The Objectivity of Warmth, Violence, and the Moral Weight of Now
A personal essay on life, restraint, extremism, and the obligation to stop
I keep coming back to an idea that is so simple that I am almost embarrassed to describe it as a philosophy. I think of human life as a field. There are no perfectly drawn shapes in it, no immaculate political boxes, no permanent teams whose uniforms tell me whether the person inside them is good or bad. There is movement across a field. There is direction. There is a spectrum. At one end are warmth, care, patience, gentleness, curiosity, acceptance, truthfulness, restraint and the preservation of life. At the other are coldness, contempt, domination, humiliation, cruelty, hatred, coercion and violence. Every day, in ways large and small, we move somewhere across that field. We move through what we say to people, what we permit ourselves to think about them, what we do when we have power over them, what we do when we are afraid of them, what we excuse when our own side does it, and what we condemn when the same thing is done by somebody we have already decided is an enemy. My belief is that the goal of a human life is to stay, as deliberately as we can, in the warmer part of the field. Stay close to life. Stay close to the impulse that protects rather than destroys. Stay in the part of ourselves that can see another person without first turning that person into a category.
I do not mean warmth in a vague, decorative sense. We are warm organisms. Life, in the most immediate bodily sense, is warmth sustained against the cold. A living body regulates heat, consumes energy, breathes, circulates blood, reacts to touch, seeks shelter, needs water, food and rest, and depends from the first moment of life on other people for protection. The first moral experiences most of us ever have are not theories. They are warmth, hunger answered by food, fear answered by a familiar voice, pain answered by a hand, exposure answered by shelter. Long before a child understands a nation, an ideology, a religion, an army, a border or a historical claim, the child understands comfort and distress. There is something foundational in that. It does not solve every philosophical problem and I am not pretending that thermodynamics secretly contains a complete moral code. I am saying that our embodied existence gives us a common starting point. We know what it is for a body to be safe and what it is for a body to be harmed. We know what it is for a person to be allowed to continue and what it is for a person to be stopped by force.
That is what I mean when I speak about the objectivity of the field. I am not claiming that every difficult human dispute can be solved by pointing at a colour chart marked GOOD on one side and BAD on the other. Human situations contain competing duties, imperfect information and consequences we cannot foresee. But there are directions that remain recognisable. Feeding a hungry child is toward warmth. Deliberately starving a population is toward coldness. Listening is toward warmth. Dehumanising language is toward coldness. Protecting a civilian is toward warmth. Deliberately attacking a civilian is toward coldness. Releasing a hostage is toward warmth. Taking a hostage is toward coldness. Making room for another people to live securely beside you is toward warmth. Building a political future that requires another people to disappear is toward coldness. The field does not make us omniscient. It gives us orientation.
That orientation matters because politics is extraordinarily good at manufacturing fog. Politics can take an act that would horrify us in ordinary life and surround it with enough vocabulary that we begin to wonder whether the obvious is still obvious. A dead child becomes collateral. A family driven from a home becomes a demographic question. A hostage becomes leverage. A bomb becomes a message. Hunger becomes pressure. A civilian settlement becomes a strategic fact on the ground. Hatred becomes resistance or security or historical necessity depending on who is speaking. The field asks me to move in the opposite direction: strip away whatever language has been added until the human thing becomes visible again. Who is bleeding? Who is afraid? Who cannot leave? Who has been deprived of choice? Who is being told that their suffering is necessary for somebody else's future? Who has the power to stop and who does not? Those questions do not answer everything, but they prevent abstractions from completely replacing people.
I still believe in this field. I believe in it more, not less, after watching the world repeatedly demonstrate how easy it is to abandon. I believe that a mature person should be capable of holding history without becoming imprisoned by it, capable of remembering injury without turning memory into a licence to injure, capable of feeling anger without making anger sovereign, capable of defending somebody without deciding that the opposing population has forfeited its humanity. I also believe that goodness is not passivity. Staying in the warmth does not mean smiling faintly while people are hurt. It can require saying no, naming an abuse, opposing a government, stopping an armed group, restraining a friend, refusing a crowd, demanding accountability, or standing visibly beside people who are being crushed. Nonviolence is not the absence of judgment. It is judgment disciplined by the refusal to dehumanise.
Sequence, proportion and the moral weight of now
There is a temptation, when talking this way, to float above events. If all violence is bad, somebody can say, then perhaps every act of violence can be placed side by side and we can announce that we condemn everything equally. That sounds clean. It is also inadequate. I am not so floaty that I think sequence, scale, power and immediacy do not matter. The field has a direction, but it also has a present tense. If two houses have burned at different times, remembering the first fire does not require me to ignore the second house while it is still burning. If two people have been wounded, and one is stable while the other is bleeding out in front of me, equal human worth does not mean equal allocation of my attention in that moment. I go first to the person whose need is greatest. That does not retroactively make the other person's wound less real. It means that moral attention has to operate in time.
This is where proportionality enters my thinking, not as an accountant's trick in which one corpse cancels another corpse, and not as a claim that international humanitarian law can be reduced to a ratio. Legally, proportionality in armed conflict is not simply a comparison of total casualties between two sides. It concerns whether expected civilian harm from a particular attack is excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. I understand that distinction. My moral use of proportionality is broader. Scale tells us something about where power is being exercised and where suffering is accumulating. Capacity tells us something about responsibility. A person with a stone and a state with an air force do not occupy identical practical positions even if both remain morally bound not to target civilians. A movement that commits an atrocity does not thereby make every person in the territory it controls responsible for that atrocity. A government responding to an atrocity does not acquire unlimited moral credit simply by using the word defence.
The greater the power, the greater the capacity for restraint. That is not anti-defence. It is what defence is supposed to mean when defence is governed by law and morality rather than revenge. Power creates options. It creates intelligence capabilities, precision capabilities, diplomatic leverage, control over borders and supplies, detention systems, negotiation channels, defensive technologies, alliances and time. A weaker actor may also be morally culpable, vicious or criminal. Weakness does not sanctify Hamas. But when one side has vastly greater control over the physical conditions under which millions of people live, I cannot pretend that responsibility is evenly distributed simply because suffering exists on both sides. Responsibility follows agency. The hand that can release pressure has a special obligation to notice that it is pressing.
