Politics, People and Power :

By the end of 2024, more than a year after October 7, one of the most revealing features of this war is not only the scale of destruction, but the language used to excuse it. What began as a claim of self-defense has, in many circles, hardened into something far darker: the suggestion that an entire population can be morally written off.

After the Hamas attacks of October 7, Israel had the right to respond militarily. That much is clear. Hamas committed atrocities against civilians, and no serious person should pretend otherwise. But the right to respond is not the right to erase all limits. It does not mean that every apartment block becomes a military site, every hospital a suspect space, every school a legitimate target, and every civilian death an unfortunate but acceptable detail in a larger campaign.

Yet this is exactly where much of the rhetoric has gone. The underlying message is blunt: Gaza is so compromised by Hamas, so politically contaminated, so intertwined with militancy, that its civilians no longer deserve the full moral protection normally granted to human beings caught in war. Once that logic is accepted, the rest becomes easy. Starvation becomes pressure. Mass displacement becomes security policy. The killing of families becomes tragedy without consequence.

This is not realism. It is moral collapse.

War always produces propaganda, but some arguments are worse than propaganda. They are frameworks for abandoning basic standards altogether. The moment people start treating civilians as collectively responsible for the actions of an armed group, they have crossed a line that should never be crossed. A child is not a combatant because he was born under Hamas rule. A mother is not a military asset because she lives in a neighborhood where militants operate. A trapped population does not lose its civilian status because it cannot overthrow its rulers while under siege, bombardment, surveillance, and deprivation.

That should be obvious. Yet over the past year, what should have remained morally unthinkable has been repeated with growing confidence in television studios, online debates, and political commentary. It has become normal to speak of entire districts as if they were enemy infrastructure and of civilian death as if it were merely a regrettable technical side effect of a righteous war.

But words matter because they prepare the ground for action. Once a population is stripped of innocence, it becomes easier to strip it of food, electricity, shelter, medicine, and finally life itself. Dehumanization is never just rhetoric. It is part of the machinery.

And let us be honest about where this leads. If the presence of Hamas is enough to taint the whole of Gaza, then the principle can be used anywhere. Any civilian population living under authoritarian rule, armed faction control, or militant influence can be reclassified as morally expendable. That does not defend civilization. It destroys the very distinction that civilization claims to rest on.

The defenders of this logic like to present themselves as serious-minded adults confronting the harsh truths of war. In reality, it is often a way of avoiding the hardest truth of all: that overwhelming power does not become just because it is exercised in the name of security. A state does not prove its moral seriousness by insisting on its own trauma while dismissing the shattered bodies of others as strategically inevitable.

By late 2024, Gaza had become a landscape of ruins, displacement, grief, hunger, and mass death. At that point, continuing to speak in abstractions about precision and necessity without confronting the human reality is not analysis. It is complicity in moral anesthesia.

None of this absolves Hamas. Its crimes were real, deliberate, and barbaric. But if the answer to one crime is the normalization of another form of collective brutality, then the standard being defended is no standard at all. Condemning Hamas does not require accepting the destruction of the moral boundary between fighter and civilian. In fact, it requires defending that boundary more fiercely, not less.

That is the central test after a year of war: whether people still believe that civilians are civilians, even when they are inconvenient civilians, politically uncomfortable civilians, civilians on the wrong side of an argument, civilians whose suffering interrupts preferred narratives.

Too many have failed that test.

The most dangerous idea of this war is not only that massive civilian suffering can be justified. It is that some populations can be talked out of their humanity first, so that their suffering no longer counts in full. Once that becomes normal, everything else follows: the indifference, the double standards, the bureaucratic language of necessity, the deadening repetition of casualty figures as if they describe weather.

A society does not lose its soul all at once. It loses it when it becomes comfortable explaining why certain human beings no longer qualify for the protections it loudly claims to value.

That is what is at stake here. Not just Gaza. Not just Israel. But the meaning of civilian life itself.