By Simon Lucas, "The Curious Case of Philosophy's Disciplinary Failure in Addressing Gaza"

Something about Israel causes otherwise great minds to go haywire ...

ICSA is very pleased to present this original piece of scholarship by Simon Lucas, examining how the discipline of philosophy seems not to have lived up to its own aspirations or even norms in its treatment of the Israel-Gaza war.

The Curious Case of Philosophy’s Disciplinary Failure in Addressing Gaza

By Simon Lucas

Abstract: This essay argues that contemporary moral philosophy has largely failed to provide rigorous, illuminating analysis of the Gaza war, instead producing simplified, ideologically driven condemnations of Israel. Despite a rich tradition of just war theory, many philosophers rely on selective evidence, flawed legal interpretations, stipulative reasoning, or emotionally charged narratives rather than disciplined argument. The essay contends that these patterns reflect pre-existing ideological frameworks, professional incentives, and social pressures that privilege moral signaling over inquiry. The result is a discourse shaped by a “moral supremacy of victimhood” framework, where conclusions precede analysis. He concludes that philosophy risks losing its intellectual authority unless it reasserts standards of clarity, rigor, and epistemic humility.

Great expectations, greater disillusionment

Moral philosophy has a long tradition of reflecting on armed conflict, drawing on centuries of religious, legal, and political thought. Contemporary just war theory continues to build on this heritage. Furthermore, philosophers working in different strands of the tradition have repeatedly entered public debate during wartime, offering assessments of various past conflicts. Given this rich intellectual background, one might expect moral philosophy to be especially well suited to illuminate contemporary conflicts such as the war in Gaza, clarifying difficult normative questions and bringing measured expertise to a public discourse that often oscillates between oversimplification and outrage.

All the more perplexing, then, is the tenor of many open letters and public commentaries issued by philosophers in response to the war. Rather than explaining the moral complexities at stake, these interventions appear to deliberately simplify them. Many have taken the form of sweeping condemnations of Israel while offering little by way of ethically informed proposals about what ought to be done beyond calls for peace and ceasefire. Such interventions may express moral urgency, but they rarely provide the kind of analysis one might expect from a field devoted precisely to careful normative reasoning. At times, the simplicity of these appeals borders on the formulaic and calls for “peace and ceasefire” read as curiously uninformative; rather like bioethicists intervening in public debates on abortion only to repeat slogans such as “life begins at conception.” Such statements may signal a moral stance, but they do little to illuminate the ethical questions at stake or to guide judgment in difficult circumstances.

Perhaps more surprising still is that contributions by moral philosophers directed at scholarly audiences frequently add little in the way of substantive argument either. A considerable number adopt a tone strikingly similar to that of the open letters without offering much philosophical originality. Even where arguments are developed in greater detail, they often converge on condemnations that remain largely indeterminate, forceful in their moral language, yet vague about what concrete judgments or courses of action would follow from them. With the considerable volume of writing produced over the past years, a revealing pattern begins to emerge. Much of the commentary consists of broad moral denunciations, with arguments typically falling into three categories: a kind of flawed legal positivism, stipulative reasoning in which the conclusions are already embedded in the premises and morally charged storytelling.

A look at the earlier work of many of the same authors is instructive as well. The frameworks within which the Gaza war is now interpreted were often established long before the present conflict, shaping both the narrative structure and the conclusions that follow from it. This helps explain the prevailing tone as well as the comparatively limited analytical depth that characterizes much of the literature. Much of the recent writing is more easily understood not as a response to the specific moral complexities of the current war, but as the continuation of an already familiar narrative in which Israel appears as the permanent aggressor and Palestinian violence as merely reactive. The phenomenon has several other sources, including pre-determined ideological boundaries, moral symbolism, professional incentives, and social pressures within academic communities. Within such an environment, philosophical analysis risks giving way to something closer to moral performance.

A taxonomy of scholarly failure

Contributions in scholarly venues can be roughly divided into two categories: those that operate within the boundaries characteristic of moral philosophy—that is, arguments grounded in logical reasoning, conceptual clarity, and shared standards of evidence—and those that do not. Even the former category, however, often takes the form of broad condemnation rather than analytical argument. Counterarguments portraying Israel in a more favorable light, or at least challenging these sweeping condemnations, have appeared largely as occasional rebuttals rather than as independent contributions. Beyond their condemnatory tone, several features stand out:

1) The presentation of the factual record is frequently strikingly selective. Evidence is framed as though it were unequivocally detrimental to Israel, while authors simultaneously emphasize that their assumptions are “unrealistically favorable” to Israel. Illustrative examples are often drawn from highly contested incidents, such as the tragic deaths of children, and presented as though they resulted from a deliberate strategy of targeting them, for instance through sniper fire.

2) Some interpretations of conditions on the ground appear simply grotesque. For example, of Hamas’s systematic use of human shields Oxford emeritus Jeff McMahan writes: “Since Hamas members cannot leave Gaza, which is densely populated with civilians, one wonders where else can they embed themselves.” One might almost picture Gaza as an uninterrupted corridor of hospitals, schools, and mosques, its terrorists merely victims of unfortunate urban planning.

3) Philosophers frequently engage in striking reversals of moral culpability. Israel is criticized for failing to fulfill alleged “duties of justice” toward Palestinians—by not enabling Palestinian statehood, on the suggestion that the war might thereby have been prevented—while simultaneously being held militarily accountable for not having stationed “combat-ready forces along the border with Gaza.” The result is a peculiar form of retrospective moral accounting in which Israel is faulted both for the political conditions preceding the attack and for failing to prevent the attack itself.