There is another reason sequence matters. Trauma can explain behaviour without excusing it. Human beings who have been attacked often want certainty, protection, retribution and proof that they will never again be vulnerable. That impulse is understandable precisely because vulnerability is terrifying. But if trauma is allowed to become a permanent moral exception, it reproduces itself. The injured person becomes the injuring person and then points back to the original injury whenever asked to stop. The new victim develops a history of pain of their own. Soon both communities possess graves, stories, photographs, missing relatives, inherited fear and an archive of reasons not to trust the other. The field gets colder with every cycle.
Somebody has to stop. I do not mean that as a childish instruction delivered to two equal schoolchildren in a playground. I mean it as a practical moral principle. A cycle cannot end unless an actor with enough power to alter its direction chooses not to maximise what it can do. Sometimes stopping first feels unfair. Sometimes it feels like surrendering the satisfaction of retaliation. Sometimes it feels intolerable because the other side has not apologised, disarmed, confessed or transformed. Yet every peace that has ever become real required somebody, somewhere, to decide that the future mattered more than completing the emotional arithmetic of the past.
This is also why I reject the demand that concern must always be expressed in perfectly balanced sentences. Balance is useful when it protects truth from propaganda. Balance is useless when it becomes a ritual that prevents us from saying where the greatest present harm lies. If one side is currently being bombed, displaced, deprived of food, prevented from returning to destroyed neighbourhoods and subjected to restrictions that shape almost every ordinary aspect of life, I will speak about that side more. If Jewish people are being harassed in another setting because strangers hold them collectively responsible for Israeli policy, I will speak against that too. The amount of attention I give each harm can change with circumstances without my underlying rule changing at all. Human beings remain human beings. Violence remains violence. The emergency, however, moves.
October 7: no excuse, no footnote, no moral escape hatch
The field requires me to begin the Israel-Palestine part of this essay where the most immediate recent sequence began: 7 October 2023. Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups launched a coordinated assault into southern Israel. Around 1,200 people were killed and 251 people were abducted, according to later reporting and official figures. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry found that civilians were intentionally targeted and that Hamas and other armed groups committed war crimes including murder, torture, cruel treatment and hostage-taking. Separate United Nations work found reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, occurred in multiple locations during the attacks, and that hostages were also subjected to sexual violence in captivity. I do not need to hedge the moral statement that follows. Those acts were wrong.
They were wrong if the perpetrators had lost relatives. They were wrong if the perpetrators had lived under blockade. They were wrong if the perpetrators believed they were resisting occupation. They were wrong if they believed history was on their side. They were wrong if they could recite every Palestinian grievance since 1948. A civilian dancing at a music festival does not become a military target because somebody can construct a historical argument around the field in which the festival is taking place. A child in a kibbutz does not inherit collective guilt. A grandmother is not a bargaining chip. A woman does not become available for sexual violence because the man hurting her can use the language of resistance. The field does not care how rhetorically sophisticated the justification is. Deliberate cruelty to a civilian is movement toward the cold.
I understand why this point matters enormously to Jewish people, and I understand why Adam Sessler's writing after October 7 is full of fury about people who seemed unable to say it cleanly. He describes watching acquaintances and communities that had spoken constantly about empathy, minority protection and moral clarity suddenly reach for explanations, qualifications, jokes or abstractions when Jews had been murdered. I can see why that felt like betrayal. If somebody spends years believing they are surrounded by people committed to universal human dignity and then discovers that some of those people become curiously inventive when the victims are Jews, something foundational breaks. I do not need to be Jewish to recognise the injury in that.
I am also not Jewish, and that matters. I have not inherited the history that a Jewish person may feel in their bones when a crowd begins talking about Jews as a problem. I do not carry ancestral memory of expulsions, pogroms, legal exclusion and the Holocaust as family history in the way many Jewish people do. I will not lecture a Jewish person about what antisemitism feels like from inside. I will not tell Adam Sessler that he misread the fear produced by watching people celebrate or rationalise the killing of Israelis. His experience belongs to him, and the historical pattern that makes such fear intelligible is real.
But respect for Jewish fear cannot require blindness to Palestinian suffering, just as concern for Palestinians cannot require me to reinterpret October 7 into something acceptable. These obligations coexist. In fact, they depend on each other. If I say civilians are civilians, then Israeli civilians count. If I say collective punishment is wrong, then Palestinians cannot be collectively punished for Hamas. If I say historical persecution matters, then Palestinian dispossession matters. If I say sexual violence is intolerable, then I must care about credible allegations whether the victims are Israeli hostages or Palestinian detainees. The same rule has to survive contact with people I do not identify with.
This is why I have no patience for conspiracy as a substitute for evidence. There were catastrophic Israeli intelligence, security and command failures before and during October 7, and those failures deserve exhaustive investigation. But failure, negligence and political exploitation after the fact are not identical to proof that Israeli leaders deliberately allowed the attack to happen. If evidence establishing such a claim emerges, it should be examined. Until then, I do not need it. The moral case against what followed in Gaza does not become stronger by attaching itself to a theory that cannot be demonstrated. It is already strong on the visible record.
October 7 should therefore remain what it was: a massacre, a hostage-taking operation, an eruption of cruelty against civilians and a profound trauma for Israeli society and Jewish communities far beyond Israel. Saying that plainly does not bind me to everything Israel did afterward. It binds me to the victims. The moment I allow the suffering of those victims to become a warrant for unrelated civilians to suffer without limit, I have stopped honouring the principle that made October 7 wrong in the first place.
When defence becomes destruction
A state has a right to protect its population. That sentence is not controversial to me. After October 7, Israel had a legitimate security problem of extraordinary seriousness: armed groups had crossed its border, murdered civilians, taken hostages and demonstrated both intent and capacity to attack again. There were military targets in Gaza. There were hostages to recover. There was an armed organisation whose leadership could reasonably be expected to plan future attacks. I do not believe that a moral person has to pretend those realities did not exist in order to oppose what came next.
