Nachum Kaplan is a journalist, media consultant and commentator. He has 25 years of international media experience, having held senior international roles at Reuters and IFR (International Financing Review). Access his work on his Substack.
There is no statute of limitations on an Israeli mistake.
An Israeli minister can utter a reckless sentence and it will be preserved indefinitely in diplomatic amber. An Israeli soldier can make a grave error and the footage will be replayed for years as evidence of an entire nation’s depravity. A military operation can go wrong in the fog of war and the incident will be cited in every subsequent conflict, stripped of circumstance, enlarged into doctrine and presented as Israel’s true face.
Israel’s enemies enjoy a more generous arrangement; their atrocities have short expiry dates.
A massacre is horrific until breakfast, complicated by lunch and placed in its “broader context" before dinner. Hostages disappear from public discussion. Rape allegations are subjected to fastidious evidentiary standards not applied to any other victims. Rockets become background noise. Terror tunnels become infrastructure. Murdered civilians become statistics. The perpetrators acquire grievances, childhoods, political aspirations and an abundance of irritating sympathetic adjectives.
Israel receives a charge sheet while its enemies receive a case history.
This is an obscene feature of discourse about Israel. The people who never forgive Israel are perpetually ready to forgive those who attack it. Israel’s misconduct, real or imagined, is treated as revelation. The conduct of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and the various armed movements devoted to Israel’s destruction is treated as reaction.
One side acts. The other side is acted upon. Israel possesses agency and so is guilty. Its enemies possess grievances and so have excuses and justification.
The result is not just a double standard. It is an entire moral accounting system designed to ensure that only one side can ever accumulate debt.
Israel is expected to remember every Palestinian grievance while the world forgets every Jewish grave. It must retain an encyclopedic understanding of displacement, occupation, checkpoints, blockades, humiliation, poverty and statelessness. Each Israeli decision is to be weighed against the accumulated pain of generations.
Murdered Israelis, by contrast, are treated as historically weightless.
Share
Their deaths float free of consequence, with no impact on the moral balance. They do not confer upon Israel a durable right to suspicion or justify strategic conclusions. They certainly must not interfere with the next demand for restraint.
The world insists that Israel learn from Palestinian suffering but becomes strangely agitated when Israel learns from its own.
When Jews draw conclusions from suicide bombings, they are accused of becoming hardened. When they do the same after failed withdrawals, they are accused of abandoning peace. When they do so after abductions, invasions, pogroms or the repeated discovery that territory vacated in the name of peace has become territory used for war, their conclusions are pathologized as trauma.
Israel is never allowed to call experience knowledge. Its experiences are dismissed as neurosis at best. Its enemies’ experiences, by contrast, are history.
This moral asymmetry depends upon a simple but poisonous fiction: that violence against Israel is always downstream from something Israel did first. The attack may be condemned, naturally, but only after the explanatory scaffolding has been erected. There was an occupation, a blockade or a provocation. There was despair. There was a loss of hope. There was no political horizon. There was an inflammatory visit, an offensive statement, a controversial policy or a historical grievance waiting patiently to be converted into murder.
The violence is deplored but also translated. It is placed in a causal chain whose final purpose is to lead back to Israel.
Israeli violence receives no such intellectual courtesy. It is not contextualised as the accumulated result of repeated invasions, terrorism, rockets, kidnappings, genocidal rhetoric and diplomatic betrayal. It is not routinely explained through Jewish historical vulnerability, regional hostility or the failure of international guarantees. It is judged at the moment of impact, in isolation, as though Israel woke one morning seized by an irrational desire-as though possessed-to send its children to war.
The people who demand context for terrorism suddenly discover the moral beauty of decontextualization when Israel responds.
This is why every war involving Israel is narrated twice.
The first war is the one that actually occurs. Terrorists cross a border, fire rockets, murder civilians, seize hostages or build military infrastructure among the population they claim to defend.
The second war begins when Israel retaliates. At that moment, the chronology is reset.
The initial attack becomes a prologue, then a footnote, then an inconvenience. The camera turns towards the consequences of Israeli action and remains there. The aggressor disappears into the rubble he helped create. The defender becomes the central object of scrutiny because the defender is visible, organised and powerful enough to be blamed.
Hamas can hide beneath civilians and hide behind the Islamic Republic of Iran, its odious patron. Israel has nowhere to hide, so it is made to answer for everything.
This is not accidental. Modern moral culture has developed a peculiar preference for judging the stronger actor rather than the actor with the worst intention. Power is treated as morally incriminating in itself. Weakness is treated as a partial absolution.
The stronger party must exercise restraint. The weaker party may exercise barbarism, provided it can be described as resistance.
It is as morally backwards as it sounds.
This moral arithmetic rewards savagery. It tells violent movements that the more recklessly they endanger their own civilians, the more politically valuable those civilians become. It teaches them that a war need not be won militarily if it can be converted into international revulsion against Israel. It transforms civilian suffering from a tragedy into a strategy.
Israel’s enemies understand this very well. They not only fight Israel but are masters at manufacturing indictments against it.
They place weapons near homes, fighters beneath hospitals, command centres inside dense neighbourhoods and rockets beside schools because they know Western audiences will judge the explosion, not the decision that made the explosion likely. They understand that the television image will contain Israeli firepower but not the chain of choices that required its use.
Israel is then told that it must fight an enemy embedded among civilians without harming civilians, destroy military infrastructure without damaging infrastructure, rescue hostages without entering hostile territory, stop rockets without striking launch sites and win without imposing defeat.
Every feasible military option is forbidden and every infeasible one is morally required.
