularity of Hamas and disrupt the improving relations between Israel and certain Arab states, to a sort of last resort after attempts to negotiate had failed. But let us assume, for the sake of argument and because it may well be true, that Hamas is not interested in any long-term solution in which Israel continues to exist. (The destruction of Israel was removed from their charter in 2017, but after October 7th it is difficult to attach too much significance to that removal.)

The weakest link in the argument, it seems to me, is the part that says that since Israel faces an existential threat, nothing less than the total destruction of Hamas will do. Let us try to assess that in the way that I have outlined above.

Before I start talking about alternative responses, acceptable casualty ratios, and so on, I’d quickly like to discuss the assertion that Israel faces an existential threat, since there is a sense in which it is obviously true and another in which it appears to me to be obviously false. The obviously true sense is that there are people in the Hamas leadership who are doing what they can to achieve the end of the existence of Israel. So that is, by definition, an existential threat. However, the phrase “existential threat” is usually used to mean something a lot stronger, namely a genuine danger that someone or something will cease to exist. When we talk for example of AI being an existential threat, we mean not just that some language model has blurted out that it would like to destroy the human race, but rather that if we are not careful then there is a genuine possibility that the human race could be destroyed by a superintelligent AI.

Is Hamas an existential threat in this stronger sense? Clearly not. It is a substantial problem for Israel of course, and it revealed itself to be a very much more substantial problem on October 7th. But it is quite clear that it would have no chance of conquering and dismantling the state of Israel. Perhaps it could get somewhere with the help of Iran, though full conquest seems inconceivable, since Israel could respond in a devastating way, and if it appeared to be losing the US would undoubtedly step in. In any case the real problem would then be Iran and not Hamas.

So the threat from Hamas is not existential, but it is still extraordinarily serious if there is any danger of a repeat of October 7th. What then would a better response from Israel have been? Remember that I am not aiming for a response that is free of problems — just a response that is better than attempting to destroy Hamas, with all the consequences that that necessarily entails.

In that spirit, I would like to consider the option of doing nothing. By this I don’t mean literally nothing, but I mean nothing military of an offensive nature — in particular, no bombing of Gaza. Suppose that Israel had responded with maximum restraint on October 7th. What would the consequences have been? Again, any answer to this necessarily involves large doses of speculation, but I think some guesses are pretty safe.

On the plus side, no civilians in Gaza would have been killed. There may well be debate about what constitutes a civilian in Gaza — I’ll come back to that point — but there can be no doubt that even with the most restrictive possible definition of “civilian” there have been very significant civilian casualties. Over 400 Israeli soldiers killed since October 7th would also still be alive. There would have been a huge diplomatic gain for Israel compared with what we have actually seen: instead of almost immediately losing the sympathy of a large proportion of the world for October 7th, Israel would have kept it. It would also have sent an incredible signal to the Palestinian people, saying, “As you well know, we could respond to this attack in a devastating way. For the time being we choose not to continue the cycle of violence. Your move.” For Hamas on the other hand, the attacks would have been a diplomatic disaster (maybe not in all countries, but in the countries it needs to persuade if it is to advance its aims). A combination of these points is that doing nothing would have avoided the situation we have now where everybody still alive in Gaza has lost loved ones, and many people have suffered trauma and life-changing injuries, which will surely make it a fertile ground for future recruitment by Hamas and other militant groups. It also seems likely that more hostages would have survived. I don’t want to discuss that last point in detail, but if my understanding is correct from various news articles I have read, many Israelis, including families of several of the hostages, would agree.

On the minus side, doing nothing might have emboldened Hamas and encouraged it to plan further attacks. But how much of a danger would this really have been? After 9/11, there have been no further examples of jets being hijacked and flown into buildings, which is much more to do with security measures in airports and aeroplanes than with “wars on terror”. If a fraction of the money used to bomb Gaza had instead been used to set up defence systems near the Gaza border, to take steps to ensure that any future attacks would be met swiftly and decisively, and to improve the intelligence that failed so badly, then it could have been made far harder for Hamas to carry out a repeat attack.

