Seven lessons seven months after October 7

It’s been seven months since the massacres of October 7, which started the war between Israel and Hamas that has claimed thousands of lives and dominated the headlines.

What have we learned over these seven months?

By “we,” I mean people interested in making sense of events with care for the people suffering, appreciation for the complexity, and a view unobstructed by ideological blinders.

Here are seven lessons. Each lesson will resonate with many readers and upset others. Together, they represent my best stab at a fiercely nuanced take on a complex and heartbreaking situation.

Lesson #1: Blind condemnation of Israel’s actions is polarizing and unhelpful. So is blind support. Both interfere with clearheaded thinking. But they are not equivalent in tone or impact.

(Note: edited to more fairly characterize the difference between these two groups).

The trouble with extreme polarization is that people stop using their minds. That’s been happening with this war. People who take strong positions speak with certainty and defend with ferocity. Moral certitude trumps reasoning. Tribal alliances block listening. This makes for clouded thinking. It also pressures everyone else to take sides or risk losing friendships and status.

Pause. Some of you may be reading this and thinking, “Amiel, you are misguided. The proper moral position in this war is obvious. Your nuance simply justifies immoral action.”

Does this capture your thoughts? If so, please stop reading here. This essay isn’t for you. It’s for people wrestling with the moral, political, and spatial complexity. Because this war involves not a single oppressor and single victim, but groups with competing moral claims.

• Blind condemnation of Israel. I’ve been stunned by the number of people who are absolutely certain that Israel is committing genocide. I’m not referring here to scholars or other thoughtful people who understand the standards for genocide, evaluate the evidence, and develop an assessment by comparing the evidence to the standards. Nor am I referring to anyone who realizes the seriousness of the charge but makes it because they’ve formed such a grounded assessment. Instead, when I say “blind condemnation” I’m referring to people who casually use this word — which by its nature as an assessment can’t be true or false, but instead grounded or ungrounded — as objective fact, uncontroversial, and a matter of consensus. This is mistaken on many grounds and offensive for many reasons (more on these points below), but what interests me is this: why are these people so certain? Why do they use the language of genocide with utter confidence and more than a little smugness? (Again, I’m not talking about people who have thoughtfully weighed evidence). I suspect a mix of reasons. For progressive students and activists: ignorance of the standards for assessing genocide, ignorance about or willful blindness of Israel’s military aims, ignorance about or willfull blindness of the unprecedented landscape of war, and denial or minimization of the October 7 massacres. For Arabs and Muslims, add in trauma at witnessing the devastation in Gaza, which, like all trauma, often blocks critical thinking.
• Blind support of Israel. There is much to say about the American population as a whole, but let me focus here on American Jews. A significant portion of American Jews — and the percentage increases with people’s ages — defend Israel’s actions without qualification. Some harbor private criticism but feel disloyal making them public. I’ve called these Home Team Jews. Others are convinced that Israel is entirely in the right. I’ve called these All-In Jews, and some can be as smug and certain as people blindly condemning Israel. What these subsets of American Jewry have in common are trauma from October 7 and a commitment to standing up for a country and people being globally villified.

Blind condemnation and blind support of Israel are both unhelpful, but they have not been equivalent in tactics or impact. The level of aggression and vitriol in the condemnation of Israel has reached astronomical proportions. Many protests include lionization of Hamas, calls for more October 7 attacks, and support for “globalizing the intifada.” College students are being intimidated, attacked, excluded, and condemned for being Jewish. Restaurants are being boycotted or vandalized for having Jewish owners. In many progressive circles, if you won’t use the word “genocide” to refer to Israel’s actions, your presence is no longer welcome. I’m less concerned about what we call these actions — ignorance, immaturity, Jew hatred, or antisemitism — than I am about their impact. (More on this below in my discussion of the genocide accusation).