The question is what defence is allowed to become. Defence cannot mean that the civilian population among whom an enemy operates becomes expendable. Defence cannot mean that hunger is an instrument. Defence cannot mean that displacement can be repeated until there is nowhere meaningful left to move. Defence cannot mean that hospitals, schools, homes, water systems, farmland and the conditions that sustain civilian life can be systematically degraded and then folded into the word necessity. Defence cannot mean indefinite control over another people's movement, reconstruction, imports, exports, land and political horizon. At some point, the word defence ceases to describe the totality of what is happening.
By October 2026, the numerical landscape is devastating. Contemporary reporting places the Israeli death toll from the October 7 attacks at about 1,200, with 251 people abducted. Reuters reported this week that more than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed during the Gaza war. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported on 5 October 2026 that, even after the ceasefire agreement announced on 10 October 2025, the Gaza Ministry of Health had reported another 1,431 Palestinian fatalities and 5,026 injuries. OCHA also reported that access restrictions continued to affect 65 per cent of Gaza's land, leaving the remaining territory overcrowded, while restrictions on critical humanitarian items continued to impede the response. Those figures are not a ledger in which 1,200 deaths can be exchanged for 74,000 deaths. Every one of those people was one person, not a unit. But pretending that the scale tells us nothing would be another form of abstraction.
The imbalance matters because Israel possesses overwhelming military, technological and institutional superiority over the population of Gaza. That does not make Hamas harmless. It does make the idea of two equivalent forces misleading. One party is a state with an advanced military, air power, intelligence capabilities, powerful allies and extensive control over the physical environment in which Gaza exists. The other side includes an armed organisation that committed atrocities, but it also includes more than two million civilians, most of whom did not choose the circumstances into which they were born and cannot simply relocate to a safer country when military strategy makes their home unlivable.
I reject a moral system in which the stronger actor can endlessly point to the original crime of the weaker armed actor while the civilian population absorbs the cost. The October 7 dead cannot be protected retroactively by another Palestinian child dying in 2024, 2025 or 2026. A hostage does not become freer because a family elsewhere loses its home. Israeli trauma is not healed by Palestinian amputation. Palestinian grief does not resurrect an Israeli murdered at Nova. Once this is understood, the logic of multiplying pain begins to look as futile as it is cruel.
This is where my phrase someone has to be the bigger person becomes literal rather than sentimental. The actor with the greater capacity to stop, reroute, negotiate, supply, permit, withdraw and restrain has the greater immediate capacity to change the field. That is why my present moral demand falls more heavily on the Israeli state and on the political ideology sustaining its most maximalist policies. Hamas should release hostages, renounce attacks on civilians and cease armed strategies that treat Israeli civilian life as disposable. That statement remains true. It does not erase the separate fact that Israel controls far more of the machinery currently determining whether Palestinian civilians can live safely, return home, receive supplies, rebuild, move, farm and imagine a future.
There is a difference between refusing false equivalence and denying anyone's humanity. I refuse the first precisely because I insist on the second. If the stronger side is causing vastly greater ongoing harm, then insisting that my criticism remain perfectly symmetrical would be a failure to respond to reality. A doctor does not distribute equal bandages to unequal wounds simply to prove impartiality. Fairness is not always sameness. Sometimes fairness means looking directly at where the weight has accumulated and taking some of that weight off.
Genocide, the word, and the facts it is supposed to describe
The word genocide carries enormous moral force, and it should. It names an attempt to destroy a protected human group, in whole or in part. Because the Holocaust sits so centrally in modern consciousness, people often imagine genocide through its most explicit and industrialised twentieth-century form: declared racial ideology, deportation systems, ghettos, extermination camps, gas chambers and a state machinery organised around annihilation. The Holocaust was genocide in an exceptionally systematic, ideologically explicit and mechanised form. Nothing about naming another genocide diminishes that. Historical memory is not a shelf with room for only one catastrophe.
I would change one formulation I used instinctively when first thinking this through. Legally, genocide is not a spectrum on which one event becomes genocide only when it approaches Hitler's degree of explicitness. Genocides can differ radically in method, duration, scale, rhetoric and administrative form. The legal question concerns prohibited acts and the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such. One genocide can be carried out through industrial killing, another through mass killing combined with starvation, destruction of the conditions of life, forced displacement or measures intended to prevent births. The fact that two genocides are different does not require us to deny one in order to preserve the uniqueness of another.
By 2026, describing the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza as genocide is not a fringe rhetorical leap. Amnesty International concluded in December 2024 that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza after analysing killings, destruction of civilian infrastructure, forcible displacement, obstruction of life-sustaining goods and aid, restrictions on power and evidence of intent. More decisively for my own use of the term, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry reported in September 2025 that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed and were continuing to commit four of the five underlying acts of genocide identified by the Genocide Convention. The Commission concluded that genocidal intent was present, that the State of Israel bore responsibility for commission of genocide and failure to prevent and punish it, and that senior Israeli officials had incited genocide. Israel rejects these findings and describes them as biased and false. The International Court of Justice's separate South Africa v. Israel case has not yet reached a final merits judgment. Those qualifications matter. They do not make the Commission's finding disappear.
For me, the honest sentence is therefore this: I regard what has been inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza as genocide, and that view is now supported by a detailed finding of a United Nations-mandated independent commission and by major human-rights investigations, even though the world's highest court has not yet issued a final merits judgment in the genocide case. That is strong enough. I do not need to pretend that every institution has reached the same procedural stage or that legal dispute has vanished. I also refuse the opposite trick, in which the absence of a final ICJ judgment is treated as if no serious body has made a genocide finding at all.