In the unlikely event that Israel ends up successful in its war aims and removes the threat from Hamas by completely destroying it, what will the balance sheet look like? As a result of the war, over 50,000 Palestinians will have been killed — in fact, probably many more since the job is by no means finished — and the Gaza strip will have been rendered virtually uninhabitable. With the alternative course of action, no Palestinians would have been killed, but there would still be a threat of attacks by Hamas. But if Israel had concentrated its resources on making such attacks much more difficult, the attacks would have probably ended up being very infrequent, and much less deadly when they did occur. I find it unlikely that as many as 1000 Israeli lives would be lost as a result of the continued operation of Hamas in a hypothetical world where Israel had not responded militarily to October 7th. So my estimate of Israel’s acceptable casualty ratio is that it is at least 50. (Note that the deaths on October 7th are not part of the calculation of this ratio, because they have already happened: I am talking about the future effects of different possible responses.)

Here’s a summary of that calculation, to make it as clear as possible what my assumptions are (some of which can certainly be contested).

Destroying Hamas necessarily involves destroying most of Gaza and killing Gazans in the sorts of numbers they have been killed (though not the actual numbers — it is quite clear that many of the deaths have been unnecessary even if you accept the need to destroy Hamas).
Not responding militarily at all but instead shoring up defences would over the years have led to a very small fraction — probably on the order of 2% at most — of that number of deaths of Israelis.
Therefore, Israel’s acceptable casualty rate is probably at least 50.

A gruesome detail to add here is that Israeli academic lawyers have in the past thought about the question of how many Palestinians it is justified to kill to save the life of one Israeli. This is an excerpt from an article by Maya Wind on work done in Israeli universities to create a legal and philosophical underpinning for the Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

In 2002, Kasher and Yadlin joined a committee of military lawyers and academics that came together to formulate Israeli laws of war concerning targeted assassinations. Reportedly, committee members debated what number of Palestinian civilians it would be ethical to kill—in pursuit of a targeted assassination of a Palestinian defined, by Israel, as a militant—all to save a single Israeli. Answers varied between “zero” to “as many as needed,” and the committee average was 3.14 Palestinian civilian lives for one Israeli.

Something to reflect on next time pi day comes around.

Some potential counterarguments

Doing nothing was not a realistic option.

An obvious argument against what I have just suggested is that not responding militarily to October 7th was not an option, because it was politically impossible. And indeed, I am not naive enough to think that Netanyahu, or any other Israeli leader for that matter, would ever have responded in such a way. Although I considered the do-nothing option merely as a way of establishing a lower bound on the acceptable casualty ratio, I accept that my argument would be stronger if I put forward an alternative course of action that could conceivably have happened.

I don’t want to concede this point too fully, since saying “X did something bad but there was absolutely no way that X was ever not going to do that bad thing” doesn’t constitute a defence of X. But “X did something bad but there is absolutely no way that anyone in X’s position would not have done that bad thing” is a stronger defence of X, and I am mindful of one of the IHRA’s examples of antisemitic behaviour:

Applying double standards by requiring of it [=Israel] a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

And indeed an example springs to mind of another democratic nation, the US, with the full support of my own country, the UK, that responded to 9/11 in a somewhat similar way: by starting two wars that led to large numbers of deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq and may well have increased deaths from terrorism round the world. There are significant differences between those wars and the war in Gaza, but they did also involve high acceptable casualty ratios — dropping lots of bombs before a ground invasion in order to minimize casualties on the side of the US-led coalition is an example of this. But I am not applying double standards: I regard those wars as very wrong as well, not least because of their high ratios, and am ashamed of the part my country played, especially in the decision to go to war in Iraq.

But even within the realms of the politically possible, there are responses that would have been far better than what Israel’s response has actually been. For example, Israel could have stopped the war much earlier and restricted itself from that point on to a few targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders when the opportunity arose. It could have refrained from destroying hospitals, schools, universities, residential buildings, mosques, libraries, cultural archives, and agriculture, or at least greatly reduced the amount of destruction and left Gaza broadly functional. That might have been difficult for Netanyahu, but not obviously impossible for the country as a whole. The difference between a do-something-but-not-too-much option like that, and what it will need to do to destroy Hamas is still tens of thousands of deaths, so we still end up with an acceptable casualty ratio of dozens of Palestinians to one Israeli.

There is plenty of other evidence that Israel is ready to accept a high casualty ratio. One example among many is the rescue of hostages from the Nuseirat refugee camp, where four Israeli hostages were rescued, but hundreds of Palestinians were killed in the process.

The Palestinians are not “innocent civilians”.

Another argument, which one often sees, is that a large proportion of the Palestinian casualties are combatants in the war (or militants, or terrorists, or whatever word you like to use), and also that polls have shown that a majority, sometimes quite a large majority, of Palestinians supported the October 7th attacks. Implicit in this argument is that there are not many genuinely innocent civilians, and therefore that the deaths there have been are more acceptable. I have even seen this argument being used to justify the killing of children — even 12-year-olds can be combatants, it appears.