In contrast, although Israel’s blind supporters can be rigid in their arguments and use various means to discourage dissent, they’re acting differently. Until the recent counterprotest at UCLA, which was violent and ugly, they have not physically threatened or harassed Muslim students or anyone else. Nor, until that event, have they physically intimidated people who disagreed with them. Nor, with the exception of a small number of far-right extremists in Israel, are they celebrating the deaths of Palestinians. This doesn’t make blind supporters right, respectful, or pleasant to be around if you disagree. But with the exception I’ve mentioned, they have not crossed the line into physical intimidation, violence, and vandalism as have many people blindly condemning Israel.

These differences make a difference.

Lesson #2: Israel’s cause was just.

(Note: edited to make explicit what was previously implicit: the distinction between a just cause and just conduct)

According to ethicist Michael Walzer, originator of the just war theory, the October 7 massacres provided a moral justification for Israel to respond militarily. Walzer offers this analogy: “If I am attacked on the street, I can defend myself. And whoever steps in and comes to my aid is acting just as justly.” Hamas not only butchered, burned, and abused 1,200 Israelis, but it promised to repeat the act over and over.

Israel’s decision to use military force was an act of self-defense. In writing this, I’m not saying that Israel’s conduct of the war has been entirely just. In Lesson #5 I write about the war cabinet’s catastrophic blunders, some of which may involve war crimes. What I’m arguing is that the cause is just.

People who deny or minimize the horrors of October 7 will, of course, never consider Israel’s cause to be just. But for the rest of us, the motive of self-defense should be pretty obvious. This is not one of those times in history when a powerful nation (e.g. Germany in the 1930s; Russia today) invents its own victimhood to justify unlawful and immoral wars. Not in the least. The horrors were real. The enemy was real. And the enemy was mere miles from Israel and determined to strike again.

Lesson #3: Israel’s conduct of the war has been better than its fiercest critics claim and its moral cause more just than they will permit.

The situation in Gaza is far more logistically and morally complex than is acknowledged by Israel’s loudest critics, particularly those insistent on using the term genocide.

The key fact is that Israel is fighting an army that operates in an underground city. Hamas built over 300 miles of tunnels in a very small area of land. In the history of human warfare, there is no precedent for this. How do you fight against an enemy that is deeply underground? It’s a nearly impossible situation. Complicating matters is the fact that Hamas (a) wants innocent Palestinians to die to bolster its political standing and evoke condemnation of Israel, (b) intermingles with civilians when above ground, (c) built exactly zero bomb shelters for civilians, (d) has declared civilians in Gaza the responsibility of the UN, not of the Gaza government that Hamas oversees, (e) has long had as its mission the genocidal destruction of Israel, and (f) has declared its intention to repeat October 7 “again and again.”

There is a reason Israel dropped so many 2,000 lb bombs on Gaza. It wasn’t to kill Palestinians. It was to destroy tunnels underneath Palestinians and the terrorists operating there. Unfortunately, the tunnels were deeper and harder to reach than Israel expected. This doesn’t justify the human cost of the bombing, which I’ll get to, but it makes clear the rationale: not murdering civilians but destroying tunnels and killing murderers.

People accusing Israel of “genocide” either overlook these facts or don’t care. In the words of Walzer, “There is no genocidal intent on the Israeli side. Some members of the Israeli government want to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza and relocate them. But fortunately, they are not the decisive force in government.”

Lesson #4: Although not genocidal, Israel’s conduct of the war warrants criticism even from people who love Israel.

Back in November, I advocated for Israel to take a counterterrorism approach to the war. I thought this would be a better approach both strategically and morally than massive bombings, a seige, and a full ground invasion. (Meanwhile, I argued, given the atrocities of October 7 and Hamas’s determination to repeat those events, a unilateral ceasefire would have been immoral and stupid).

My argument went like this: First, an all-out war was walking into a trap set by Hamas. They wanted Israel to invade, kill Palestinians, and bolster Hamas’s reputation in the Arab world. Second, the goal of completely destroying Hamas was unrealistic, never clearly defined, and likely to end in failure. Limiting Hamas’s killing capacities was a better goal. Third, Israel had no plan for who would govern Gaza after the war. This partly reflected fuzzyheaded thinking of traumatized leaders and, as I later learned, partly reflected political calculus: Netanyahu didn’t want to re-occupy Gaza but if he said this publicly, the far-right members of his coalition would push him out of office. Fourth, a counterterrorism approach would save innocent lives, which would be morally preferable, better for Israel’s global standing, and less likely to create future Hamas recruits.