I do not know Benjamin Netanyahu's private mind. I do not need to invent it. Earlier I found myself reaching for the thought that perhaps he simply wishes Palestine were not there, and that this desire, while expressed differently from Hitler's hatred of Jews, points toward the same underlying wish to remove a human group from the political future. But a private-mind claim is unnecessary and weaker than the public record. Intent in international law is not established by telepathy. The Commission of Inquiry examined statements by Israeli authorities, the pattern of conduct, the siege, killing, destruction of health and education systems, conditions imposed on civilians, targeting of children and the persistence of these practices despite warnings and court orders. It concluded that genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference from the totality of the evidence it assessed. I can argue from that record without pretending I have access to Netanyahu's internal monologue.
This distinction matters to the objectivity of the field. If I want an ethical framework grounded in reality, then I should not smuggle speculation into it simply because the speculation feels plausible. Pattern is evidence. Public statements are evidence. Policies are evidence. Bodies are evidence. Destroyed homes are evidence. Denied aid is evidence. A legal commission applying a defined convention is evidence. Rumour is not evidence merely because it fits my moral conclusion. The field should make me more disciplined, not less.
I also reject the idea that invoking genocide against Palestinians somehow invalidates Jewish history. It does not. The Holocaust remains what it was: a systematic genocide of European Jewry conducted by Nazi Germany and collaborators, built around an explicit racial ideology of eradication and carried out on a continental scale. Jewish persecution did not begin with Hitler and did not end in 1945. Antisemitism remains real. Jewish people remain entitled to safety, dignity and freedom from collective blame. None of those truths grants any government immunity from the Genocide Convention. If anything, the history of genocide should make humanity more willing to recognise the structure of destruction when the victims are somebody else.
The moral danger is turning memory into ownership. No people owns victimhood. No trauma confers permanent innocence on a state. No past genocide licences a present one. If a Jewish person objects to the genocide finding because the word touches the deepest wound in Jewish history, I can understand the emotional charge without surrendering the evidence. Respect means I do not mock that wound. Truth means I do not let the wound decide what facts I am permitted to name.
Jews, Israelis, Zionists and extremists are not interchangeable words
Language becomes dangerous when it gets lazy. Jewish people are not the Israeli government. Israelis are not a single political ideology. Zionists are not all identical to one another. Palestinians are not Hamas. Muslims are not Hamas. Civilians living in an unlawful settlement do not become lawful military targets because the settlement itself violates international law. If I am going to argue against collective punishment, I have to practise the same discipline in my own vocabulary.
This is why I resist saying the Jews are doing this. They are not. That sentence would be both false and antisemitic. Most Jewish people on earth do not control the Israeli cabinet, and Jewish identity is infinitely larger than any government's military policy. I also resist saying Israelis as though every Israeli citizen wants the same outcome. Israeli society contains people who support the government, people who oppose it, people who have spent years fighting occupation, people who want a Palestinian state, people who want annexation, people whose politics changed after October 7, people who have lost relatives, people who have protested their own leaders, and people who simply want to live.
Zionism requires similar care. Historically, the term covers a broad family of movements centred on Jewish national self-determination and the establishment or maintenance of a Jewish homeland or state in the land of Israel. It contains liberal, socialist, religious, revisionist and other traditions, and many people who call themselves Zionists understand the word primarily as the proposition that Jewish people should not again be dependent on the goodwill of other states for collective safety. I can understand why that proposition has emotional and historical force. I therefore do not use Zionist as a disguised synonym for Jew, and I reject anyone who does.
My objection is to a particular political direction within Zionism: the maximalist or ethnonationalist form that treats permanent Jewish political supremacy over the whole land as more important than Palestinian equality, freedom, self-determination and continued presence. When that ideology becomes settlement, annexation, forced displacement, indefinite occupation, denial of statehood, blockade or policies that destroy civilian life, I oppose it. Calling that opposition antisemitic would make the word antisemitism less useful by turning it into a shield for state power. Antisemitism is hostility or prejudice toward Jews as Jews. Opposition to an ideology, a government, an occupation or a military policy is not automatically hostility toward Jews.
The legal status of settlements is not merely a question of taste. In its July 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel's continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory was unlawful, that policies including settlements and associated infrastructure entrenched control and annexation, that Israel was violating the Palestinian people's right to self-determination, and that Israel must cease new settlement activity. I therefore do not need to speak vaguely when I say that continuing to plant civilian communities in occupied territory while restricting the people already living there is wrong. It is wrong morally, and the world's principal judicial organ has described the broader situation as unlawful.
By October 2026, the political problem is not hypothetical. Reuters reported this week that Netanyahu's government rejects a two-state solution, while international concern about settlement expansion and settler violence continues. That rejection matters because a people cannot be indefinitely told that they may neither have a viable state nor equal political membership in the state that controls them. If neither partition nor equality is permitted, domination becomes the default arrangement. No amount of security vocabulary can make permanent domination into a morally stable solution.
So when I say the Zionists need to stop, I want the sentence understood precisely. I mean that the political forces using Zionism to justify permanent territorial supremacy, dispossession and the destruction of Palestinian self-determination need to stop. I do not mean Jews need to stop existing as Jews. I do not mean Israelis should be expelled. I do not mean Jewish historical attachment to the land is fictional. I do not mean an Israeli child owes a debt for the decisions of ministers. And I certainly do not mean violence against Jewish civilians becomes acceptable because somebody has labelled them Zionists. If the word Zionist is used so broadly that it turns every Jewish person into a legitimate object of hostility, then the speaker has moved into the cold part of the field while pretending to be fighting for justice.
The same discipline applies to the phrase Free Palestine. To me it means free Palestinians from blockade, permanent occupation, forced displacement, settlement expansion, collective punishment, military domination and political structures that deny them meaningful self-determination. It means a Palestinian child should be able to imagine adulthood without needing permission from another people to possess a future. It means Palestinians should be able to move, work, study, build, travel, farm, receive medical care and participate in political life under conditions compatible with dignity. It does not mean drive Jewish people into the sea. It does not mean repeat October 7 at a larger scale. Freedom that requires another population's terror is only the next turn of the same wheel.
