Let’s talk about war—because apparently, it’s back in vogue. The kind where babies die, memes go viral, and people start quoting the Geneva Conventions after watching one emotional reel. Everyone’s suddenly a battlefield ethicist with a Wi-Fi connection and a meme addiction.
But somewhere in the rubble of moral confusion lies a rather inconvenient truth: not all killing is created equal. There’s a world of ethical difference between accidentally hitting civilians while targeting terrorists, and intentionally butchering them because that’s your whole strategy. And yes, I said strategy, not side hustle.
Welcome to Gaza—population dense, emotionally fraught, and practically engineered for tragedy. And smack in the centre of it? Hamas. A group that turned human shields into policy and tunnel-building into a national sport. They don’t just break the Geneva Conventions—they treat them like IKEA instructions: skimmed, ignored, and then set on fire.
When Israel targets a Hamas cell and civilians tragically die in the process, that is not the same as sending armed men to murder entire families in their homes. If you think those two acts live on the same moral street, you might want to double-check your GPS—or your conscience.
Yes, the casualty figures are lopsided. That’s war. But moral clarity isn’t found on a spreadsheet. Ask the families in Dresden whether Britain’s bombs meant the Nazis weren’t the bad guys. Spoiler: intent matters. Context matters. The difference between "fighting evil" and "being evil" isn’t always tidy—but it’s real.
There’s also this charming fiction floating around that Hamas is some kind of necessary evil—a reaction to injustice. Let me be clear: taking hostages, murdering children, and launching rockets into civilian areas is not “resistance.” It’s terrorism. Dressing it up in revolutionary chic doesn’t make it noble—it makes it delusional. If Hamas truly cared about Palestinians, they’d invest in schools, not smuggling tunnels. Sewage systems, not stockpiles.
And let’s dispense with the idea that Israel has spent the past 75 years indiscriminately bombing everything that moves. No. Israel has made mistakes, yes, and sometimes terrible ones. But its aim has always been defensive survival, not conquest. The difference? One builds Iron Domes to protect its citizens; the other hides weapons under hospitals.
Then there’s the genius suggestion that if only Israel gave up its security measures, peace would magically bloom. Sure, and if I stop locking my front door, the burglars will probably drop by with cake. When your neighbours include groups chanting for your annihilation, you don’t dismantle your fences—you reinforce them.
The reverse claim, that a demilitarised Palestinian Authority would face genocide, is even shakier. Israel has backed a two-state solution more times than most of us have reset our Wi-Fi. What it won’t accept—and shouldn’t—is a neighbour committed to its destruction.
Moral equivalence is seductive. It sounds fair. Balanced. Civilised. But it’s also lazy. There’s a reason Mother of Hate—my upcoming documentary—zeroes in not on battlefields, but on the battlefield of narratives. From medieval blood libels to Goebbels-style slanders reborn on social media, it reveals how old hatreds have been refashioned for modern consumption. Today’s lies echo yesterday’s: Jews kill children. Jews control the media. Jews deserve what’s coming. The same poison, just wrapped in hashtags instead of swastikas.
War is hell. But even hell has rules. The path to peace won’t be paved by hashtags, hypocrisy, or false symmetry. It begins with rejecting these recycled myths and recognising that while no state is perfect, there’s a vast ethical gulf between self-defence and premeditated terror.