email #40 — angry thoughts about violence, caring, and the law
Leon Kraiem
Hi friends. This is more political than usual, and gets at morally difficult, fucked up topics about Gaza; I thought it might be useful for some people, and it was useful for me to write; but there are definitely parts that are overly callous, or snarky where it is extremely inappropriate to be snarky; read it if you want to, and feel free to skip it if you don't. I've mostly avoided this sort of talk, but we're almost two years in at this point, and it's sort of unavoidable.
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I’m writing you from the National Library, where I arrived earlier today with a big stack of papers, things I’d printed out at home, that I’ve wanted to read for a while, and needed a day off in a quiet space to work through.
The first thing was the UN Human Rights Office’s report from last week that determined Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. This sort of thing is important for me to read. As a journalist, as an Israeli citizen, and as a human being, all. The army launched its (well, really, the political echelon’s — the army was actually against it) new offensive in Gaza City this week, and the initial wave of bombing was so loud you could hear it in Tel Aviv (which, for context, is about an hour’s drive away from the Strip.)
An hour’s drive is a long way for sound to travel, but not so far away for a person, and it’s easy to forget just how close the war is to me. (That construction is a little problematic, because it implies “the war” is located only in Gaza — in fact, it’s still taking place, at some clip, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Yemen — and now, it seems, in Qatar, too. Plus, there’s still a ballistic missile coming for the homefront on a more or less daily basis; I was woken up from a nap just yesterday by a siren, and hustled down to the bomb shelter. But of course, there’s no equivalency — Gaza is a warzone. My neighborhood in Jerusalem is not.)
And I’ve found myself wondering, when a non-commercial-jet-sounding plane flies overhead every now and then, whether I’m disturbed enough — either in the visceral, moral sense, or just the more neutral sense of a disruption to the ordinary course of things — by the knowledge that there are acts of mass violence occurring so close to me that I could (in strictly geographical terms) leave my laptop here, drive to Gaza City, spend an hour in Shifa Hospital as the wounded are rushed in from bomb sites, and then drive back here and gather my things before the library closes, and take the bus home. Whether I’m disturbed enough by the fact some two million people are trapped in that warzone, while I’m free to peruse the library stacks.
But I’m trying to be disturbed by what’s happening to Israelis, too, and I’m not even succeeding at that.
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Every Israeli is constantly asking whether he's sufficiently disturbed by the violence that’s being done right now in Gaza to the twenty-two living people who were abducted from Israel and are being held, as we speak, in Hamas’s tunnels — or, if frightening but utterly plausible-on-their-face reports are to be believed, above-ground, in Gaza City, where the IDF can identify but not get to them, as a means of warding off attacks that we otherwise might execute, if we weren’t worried about killing our own.
And when every Israeli, day in and day out, asks herself if she's sufficiently disturbed by the ongoing suffering of the hostages, the insistent answer from all of the hostages’ families is: No. You’re not. And of course, they're right. Which is why when I look around me at the National Library, everyone is wearing the dog tag, or the ribbon, or the piece of tape with the number of days on it. And those who aren’t? They’re praying for the hostages every day, multiple times a day. It’s a lie — a commonplace lie, but a lie — to say that anyone here doesn’t care. They might be failing to put that care into action in the way they probably should, but there’s not a person, in government or outside of it, left or right, who isn't torn up about this.
The Prime Minister’s Residence is about a twenty minute walk from my house. Every Saturday night, freed hostages and hostages’ parents and siblings and friends get up in front of a couple hundred people and demand the government make a hostage deal with Hamas, to return all the captives, living and dead, all at once.
The terms of the deal are never clear: does Hamas get to stay in power as the government of Gaza? How many convicted killers are we willing to set free from Israeli prisons — all of them? And if we’re offered a phased deal, dragged out over months, are we to accept it, and make all the security concessions before Hamas hand over all our people, or do you actually want the government to say “no deal” until Hamas agrees to release them in one go?
