False Equivalence
There are no "two-sides" to the Israeli-Hamas War.
Oftentimes during conversations about the Israel-Hamas war, even with people who are pro-Israel, they say ”both sides” are to blame for the cycle of violence, suggesting they are being even-handed.
According to this view, when one side initiates violence and the other retaliates, both are equally culpable in a continuing cycle. This assumption informs their understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its entirety.
I can understand this impulse; it invokes balance, fairness, and empathy. It also leaves open hope for a positive outcome. If both sides are at fault, each one can contribute to the resolution by controlling their own behavior.
There are situations, however, where the “two-sides” paradigm fails. Few people, for instance, claimed that the Nazis had a valid "side" when the Allies invaded Germany to combat them. This is true despite the fact that the Germans may have had legitimate complaints and that they had experienced significant hardship following World War I. And the Allies were ruthless, killing a large number of civilians. Still, the moral difference is clear: The Nazis systematically annihilated millions of innocent people, while the Allies were fighting to stop them.
In the case of the Israel-Hamas war (which can be viewed as a microcosm of the broader conflict), falling back on the “both sides” theory may feel comfortable and fair. But it grossly oversimplifies a very complicated set of events. If we are after the truth, sometimes we must be uncomfortable in order to draw critical distinctions, like the distinctions between justifiable homicide and murder, acts of war and barbarism, imperfection and evil, and cause and effect. In order to fairly assign blame, it is necessary to acknowledge the fundamental moral imbalance in the Israel-Hamas war.
Hamas is a designated terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, and many other countries.
Its stated purpose is the destruction of the State of Israel and killing Jews, as they have demonstrated time and again in word and deed.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas invaded Israel alongside other Palestinian terrorist groups and civilians, and massacred some 1,200 people, including children, the elderly, and entire families; not merely killing them, but inflicting deliberate cruelty through burning victims alive, beheadings, and dismemberment.
They also perpetrated gruesome sexual violence against countless victims before murdering them and abducting 250 innocent civilians into Gaza, where they have been starved and tortured.
In response, Israel launched a military campaign to dismantle Hamas’s infrastructure and secure the release of its hostages. The war has devastated Gaza, where civilian casualties have been in the tens of thousands, infrastructure has collapsed, and humanitarian suffering is immense. Compassion for Gaza's civilians is natural and appropriate, but should not obscure the cause-and-effect relationship. The war began with a massacre and continues because Hamas still holds hostages and refuses to lay down arms.
Fueling the “both sides” argument among the public (and even portraying Israel as the sole aggressor) is misinformation and selective reporting on the war by a politically driven media.
For example, both before and after October 7, Hamas fired thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli population centers.
But if I did not have family and friends living in Israel, I would not know this because it is not reported in the media. In contrast, critics pay close attention to Israel's military blunders, often portraying them as deliberate crimes. Consider this headline in NPR published on March 16, 2025 “Israeli strikes in Gaza kill 9, including aid workers and journalists.”[1] Hamas officials were among the primary sources under the disguise of neutral terms such as “civil defense authorities in Gaza.”[2] Buried somewhere in the Article is Israel’s claim that the deceased were Hamas terrorists, including those who infiltrated Israel on October 7.
Here are some more examples:
On December 1, 2024, the Wall Street Journal headline announced that “Israel Resumes Combat Operations in Gaza as Ceasefire Stalls”, without mentioning that Hamas broke the ceasefire by resuming rocket fire into Israel.[3]
· A paper published in the medical journal Lancet on July 5, 2024 strongly implied that Israel had killed as many as 186,000 people in Gaza. This figure was cited as factual numerous times by commentators and gave rise to vicious attacks against Israel on social media platforms.
The paper cites the then Hamas number of 37,396 fatalities citing UN OCHA – but omitting that OCHA takes these numbers from Hamas. To support this number , the authors claim the figures are “accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services.” This “source” turned out to be a Vice article citing a Mekomit article claiming unnamed Israeli “intelligence sources” found Hamas numbers reliable. [4] Neither do they report on Hamas’ human shield strategy which is the main driver of the casualty figures.
· The Hamas Health Ministry, among other malfeasance, does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its casualty reports. Fifty Global Research Group, an independent group of researchers, analyzed 1,378 articles from CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Associated Press, Reuters, and Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The study concluded that the media outlets in almost all cases failed to disclose this information, even though the IDF reports on combatant casualties. Nearly 20 percent of all publications cited Hamas’ figures without even referencing any source, treating it like common knowledge. “Excluding combatant casualties from reports creates a misleading narrative that disproportionately portrays Israeli actions as targeting civilians. This narrative has been popularized by journalists, bloggers, and even international organizations”.[5]
· A study by Yale University professor Edieal Pinker found that The New York Times’ coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has overwhelmingly shaped a narrative that generates sympathy for Palestinians while downplaying Israeli suffering and Hamas’ responsibility for the conflict.[6]
· Israeli is constantly criticized for targeting hospitals, but even the Palestinian Authority has reported that Hamas uses these hospitals
Palestinian propagandists routinely falsely attribute Hamas's atrocities to Israel. Here is a particularly blatant example: After October 7, Israel made a film of the Hamas violence from recovered footage. In one now famous clip, a young terrorist calls his parents using the phone of a woman he had just murdered to brag that he had killed ten Jews with his own hands.