I deplore anybody who celebrated the attacks on October 7th, but the death penalty is not an appropriate punishment for somebody who expresses deplorable thoughts. As for combatants, how should that be defined? A war in which one side bombs the other side to rubble and the other side sends in a few rockets that are easily intercepted is extremely asymmetric. The people firing the rockets are clearly combatants in a meaningful sense, but there cannot be many of those, and the rest, however ready they may be to fight, won’t actually have much opportunity to do so, so in what sense are they combatants? Let us distinguish the following classes of people.

Those who are actually fighting offensively, e.g. by firing rockets into Israel.
Those who are fighting defensively, such as snipers attacking Israeli soldiers within Gaza.
Those who are not actually fighting, but who are armed and would put up fierce resistance if they encountered Israeli soldiers.
Those who are not fighters at all, but who are involved in various kinds of logistical support for those who are.
Those who are not involved in the fighting in any way but are in favour of it.

Which of these classes of people are somehow “more legitimate” to kill? Killing people in class 1 could be regarded as acting in self defence (the fact that almost none of the rockets actually kill anyone weakens that argument, but it is difficult to argue against the view that somebody who is actually firing rockets into Israel is asking for it). If destroying Hamas is the war aim, then it may well be necessary to kill people in classes 2 to 4, but since the question I am considering is whether destroying Hamas is a legitimate war aim, to use that as a justification is circular. The relevant question here is whether those in classes 2 to 4 would be combatants at all if Israel were not attacking Gaza. If not, then the alternatives being compared are one where Israel attacks Gaza, turning large numbers of people into what one might call defensive combatants (and surely Gaza, just as much as Israel, has a right to defend itself), and another where Israel does not attack Gaza, or attacks it much less, and those people go about their normal business and do not attack Israel. There might also be an intermediate class of people who, if not killed by Israel now, would at some later stage go on to attack Israel, but killing someone for a crime they have not yet committed is morally problematic, to put it mildly. (As it happens, I have just re-watched Minority Report.)

There is room for argument about this, but I do not see an important moral difference between killing somebody who puts up no defence at all, and killing somebody who was minding their own business until they came under attack but at that point fought back. So I regard casualties in classes 2 to 4 as avoidable deaths of people who would have been innocent civilians if not attacked. (For comparison, consider a Ukrainian man who joins the army in order to fight against the Russians. Such a man is a military target in a sense, but if Russia had not attacked, he would not have been, so his death is not more justifiable than that of a civilian.)

The responsibility for the deaths lies with Hamas and not with Israel.

A short answer to this objection is that it is irrelevant to my analysis above. I have considered two responses that Israel could have taken to October 7th, and judged that one can justify the war aim of destroying Hamas only if one accepts that an Israeli life is worth something like 50 Palestinian lives, a view that I personally find morally repugnant.

However, since some people argue that they regard Palestinian lives as of equal value to Israeli lives, but blame Hamas for the deaths of Palestinians, let me discuss that argument.

How might one present the argument in more detail? One would point out that the deaths would not have occurred if Hamas had not acted in various ways. Top of the list of these actions is October 7th, without which there would have been no war in Gaza. Also high on the list is the fact, which I have mentioned already several times, that Hamas operatives dress as civilians, have headquarters in civilian buildings, and in general make it hard to damage it without killing many civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure.

What is the underlying moral principle here? It seems to be “A is responsible for X if A took an action P without which X would not have happened.” But as many philosophers have pointed out, this is too simple. A famous example called Smullyan’s paradox is the story of a man who is about to take a long trek across a desert. He has two enemies, A and B, one of whom makes a small hole in his water bottle and the other of whom poisons his water. The man dies of thirst in the desert. But if A had not made the hole, then the man would have died anyway (of poisoning) and if B had not poisoned the water then the man would have died anyway (of thirst). Since A and B clearly do have some responsibility for the man’s death, we deduce that “A took an action P without which X would not have happened” is not a necessary condition for A to be responsible for X.

It is also easy to see that it is not a sufficient condition either. If I unwisely answer back to a bully who then beats me to a pulp, then it may be true that I took an action without which my being beaten to a pulp would not have happened. But it is clearly wrong to argue on those grounds that I was responsible for my being beaten up. (I hope it is clear, but I should probably state explicitly that this example is meant merely to illustrate an abstract point about moral responsibility and counterfactual conditionals. It should not be taken as a suggestion that October 7th was a relatively trivial offence in the way that answering back to a bully would be.)

