Early October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters seized villages along Israel’s southern border with Gaza. The strike—according to official Israeli numbers—killed at least 1,139 individuals and the capture of 240 others. Hamas stated in its first public report following the incident that confronting all Israeli “schemes” against the Palestinian people was a required and reasonable reaction. Accusations of war crimes during the raid were made against Hamas members by Israeli officials, including torture, rape, and mutilation, though holding no basis of evidence. In retaliation, Israel began a series of catastrophic bombings of Gaza, having already been under Israeli siege for 17 years, killing over 25,000 people, predominantly women and children. Today, these numbers have spiked to a whopping estimate of 40,000 Palestinians murdered (Al Jazeera, 2024). This article will adopt moral skepticism as a framework in analyzing the issue: what is being witnessed today concerning the global response to the ongoing occupation and genocide in Palestine, most notably following the events of October 7, 2023, is the prominence of moral relativism—a concept utilized by many moral skeptics—and the “nitpicking” of morality and ethics as a weapon in fueling cognitive dissonance. The definition, understanding, and application of morality differ between different parties, influenced by bias, bigotry, and personal agenda.

Disparities in global responses are evident and can be found merely by scrolling through media platforms and news articles. According to Roy Peled, an Israeli constitutional law expert, for example, ‘no acceptable definition of armed resistance includes bursting into the homes of individuals on a Saturday morning and executing them and their children.’ He added that despite a lack of an agreed-upon legal or political definition, at its core, the nature of terrorism is calculated, demonstrative, and direct violence without moral restraints which primarily targets civilians; a definition that fits October 7 (Nelson, 2024). In the same article written by Nelson (2024), academic Judith Butler argued that moral anger rooted in the terror of Hamas’ cruel onslaught is an absolute imperative that should not be based on a historical record or an assessment of the offenders’ motives. Within this context, Butler further contests that certain moral crimes are sufficiently severe that they effectively detach individuals from their interpretive circumstances; a status that Hamas holds following October 7.

In other cases, photographs of what took place following the Hamas attack inundated social media and news sources online. Among this deluge of reports of murder, looting, and mutilation, a rumor grew on great proportions: the beheading of 40 newborns purportedly discovered in the Kfar Aza kibbutz, the narrative spreading rapidly and going as far as being acknowledged by the White House. The conundrum is that as verified by the Israeli government press office, there were never 40 beheaded babies found in any kibbutz (Maad et al., 2024). On the other hand, media coverage with regard to the violence and mass murders perpetrated upon the Palestinian people have been made widespread and explicit on media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, most notably through journalists who have caught global attention for their extensive documentation from the frontlines, such as Motaz Azaiza, Plestia Alaqad, Bisan Owda, and Hind Khoudary. Here, relentlessly distressing pictures and videos from Gaza and other Palestinian territories have become very easy to access, including documentation of beheaded newborns, charred children, individuals burned alive, and many buried under rubble for days on end before their last breath. This persists even after the order for Israel to cease its military onslaught by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). In the meantime, the U.S. administration continues to convey excuses for Israel’s egregious violations of international law, which Israel claims is a “tragic mistake” (Mahdawi, 2024). Whereas the atrocities imposed on the Palestinian people are dismissed merely as a miscalculation, Joe Biden reiterated unproven rumors such as the story of beheaded newborns even when advised otherwise, going so far as to misrepresent through a statement about seeing picture evidence as a means of scraping for justifications about the degree of Israel’s disproportionate retaliation.

Moral skepticism is the fundamental conviction that moral judgments have no place in arguments about international affairs and foreign policy. Skepticism with regard to the feasibility of international morality may arise due to one’s doubts about the existence of any type of morality; that humans are incapable of being motivated by moral judgments and concerns, or that the subjective nature of moral judgments renders them ineffective in resolving conflicting assertions or carrying out social obligations. Whatever the cause, moral skepticism indicates a refusal to accept moral reasons as sources of motivation (Beitz, 1999). Within the context of this paper, cultural relativism is a major source of international moral skepticism. Here, vast discrepancies in the global civilizations’ perspectives on reason and the good are prominent, and these distinctions are mirrored in the frameworks of diverse legal systems, as well as the views that different cultures have regarding social rules, communal values, and the importance of individual autonomy. Overall, provided any consistent classification of social advantages or any reasonable perspective on how such classifications may be ethically justified, it is often likely to find a society in which a valuation of goods or standpoint on moral justifications predominates. Assuming this is true, moral skeptics would argue then that there are no reasonable grounds to believe one social morality is superior to another (Beitz, 1999).

What has happened and continues to happen to Palestine illustrates the moral skepticism framework: universal morality, if it exists, has proven futile in halting a contemporary case of genocide and occupation, despite lessons from the past. Instead, it has only been exacerbated, killing an estimated 40,000 Palestinians and wounding another 87,000 as of today (Gadzo et al., 2024), displacing millions of people, and destroying what is left of schools, universities, hospitals, and homes into rubble and dust whilst much of the Israeli population can pick up on their lives. What is occurring instead is the weaponization of the terms morality and ethics in condemning one party without also doing so to the other. This perfectly illustrates the cognitive dissonance many have actively decided to adopt in analyzing the case of Palestine and Israel—condemnation is centralized on Hamas’s armed resistance on October 7 and not for what prompted the resistance to begin with; the vast history of murders, bombings, detainment, torture, and starvation (amongst other unlisted monstrosities) imposed on the people of Palestine for the past 70 years. In addition to this, many remained complacent and “impartial” on the retaliation by Israel that followed whilst they emphasized the ethics and unjustified nature of what occurred in Tel Aviv previously. The 70 years of occupation imposed on Palestine elucidates that morality is an argument utilized and considered merely when it suits one’s interests.

References

Al Jazeera. (2024, January 21). Hamas says October 7 attack was a ‘necessary step’, admits to ‘some faults.’ Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/21/hamas-says-october-7-attack-was-a-necessary-step-admits-to-some-faults

Beitz, C. R. (1999). Political theory and international relations. Princeton University Press.

Gadzo, M., Pietromarchi, V., Rowlands, L., & McCready, A. (2024, July 3). Israel war on Gaza live: 28 killed in 24 hours in Gaza: Health Ministry. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/7/3/israel-war-on-gaza-live-twelve-killed-in-israeli-air-raid-on-safe-zone#:~:text=At%20least%2037%2C925%20people%20have,on%20Gaza%20since%20October%207

Maad, A., Audureau, W., & Forey, S. (2024, April 3). “40 beheaded babies”: Deconstructing the rumor at the heart of the information battle between Israel and Hamas. Le Monde.fr. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2024/04/03/40-beheaded-babies-the-itinerary-of-a-rumor-at-the-heart-of-the-information-battle-between-israel-and-hamas_6667274_8.html

Mahdawi, A. (2024, May 30). Where is Joe Biden’s fury about decapitated Palestinian babies? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/30/biden-palestinian-beheaded-israeli-babies

Nelson, C. (2024). ‘We can have a debate about whether Hamas did the right thing’: Judith Butler’s Moral Relativism. Fathom. https://fathomjournal.org/we-can-have-a-debate-about-whether-hamas-did-the-right-thing-judith-butlers-moral-relativism/