Subscribed
When Israel inevitably fails to conduct war according to a therapeutic workshop’s standards, its enemies are forgiven for having started the war, prolonged the war and engineered the conditions under which civilians would suffer.
This is the great absolution.
The more monstrous the enemy’s tactics, the more constrained Israel becomes. The more constrained Israel becomes, the easier it is to accuse Israel of failure. The failure then becomes further evidence that Israel lacked moral legitimacy from the beginning.
It is a closed ideological circuit that no fact can escape.
Consider the asymmetry of language. Israel “targets." Its enemies “respond." Israel “escalates." Its enemies “resist." Israel “kills." Its enemies “clash." Israel acts from ideology. Its enemies act from desperation. Israel has policies. Its enemies have pressures.
Even the dead are sorted into morally useful categories. Israelis are killed in “cycles of violence." Palestinians are killed by Israel. One death is passive, almost meteorological. The other has a subject, verb and perpetrator.
The language knows where it wishes the guilt to land.
The people who never forgive Israel are also remarkably selective about whose voices deserve to be believed. When Israeli survivors describe what happened to them, their testimony is treated as politically contaminated. Their grief is too nationalistic, their fear too convenient and their anger too dangerous. They must grieve with moderation and speak without drawing conclusions.
The propagandists of terrorist organisations face fewer obstacles. Their casualty figures circulate instantly. Their claims are reported before verification. Their spokesmen appear on television as political representatives, not as members of movements that censor, intimidate and murder.
Israel is expected to prove the impossible under battlefield conditions, while its enemies need only announce it.
This moral indulgence does not help Palestinians. It condemns them to leaders who are never required to answer for failure. A political culture shielded from accountability cannot reform. A movement told that every disaster is ultimately Israel’s fault has no incentive to examine its own corruption, militarism, religious zealotry, rejectionism or sacrifice of civilian life.
Western sympathy becomes a narcotic that relieves Palestinian leaders of the pain of self-judgment.
Every failed war can be recast as victimhood. Every rejected compromise can be forgotten. Every authoritarian abuse can be blamed on conflict. Every generation can be taught that liberation requires perseverance rather than reassessment.
Those who claim to champion Palestinian Arabs are often the most determined to preserve the ideas that have brought Palestinian Arabs ruin.
They forgive the leaders who steal from them, the militants who hide among them, the clerics who sanctify death and the foreign patrons who use their suffering as a weapon. They forgive everyone except the country that refuses to be destroyed for the sake of preserving the Palestinian Arab narrative.
There is something deeply revealing in this eagerness to forgive Israel’s enemies.
It is not ordinary compassion. Compassion would acknowledge suffering without falsifying responsibility. It would demand that armed movements stop sacrificing civilians and that Palestinian leaders abandon the fantasies that have wrought repeated catastrophe. It would insist that Iran cease treating Arab lives as expendable instruments in its war against the Jewish state.
What we see instead is moral vanity. Forgiving Israel’s enemies allows Western commentators to feel nuanced. Condemning Israel allows them to feel brave. They can pose as champions of the powerless while demanding nothing difficult from those they claim to defend.
It takes no courage to excuse Hamas from a television studio, no sophistication to describe Hezbollah as a product of circumstance and no wisdom to blame Israel for the consequences of wars its enemies start.
The unforgiving posture towards Israel is equally fraudulent. It masquerades as accountability but functions as permanent suspicion. Israel is never judged only for what it does. It is judged according to the obvious fictions its critics entertain: that it is colonial, racist, expansionist, supremacist and illegitimate.
No other nation is forced to defend not only its conduct but the metaphysical legitimacy of its existence every time one of its soldiers fires a weapon.
Britain can fight a disastrous war without its right to exist being debated. America can commit grave abuses without campus encampments demanding its abolition. France can police riots without international organisations reconsidering French sovereignty.
Israel alone lives provisionally in its critics’ imagination. Its legitimacy is a licence that can be revoked after every headline. The legitimacy of its enemies-including that of movements openly dedicated to religious tyranny, mass murder and even genocide-is endlessly renewable.
This is why no Israeli concession is sufficient and no enemy atrocity is disqualifying. The verdict was reached before the evidence arrived. Israel is the powerful Jew and must therefore prove innocence indefinitely. Its enemies are the aggrieved anti-Jews and so remain redeemable regardless of what they do.
That is not anti-colonialism, humanitarianism, human rights or any other modern quasi-religious virtue.
It is the oldest prejudice in modern costume: the conviction that Jewish self-defence is uniquely suspect, while violence against Jews is always awaiting a more sympathetic explanation.
Israel should reject this moral tribunal outright.
It should investigate its failures, punish crimes and scrutinise military decisions because democracies remain accountable to themselves. However, it should stop imagining that perfect conduct will earn fairness from people committed to withholding it.
They do not object just to what Israel does; they object to the fact that Israel has the power to do anything at all. The unforgivable Israeli act is not a bombing, a checkpoint, a settlement or a minister’s speech. It is sovereignty.
A Jew who can be attacked is a victim; one who can answer back is a problem.
That is why Israel’s enemies are endlessly forgiven. Their violence restores the Jew to the familiar role of sufferer. Israel’s response disrupts the arrangement.
So the world must choose between two moral systems. One judges actors by their intentions, choices and conduct. The other judges Israel by the damage it causes and its enemies by the grievances they claim. One holds all peoples morally responsible; the other grants Israel’s enemies permanent childhood.
The first may lead, eventually, to realism and peace. The second has already produced about a century of bloodshed.
The people who never forgive Israel will continue forgiving its enemies because forgiveness is not the point.
The point is to ensure that Israel alone remains guilty.