Seiz­ing the high ground is uni­ver­sal­ly con­sid­ered a cru­cial ele­ment for mil­i­tary vic­to­ry. The moral high ground is equal­ly essen­tial in the after­math. Claim­ing and then try­ing to hold it with snap judge­ments, over-blown rhetoric and no-mat­ter-what back­ing of obvi­ous­ly evil actions is a sure way to lose it.
So far, that out­come is being pur­sued with an alacrity that enhances the over­all cred­i­bil­i­ty of nei­ther side, both of which have reli­a­bil­i­ty prob­lems that range from mis­lead­ing through obfus­ca­tion to out­right lies.
Sim­plis­tic views offer nei­ther per­spec­tive nor pos­i­tive sug­ges­tions to help resolve an issue of Gor­dian knot complexity.
Hamas and its sup­port­ers declared Israel guilty of bomb­ing the Al-Ahli hos­pi­tal before the smoke cleared.
Israel’s allies accept­ed a not guilty plea as soon as it was entered.
Nei­ther was based on foren­sic evi­dence, nor will be help­ful in the long run, which counts for more than the moment.

                       QUICK CALLS, LAZY JUDGEMENT

Stand­ing next to Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Binyamin Netanyahu, a man whom his ene­mies (and a good many Israelis) con­sid­er at best an oppor­tunis­tic liar, and stat­ing that “Based on what I have seen, it appears as though it was done by the oth­er team, not you…”, was nei­ther Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s best optic nor option for U.S. efforts to counter anger and dis­be­lief in Arab cap­i­tals, whose sup­port will be vital when the rage and blood­let­ting is exhausted.
Not­ing lat­er that an Amer­i­can mil­i­tary eval­u­a­tion put the blame on an errant Islam­ic Jihad rock­et was almost cer­tain­ly lost on those whose judg­ment is based on blind ide­ol­o­gy and what­ev­er pops up first on social media.
That includes promi­nent fig­ures who ought to know bet­ter. Demo­c­ra­t­ic Con­gress­woman Ilhan Omar re-post­ed (and lat­er took down) a pho­to of what were claimed to be dead chil­dren wrapped in white shrouds in Gaza. It was actu­al­ly tak­en in Syr­ia in 2013, and was post­ed by a known dis­sem­i­na­tor of disinformation.
For Israel’s back­ers to pay lip ser­vice to moral­i­ty by inton­ing vari­a­tions of  “Hamas doesn’t rep­re­sent all the peo­ple of Gaza”, while treat­ing said peo­ple and their plight as a back­ground noise to the main per­for­mance, is a guar­an­teed way to dele­git­imise what­ev­er jus­ti­fied action Israel may take. Worse, it will only build sup­port for the next incar­na­tion of Hamas which facts, nev­er mind pro­pa­gan­da, guar­an­tee there will be.
A New York Times sto­ry about Israeli civil­ians ordered to evac­u­ate the war zone includ­ed this sen­tence: “In Sderot, vol­un­teers showed up to take res­i­dents to hotels in oth­er parts of the coun­try even before the author­i­ties began an offi­cial­ly sanc­tioned evacuation.”
In the same edi­tion was a report with this quote from Muham­mad Abu Sal­i­ma, the direc­tor of Gaza City’s Al-Shi­fa hos­pi­tal:“There is nowhere in Gaza that can accept the num­ber of patients in our inten­sive care unit or neona­tal inten­sive care unit or even the oper­at­ing rooms.”
Politi­cians who have no idea about mil­i­tary oper­a­tions and on avail­able evi­dence, geog­ra­phy or espe­cial­ly his­to­ry, weigh­ing in with counter-pro­duc­tive noise don’t mer­it reporting.
But clas­sic exam­ples of igno­rance and moral sloth “solu­tions” like  Sen­a­tor Lind­sey Graham’s “Lev­el the place” and 2024 GOP pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion seek­er Nik­ki Haley’s “This is sick, and we have to treat sick peo­ple the way they deserve to be treat­ed and elim­i­nate them”, gar­ner publicity.
So does stat­ing the obvi­ous “Israel has a  right to defend itself”, with­out adding the caveat that doing so does not jus­ti­fy labelling Pales­tin­ian civil­ians who have no say in any of it with the appalling term “col­lat­er­al damage”.

                   INEVITABLE VS INTELLIGENT

It is an ugly and unavoid­able truth that bru­tal­i­ty will not be met with com­pas­sion, for the sim­ple rea­son that it might vin­di­cate the transgressor. 
Coun­ter­ing it with equal or worse acts of vio­lence and inhu­man­i­ty, how­ev­er, more often than not  has the effect of per­pet­u­at­ing and often esca­lat­ing rather than decreas­ing the vio­lence in the long run. The his­to­ry of the so-called “Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict” is proof, if any was need­ed, that it cer­tain­ly impedes efforts to achieve a work­able peace.
Expect­ing Israeli troops to find the bal­ance in the heat of com­bat is fan­ci­ful, even if their com­man­ders set “rules of engage­ment” that will secure the high ground, both moral and military.
The chal­lenge for those not direct­ly involved in the blood-let­ting is hold­ing onto what in one of the most bal­anced and intel­li­gent columns in a fraught and emo­tion-charged week, Wash­ing­ton Post colum­nist Sha­di Hamid termed “intel­lec­tu­al humility”: 
“Even if we think we are right, it entails hold­ing open the pos­si­bil­i­ty that we might be wrong. But on a deep­er lev­el, humil­i­ty involves the recog­ni­tion that the truth itself is more com­pli­cat­ed than it might first appear.”
When it comes to per­ceived slights, even from allies, atten­tion spans in the West tend to be a few news cycles long at best.
Pales­tini­ans and Jews mea­sure ones against them in uncount­ed generations.
No mat­ter how counter-intu­itive it may be, hold­ing the moral high ground is both an oblig­a­tion and a neces­si­ty in the Gaza debacle.

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