There’s a minority of hostage families who oppose cutting a deal, even now, if it’s in phased releases like the last ones have been— they fear that their sons will be the last ones, whom Hamas will hold on to for years, holding Israel by the throat as long as it possibly can; it’s important to remember, two of the hostages who came out in the last deal had been in captivity for a decade, mentally ill men who had wandered into Gaza and whom the Hamas government refused to return.
And then, there’s also the issue of all the people who will be murdered, who will be kidnapped, by the convicted terrorists whom we let out of jail by the dozens in exchange for every hostage.
As one right-wing commentator put it when expressing her opposition to the first hostage deal, back in November ’23: “We are saving the lives of these Israelis, by condemning to death other Israelis in the future. The only difference is that we don’t know those future ones’ names yet.”
And, of course, most immediately for most people: there are the tens of thousands of soldiers who are fighting the war — your little brother, your big brother, your husband, your son, you. Able-bodied teenagers are graduating high school, getting trained for six months, and then sent into a war zone. Yes, they chose to be in combat units — to do what has to be done — but they are by no means responsible for the fact they have to do it. I spent my nineteenth year wearing pajamas to class in Saint Paul, Minnesota. These guys are spending their nineteenth year trying not to get shot in Jabalia.
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None of this is new, and so far this email sounds like my least favorite sort of Israel writing, which is: post-army-age American “makes aliyah” (i.e. moves, whoopdeedoo), discovers that terrorism is bad, and then grandstands to their own community abroad about how Diaspora Jews just don’t understand. I hope that’s not what I’m doing here; I didn’t leave my job at the Jerusalem Post just to become a JPost columnist myself.
But it is worth stressing — because even some really smart people don’t seem to get it — the extent to which this is all, as I often say, one big trolley problem from hell. It is worth stressing not only that Israelis are trying to care about all of these people — hostages, soldiers, citizens— while also going about their daily lives, but also that these groups’ interests are not necessarily aligned, and by “interests” we mean here “survival”: a hostage deal endangers citizens; lower-risk fighting endangers hostages; a quieter homefront endangers hostages and soldiers both, so long as the war never ends.
And all of those groups are endangered the more you protect civilians on the ground. That is an oversimplification, of course — in the 21st century, diplomacy is part of the war, and there would obviously be consequences if Israel started fighting the war in a maximally effective, minimally dangerous way — but it is, as a general rule, almost definitionally true. The tighter your rules of engagement are, the fewer targets you can hit. The more buildings you clear individually instead of blowing them up preemptively, the more booby traps you risk walking directly into. The more protection you grant hospitals and schools, the more reliably you can count on Hamas to embed itself inside them, and fight from within their grounds.
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Which is why this genre of Really Makes You Think journalism, where a reporter runs around talking to Israelis who are agonized about the hostages, and agonized about the soldiers, and agonized about the citizens, and asks, “Why are you not also agonized about the innocent Palestinians??!” is so childish. I try every day, I hope, to deepen my capacity for empathy, and for holding contradictions and working through moral trade-offs. So I don’t want to say that holding all of those people in your mind, and being appropriately moved, is impossible: but I don’t think it’s reasonable. And I think anyone who pretends that it is, is being willfully obtuse.
The one thing Israelis are not prepared to do, in this impossible, only-wrong-answers nightmare, is to sacrifice everybody for the sake of innocent people in Gaza. To let the hostages languish in captivity; to set the conditions for another, bloodier war in a few years’ time; and to render all the civilians in the country sitting ducks, for the next round of massacres and rapes and kidnappings. That is, to be clear, what the world is apparently expecting of us, in calls to end the war with nothing demanded in return.
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This does not mean, to be clear, that Palestinian civilians do not have moral standing that every decision-maker, and every citizen, is morally commanded to respect and not violate. War has laws for a reason, and they must be obeyed. But that’s precisely the point — they’re there for a reason: you cannot expect a psychologically normal person, when sending their son into a warzone, to tell him: “Make sure to get a good look before shooting, in case what looks like an RPG is actually just a shovel.” A normal person tells their child: “Don’t take any chances. I want you back alive and in one piece.”