So, again, the idea was to act strongly in self-defense using counterterrorism, intelligence, surprise, targeted assassinations, and, perhaps above all, patience.

One thing that Israeli leaders did not have after October 7 was patience. The trauma and gruesomeness of the massacres activated a core part of the Israeli psyche: Take action. Protect yourself. When you get hit, hit back quickly. And never let yourself be vulnerable again. To paraphrase Yossi Klein Halevi, Israelis would rather be despised than pitied.

The motivation to act quickly to reduce vulnerability was understandable, but it created distorted behaviors, especially when coupled with the moral corruption and political calculations of Netanyahu.

And so Israel did what I feared it would: continue the non-stop massive bombings and make a full-scale ground invasion.

Things have not turned out well.

Although Israel has eliminated substantial portions of Hamas, it has neither destroyed Hamas nor returned the hostages. These two core aims of the war remain unfulfilled.

And the cost of Israel’s approach to the war — a war that, I must emphasize, was just in its cause — has been enormous in terms of Palestinian suffering and global reputation.

A brief aside. When I imagine my Israel friends reading this section, I picture them thinking, “Amiel, how could you criticize us? Surely you see we had no other choice.” My response is this:

1. I’m not criticizing the Israeli people. I’m criticizing Netanyahu and the war cabinet. They made dumb and catastrophic decisions that don’t reflect the deep wishes of an Israeli majority, at those not blinded by trauma. With the exception of right-wing extremists, who sadly are growing in number, the majority of Israelis were not well represented by how the government fought this war.
2. Israel had other choices. Its leadership chose this path. Yes, Israel had a right and a duty to fight a war. Yet, as I wrote back in December, “Hamas started the war but did not force Israel to choose this war in this way.”

Lesson #5: Israel’s war cabinet made five catastrophic blunders.

What catastrophic blunders has Israel made in this war? In an article in late February called “How Israel’s war went wrong,” Zach Beauchamp described many based on his interviews with military and foreign policy experts. Here are five:

1. Israel’s original aim to completely destroy Hamas was vague and maximalist. This set the stage for all the brutal war tactics that would follow.
2. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has long had the world’s strictest policies for reducing civilian deaths. (Most of Israel’s critics ignore this or claim that it’s all propaganda). It abandoned or at least loosened that doctrine in this war. The IDF greenlighted attacks on civilian targets that in previous conflicts it would have avoided. In other words, it was far less discriminating in its attacks. These attacks didn’t constitute genocide — and the civilian-to-combatant ratio is relatively low (2:1 or 3:1 versus 7:1 when the United States fought in Iraq) — but some, if not many, may have met the definition of war crime or crime against humanity.
3. Israel’s siege on day three of the war was a moral and political disaster. The reason it failed is that the key condition for making a siege work was absent. The political leadership of the sieged people needs to care about those people’s lives such that it is willing to surrender to save them. Hamas didn’t care about Palestinian lives, so it didn’t surrender. People starved, and Israel looked monstrous. (Secondary point: the siege was incomplete anyhow because Israel didn’t control the Gaza/Egypt border in Rafah until the past week). Now, I know the two main counterarguments. One, Hamas regularly hoards aid for its own forces rather than share with the civilian population. Two, it uses aid trucks to smuggle in weapons. So the siege wasn’t about starving civilians but disabling Hamas. Still, the siege caused enormous human suffering. In my assessment, this outweighs any positive benefits Israel gained from strangleholding Hamas’s energy, food, and other resources.
4. Israel didn’t given Palestinian civilians time or space to flee, especially at the onset of the ground offensive in the northern Gaza Strip. It told Palestinians to travel south but gave them only 24 hours to move. And Israel never seems to have considered building places for Palestinians to sleep out of harm’s way. If this sounds like an impossible dream in an untenable situation, then you may not have spent much time studying Israel’s history of ingenuity or its recent emergence as Startup Nation. The Israeli people regularly do impossible things, but its leadership did not give them this opportunity.
5. Israel’s approach to the war — coupled with a pre-existing political movement of people devoted to condemning Israel at every opportunity — has made it an international pariah. The tragic nature of this is hard to overstate. Seven months ago, 1,200 Israelis were savagely mutilated, burned, raped, tortured, and subject to barbaric psychological manipulation. Today, their country is despised as never before. Some of this was unavoidable because Israel-haters would’ve used the word genocide regardless of Israel’s approach, but the full extent of this global villification did not have to happen.

