Israel doesn’t owe anyone an explanation.
Israel is not on trial. Israel was attacked. And any moral conversation begins there.
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This is a guest essay written by Yonatan Daon, a student of philosophy and art history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
A few days ago, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett appeared on the BBC.
The interviewer raised a now-standard accusation disguised as a question: “President Trump said there’s starvation in Gaza. Is he wrong?”
Bennett replied quickly, “There is no starvation in Gaza,” he said, listing the number of aid trucks allowed in and insisting Israel is doing all it can.
But the question itself was already the problem.
The interviewer set the terms from the outset, accusing Israel and expecting its representative to prove its innocence. She did not refer to October 7th — no mention of the hostages. No context. He was just an Israeli man defending himself against a moral blood libel, hoping to appear humane enough to avoid condemnation.
This is the perverse logic that defines today’s discourse. It treats a Western democracy, forced into war by a genocidal enemy, as if it were morally indistinguishable from the people who butchered its civilians. It demands that Israelis answer for the suffering caused by a war they did not start, while the people who started it are spared all scrutiny.
And Israeli officials play along. They answer the questions. They try to sound compassionate. They scramble to recite numbers, pleading with logistics, as if morality were a bureaucratic formula. We must always begin with regret when defending ourselves.
This isn’t diplomacy. It’s ritual humiliation.
This essay is about why we must stop playing this game. Why is it important to reject the false equivalence. We must stop conceding the terms of a conversation that was never honest to begin with.
If Israel is right, it should speak like it is. And if the war is just, it should be fought and spoken of with the full confidence of moral certainty, not with PR strategies designed to gain the approval of people who have already chosen sides.
The mistake begins the moment we accept the format. The moment we sit down for an “interview” in which one side is asked to justify its right to self-defence, while the other side is never required to justify its war of extermination. This isn’t a debate. It’s a staged trial — with the verdict already written.
When a nation has been attacked, its civilians butchered, its children dragged into tunnels, what moral person begins with, “Do you condemn the suffering on the other side?” Would we ask a woman who fended off her rapist if she feels guilty for hurting him? Would we ask a country that survived a terrorist attack if it regrets scaring the people who supported it?
The whole structure is corrupt. And every time we answer such questions seriously, we reinforce their legitimacy.
Israel is not on trial. Israel was attacked. And any moral conversation begins there.
However, we continue to respond as if our job is to garner sympathy rather than to win the war. We produce infographics. We send spokespeople to be interrogated by journalists who believe morality is a contest of who cries louder. And in doing so, we accept a framework where our cause is equal to, or worse than, theirs.
This isn’t just foolish. It is self-defeating. Because beneath the emotion games lies something deeper and darker. These are not just people who have different views. Many of them, including the journalists (and certainly many in their audience) have already made up their minds.
But what they’ve made up their minds on is not evidence. It’s not reason. It’s propaganda. Fakery. Emotional manipulation. They are not truth-seekers. If they were, they would not ask questions framed to equate a Western liberal democracy with a death cult. They would not treat “genocide” and self-defence as two sides of the same coin.
And here is the real tragedy: Many of the Israelis brought into these interviews only serve to affirm the journalists’ worldview. They don’t challenge the premise; they accept it. They speak in weakness; they try to appear humane; they concede every false framing.
And under that false framing, yes, Israel is guilty. Because if you accept the false premise, then the conclusion is “true.” These interviews are not intended to seek clarity. They are rituals of confirmation, staged to produce moral confusion, and the Israeli spokesperson is brought in as a useful prop.
This is not a clash of narratives. It’s a collapse of reason. You cannot reason with the unreasonable. You cannot persuade those who have no interest in truth. And you cannot win a moral argument with graphs and statistics.
These individuals are not arguing about numbers; they are arguing about moral principles. When they say, “Israel is starving Gaza,” they don’t mean that aid logistics should be improved. They mean that Israel’s very act of self-defence is evil. That war itself is immoral. That making the enemy suffer for its crimes is wrong.
Why?
Because their standard is not justice; it is sacrifice. It is the morality of victim-worship, where the weak are righteous, the suffering are holy, and the more helpless a people appear, the more moral their cause becomes. In that framework, every Israeli action becomes a crime — because Israel is strong, and strength is their original sin.
The correct response is not to scramble for calorie charts. It is to reject the premise, to say: Yes, war causes suffering, and that is a tragedy, but that tragedy began on October 7th. And if starvation exists in Gaza, it is because the Gazans chose to start a war they could not win. That’s not Israel’s fault. That’s what happens when you wage war against a country stronger than you. That is the moral consequence of evil.
This is the moral inversion at the heart of today’s discourse. It punishes the good for being strong and rewards the wicked for being weak. It turns suffering into a moral claim and power into a sin. And it treats Israel’s very ability to defend itself as the greatest crime of all.
You cannot win a moral argument with people who believe that morality means helplessness. You must reject their premises entirely and assert your own.
One of the most effective tools of moral inversion today is the “balance” language.
This is how the conversation is rigged: On one side, you have Israel, a fundamentally free, capitalist, liberal Western democracy. On the other side, there is a theocratic, socialist, terrorist regime that initiated war by burning children alive and dragging hostages into tunnels.