The point of international humanitarian law — the point of law, across the board — is to decide, in advance, what you aren’t allowed to do, because a situation will come when you would probably otherwise do it.
None of us likes to think of ourselves as criminals, and it would probaby be bad for society if we did; but if you reflect for a moment, it should occur to you that laws are only relevant when normal psychology meets abnormal circumstances — hence the insanity defense: if a perpetrator really didn’t know better, if he ‘isn’t like us’ in some fundamental way, then he isn’t fit to stand trial. Send him to the hospital, not to jail.
All of which is why something like this Human Rights Office report is so important: I don’t expect — nor do I want, if I’m being honest and normal — the Israel Defense Forces to care about Gazans as much as they care about Israelis. What I want, and expect, is that the army follow the law; the law we agreed to before, in more level-headed moments, when we were in the same state that we’ll return to, and have to live with ourselves in once, God willing, all of this is finally behind us.
Law, in other words, is my one refuge from the impossible obligation to care about everyone, when it’s hard enough to care for all of the the people I already love. Law is how you triage your care ethically.
So rather than self-absorbed, anguished soul-searching about whether I’m sufficiently upset about what’s happening to Palestinians in Gaza, while my own people fight for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, I sat down with this UN Human Rights Office report, to answer a more reasonable, more containable question: Is my country following the law?
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And that’s why it’s such a dereliction of duty to produce a report that is so stunningly, unoriginally bad faith as this one.
In short: this report from the UN Human Rights Office cites almost nobody but the UN Human Rights Office; it pretends not to know the difference between killing somebody and targeting somebody, and hardly acknowledges that the laws of war allow for civilian casualties, when they are unintentional, unavoidable, and proportional to the value of the target.
This is extremely basic: If the laws of war never allowed civilian casualties, they would have no point — the purpose of the laws of war it to set the parameters of what those circumstances are; these laws are not useful if they're impossible to adhere to, and it is impossible to fight a war without some innocent people getting caught in the crossfire.
According to the report, Israel is committing genocide by trapping Palestinians inside of Gaza; Israel is also committing genocide by trying to force the Palestinians out of Gaza; Israel is committing genocide by striking populated areas, knowing there are civilians there; Israel is also committing genocide by ordering civilians to evacuate those areas; Israel is committing genocide by blocking the flow of aid; Israel is also committing genocide when it distributes aid poorly.
The enormous quantity of munitions used, and the physical destruction, demonstrates that Israel is committing genocide, even though it would be impossible to expend that much firepower and yet kill so few people, unless you were taking extreme measures to get people out of the way. It’s the equivalent of dropping a nuke, people always say; okay. How does the death count compare to dropping one? If we want to kill people, we are humiliatingly bad at it.
The report cites an internal Israeli government figure for the number of combatants killed, and then compares it to the Hamas government’s total reported deaths, to calculate that 83% of those killed so far were civilians. But that was never the Israeli government figure for the number of combatants killed. It was (some time ago) the number of Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters we’ve killed whom we have been able to identify by name. The actual government figure for combatants total — we don’t have a social security number immediately on file for all of them — is some three or four times that.
The actual statistic shows quite low civilian casualties in the context of urban war, actually, but that’s not the point: the point is that the authors of the report are not illiterate; they know they’re lying about this.
Amid the report’s examples of genocidal violence by the IDF: at one point, Israel struck a fertility clinic, and destroyed a lot of embryos and frozen eggs and sperm samples; this is not used as evidence that we’re trying to suppress Palestinian birth rates — which would obvioulsy be a stretch in itself. No, the relevance of hitting the fertility clinic, presumably because there was a combatant in the vicinity, was that couples will be traumatized by grief at losing the opportunity to have children. This a tragedy. It is very sad. It is not genocide.
