Is Israel justified in its military offensive against Gaza? I do not know. Make no mistake: what Hamas did on October 7 is despicable and deserves strong condemnation. A state that has suffered a terrorist attack has a right to self-defense, and some retaliation is acceptable.
But has Israel gone too far? This matter is debatable. The number of killed civilians in Gaza (especially children) is disturbing, and there comes a point when we ought to say: enough is enough. When do we reach that point? Again, I do not know. Perhaps Israeli authorities are right when they claim that no peace is possible until Hamas is wiped out and that this objective is feasible; perhaps critics of the current Israeli offensive are right when they claim, as Michael Cook does, that "bombing Hamas out of existence is no more possible than bombing a virus."
But even if one were to defend Israel's actions, there are good and bad ways of doing it.
Israeli authorities have long claimed the higher moral ground by arguing that they take all the necessary steps to avoid killing civilians, and when civilians do die, it is only as collateral damage of actions that aim at military targets; in contrast, Hamas directly targets civilians. This is a plausible defense, although there are still doubts about the proportionality of Israeli attacks, given that in Gaza the number of civilians killed is far higher than the number of Hamas terrorists killed.
It is usually claimed that Israel has lost the higher moral ground because the number of Palestinians killed is higher than the number of Israelis killed. This is a very bad argument. In a debate at Oxford, Ben Shapiro asked: "if based on the numbers, more Germans died than Brits in World War II, did that mean the British were wrong in World War II?" His point is a valid one: a country does not lose the higher moral ground simply because it has fewer casualties in the conflict.
Shapiro's counterpart in the debate - a young Muslim lady - retorted: "Britain wasn't bombing civilians." The audience laughed because it is firmly established that Great Britain did bomb civilians, and Shapiro's facial expression suggests that he believes that those attacks on civilians were morally acceptable.
Indeed, various supporters of the Israeli offensive are now saying that if Churchill was justified in bombing Dresden to defeat Nazism, then Israel must do the same in Gaza in order to defeat Hamas. For example, Tzipi Hotovely - Israel's ambassador to the United Kingdom - told Piers Morgan: "There were many, many civilians [that] got attacked from your attacks on German cities... Dresden was a symbol, but you attacked Hamburg, you attacked other cities, and altogether it was over 600,000 civilian Germans that got killed... Was it worth it in order to defeat Nazi Germany? And the answer was yes."
This is a terrible argument. The bombing of Dresden was a major moral failure, if not a war crime. In February 1945, 25,000 civilians were killed in the bombing of a city with no military strategic value. The rationale of that attack was to force German surrender by targeting civilians. This is morally unacceptable, and it is precisely the sort of action that renders Hamas as terrorists.
Moral philosopher Michael Walzer has long been a Zionist, and he defends Israel's current offensive. Yet, he would probably strongly rebuke those who invoke Dresden in order to justify the assault on Gaza. In his seminal book Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer writes: "The greater number by far of the German civilians killed by terror bombing were killed without moral (and probably also without military) reason."
More enlightened defenders of the Israeli offensive may claim that the assault on Gaza is justified, precisely because it is different from the bombing of Dresden. After all, Hamas has its base of operations in Gaza itself, whereas Dresden was of no military importance to Nazis. Israel's purported goal is not to kill civilians; at least on an official level, the IDF is not seeking to force Hamas' surrender by killing Palestinian children. In that regard, the assault on Gaza may be more akin to the D-Day invasion, in which many German civilians died as a result of the Allies' military action, but they were not directly targeted.
Agreeing that there was no moral justification for the bombing of Dresden does not entail sympathizing with Nazism. In philosophical parlance, there is a difference between ius ad bellum and ius in bello. The justice of a war has two dimensions: there must be justice in the decision to begin a war, but there must also be justice in how the war is conducted. Britain was morally right in deciding to wage war against the Nazis, but Britain was not right in bombing Dresden.
In our times, comparing anything we do not like to Nazism has become a cliche. In fact, for decades there has been talk of the so-called Godwin's Law, according to which, "the longer an internet argument goes on, the higher the probability becomes that something or someone will be compared to Adolf Hitler." This is bad enough, but it is made even worse if, in order to justify some action, we appeal to any deed - no matter how immoral - that was used to defeat Hitler.