A Moral Tale of Two Wars

THE FIRST WAR began two years ago, when the invader borrowed a leaf from the book of great wars and staged a miniature version across the border with a neighbour whose right to exist he has never accepted. Ukraine since then has lost land and people, accumulated courage and international support, and punctured the invader’s fantasy of invincibility. Ukraine denied Russia the nationalist satisfaction of an easy conquest, and its president who carried his heroism and victimhood with casual youthfulness became this century’s freedom fighter with a begging bowl. The war shows no signs of weariness.

In a month, it will be the anniversary of genocide and hostage-taking by Hamas in Southern Israel. Gaza became the inevitable battlefield of the war against a group that has used the entire population of a brutalised land as a human shield. The humanitarian crisis the war has created is immense, and ordinary Palestinians continue to pay with their lives for the sins of those who swear by their rights. Being the more effective bargainer, Hamas releases the bodies of hostages to change public opinion in Israel—and it is succeeding. Hamas cannot win the war by military power; it hopes to win the war it caused by influencing the streets and liberal sensitivity across the world, by isolating Israel further in the global opinion market.

Every war is followed by a moral conflict in which portraits of the victim and the aggressor are interchangeable. It all depends on the moral perspective of those who are watching. On Ukraine, whose tenacity is appreciated by liberals still raging against the extra-territorial terror of autocrats and dismissed by conservatives as the misplaced heroism of a country historically bound to accept Russia’s peeves and grievances, morality is still a dispute. The suffering of Ukraine, for most of the world, needs to be shared by countries bound by liberal democracy. Ukraine is a worthy liberal cause, because it is pitted against a regime for which the bloodlust of the present, justified in a vocabulary of wounded nationalism and stolen glory, is a prerequisite for the restoration of a lost past. Ukraine is a solicited war that can be stopped by denying Kyiv arms and its leader an international stage to perform victimhood—that is what comes out of some conservative positions. Conscience cannot be subordinated to ideology, they argue.

Suffering, in today’s divided morality, requires different methods of measurement. In the story that emerges from angry streets and revolutionary campuses, a variation of the same story told by liberals over the years, the magnitude of Palestinians’ suffering makes the genocidal rage of Hamas on October 7 an inevitable horror by a group that represents the historical sorrow of Palestinians. In this liberal war critique, Netanyahu should stop the bombardment before Israel cuts off the Philadelphi Corridor, Hamas’ supply line between Gaza and Egypt; hostages coming home as dead bodies should be the last reminder to Israel about the futility of war. That Israel owes the dead hostages and the dozens still in captivity an answer beyond political or strategic convenience escapes this argument. Humanity, too, is a dispute in divided morality.

There is still no liberal consensus on Putinism. Russia’s leader is not yet Netanyahu. If Putinism is sustained by simulated nationalism feeding on grievances and nostalgia, it is tolerated by the ideological legion beyond Russia that still needs a counterargument in an Americanised world. The suffering of Ukrainians is not as poignant or protest-worthy as the Palestinian struggle, even though the Soviet fantasy Putin’s Russia clings on to cannot be, by any liberal logic, lesser than the demonology with which the left tells the origin story of Israel. Still, ideological expediency can bend morality at the drop of a missile. It is as if the degree of suffering is determined by how the liberal conscience defines the tormentor. Israel cannot win. Russia can get away with minor scars.

It is the applied science of morality that makes the calls for ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine unequal. Hamas is winning the perception war because it is not only the perpetrators of October 7 that claim Israel is a huge lie imposed on a history of displacement. That Israel must remain in a permanent state of war to maintain the truth of its own existence is a story with minimum liberal readership. And the transformation of the Palestinian struggle into an Islamist movement—forget Darwish’s poetry for a while—is not acceptable to the street fighters of freedom. And the resistance in Ukraine? It is yet to earn its protests or poetry.

Morality is trapped in the last vestiges of ideology, and its freedom seems to be deferred by our readings of two wars.

Benjamin NetanyahuGazaideologyIsraelIsrael-Hamaspolitical ideologyTwo WarsUkraine crisisVladimir Putin