Lesson #6: Defining the war as genocide by Israel — and nothing more — is ungrounded because it ignores October 7, Israel’s moral claims, military aims, and the unprecedented landscape. It also has dangerous consequences.

(Note: updated to (a) Distinguish between people making careful assessments using standards and evidence and people making blind accusations and (b) Clarify that what’s most troubling and dangerous is accusing Israel of genocide without acknowleding its moral claims and military aims.)

All wars, both just and unjust, are tragic and gruesome. Far too often, countries at war commit war crimes. These crimes can be horrendous, sometimes unimaginably so. But war is not a war crime. And a war crime is not the same thing as genocide.

When you accuse a country of genocide and ignore the primary reasons it is fighting, you are making a very specific claim about its motivations. You are saying that the country’s intent is to destroy an ethnic group, in whole or in part. Not to defend itself and its people from outside aggression. Not to save lives and reduce suffering. Not even to kill enemy combatants. But simply to destroy a people, in whole or in part.

The motivations behind genocide are purely destructive, entirely malicious, and without any moral value whatsoever.

In contrast, when you‘re fighting a war for just causes and are indiscriminate or insufficiently discriminate in your tactics, you may kill unnecessary numbers of civilians, including innocent children. This is a tragedy. It is heartbreaking. And in certain instances it may constitute war crimes. But this behavior is not genocide.

In genocide, your aim is to kill innocent civilians. That’s the whole point of genocide: to destroy a people in whole or in part. This is not the case in a just war. In a just war, your aim is to kill enemy combatants, and you’re doing this to protect your own people. You don’t want to kill civilians. Yes, their deaths are horrible, but they aren’t your aim. Instead, they are the tragic result of your methods.

People accusing Israel of genocide without honoring its moral claims and military aims aren’t saying, “Your country suffered an unbearable event, and your military is fighting a war to prevent this event from happening again. In so doing, they are committing crimes and should be held accountable.”

They’re not saying this at all.

With the exception of a small number of scholars and nuanced thinkers, people accusing Israel of genocide, include most protesters on and off college campuses, are making these false assertions and ungrounded assessments:

• Israel’s bombs have no legitimate military aims. They’re not trying to destroy tunnels, missile launchers, command centers, or any other Hamas infrastructure. All of these targets are an Israeli fabrication, a mirage, a lie. The purpose of the bombs is purely to murder Palestinians.
• Israel’s soldiers have no intention to kill enemy combatants. They’re not interested in eliminating terrorists who burned their parents, tortured their sisters, or mutilated their friends. They don’t care about preventing future atrocities against their people. Instead, Israeli soldiers want to murder Palestinians.
• This is a typical landscape for war. There is no underground city where Hamas combatants hide in tunnels. There are no missile launchers, command centers, or armaments integrated into heavily populated civilian areas.
• This is a typical enemy. Hamas is doing everything it can to separate its militants and tools of warfare from innocent children and other civilians. It isn’t intentionally using civilians as human shields. It has built hundreds of underground bomb shelters for civilians. And it hasn’t redirected food and humanitarian supplies intended for civilians into its underground city for militants.
• There is no legitimate reason for Israel to be fighting this war to begin with. It’s all about murdering innocent Palestinians, and the more the better.

These assessments are ungrounded, and these assertions are false. The fact that so many people are explicitly or implicity making them is disturbing. It strips Israel of any claim to have just cause for entering the war. It treats Israel as the devil, pure evil — a state and nation without any redeeming value.

It’s a bit like the old lie that Jews murder Christian children to harvest their organs. Never happened, but boy was that blood libel effective at stirring outrage against Jews.