Another example: in May 2025 — more than a year and a half into the war — the European Gaza Hospital was rendered out of service. “Due to the forced closure, the hospital had to stop providing services including neurosurgery, cardiac care and cancer treatment which were unavailable elsewhere in Gaza.” This is, again, a really bad situation. But nobody was getting regular chemotherapy for a year in Auschwitz, nor were Jews holding German civilians hostage under the camp’s crematoria.
There is an intelligent, morally urgent, absolutely necessary way to talk about the laws of war, but comparing Gaza to the Holocaust — which, to be clear, is the “genocide” word’s special sauce, why everyone foams at the mouth to use it against the Jewish state — is not it.
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A digression, but it's not one:
In the West Bank — and I originally wanted to make that the subject of this email, but it’s 3pm on a Friday, this is 4,000 words long, and I haven’t cooked for Shabbos yet, so in very very brief: In the West Bank, violent settler thugs are pogroming Palestinian villages on a daily and nightly basis, as they have been since October 7, when the world shifted its focus to Gaza and Itamar Ben Gvir got his run of the place.
I have a friend, Eliana. We can’t talk politics without bickering, and I think her attitude toward Zionism is silly, and her take on Gaza wrongheaded and dangerous. She is also an extremely admirable person who is right about a lot of the things that really matter, and walks the walk about them.
One of those walks she walks, on a regular basis, is to the South Hebron Hills, where a lot of these pogroms take place. She puts herself between the marauding Jewish supremacists and their Palestinian civilian punching bags, and she and other activists record the thugs and call the (mostly apathetic) police and army, in an attempt to prevent, or at least set the stage for punishing, the ongoing attacks. A couple weeks ago, while doing this, one of the settlers beat her with a stick and broke her arm, while she tried to videotape him.
What is it they were doing, these settlers, that she wanted to document? They were breaking windows, pepper-spraying inhabitants, beating people up, and then retreating back to their outposts. They have not been arrested; they have not been charged; they are de facto encouraged to do this, by a National Security Minister who, it’s worth noting, is significantly more supportive of these attacks on Palestinians than the czars of imperialist Russia were of the Cossacks’ attacks on the Jews.
Why isn’t Ben Gvir enforcing the law? Because he doesn’t believe in the law. He treats it as a tool to help the people he cares about (Jews) and hurt the people he doesn’t (Arabs). Unfortunately, the UN Human Rights Office does exactly the same thing: It writes propaganda instead of legal analysis, because it’s helping the good guys and hurting the bad guys, so why make it any more complicated than that.
Settler violence, horrendous as it is, is fairly straightforward: the marauding Israelis are aggressors, the Palestinian villagers are victims, and tit-for-tat bullshit is irrelevant, because that isn’t how we handle terrorism in a civilized society. Its tolerance is our shame. There's little excuse for it.
Gaza, on the other hand, is more complicated: How do you fight a war, ethically, when the entire world refuses to let civilians flee the danger zone, when the battlefield was meticulously designed to put those civilians in harm’s way, when the territory’s rulers spent decades and billions of dollars in aid money excavating a subterranean bomb shelter system that only combatants are allowed to use, while civilians are intentionally left exposed, and when — all the while — your own citizens are being starved and abused day in and day out, and the people who kidnapped them are trying to kill your country’s eighteen year olds, sent into the warzone to stop it from happening again?
The Western world spent decades building international humanitarian law. We built it on the groundwork of a millennium of natural law theory, which Catholics sewed together from Hebrew prophets and Athenian philosophers, the latter of whom were preserved by Arabic translators and Muslim theologians. This is a history-long moral relay race, culminating in one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
The UN, Ben Gvir, the guy who shot Charlie Kirk, the people Charlie Kirk got elected: All of these people are crumpling up that achievement and throwing it in the garbage, and then bragging to us about how much they care about some people, and how righteously angry they are about others.These people need to care less, and follow the law more. Because no one can care about everyone, but everyone can care about the law. And, poorly edited as this closing sentence may be: if you care about anyone, that's something you should care about.