A year has passed since the day when Hamas fighters burst through the border into Israel, slaughtering over a thousand civilians and taking hundreds more hostage. The news has not been short of horrors since, with a brutal battle to destroy Hamas waged by Israel that has seen the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians at the hands of Israeli bombs. New fronts have opened up as Hezbollah, which has been raining rockets down upon northern Israel, was finally and devastatingly attacked in Lebanon, with yet more civilian lives lost in the process. 

Accompanying this desperate material struggle has been a war of words, furiously fought online and in the media by Western partisans for the Israeli and Palestinian causes. This is far from new, but it has grown more extreme and more unbalanced in the age of the internet. It reflects a pattern of declining moral and intellectual standards that extends to every area of our politics today. 

Reducing yourself to an eternal victim is as soul destroying as casting your foe as eternal perpetrator

What I am struck by is the mutual dehumanisation and refusal of responsibility that characterises the “debate” on this issue. As oppressors, the Israeli civilians are not “really” innocent in the eyes of those who regard Israel as a “settler-colonial state”. Not only does the “zionist entity” have no right to exist from their perspective, but its citizens are interlopers, their very presence an act of oppression. The Hamas fighters are, according to this worldview, not really to blame for the slaughter. Rather Israel, which originally displaced and occupied the Palestinians from their homeland, bears the real blame for this “act of resistance”. 

On the Israeli-supporting side, ordinary Palestinians are seen as no less complicit. Hamas are viewed as representative of every man, woman and child. All Palestinians are presented as barbarous, bloodthirsty and menacing. They have refused reasonable deals, openly celebrated acts of terror. October 7th becomes a year zero. Any level of suffering that follows is to be blamed on the Palestinians and Hamas, rather than those actually dropping the bombs. 

The displacement of responsibility has a very dangerous, escalatory logic. Not only is your opponent responsible for every crime they have committed themselves, and for every crime of their neighbours and ancestors — they are even guilty of your crimes, responsible for the price you are forced to repeatedly exact from them. There is no end to their guilt, nor any possibility of release from it. They can never become justified in your eyes except by an act of submission so complete as to be suicidal. 

This way of thinking doesn’t just dehumanise the opponent, it also cuts away at your own humanity. If you’re not responsible for your own actions, you aren’t really fully human, fully sentient. Reducing yourself to an eternal victim is as soul destroying as casting your foe as eternal perpetrator. 

To admit that this logic is at work is exceptionally hard for those caught up in it. The problem is that, though the same mechanisms are at work on both sides, the illusion of difference is created by the real asymmetries between them. There is no moral equivalence, for instance, between the government of Israel, a law-governed state, and Hamas, a psychotic, fundamentalist terrorist organisation committed to genocide. 

But the relative moral legitimacy of Hamas and Israel is only one point of asymmetry, and the one most convenient for Israel. Another is the gap in military and political power between Israelis and Palestinians. Palestinians have no real government of their own, no democratic outlet for their grievances, no courts they can easily appeal to on equal terms for justice, and certainly no military capable of defending them from Israeli attacks.

Our inability to hold both these perspectives in our heads at once — to recognise the sheer monstrosity of Hamas, but to also recognise that Israel, as the combatant with vastly superior military and economic power, has a proportionately greater obligation to offer justice — seems to escape us. We shrink and manipulate reality into a one-way ratchet of resentments, always concealing our own responsibilities and duties.

So much of the dehumanising logic of violence is linked to a fatalistic account of morality and causation

Perhaps one of the most brilliant books ever written about the irrationality of war in the age of the bomber is Slaughterhouse Five. It was written by Kurt Vonnegut, and based on his experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden during the firebombing of the city by the Allies, in which the “good guys” intentionally incinerated tens of thousands of German civilians. One of the great postmodern novels, it plays with our experience of time and space, telling its story in a fragmented, collage-like fashion. Time is imagined out of order, flowing backwards as well as forwards. The power of this disruption of conventional narrative is not, despite its fatalistic protagonist, supposed to numb us into despair. Rather, it is intended to shock us into awareness, and force us to see events from new perspectives. 

So much of the dehumanising logic of violence is linked to a fatalistic account of morality and causation. Blame flows forwards and accrues interest; our own actions disappear into the current of events beyond our control. Vonnegut strips away that illusion, isolating moments from their context, forcing us to confront the moral significance of death. The narrator’s own apparent, amused indifference becomes, as Salman Rushdie writes, a mask of comedy that communicates the inexpressible horror of mass slaughter. Vonnegut is no apologist for the Nazis, but refuses to collapse the humanity of individuals into an heroic or villainous mass, and sees in war a mutually corrupting pattern of destruction. 

This ability to so deeply interrogate our own thinking and motivations, in a way that redeems rather than refuses the humanity of every person, is one of the central virtues and sources of vitality in Western culture. For much of my life, it was this humane scepticism, this alertness to the weight and dangers of history, which defined our response to the Israel-Palestine conflict for most reasonable people.

That so many of us are losing this civilisational habit, and are no longer questioning or critiquing our own thinking, is a worrying symptom of a deadly decline. It suggests an intellectual decadence, driven by our unthinking embrace of technology in which social media and now AI manipulate and substitute for public reason. For those caught between the missiles and bombs of an unending ethnic conflict, the loss of a fair external judge and mediator makes peace that much less imaginable.

We do not have to become relativists, or abandon our natural national, religious and political sympathies, to become deeper and more ethical thinkers when faced with war and conflict. But we do have to become eternally vigilant against habits of thought and speech that degrade us and our foes, unseating our reason and destroying our common humanity.