As is the current accusation of genocide when not accompanied by an acknowledgment of Israeli’s moral claims and military aims.

Is it any wonder, then, that Jewish students in the United States and around the world are being threatened, intimidated, and physically assaulted? Is it any surprise that hateful posters are showing up at anti-Israel protests or that Jewish students and faculty are being told to leave campuses for their own safety?

I’m not saying that everyone accusing Israel of genocide wants to harm Jews. I’m saying that words have consequences regardless of your intentions. Accusing a people of genocide without acknowledging their moral claims or military aims has dangerous consequences.

Lesson #7: Israel’s harshest critics act as though Hamas has no agency.

People loudly protesting Israel’s actions — and, in many cases, its existence — are doing so for a variety of reasons. One thing they have in common other than smug certainty is a deep commitment to a particular view of Hamas. To these protesters, Hamas has no agency or power. It’s an organization with no ability to influence what happens in Gaza or anywhere else. Why do I say this?

Because of four behaviors of these protesters.

• They ask nothing of Hamas. When they demand a ceasefire, it’s Israel, and only Israel, they expect to take action. Yet it is Hamas who has the power today to end the war by laying down its arms and releasing hostages. In fact, this is what happens in most wars when one side is being utterly destroyed. They surrender. Hamas won’t surrender, and none of these protestors are asking it to.
• They ignore Hamas when speaking of death counts. According to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, 35,000 people have died in Gaza since October 7. The IDF says that it has killed 13,000 Hamas operatives and their allies. In other words, one third of the people killed are terrorists. And then there are Palestinians killed by Hamas — also not distinguished from the overall count. Less obvious but equally important is the fact that the 35,000 figure includes roughly 4,000 people who would have died during this period regardless of the war due partly to the dreadful living conditions created by a Hamas regime that funnels humanitarian aid into tunnels and killing machinery. Now, death count data is difficult to verify, and the Israeli figures themselves may not be accurate, but the fact remains that far fewer than 35,000 people have died due to Israel’s actions. Yet you would never know any of this from listening to protesters cite death counts — or, to be fair, from most journalistic accounts, which are shockingly lazy and plagued by ignorance of basic math.
• They forget October 7 ever happened. Accusing Israel of genocide is much easier when you conveniently block from your awareness why Israel is in Gaza to begin with: the October 7 massacres committed by Hamas. Omitting those horrific acts is treating Hamas as a non-entity, irrelevant to understanding anything happening in Gaza.
• Many of them deny what Hamas has done. The protesters who claim that Israel was responsible for the atrocities of October — a devious act to pre-empt a war — may represent an extreme fringe. Yet a remarkable number of people, including many leading women’s organizations, either ignore the sexual violence Hamas committed against Israeli women or, contrary to every other stance taken by the MeToo movement, claim there is insufficient evidence it happened. It’s the height of incongruity.

Denying Hamas’s agency is, ironically, an act of condescension. It’s treating these human beings — people with parents, friends, life stories, and reasons for choosing the path of violence — as less than human, as children or savages incapable of making decisions or taking responsibility for their actions. This is not only condescending, but it’s dangerous. Letting Hamas off the hook is an evasion of moral responsibility. To borrow a criticism that some readers lobbied at me last fall, it is acting as an apologist for genocide. Because that’s what Hamas has begun and, if given the opportunity, wants to finish.

Nuance can be fierce

This essay is unabashedly nuanced. That word, nuance, gets a bad rap in some quarters. It sounds equivocal, mealymouthed, even weak.

I have a difference view of nuance. It can be fierce. The fierceness comes from being unwilling to fall into the trap of simplicity. It comes from an unwavering commitment to taking multiple strong moral and political stands at the same time, many of which, on the surface, seem unlikely to arise from the same mindset. That is because the nuanced mind is one that is stretching itself, challenging itself, always wrestling, never totally confident about any one perspective.

Except for one: the value, in a polarized world of simplistic arguments, of bringing fierce nuance to the conversation.

Weary of the pointless prickly polarization? Ready for more fiercely nuanced stands? I can help.

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