What this second example illustrates is the simple point that very often we are in a situation where an adverse consequence X would not have happened without more than one action having taken place. Yes, if I had held my tongue then I would not have been beaten up, but I would also not have been beaten up if the bully had not swung his fists at my face. In the case of the deaths in Gaza, they would not have happened without October 7th, and many of them would not have happened if Hamas had made themselves easier targets, but they would also not have happened if Israel had not dropped a huge number of bombs on Gaza.

In such cases we have to talk about shared responsibility. How should we apportion blame for the deaths between Israel and Hamas? One possibility is to attribute 100% of the blame to the party that acted first. But that is in general an unsatisfactory principle — for example, it would lead to my being entirely blamed for being beaten up by the bully. It also leads to arguments about whether October 7th was itself a response to previous acts by Israel.

I myself favour an approach where we don’t have to find two numbers that add up to 100, but instead consider each party individually and assume likely behaviour by the other party. I have already considered Israel in some detail, so let me now consider Hamas (as I promised to do much earlier).

Hamas must have known that October 7th would be met with a devastating response. Perhaps some members of Hamas actually thought that they would be able to conquer Israel, but even they must have recognised that there was a significant probability that that would not be the result. So Hamas deliberately took an action that was highly likely to have terrible consequences for Palestinians, as well, of course, as quite definitely having terrible consequences for a large number of Israelis. It is difficult to balance these negative consequences against any hoped-for positive consequences, partly because it is hard to say exactly what Hamas’s objectives were, and partly because some of those objectives were likely to be ones that would not in fact be positive. But however one looks at it, the probable consequences of attacking Israel on October 7th were extremely negative, both for Israelis and Palestinians (though I would guess that the ferocity of Israel’s response has exceeded Hamas’s expectations), and the probable consequences of not doing so were much less negative. Therefore, Hamas should indeed receive a large amount of blame for the deaths that have occurred in Gaza, in addition to unequivocal condemnation for October 7th.

But that does not, according to this approach, let Israel off the hook, since there is the possibility that two parties can both be responsible for something bad. Here is another example of that principle. Suppose that I were to carry out a racist attack in the full knowledge that it would be likely to lead to riots, and that the riots did indeed occur. Then my attack would be terrible and I would certainly be to blame for the riots, but that would not give carte blanche to the rioters: they would also be to blame for the riots.

To summarize: my position is that the responsibility for (most of) the deaths in Gaza lies with Hamas and with Israel. It’s not one or the other. Israel may have responded to October 7th in a largely predictable way, but that does not make it right.

Israel has a right to defend itself.

Here I will be brief. Yes, every country has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself. For that reason, I do not see many people objecting to Israel’s Iron Dome. But what counts as defence? This is a question that lawyers and philosophers have of course considered in great detail, and about which I am not at all an expert. But one does not have to be an expert to see that the following principle is flawed: an action by A against B is justified if it reduces a threat from B against A.

To give an example, if I am sitting down and a delinquent child is clearly about to aim a punch at my face, I can reduce that threat by punching the child hard in the face before it punches me. Why is that not justified? Because there are much better ways of dealing with the situation, such as taking evasive action and then reporting the child to its parents.

I have argued above that Israel had far less harmful ways of defending itself against possible future attacks by Hamas, and therefore I conclude that what it actually chose to do is not justifiable on the grounds of self-defence.

What about boycotts?

The question of whether it is right to sign a letter in support of a boycott feels embarrassingly trivial compared with the question of whether (given the circumstances) it is right to flatten Gaza. However, the two go together. Above, I have tried to explain why I believe that Israel is wrong to pursue the aim of destroying Hamas by force, and that is without even considering all the stories of wrongs that make no obvious contribution to that war aim. But does that justify my own tiny response of signing a letter that calls for Israeli IMO contestants to be asked to compete as individuals rather than as an official team?

The most obvious argument against that measure, and other similar measures, is that it affects the wrong people. For all I know, the members of the Israeli team are strongly against the war in Gaza, but even if they are not, they are certainly not responsible for it, and cannot do anything to stop it.

