Why Hamas, Hezbollah must face the same moral scrutiny as Israel

First Post

16-07-2025

Days after Hamas's October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, I reread Japanese author Haruki Murakami's 2009 acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. In it he said, 'Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg […] [y]es, no matter how right that wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg.' While this was widely interpreted to be a pro-Palestinian message, I believed that Murakami was making a subtler point about 'the wall' in his metaphor, which he also calls 'The System'.
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'The System,' Murakami tells us, 'is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others—coldly, efficiently, systematically.' This description, I believed, tacitly extended the blame to forces like Hezbollah and Hamas. So I read it as a call to re-examine blind, angry loyalty to one's own side.
Subsequent reporting suggested Murakami had been more stridently critical of Israel elsewhere and that Murakami inadvertently held anti-Israel notions due to 'the cultural milieu in which he dwells'. This question in itself doesn't interest me, but another re-reading has convinced me that the speech's inclusiveness was less intended than superimposed by a wishful reader.
This realisation was disappointing at several levels. The primary one being that Murakami's greatest appeal was his alienation, an estrangement from society that seemed to place him beyond familiar political divides. His distaste for Japanese nationalist writers like Yukio Mishima is well-known, and his novels like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle were deeply political, but they seemed to emerge from the depths of the individual 'psyche' where mundane political ideas gave way to universal emotions and images. So this binary, uninsightful nature of his political stances felt like a betrayal of promise. It is my impression—an unverified one—that his 'anti-nationalist' pronouncements grew shriller after the annual Nobel Prize speculation began.
Murakami, the master storyteller, surely needn't be warned of the perils of creating paper-thin antagonists. The playwright Aaron Sorkin insists, 'You can't think of your villain as a villain'. Instead, he suggests writing them like 'they're making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven'. To be fair, Murakami didn't make Israel out to be an outright villain, and he did defy calls from Palestinian groups to decline the prize. Still, his metaphor of a state having convinced its people to 'kill others—coldly, efficiently, systematically' comes dangerously close. And it's telling that such calls to conscience fall only upon Israel: is Murakami unaware that forces like Hamas and Hezbollah, with the sponsorship of the likes of Iran and Qatar, strive to 'coldly, efficiently, systematically' kill Israelis? Is he also unaware that terrorist acts are designed to invite state clampdowns and cause alienation?
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His framing of the issue is of interest because it is indicative of a wider moral incoherence that surrounds this and other conflicts and only accentuates their tragedy. Observe how Murakami's wall-and-an-egg symbolism perpetuates the symbolism of an armed state at war with unarmed people.
Gaza's tragedy (and that of Palestinians as a whole) would have been better approximated with the image of an egg being crushed between two steel blocks: one gripping the egg in place and the other closing in and smashing it against the first. The second steel block consists of Palestinian extremist groups and their sponsor states. And it is precisely because serious moral pressure isn't mounted upon this second block that Israeli suffering is perpetuated and Palestinian tragedy compounded.
To illustrate, let's take Israel's accusation of Hamas 'unlawfully' embedding military assets in densely populated areas and using them as human shields. New York Times paraphrases Oxford Professor Janina Dill countering the charge with '[e]ven if Hamas uses civilians as human shields, those civilians are entitled to full protection under international law unless they directly participate in the fighting'. Israel can neither be expected to ask its soldiers to get shot rather than fire at terrorists attacking from behind civilians nor will it give up its military objectives. Then why not call for an international ban on Hamas and for the sanctioning of its supporters? Such pressure may well force Hamas to return the hostages and thereby compel Israel to cease fire.
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Such calls don't arise because global realpolitik and ideological pressures suppress them. Also, the fact that these pressures weigh disproportionately upon individual states suggests that keeping states off balance is desirable to multiple players. But let us stay with the moral discourse here.
Counterintuitive though it might seem, international law allows 'certain , including uses directed toward 'self-determination''. Using this outdated anti-colonial provision, ideologues project terrorism as a struggle for self-determination (therefore a ) to justify violent means. [Incidentally, it isn't clear that Hamas's military wing is legitimate in international law.] But even with 'just cause', , and so a more roundabout intellectual exercise begins.
For example, Neve Gordon points to Israel's celebration of the roles of Zionist paramilitaries—some murderous—in Israel's creation, seemingly to equate future Hamas's legitimacy with Israel's today. He bemoans the tendency of states to describe civilians they've killed as human shields while describing civilians killed by 'non-state actors'—Gordon won't call them terrorists—as 'civilians.' He also suggests that states locating military offices in densely populated areas should invite similar condemnation. Citing anti-colonial struggles, Gordon then justifies 'the ability to blend into the civilian population' as being 'necessary for military survival' of paramilitaries, given the 'asymmetry of power.' He further holds state militaries' 'new surveillance technologies and enhanced weapon systems' responsible for forcing paramilitary groups to hide in 'densely populated urban settings' and concludes, 'Hamas, in this sense, is no outlier.' This is a 'hardboiled egghead' version of Murakami's egg-and-wall stuff. A question worth posing here is why Gordon doesn't worry that making a military case for human shields is self-defeating, as it would lead us to the concept of
