The language of conflict

There is a moment in every conflict when language collapses. Words like justice, revenge, and security are repeated so often they lose their meaning. When that happens, something even graver follows, we stop seeing people as people. We see enemies, justifications, threats, numbers, causes.

This, more than anything, is the moral crisis of our time. It is not confined to one nation or one people. It is what happens when fear and grief eclipse empathy, when each side’s wounds become the only ones that matter.

Every ethical tradition, religious, philosophical, and secular, begins with a common truth: human beings possess an intrinsic worth that cannot be revoked. To deny that dignity, even to those who have committed terrible crimes, is to destroy the foundation on which morality stands.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that each person must always be treated as an end in themselves, never as a means. The moment we decide that some lives count less, we prepare the ground for cruelty. That is as true for militants who slaughter civilians as it is for states that unleash destruction on entire populations in the name of security.

We want morality to be simple, villains on one side, innocents on the other. But it rarely is. People who love their families, who weep for their children, can support or participate in acts of barbarity when loyalty, fear, or trauma demand it.

This is the tragedy of human moral life: virtue can coexist with blindness. A mother can mourn her son and still justify the killing of someone else’s. A soldier can believe he is defending freedom while helping to erase a city.

Understanding this does not mean excusing it. It means acknowledging how fragile goodness is when it becomes bound to belonging.

In Gaza today, we are witnessing not only the collapse of buildings but the dismantling of a civilisation’s ordinary life, the places where people once cooked, learned, played, prayed, and buried their dead. What is being lost cannot be measured in body counts alone. It is the destruction of a people’s capacity to live as a community among others.

And yes, this has occurred in response to acts of staggering horror. The murders of October 7, the slaughter of civilians, the gleeful cruelty, the targeting of children, were moral atrocities that should sear every conscience. But the moral ledger cannot be balanced by adding more suffering to it. Retaliation on this scale does not heal trauma; it multiplies it.

When revenge becomes the language of justice, justice itself dies.

For many Israelis and Jews around the world, the memory of past persecution fuses with the fear of renewed extinction. The trauma of October 7 reopened an ancient wound, the knowledge that hatred of Jews can erupt anywhere, anytime, and with unthinkable violence.

For many Palestinians, the trauma is just as old and ongoing: displacement, occupation, humiliation, the suffocating knowledge that the world tolerates their statelessness.

Each side’s trauma makes the other’s invisible. Each sees its own grief as proof of its righteousness. The result is a world in which empathy feels like betrayal, where compassion for one victim is interpreted as indifference to another.

In moments like this, the most necessary moral act is not to choose a side but to refuse the false choice altogether. Justice does not require partisanship. It requires imagination, the ability to see the humanity of those who frighten us.

This is not moral relativism. It is moral realism: the recognition that the slaughter of innocents, whether in a kibbutz or a refugee camp, desecrates the same principle. Evil is not measured by flag or faith. It is measured by the deliberate disregard for human life.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that the greatest evil often arises from thoughtlessness, from people doing their duty without imagining its consequences for others. That warning applies equally to those who fire rockets at families and those who drop bombs on cities.

True moral courage is not condemning your enemy; it is holding your own side to account. That has become almost impossible in today’s climate, where criticism is immediately branded as betrayal. Jews who speak out against Israeli policy are accused of disloyalty; Muslims who denounce the use of violence are accused of surrender.

But conscience must not be outsourced to collectives. The duty of moral speech lies precisely in naming wrongs committed by those we most identify with. Silence, whether born of fear, shame, or tribal solidarity, perpetuates the suffering of others and erodes our own moral integrity.

Beyond the horror of casualties and ruins lies a subtler tragedy: the destruction of home as a moral concept. Home is where life acquires its texture, the rhythm of streets, the sound of prayer, the continuity of generations. To obliterate that is to wound humanity itself.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argued that ethics begins in the face of the Other, the moment we recognise another person’s vulnerability as binding upon us. When we no longer see those faces, or when we see them only through the lens of guilt or threat, we enter what Levinas called “the night of the self.”

That is where much of the world now stands: unable to imagine the Other as human, and thus unable to imagine a future that is not written in blood.

No amount of historical grievance or national trauma justifies the deliberate killing of civilians. Not by Hamas. Not by Israel. Not by anyone.

There are differences in law, power, and circumstance, but none in the value of human life. The child killed in Sderot and the child killed in Rafah are victims of the same moral failure: the belief that one people’s pain can redeem another’s.

When history is written, it will not matter which flag flew over the rubble. What will matter is whether humanity can still see itself in what it has done.

To end this cycle requires more than ceasefires or negotiations. It requires a recovery of moral imagination, the ability to feel the full weight of another’s suffering without diminishing one’s own.

As long as vengeance is mistaken for justice, and silence for loyalty, peace will remain impossible. The real test is not which side wins, but whether, when the dust clears, we can still say we remained human.

This article was originally published on Pearls and Irritation.

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