Recently, a substacker with 38,000 followers claimed that it was actually an Israeli soldier who called his parents after killing Palestinian children, telling them that what he really wanted was to kill babies. Additionally, it is widely known that Hamas committed sexual torture on a mass scale on October 7.
This same substacker claimed that it is actually IDF soldiers who are raping people with metal objects and with dogs. These falsehoods spread unchallenged.
No doubt, Israel has made some terrible mistakes in this war. How could it be otherwise in the impossible situation Hamas has created? Hamas embeds itself in schools, hospitals, and civilian neighborhoods, making civilian casualties unavoidable no matter the precautions taken[7]. When Israel warns civilians to evacuate, Hamas orders them to stay. When aid trucks enter Gaza, Hamas seizes the supplies. Its goal is not only to maximize Israeli civilian deaths but to maximize Palestinian civilian deaths for propaganda purposes.
“Deliberately putting the entire civilian population in harm’s way is a military and political strategy. It is designed to make it impossible for the enemy to fight without killing civilians. This has been Hamas’s strategy in all its wars with Israel; it embeds its fighters in the residential neighborhoods of Gaza’s cities and in the institutions that serve civilians. It stores rockets in mosques and schools, puts its communication and control centers in or under hospitals, and fires rockets from schoolyards and hospital parking lots. This is macro-immorality. Every dead civilian is a political asset for Hamas…”.[8]
Israel has been charged with indiscriminate attacks on civilians. However, before a strike, the IDF adheres to procedures that are in line with international law and assess the danger to civilians against military goals.[9] The majority of observers are not professionals in the military field. But independent military authorities like Andrew Fox, Richard Kemp, and John Spencer have consistently maintained that Israel uses extreme measures to lessen civilian casualties during this war.[10]
The data supports this assessment: the civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in this conflict is the lowest in the history of urban warfare—a fact that is routinely ignored in overly simplified narratives about the conflict by people who actively seek to place blame on Israel.
Neither Israel nor any other country is above criticism. Israel has acknowledged operational failures, and there are ongoing debates within Israeli society and among its allies about whether Israel has done enough to protect noncombatants. But none of this erases the fact that one side follows the rule of law, however imperfectly, while the other side embraces cruelty and terror as foundational values .The moral difference between Israel and Hamas is not one of perfection versus imperfection. It is a difference between a state that, although flawed, values civilian life and seeks to minimize harm, and a terrorist group that celebrates civilian death and seeks to maximize it. Israel has an independent judiciary, free press, and a civil society that debates its actions. Hamas has none of these. It silences dissent, indoctrinates children with antisemitic hate, and punishes critics with imprisonment or death.
The world must maintain the moral clarity to distinguish between these fundamentally different actors. Applying a framework of equivalence to parties with such disparate values and methods does not serve the cause of justice or peace. It undermines the very principles that allow for meaningful conflict resolution. Understanding this asymmetry is not about taking sides but about recognizing the reality of the situation: one cannot make peace with those who reject its very possibility. True progress requires honest assessment of the moral landscape, even when that assessment is uncomfortable or challenges our desire for simple narratives.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/15/nx-s1-5329257/gaza-air-strike-israel-al-khair-foundation
[2] https://honestreporting.com/aid-workers-or-terrorists-the-truth-behind-the-british-charity/
[3] https://honestreporting.com/skewed-stories-the-wall-street-journals-biased-coverage-of-the-israel-hamas-war/
[4] https://x.com/Aizenberg55/status/1810312698128699507
[5] Fox, A. and Glezer, T. “Misinformation Strategy and Media Bias in the Gaza War” Middle East Quarterly Spring 2025. https://www.meforum.org/meq/misinformation-strategy-and-media-bias-in-the-gaza-war
[6] “Study Finds New York Times Coverage Skews Against Israel in War Reporting” (February 19. 2025)ttps://themedialine.org/headlines/study-finds-new-york-times-coverage-skews-against-israel-in-war-reporting/
[7] Econow, N. (November 1, 2023) “Hamas officials admit its strategy is to use Palestinian civilians as human shields.) New York Post https://nypost.com/2023/11/01/opinion/hamas-officials-admit-its-strategy-is-to-use-palestinian-civilians-as-human-shields/
[8] Walzer, M. (December 1, 2023) “Gaza and the Asymmetry Trap.” Quiliette https://quillette.com/2023/12/01/gaza-and-the-asymmetry-trap/
[9] Ward, C. and Corn, G. (January 18, 2025) “Correcting the Record on the IDF and Lethal Targeting” The Cipher Brief https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/correcting-the-record-on-the-idf-and-lethal-targeting
[10] Fizgerald, H. (April 7, 2024) “West Point’s John Spencer: The Americans Should Study the IDF’s Tactics to Protect Civilians .”Jihad Watch https://jihadwatch.org/2024/04/west-points-john-spencer-the-americans-should-study-the-idfs-tactics-to-protect-civilians
Exactly.
Good article