And yet the journalist turns to the Israeli and says: “Do you condemn what your army is doing?” (And then they cite some esoteric example of a supposed wrongdoing, like the accidental killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers)
“What about the settlers?” (And then they invoke some fringe cases of settler violence, as if they represent state policy, reviving the modern blood libel that Jews inherently abuse power.)
“Surely you admit there are atrocities on both sides?”
It’s a trick. And far too many fall for it.
This is not about denying complexity. It’s about refusing to erase the fundamental difference between civilisation and barbarism — between a nation trying to defend its people and an ideology committed to eradicating them.
When you accept the premise that both sides are guilty, you’ve already lost the moral argument. Even if you respond with nuance, data, sorrow, and care, the conversation’s structure has already made you a defendant and your enemy an accuser.
And that’s the goal.
The moment you start explaining, you are no longer defending. You are justifying. You are conceding moral clarity for the illusion of being “reasonable.”
There is no equivalence. There is no symmetry.
The Palestinians initiated the war, and everything that occurred as a result is their fault. Period. That’s it.
And yet, even among those who supposedly admit that the Palestinian atrocities of October 7th were evil, the game continues. They pivot. They shift the spotlight away from the butchers and toward internal political disagreements in Israel because that serves their purpose, too: “But what about the ‘illegal’ settlements?” “What about Ben Gvir?” “What about Netanyahu’s judicial reform?”
Let’s be clear: Internal disagreements, however heated, are not the same as genocide. They are the mark of a free society. They are precisely what you would expect in a democracy governed by the rule of law.
In Israel, people protest against the war, people protest for the war, and those who commit crimes — whether “settlers” or anyone else — are prosecuted. Israel’s justice system is one of the most liberal in the world. Probably too liberal. But it exists, and it functions.
You don’t get any of that in Gaza. There is no protest. No dissent. No press. No legal redress. There is only hatred — unified, state-sponsored, and turned outward toward the Jews.
To raise these fringe internal disputes (isolated cases of misconduct) as if they cancel out the horror of October 7th is not a plea for justice. It is an attempt to make the Jewish state look bad, to blur the moral distinction, and to erode the very foundation on which Israel stands.
It is dishonest. It is malicious. And it has nothing to do with justice.
The very idea that Israel must condemn itself to be considered moral is perverse. The demand to “balance” the conversation is not a call for fairness; it is a demand for Israel to surrender the very moral ground that makes it just.
We must not play along.
I call this the polite surrender. We all know what it looks like: the Israeli spokesperson in a suit, apologising with poise. “We regret the loss of civilian life,” he says. “Israel is doing everything it can.” He bows his head and sounds sorrowful, reasonable, civilised. He thinks that if he’s nice enough, articulate enough (British enough), he might be spared.
It reminds me of a Holocaust joke: A group of Jews stands in line before a Nazi firing squad. One of them notices the guard’s shoelace is untied. He whispers to his friend, “Should I tell him?” His friend replies, “You don’t want to cause trouble.”
This is not thoughtfulness. It’s appeasement with a British accent.
Some of the most damaging voices in this war aren’t our enemies. They are the polished, articulate, well-meaning Jews who believe that winning sympathy is more important than speaking the truth. They are the intellectuals, spokespeople, and commentators who once held high positions, but now dedicate their time to criticising Israel for being overly assertive.
At the start of the war, they were principled defenders of Israel: clear, firm, effective.
But over time, their mission shifted. They stopped defending Israel and started managing its image. When Israeli ministers expressed the moral outrage that October 7th demanded, they didn’t support them; they condemned them.
Why? Because it was “bad PR.”
This is how it always happens. The intellectual who starts out fighting for his country ends up policing its conscience. He internalises the foreign audience’s gaze. Slowly, his standard shifts from justice to diplomacy. This is not thoughtfulness. It’s appeasement. It’s weakness. And it is tragic.
When Israel’s defenders begin to view the truth as a liability, they unintentionally become instruments of the enemy’s narrative. We don’t need better manners. We need better courage.
One of the most common objections to calls for moral clarity is the supposed need for restraint: “Yes, but Israel can’t make its own F-35s.” Or: “We rely on American weapons. We can’t upset Washington.” As if the price of sovereignty is submission.
To which I say: We should pack up and go back to the shtetl.
If we are going to live as a vassal state, tiptoeing around the opinions of foreign powers that pressure us to show mercy to our enemies, then what exactly did we fight for?
This is not the first time Jews have fought without the world’s approval. In 1948, Israel fought for its life with barely a dozen tanks, a handful of armoured trucks welded together in Tel Aviv underground garages, and broken-down Czech planes held together with scrap parts and prayers. The pilots barely had training. Some of the rifles were leftovers from both sides of World War II.
And we won.
We didn’t win because we had NATO. We didn’t win because the world loved us. We won because we had no choice — and because we were willing to do whatever it took.
That spirit has not disappeared, but it has been suffocated by a new-old fear. The shtetl mentality has returned, not to a Polish village, but to the halls of Israel’s own government. We still act like frightened exiles, constantly looking to the mayor, the governor, and the empire for a nod of approval.