The scale must be rebalanced
I keep returning to the image of a scale because it captures something that the language of sides often destroys. A scale can be badly weighted without either side ceasing to be human. Rebalancing does not mean taking weight from the suffering of one people and placing it onto another. It means recognising where overwhelming force, deprivation and political control have accumulated and deliberately reducing them.
At this point in history, that requires bringing Palestine to the foreground. I say that without embarrassment and without pretending that every Palestinian political movement is admirable. Palestinians are the population whose homes, bodies, institutions and future have borne the overwhelmingly greater physical destruction of the years since October 7. More than 74,000 reported deaths in Gaza cannot be treated as a parenthesis to a story whose only morally meaningful event occurred on one day in Israel. The continued death toll after the 2025 ceasefire, the restrictions on land and goods, the destruction that has still not been rebuilt, the displacement and hunger all mean that the emergency has not simply passed into history.
This is where I differ from people who respond to every appeal for Palestine by immediately returning to October 7 as though chronology itself were an argument. October 7 explains the beginning of the war. It does not answer every question about the conduct of the war. It does not decide how many civilian deaths are acceptable. It does not resolve whether starvation, mass displacement or destruction of civilian systems can be justified. It does not turn indefinite occupation into law. It does not make settlements legal. It does not create a permanent exemption from the requirement to stop.
Nor do I believe that Jewish people should be required to perform public denunciations of Israel in order to prove their decency. That demand itself can become a form of collective blame. A Jewish person in Sydney, New York, London or Paris is not a branch office of the Israeli government. At the same time, any person, Jewish or not, Zionist or not, who continues to defend every act of the Israeli state simply because criticism feels threatening should ask whether fear has become a filter that excludes Palestinian reality. I would say the same to a Palestinian supporter who cannot acknowledge October 7. Identity does not change the rule. If evidence is visible, we are obliged to see it.
I know the phrase take a side can sound like the very tribalism I am rejecting. What I mean is something closer to triage. If a scale has tipped brutally in one direction, neutrality can preserve the imbalance. Right now I take the side of Palestinian civilian life because Palestinian civilian life has been crushed on the larger scale and because the institutions inflicting or enabling that pressure possess the greater power to stop. That does not make Hamas my side. It does not make antisemitism my side. It does not make violence against Israelis my side. My side is the restoration of weight to human beings who have had too much taken from them.
Rebalancing has practical content. The killing has to stop. Humanitarian access has to be reliable and sufficient rather than discretionary. Reconstruction has to become possible. Palestinians displaced from their communities need meaningful rights of return and residence consistent with negotiated peace and human rights. Settlement expansion has to stop. The architecture of permanent occupation has to end. Hostages must be free, civilians must not be targeted, and armed Palestinian movements must abandon strategies built around murdering civilians. A political process has to offer Palestinians something more substantive than future negotiations that never mature into sovereignty while the map changes underneath them.
I still believe a fair division of the land is imaginable, although decades of settlement and mistrust have made it harder. Two states remain the most familiar framework: Israel and Palestine existing alongside one another with security, recognised borders, political sovereignty and arrangements for Jerusalem, refugees and holy places that acknowledge the legitimate attachments of both peoples. If a viable partition becomes impossible because the territory has been fragmented beyond repair, then any alternative must satisfy an equally basic test: equal civil and political rights rather than permanent supremacy of one ethno-national group over another. What I cannot accept is the indefinite middle condition in which Palestinians are controlled but not fully represented, contained but not sovereign, expected to be peaceful but given no credible political destination.
Free Palestine, in this framework, is an instruction to open the future. It is a demand that Palestinians be treated as people whose presence is permanent and whose dignity does not depend on the consent of a stronger neighbour. It is also compatible with an Israeli future. Rebalancing is not reversal. I do not want Palestinians to become powerful enough to do to Israelis what has been done to them. I want the scale to stop being a weapon.
Adam Sessler, moral betrayal and where I part company
Adam Sessler's essays reached me because beneath their anger I recognise a moral injury. He writes as somebody who believed that his politics, his professional choices and his willingness to take public abuse were attached to a broad project of tolerance and inclusion. Then October 7 happened, and he watched people he had regarded as allies or at least as fellow participants in that project react to murdered Jews with rationalisation, mockery or ideological qualification. He experienced that as evidence that the universalism he thought they shared was conditional. In his telling, the tribe had simply changed uniforms.
I respect the core of that stance. If somebody celebrates the murder of Israeli civilians because they have convinced themselves that those civilians are settlers, colonisers, Zionists or representatives of a state, I disagree with them completely. If somebody uses the suffering of Palestinians as permission to harass a Jewish person at a synagogue, I disagree with them completely. If somebody casually uses language that collapses Jew into Zionist and Zionist into genocidaire, then they are committing exactly the conceptual laziness I object to when Palestinians are collapsed into Hamas. The field requires consistency when consistency is socially inconvenient.
Sessler is also right, in my view, about something larger than this conflict: mobs often discover moral vocabulary after they have discovered the pleasure of having an enemy. Political language can become a permission structure for cruelty. A crowd can believe itself righteous while behaving in ways that, stripped of slogans, look like humiliation, harassment and collective punishment. The right has done this. The left has done this. Nationalists do it. Revolutionaries do it. Religious movements do it. Secular movements do it. Human beings are disturbingly talented at placing hatred inside a container labelled duty.
Where I part company with Adam is his treatment, in his June 2024 essay, of the word genocide. He was writing at a particular moment, while furious about the use of that word in political rhetoric and about what he regarded as the transformation of Jewish people into acceptable targets of contempt. He argued that genocide functions rhetorically as the worst possible accusation, a word so large that it can flatten nuance and license almost anything in opposition to it. I understand that argument. A word can be abused. People can shout genocide as a substitute for thinking. People can use it performatively. None of that determines whether genocide is actually occurring.