Leaving aside the irony of worrying about hurting the wrong people when thousands of Palestinian children have been killed, maimed or orphaned, I would argue simply that competing at the IMO as an individual instead of as a member of a team is not a huge loss. I myself competed in the IMO in 1981. I can’t remember how the British team did, and I’m sure that if the British had had to compete as individuals, we would have added up our scores to see where we would have come, and that would have been almost as satisfying. It’s a little bit different now, as the closing ceremony has become more elaborate and there is more emphasis on the team aspect, but let’s face it, we are not talking about huge levels of suffering here, and one might hope that any Israeli competitors who are against the war would understand and support the decision. There is also the point that the hurting-the-wrong-people argument applies equally to Russia and I have not seen any objections to Russia’s treatment at the IMO.

Another argument is that a boycott of that kind would have very little effect. And that is undoubtedly true. It is a symbolic gesture, and, just as with Russia, it is unlikely to make any difference to how the war continues to develop. However, it is a contribution to a much larger chorus of disapproval, and one can hope that even if the Israeli government is unlikely to change its course now, the aggregate level of disapproval will have some effect on what a future Israeli government would consider itself able to do.

What I have written in the bulk of this post has been an argument for the strong claim that even if Israel had restricted itself to the aim of destroying Hamas by force, that would have been wrong. However, there is plenty of reason to suppose that Israel (by which I mean the Israeli government, with the support of many Israelis — see the end of this article for evidence of this support — and the opposition of others) has aims that go beyond that, which is relevant to my decision to sign the letter, as is the fact that close to 1000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7th and that settler violence seems to go largely unpunished. Whether or not Israel’s actions should be called genocide does not affect my argument above, but I can’t help thinking that if the Israeli government did want to commit genocide, then it would have to keep at least some level of plausible deniability and so would go about it in much the way we are actually seeing: as far as possible it would explain its actions as necessary self-defence, anything that couldn’t be explained as self-defence would be denounced as lies, the media would be excluded from Gaza, and so on.

Those who are offended by the suggestion that Israel is committing genocide tend to argue that accusations of genocide are ignoring the question of intent. Yes, they say, Israel may have killed a lot of Palestinians and destroyed a lot of buildings, but the death and destruction were unfortunate consequences of the war rather than one of its objectives. Rather than argue in detail against this, I refer the reader to what Lee Mordechai writes about intent in his analysis of whether Israel is committing genocide. Roughly, his argument is that while genocide is not an explicit policy, acts and statements of a genocidal nature are tolerated to an extent that implies some degree of intent at a high level of government. (His last update was in June 2024, before the current policy of cutting off food to Gaza.)

Conclusion

I have tried to argue that Israel’s decision to try to destroy Hamas by force was wrong. This is a stronger statement than the statement that Israel’s actions in Gaza since October 7th have been wrong, since I am arguing that even if Israel had made much greater efforts to avoid civilian casualties (in the way that I would like to define them), the decision would still have been wrong. For some people, this conclusion will be too obvious to be worth arguing for. If you are in that category, then this post is not aimed at you. Rather, I am trying to explain my views to people who share my basic values, that all lives are equal and that actions should largely be judged by their consequences, but nevertheless support the war in Gaza and feel that a large part of the criticism of Israel is unjust.

Somebody I’ve had in mind while writing this is Scott Aaronson. Scott, if you ever read this, then first of all, thank you for taking the time. I too have tried to stay as high as I can in Paul Graham’s disagreement hierarchy, so I hope that if you disagree with me, which you surely will, it will be easy to pinpoint why. I hope also that any disagreements will be mainly factual rather than ethical. (I think the most likely difference will be our assessment of the level of threat that Hamas actually poses to Israel.) Secondly, I find it striking that what you said you would ultimately like to see (at one point late on in this blog post) is pretty much exactly what I would like to see, though I would have worded it differently. (I also don’t think that embrace of women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights, much as I would like to see it, should be a precondition for a two-state solution, but perhaps you don’t either.)

I want the Palestinians to have a state, comprising the West Bank and Gaza, with a capital in East Jerusalem. I want Israel to uproot all West Bank settlements that prevent such a state. I want this to happen the instant there arises a Palestinian leadership genuinely committed to peace—one that embraces liberal values and rejects martyr values, in everything from textbooks to street names.

And I want more. I want the new Palestinian state to be as prosperous and free and educated as modern Germany and Japan are. I want it to embrace women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights and the rest of the modern package, so that “Queers for Palestine” would no longer be a sick joke. I want the new Palestine to be as intertwined with Israel, culturally and economically, as the US and Canada are.

I only wish I knew how we could get from here to there.