But this is no shtetl. This is a sovereign Jewish state, a regional superpower, a nuclear power. And yet we act like supplicants. We are told to watch our tone, to deny our pain, to limit our strength for fear of what the Gentiles will say.
But the truth is, if Israel fought this war the way it should have been fought — decisively, unapologetically, to victory — it wouldn’t need permission from Washington. It wouldn’t need to explain itself in The Hague. It wouldn’t beg for understanding in a UN commission or an Ivy League university.
It would be feared. It would be respected. It would be free.
When someone is falsely accused of a crime — when the charge is so outrageous it defies reality — what do they do? Do they grovel? Do they compile spreadsheets to prove they’re decent people? Do they preface every sentence with an apology?
No, the innocent stand tall. They speak with clarity and calm. They do not seek approval from others. They know the accusation is absurd, and they treat it as such.
This is how a nation confident in its justice behaves. It does not need to measure its morality in food trucks. It does not need to recite calorie counts. It does not need to start every sentence with, “Of course we regret civilian suffering,” as if that were ever in question.
When we do this, when our representatives scramble to say the right things in the right tone to the right interviewer, we don’t come across as moral. We come across as guilty. Because only the guilty try that hard to be liked.
This posture is not a diplomatic strategy. It is psychological residue. It is the instinct of the exile, the Jew whose safety depends on appearing harmless. But we are not exiles anymore. We are not guests in someone else’s land. We are sovereign. And sovereign people do not apologise for existing.
This is why the first moral obligation of a free nation in a just war is to say so. This obligation should be expressed without apology, without hesitation, and without any form of compromise.
Moral clarity is not a luxury. It is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a necessary instrument. And in today’s war of narratives, it is as essential as tanks and planes.
Israel’s enemies do not doubt themselves. They do not issue disclaimers. They do not soften their language or dilute their goals. They want to see Israel gone — and they say so, clearly, publicly, and proudly.
And we? We debate tone. We agonise over the phrasing. We send former prime ministers to foreign news desks to deny that there is hunger, to promise that “we are doing everything we can.” We walk into ambushes smiling, thinking we’re engaged in rational discourse, when in fact we’re being put on trial in a court that has already passed judgement.
This must stop.
We do not owe the world a balance. We don’t owe the world anything. These are the same nations that turned their backs on us, or worse. Their soil is littered with our dead. We owe them nothing. What we owe is to ourselves: the truth, the dignity of moral certainty. Because if we cannot say with confidence that we are right, then we should not be fighting.
If we owe this to anyone, it is not to our critics; it is to our dead, to the soldiers who went to war and never came back, to the civilians butchered in their beds, to the hostages still trapped beneath Gaza, praying not only for rescue, but for a country that remembers why it must fight. We owe it to them to speak with conviction, to fight without apology, and to declare without flinching that our cause is just.
This is not a call to retreat into silence or isolation. It is not a rejection of dialogue in principle. There are people in the world who are still capable of reason and can engage in good faith. And when such people speak — when they ask real questions, when they seek truth and not spectacle — Israel should answer.
But the number of such people is shrinking. We live in a culture gripped by epistemological collapse. The very idea of objective truth is under assault. Morality is measured by optics. Narratives have replaced facts. In this environment, the more Israel tries to explain itself to irrational people, the more it debases itself.
You do not owe a conversation to someone who denies your right to exist. You do not owe a debate to those who have already chosen sides. Engaging with such people is not dialogue; it is a performance. You are walking into a trial where the sentence has already been passed, the cameras are rolling, and all that remains is how pitifully you will beg for your innocence.
Speak, if you must. But speak as soldiers do: without apology, without compromise, with one goal only: victory.
Ultimately, maintaining moral clarity is not merely a matter of posture. It’s what justice demands.
If you truly care about Israel’s image, demand that it stop playing both sides of a war. Demand it act like a country that wants to win. No more staged sorrow. No more polite bleeding. No more waiting for permission from the United Nations. Victory now. For the hostages. For the soldiers. For the dead. For the living. Not for the cameras, but for ourselves.
We owe ourselves the truth. We owe ourselves the dignity of moral certainty. Because if we cannot say with confidence that we are right, then we should not be fighting. But we are right — and we must fight accordingly.
Because here, in the Middle East, we are holding the line. We are proud. Proud of our soldiers, our citizens, our heroes. Proud of a civilisation that still knows the difference between good and evil, and dares to stand and fight for it.
We do not explain ourselves. We fight for ourselves.
For truth. For victory. For Israel.
You are so right. Israel was invaded and brutally attacked. Israel fights back as any sovereign Country would. No explanation is needed!
Well Said. I’m sooo tired of the bleeding hearts who’re accusing Israel for their plight yet they tolerate a Terrorist Group who are bent on destroying Israel. Israel needs to implement a scorched earth policy.
Dresden during WW II was leveled - no one said boo.
I’m sooo tired of hearing about the Palestinians and their Living Conditions
If Hamas wants Peace and end Hunger - simply lay down your weapons