The evidentiary landscape also changed after he wrote. Amnesty International made a genocide finding in December 2024. In September 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed genocide and possessed genocidal intent. By the time I am writing in October 2026, I cannot treat the word merely as an activist airhorn. It now has a substantial institutional and legal analysis behind it, even while the ICJ merits case remains unresolved. The responsible response to a word being rhetorically abused is not to forbid the word when evidence supports it. It is to use it carefully.
I would say this to Adam with respect because I am not standing where he stands. I am not Jewish. I have not spent my life navigating the strange persistence of antisemitism. I have not watched people whose acceptance I trusted suddenly explain why murdered members of my own group should be understood as symbols before they are understood as people. I can imagine the rage, but imagination is not experience. So I will not tell him to feel differently about October 7, and I will not ask him to dilute his condemnation of people who treated Jewish death casually.
What I would ask is that the same moral clarity continue moving forward in time. The moral sequence did not end on October 7. Palestinian children born after that date did not participate in it. A Palestinian family cannot be made perpetually answerable for Hamas. A population can be victimised by an armed group that claims to represent it and then victimised again by the state fighting that armed group. The fact that antisemitic people opportunistically attach themselves to Palestine does not make Palestinian suffering less real, just as the existence of racist or extremist Israeli politicians does not make the grief of an Israeli hostage family less real.
Adam writes that his values have not changed. That is the sentence I hold onto. Neither have mine. I do not want him to abandon Jewish safety in order to care about Palestinians. I want universalism to survive the test that shattered his faith in it. The field should still contain him. It should contain Palestinians. It should contain Israelis. It should contain the person whose politics disgust me. It should contain the person whose government frightens me. It should contain the person whose grief has made them angry. The moral demand is not that everyone agree. It is that nobody be expelled from human consideration.
So I honour his refusal to accept antisemitism disguised as activism, his refusal to excuse October 7, and his decision to step away from an online culture that seemed to reward cruelty. I diverge where he appears, at least in those 2024 essays, unwilling to grant the genocide claim the status I now believe the evidence requires. That disagreement does not cancel the common ground. In fact, if his first principle is that murdered Jews cannot be converted into abstractions, then my extension of it is that murdered Palestinians cannot be converted into abstractions either.
The objectivity of the field
The word objective makes people nervous in moral discussion because it sounds as though I am claiming a god's-eye view. I am not. I am claiming something more modest and more useful: there are features of human flourishing and human destruction that are observable enough to constrain what we can honestly call good. A society in which children are nourished, educated and safe is doing something better than a society in which they are deliberately starved, prevented from learning and routinely exposed to explosive violence. A political arrangement that gives people meaningful agency over their lives is better than one that subjects them indefinitely to another population's discretionary control. A security policy that distinguishes combatants from civilians is better than one that treats the whole environment as hostile. A movement that argues for freedom without murdering civilians is better than one that makes civilian murder part of its method.
These are not mystical propositions. They concern bodies, choices, measurable deprivation and the distribution of coercion. Warmth in my metaphor corresponds to conditions in which living beings can continue to live without being needlessly harmed. Light corresponds to intelligibility, the ability to see another person clearly rather than through propaganda. Acceptance corresponds to allowing human difference to exist without treating difference as contamination. Patience corresponds to delaying the gratification of vengeance long enough for another possibility to appear. Love, at its least sentimental, means refusing to make another person's destruction the condition of my own completeness.
The field also gives me a test for ideology. I do not ask first whether an idea comes from the left or right, from religion or secularism, from nationalism or internationalism. I ask what happens when the idea is implemented. Does it require somebody else to disappear? Does it depend on permanent humiliation? Does it need censorship of obvious suffering? Does it convert children into future enemies? Does it make cruelty feel virtuous? Does it reward people for refusing complexity? Does it create a class of human beings whose pain matters less by definition? If so, the idea is moving toward the cold, whatever flag flies above it.
That is why extremism bothers me more than ideological labels. Extremism is not simply having a strong belief. I have strong beliefs. Extremism begins when a belief becomes exempt from the humanity of the people it affects. It is the moment when the goal becomes so sacred that any means can be washed clean by proximity to it. Hamas can do this with resistance. A maximalist Zionist can do this with Jewish security or historical entitlement. A white nationalist can do it with race. A revolutionary can do it with liberation. A state can do it with security. The field does not care which noun is being used. It asks what the belief permits you to do to a person.
Objectivity also means admitting facts that inconvenience my sympathies. If evidence shows Hamas committed sexual violence on October 7, I do not minimise it because I support Palestinian freedom. If a United Nations Commission concludes that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, I do not dismiss it because I understand Jewish historical fear. If the ICJ has not yet issued a final merits ruling in South Africa v. Israel, I do not pretend that it has because I prefer the stronger sentence. If Israeli military failures before October 7 do not establish deliberate permission for the attack, I do not repeat that allegation as settled fact. If antisemitic harassment rises during pro-Palestinian mobilisation, I do not call every report propaganda. The truth does not become less useful when it complicates my side. It becomes the only way not to have a side in the tribal sense.
This is where the field differs from moral relativism. Relativism can become another fog machine: everyone has a perspective, everyone has a history, everyone tells themselves a story, therefore perhaps nothing can be judged. I reject that. Perspective matters, but a broken body is not a perspective. Hunger is not a perspective. A hostage is not a perspective. A demolished home is not a perspective. A child terrified by rockets is not a perspective. A family prevented from returning to its land is not a perspective. We may argue about causation, policy and remedy, but the human cost is not imaginary.
Nor does objectivity require emotional flatness. My grief can be unequal in a given moment because the world is unequal in that moment. If one population is experiencing the greater ongoing catastrophe, I will feel more urgency about that population. The discipline is to ensure that urgency does not mutate into permission to hate the other one. I can say Palestine first right now without saying Palestinians are worth more. I can say stop Israeli state violence without saying Jewish fear is fraudulent. I can say Hamas committed atrocities without saying Palestinian political aspirations are therefore illegitimate. The field lets priority move while worth remains equal.
