What Israel’s war in Gaza reveals about the nature of cruelty and the myths around it

The victor achieved this by being brutal. It appeared to consider Palestinian and even Iranian civilian casualties collateral damage. This removed Hamas’s most effective shield, Palestinian civilians. Israel also rendered ineffective another Hamas shield—international opinion.

The country went ahead with its objective of finishing off Hamas with no regard for what the world had to say, and most of the world had only one thing to say—that it had to stop. With only the US on its side, Israel was responsible, by its own admission, for the death of at least hundreds of Palestinians who were not armed threats.

Where did Israel find the moral courage to do this? There is a popular view that Israel, as a Jewish state, is so aggressive because Jews have been historically persecuted in Europe, and that gives it the privilege to consider itself specially placed to defend itself by any means at its disposal.

I don’t think that is what is going on. There may be a more interesting aspect of human nature at work.

There is this implication about people who have gone through suffering, oppression or bias that they are bitter and deal with the world with bitterness or meanness or cruelty. Some groups of people have a reputation for being relatively nasty, and they are sometimes presumed to be so because they were or are persecuted.

What may appear to be, at first glance, a sympathetic understanding is in reality a stereotype. I have no problems with stereotypes. Usually, they are approximations of complex truths that help us grasp complex things about society. But often the stereotype is plain wrong.

All groups have people who may be kind or mean or cruel, and in any given group of people, there would be some proportion who are capable of cruelty. What may differ is how empowered they feel to express themselves. People in the social mainstream cannot express their meanness, but persecuted groups can. This, I believe, is true of all persecuted groups that have a reputation for being mean.

There is a minority within them who feel so morally empowered to be cruel that their actions become facile representations of their whole community. A handful of aggressive alpha males can create an impression that a more peaceful majority cannot.

A factor that makes this stereotype stronger is empathy, when a public figure, for instance, ‘forgives’ the behaviour of members of such a community because “they have been through much.”

Guess which group almost never seems to have a specific reputation for being publicly mean, bitter or cruel—straight mainstream men. This may not only be because they are too broad a group to have specific attributes. To my mind, this is chiefly because they have no easy moral basis to be cruel. As a result, the cruel among them can only be so in their private lives.

Some of them seem to go the woke way to expend that capacity because that offers them a moral way to defame and belittle other people.

Israelis who had the natural capacity for cruelty, aggression or violence could channel their temperament for what they saw as an exquisite moral cause. As a result, they could rise swiftly in their nation as exceptional individuals who could influence the political and military strategies of Israel. A hawk in a nation that has a moral market for hawks has a very different level of prestige than a hawk in a more placid place like India or America.

While Israel has had anti-war protests too and its leadership is yet to face its electorate, with elections overdue, I believe this is one of the important reasons why the country could deploy armed forces to blast children and other innocent people in Gaza with such ferocity that it came close to committing a particular kind of atrocity that is rarer than the word’s fame suggests— ‘genocide’.

Genocide is a word that the global left uses carelessly. Riots in India have falsely been described as such. If you object to it, lovers of the word will make you feel you are a murderer yourself. Maybe these people have seen so little of real life that they need to react in this manner to project gravitas. But in the case of what Israel was doing in Gaza, especially over the last year, it was becoming hard to deny the accuracy of the word. It was becoming hard to deny that we were watching the annihilation of a people because of who they are.

This level of organized aggression might appear to spring from within Israeli society, which may have seen a moral justification for it. But I would argue that the war’s ravages are explained by the actions of only a few individuals with a disposition to cruelty.

The rise of Hamas in Gaza itself could be explained by the same phenomenon among Palestinians. The long oppression of Palestinians gave a moral halo to those among them who were disposed to violence and they gravitated towards a violent moral cause. That made them folk heroes and materially wealthy.

Injustice does not make its victims any more cruel than people who do not face the same misery. It just gives a free pass to a small fraction of any such population to be themselves.

The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’