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Legal scholar Louis René Beres writes, 'When Israel's enemies declare an IDF attack on a Gaza high-rise building to be 'disproportionate,' they wittingly ignore ipso facto that the rule of proportionality does not demand any tangibly equivalent infliction of military harms, but only an amount of force that is militarily necessary.' He also introduces a legal concept Gordon assiduously avoids: 'perfidy'. 'To the extent that Hamas and its insurgent allies routinely practice a form of 'human shields', the Palestinian side is guilty of 'perfidy' .Any such practice is illegal prima facie and qualifies as a conspicuously 'grave breach' of the relevant Geneva Convention. The most critical legal effect of perfidy committed by Palestinian insurgent leaders is to immunise Israel from any responsibility for inadvertent counterterrorist harms done to Arab civilians.'
Ideologues don't worry about military cases because their arguments aren't really about principle but about perception: about weaponising Israel's status as a state and a democracy against it. And despite weak disclaimers to the contrary—like Gordon's—Hamas's violence is sought to be semi-legitimised in the name of the Palestinian people. Once again, using wall-and-egg oversimplifications.
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Consider the harm caused in one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the war: humanitarian aid. Israel claims Hamas diverts aid supplies for its use and to fund its war. Accusations of Israeli blockades weaponising hunger have even yielded International Court of Justice warrants against Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and then Defence Minister Gallant. Israel and pro-Israel voices deny there is starvation and accuse critics of lying. But where's Hamas, the governing party in Gaza prior to the war, in all this? A top Hamas official stated that 75 per cent of Gazans were refugees, so it was 'the UN's responsibility to protect them' and that Israel was obliged to provide for Gaza's citizens under the Geneva Convention. The hostage-taking, civilian-massacring Hamas demanding that Israel take care of its civilians is a stunning double standard, but one that aid agencies and the UN appear to go along with.
Meanwhile, most aid agencies object to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private entity backed by the US and Israel, on relief supply citing principle. As aid agencies themselves warn of a humanitarian crisis, why not engage with it for the sake of Palestinian civilians, even if under protest? And why shouldn't governments diplomatically extract concessions from Hamas to facilitate transparent aid delivery? Surely some brakes on the second steel block are also warranted.
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I sincerely believe Israel must be held to very high standards to demonstrate that it is not targeting civilians militarily or through aid. But I also believe Hamas must be compelled to cooperate to stop the suffering of Palestinians, release hostages, and be held accountable for October 7. It's a foregone conclusion that most intellectuals will emphatically agree with the former and weasel out of the latter. Sacrificing the egg for the second steel block: that is moral incoherence.
The world's intellectuals, media, and institutions must do better. Can Israel seriously be expected to validate people like UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur Francesca Albanese—the news of whose sanctioning by the US is just breaking—who reportedly justified Palestinian violence? Or journalist Mariam Barghout, who writes in Al-Jazeera of the 'exhilaration' she felt on October 7: '[T]he Palestinians have struck Israel where it has struck Palestinians for more than 75 years: lives and land.' Or Professor John Mearsheimer, who was questioned about his moralistic tone against Israel when he displayed none against alleged Russian 'atrocities' in Ukraine: 'I don't have to provide a consistency of approach. I'm focusing on what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. I'm not comparing what happened in Gaza with what happened on October 7 and what's happened in Ukraine. Those are different issues. You could write a piece like that, but I'm sorry, there's nothing wrong with me analysing what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, period.' Are there no errors or sins of omission?
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Conclusion
The universal images and emotions of Murakami's fiction can actually help us understand the soul-crushing situation of the Palestinians and Israelis' existential fears. Instead we're served up tendentious agenda-driven narratives, which in truth drive the steel blocks that smash the egg. If aggressive Zionism crushes the Palestinian people, so do ideologies that undermine legitimate states, provide cover to terrorists, and give terror-sponsor countries a free pass.
I don't have a personal axe to grind in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and I believe India's official position on the Gaza War—condemning terrorism, justifying responsibly striking back, but seeking peaceful resolution of the issue—is the moral one. But, for decades now, I have listened to smug voices shield Pakistan and its terrorist proxy-soldiers and undermine India in exactly the same way.
That's enough time to develop an aversion for vacuous moralising and intellectual contortionism. It is better to call terrorism 'terrorism', to know that justifying it in any context is perilous, and that creating ideological space for it is reprehensible. And to those very people who might loosely hurl about terms like 'Islamophobia' or 'genocide justification', I would say Hamas ruled Gaza brutally, with a fundamentalist ideology, killed Israelis including children, took hostages, raped women, and now negotiates to return dead bodies—so just take a look at what it is you are justifying. This isn't 'resistance', it's depravity. And I would question whether such critics genuinely weep for Palestinian suffering and death or find in it a vent for their anger and a useful weapon against an enemy.
Incidentally, Murakami's own relations with the political Left suffered a blow when he was semi-cancelled for misogyny in his writings. I won't go into its merits here, but I can't help but sympathise with an author who shared what was within his 'fragile shell' only to find himself up against a 'high, solid wall' made up of 'bricks in the wall' he thought were his allies.
The writer is the published author of two novels (Penguin, India and Westland, India) based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost's views.