The objectivity I seek is therefore directional rather than mathematical. I cannot assign every human act a precise moral temperature. I can still tell the difference between warming and freezing. I can tell when a political culture is teaching people to recognise one another and when it is teaching them to look away. I can tell when security is being pursued through restraint and when security has become a word covering domination. I can tell when grief is being honoured and when grief is being weaponised. The field is simple because it has to survive situations designed to make simplicity impossible.
A politics of stopping
If I were asked to reduce all of this to policy, I would begin with a verb rather than a blueprint: stop. Stop attacks on civilians. Stop hostage-taking. Stop bombardment that predictably kills civilians on a massive scale. Stop using access to food, medicine, fuel, water and reconstruction as leverage over a civilian population. Stop settlement expansion. Stop settler violence and impunity. Stop treating Palestinian self-determination as a security concession that can be granted or withdrawn by Israel. Stop treating Jewish people elsewhere in the world as representatives of the Israeli state. Stop treating every Israeli as a legitimate target because a government acts in their name. Stop political language that turns an ethnic or religious population into an obstacle.
Stopping is not the entire peace process, but nothing else begins without it. People sometimes mock ceasefires or restraint because they do not solve underlying problems. Of course they do not. A tourniquet is not rehabilitation, but the existence of rehabilitation does not make a tourniquet pointless. The first task is to reduce the rate at which new grief is manufactured. Every additional death creates more relatives who may one day be susceptible to revenge, more evidence for extremists, more children whose earliest understanding of the other side is an explosion or a funeral.
Then comes opening. Open Gaza to sufficient humanitarian and commercial flows under reliable international arrangements. Open routes for medical care. Open reconstruction. Open political space for Palestinian leadership that is neither subordinated to Israeli control nor hostage to armed factions. Open Israel to a politics in which security is not synonymous with territorial maximalism. Open the possibility of international guarantees robust enough that neither people has to rely solely on domination for safety. Open archives, investigations and courts to accountability on all sides.
Then comes division or equality. I still think it is reasonable to want the land divided fairly if two peoples both require national homes. A viable Palestinian state cannot be a collection of disconnected enclaves surrounded by another state's military infrastructure. Borders would need to be genuinely sovereign, territorial contiguity would need to be meaningful, settlement questions would need to be resolved, and both peoples would need security guarantees that are not merely promises from their adversary. Jerusalem would require arrangements acknowledging its importance to both nations and multiple faiths. Refugee questions would require a mix of return, compensation, resettlement and negotiated recognition. None of this is easy. Difficulty is not an argument for permanent domination.
If the two-state framework has been made impossible, then the moral requirement does not disappear. A single political space would have to grant equal citizenship, equal civil rights, equal political participation and equal protection to Israelis and Palestinians. What cannot be morally defended is a permanent system in which one national group exercises ultimate power while another remains fragmented, occupied, displaced or politically subordinate. The field does not mandate a constitutional design. It mandates the human conditions any design must satisfy.
This is also where international actors have responsibilities. Governments that arm Israel cannot behave as though they have no relationship to how those weapons are used. Governments that fund or shelter armed Palestinian factions cannot ignore attacks on civilians. States recognising Palestine should help build institutions capable of democratic legitimacy and civilian protection rather than simply making symbolic gestures. States that invoke a rules-based international order should accept that the rules bind allies as well as adversaries. Otherwise law becomes theatre and extremists receive another argument that only force is real.
I do not expect a politics of stopping to satisfy people who want victory. That is almost the point. Victory language is part of the trap when two populations are not going anywhere. Palestinians will exist. Israelis will exist. Jews will remain connected to the land. Palestinians will remain connected to the land. No sustainable future can be built around fantasising that one of these facts will disappear. A politics capable of surviving reality has to begin from permanence rather than elimination.
The field tells me that peace is not softness. It is a design problem under conditions of trauma. It requires institutions strong enough to restrain people who are certain they are righteous. It requires police and courts capable of protecting minorities from their own majority. It requires borders or constitutional arrangements that cannot be casually rewritten by force. It requires historical education that teaches pain without teaching inherited hatred. It requires leaders who can tell their own constituency no. Above all, it requires somebody with power to stop creating facts on the ground that make coexistence harder.
Staying in the warmth
I know how this can sound. Warmth, light, a field of good and bad: the vocabulary can sound almost embarrassingly basic beside the vocabulary of international law, military strategy and historical grievance. I am comfortable with that. The longer I live, the less impressed I am by complexity used to obscure a simple injury. Expertise is valuable when it helps us see more accurately. It becomes dangerous when it teaches us to stop reacting to what we can already see.
A human body is warm. A home is meant to shelter. Food is meant to nourish. A parent is meant to be able to protect a child. A political community is meant to give people some meaningful authorship over their future. A border is meant to organise coexistence, not decide whose grief counts. A religion or national identity can give life meaning, but it becomes monstrous when its preservation requires the routine degradation of people outside it. These are basic statements because a moral foundation should be basic enough to remember when adrenaline, ideology and fear begin taking language away from us.
I remain anti-violence in every direction. Hamas murdering civilians was wrong. Hamas taking hostages was wrong. Sexual violence on October 7 was wrong. Antisemitic harassment is wrong. Israeli civilians being targeted is wrong. Palestinian civilians being bombed, starved, displaced and denied a viable future is wrong. Settlement expansion is wrong. Settler violence is wrong. Collective punishment is wrong. Genocide is wrong. None of these sentences invalidates another one.
But they do not all have equal urgency at every moment. In October 2026, my primary moral attention is with Palestinians because the scale of destruction inflicted on them, the continuing restrictions under which they live, and the disparity in power remain overwhelming. That is sequencing, not supremacy. It is the same principle that makes an emergency ward treat the person in immediate danger first. I do not have to forget October 7 to say Gaza now. I do not have to forget the Holocaust to say Palestinians now. I do not have to deny antisemitism to say occupation now. I do not have to excuse Hamas to say Israeli power must be restrained now.
There is a strange idea that acknowledging a new atrocity somehow steals moral property from an older atrocity. I reject it. The genocide of Jewish people in Europe in the 1940s remains one of history's clearest warnings about where dehumanisation, state power and racial ideology can lead. The genocide finding concerning Palestinians in Gaza belongs on the same human shelf of warning, not because the events are identical, but because the category exists precisely so humanity can recognise the destruction of groups across different contexts. The lesson of never again becomes meaningless if it secretly means never again only when the victims resemble the victims we already know how to mourn.
I want Jewish people safe. I want Israelis safe. I want Palestinians safe. I want Palestinian freedom. I want Jewish historical trauma treated with seriousness. I want Palestinian dispossession treated with seriousness. I want Zionism discussed precisely enough that criticism of political ideology cannot be turned into an excuse to hate Jews, and I want antisemitism discussed precisely enough that it cannot be turned into an excuse to silence criticism of a state. I want the words to become smaller than the people again.
This is why I return to Adam Sessler with respect rather than with a desire to win an argument against him. I see the anger of somebody who believed in a common moral compact and watched it fail when his own community was wounded. I share his disgust with people who make another person's death into a performance of righteousness. Where I differ is that I believe the field obliges me to keep following the suffering after the date that broke him. If universalism means anything, it has to survive movement. It has to follow the victim when the identity of the victim changes.
I do not know whether humanity will ever become good at this. We are tribal animals with extraordinary powers of abstraction and extraordinary capacities for tenderness. We can recognise a stranger's child as precious and, under the right political conditions, learn to think of another stranger's child as a demographic threat. We can build hospitals and bombs with the same intelligence. We can spend generations memorialising the consequences of hatred and then invent sophisticated reasons why the hatred gathering in front of us is different.
The field is my refusal to surrender to that sophistication. Stay in the warmth. Stay with the living person. Stay with patience long enough to avoid the intoxicating simplicity of revenge. Stay accepting enough to allow another people to remain. Stay truthful enough to name atrocities committed by people you sympathise with. Stay humble enough to distinguish what you know from what you suspect. Stay brave enough to oppose your own side when it crosses the line. Stay nonviolent not because the world is gentle, but because violence is so efficient at reproducing the conditions that created it.
And when the scale has tipped, rebalance it. Right now that means Palestine has to be brought forward. Gaza has to be allowed to live, heal and rebuild. Occupation and unlawful settlement cannot be treated as permanent facts that everyone else is expected to accommodate. Palestinian political existence cannot remain indefinitely deferred. Israeli civilians must be protected without Palestinian civilians being sacrificed. Jewish people must be protected from antisemitism without the charge of antisemitism being used to protect a government from factual scrutiny. Every hostage should be free. Every child should be outside the target set. Every community should be able to imagine tomorrow without somebody else's disappearance as the price.
That is my side. Not a flag, not a tribe, not a permission slip for hatred. The side of the field where people remain warm. The side where a body is still a body before it becomes an argument. The side where the person in front of me is not reduced to what somebody wearing their identity has done. The side that says enough before enough becomes another generation of graves.
Stay in the warmth. Stay in the good. Stay accepting rather than judging, protecting rather than hurting, restraining rather than escalating, seeing rather than sorting. And when power gives you the ability to stop, stop.
There is one final discipline in this framework: grief must never become a competition for legitimacy. I can rank emergencies without ranking souls. I can say that Palestinian suffering requires the greater share of my attention now because the present destruction, deprivation and imbalance of power demand it, while still treating an Israeli family’s grief as complete rather than partial. A mother does not mourn at sixty per cent because somebody else’s catastrophe is larger. The scale I am describing belongs to public responsibility, political pressure and the allocation of moral attention, not to the private value of a dead person. Every death closes an entire world for somebody. That is precisely why large numbers matter without turning people into numbers: seventy-four thousand separate worlds are not made morally small by calling them a statistic, and twelve hundred separate worlds are not made morally small because another toll later became larger. The point of sequence is to know where intervention is most urgently required, not to manufacture a hierarchy of human worth. If we can hold that distinction, we can mourn without being manipulated by mourning. We can remember without turning memory into a weapon. We can recognise that one community needs urgent rebalancing while refusing to tell another community that its wounds are imaginary. That, too, is staying in the warmth: allowing grief to remain human while refusing to let grief govern who may be harmed next.
Sources and factual notes
This is a personal moral essay, not a legal brief. Factual claims about casualty figures, international-law findings and the status of the genocide proceedings were checked against the following sources as of 6 October 2026. Casualty figures attributed to Gaza's Ministry of Health are presented as reported figures, consistent with the way OCHA and major news agencies cite them. The ICJ has not yet issued a final merits judgment in South Africa v. Israel.
1. United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, Legal analysis of the conduct of Israel in Gaza pursuant to the Genocide Convention, 16 September 2025. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/commission-of-inquiry-report-genocide-in-gaza-a-hrc-60-crp-3/
2. International Court of Justice, South Africa v. Israel, case page and latest procedural developments. https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192
3. International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024 on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204176
4. United Nations OCHA, Humanitarian Situation Report, 2 October 2026 (published 5 October 2026). https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-situation-report-2-october-2026
5. Reuters, 6 October 2026, one year after the Gaza ceasefire plan. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/one-year-trumps-gaza-plan-has-not-stopped-israeli-fire-or-disarmed-hamas-2026-10-06/
6. United Nations Commission of Inquiry, report on violations committed on and after 7 October 2023, including Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/coi-report-a-hrc-56-26-27may24/
7. United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, mission findings on 7 October 2023. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/following-visit-to-israel-and-the-occupied-west-bank-un-special-representative-of-the-secretary-general-on-sexual-violence-in-conflict-ms-pramila-patten-finds-sexual-violence-occurred-on-7-october/
8. Amnesty International, Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza, 5 December 2024. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/
9. Adam Sessler, On Genocide and Ethics in Games Journalism, June 2024. https://adamsessler.substack.com/p/on-genocide-and-ethics-in-games-journalism
10. Adam Sessler, On Being Twitter Free and having Col. Kurtz as a Role Model, June 2024. https://adamsessler.substack.com/p/on-being-twitter-free-and-having