4) Moral philosophy occupies an uneasy, almost schizophrenic, posture in the present debate. Many commentators lament the discipline’s alleged silence on the war or describe a cultural climate in which even “expressing the belief that Palestinian lives matter” is said to be “virtually prohibited.” Yet at the same time condemnatory open letters denouncing the “Gaza genocide” circulate widely, and university campuses have become prominent arenas of antizionist and, at times, openly antisemitic agitation.

Taken together, these patterns—the reversal of culpability that effectively holds Israel responsible for the violence it suffered on 7 October, alongside narratives suggesting that Jews deliberately target children to advance political ends—reflect a deeply troubling mode of reasoning that echoes motifs from the historical repertoire of anti-Jewish libels long excluded from the realm of credible discourse. Particularly striking is the apparent lack of reflection on the historical genealogy and normative implications of such claims when they are presented within the philosophical literature, especially when done with little contextualization, and with a highly selective use of factual references.

“Other ways” of doing philosophy

It is troubling enough that elements of this reasoning occasionally appear even in the more serious philosophical contributions, that is those that at least attempt to present arguments that are, in principle, open to rebuttal. Yet the majority of contributions do not even aspire to genuine philosophical argument and instead produce something worse. They operate largely in a space beyond argument, relying on one of three recurring strategies: flawed legal positivism, stipulation, or narration.

1) Moral deference to the laws of war: Some philosophers have appealed to the laws of armed conflict in order to issue seemingly well-informed moral judgments. This approach has been explicitly championed by Zohar Lederman as “moral deference” to the laws of war, which he presents as preferable to silence in the face of one’s own “lack of expertise.” In principle, this is a reasonable strategy, indeed one that certain strands of just war theory have long encouraged. In practice, however, philosophers often appear to rely on caricatures of international law, whether out of ignorance or, at times, more strategic selectivity. Rather than engaging with authoritative legal sources, they frequently cite evaluative claims advanced by non-judicial organizations in order to support their assessments. Lederman himself provides a revealing example. Relying on highly contested interpretations advanced by human rights organizations, he characterizes white phosphorus as an incendiary weapon and declares its use a violation of the laws of war, treating it as evidence of the war’s wrongness. Under international law, however, white phosphorus is not classified as an incendiary weapon, a category that has precise legal definitions. Nor is its use prohibited. It is primarily employed for marking and illuminating targets or for generating smoke screens. Even when used in an anti-personnel function, Protocol III of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons does not ban such use outright but instead regulates the conditions under which it may occur in order to limit civilian harm. Lederman’s appeal to the legal authority of Protocol III is therefore misplaced. What initially appears to be a legitimate argumentative strategy largely collapses into selective citation practices that reinforce pre-existing moral judgments. Rather than engaging with the relevant primary legal texts, these arguments frequently rely on highly opinionated reports by advocacy organizations or on interpretations that mischaracterize the content of the legal rules themselves.

2) Condemnation by stipulation: Many other contributions arrive at condemnatory conclusions by mere stipulation. For example, bioethicist David DeGrazia begins from the premise that “Israel’s objective of eliminating Hamas was never realistically achievable” and was a “hopeless fantasy,” offering as only supporting analogy the inability to eliminate the Taliban in Afghanistan following 11 September 2001. From this starting point, the interpretive space narrows. Participation in the war, he suggests, makes sense only if “one views the killing or displacement of Palestinians as valuable in itself” or if one seeks “to annex Gaza.” From these premises he concludes that the war must be unjust because it lacks an achievable objective from the outset. Yet the decisive work is done by the premises themselves. The central claims, that the objective is unattainable and that alternative motivations must therefore be morally suspect, are asserted rather than demonstrated. A similar pattern appears elsewhere in his argument. DeGrazia simply asserts that the use of particular weaponry, military tactics, or casualty figures constitutes a “systematic devaluation of Palestinian life” rather than demonstrating this claim through argument. Conclusions drawn from such premises, such as the claim that “no morally decent person, and certainly no respectable ethical theory or just war theory, could maintain that such devaluation of Palestinian […] lives is acceptable,” add little beyond a more emphatic restatement of the initial stipulations. What emerges is a form of reasoning in which the conclusion is quietly embedded in the starting assumptions. The argumentative payoff is correspondingly thin: the appearance of moral analysis without the work of argument, and a conclusion that largely mirrors the premise from which it began.

3) Ethics as narration: A further mode of commentary elevates moral narration, in which the “lived experiences” of those affected by violence are treated as normatively decisive. On this view, appeal to disciplinary expertise is not only regarded as irrelevant but is interpreted as indicative of “willing, reluctant, or unnoticed complicity with dominant social structures.” Refraining from highly charged terms such as “apartheid, racism, or genocide in the name of neutrality” is not seen as scholarly caution, but as alignment with power and a failure to engage with “lived or community-based knowledge.” Within this approach, the act of speaking and bearing witness effectively replaces disciplined thought over complex ethical questions. The existence of suffering is taken as sufficient for moral condemnation, moving narratively from harm to determinations of culpability and assigning responsibility primarily by reference to “lived experiences” and structural power asymmetries. At times, articles proceed in extended narration while offering little explicit argument, instead presenting graphic descriptions of the devastating consequences of war, such as the scarcity of healthcare in Gaza. Paragraph by paragraph, these accounts reiterate that it is Israel that “produced” this scarcity and has done so long before 7 October, with the Hamas attack mentioned only to assert that “7 October 2023 was not the beginning of the story.” For the uninformed reader, Gaza may thus appear not as the site of a war precipitated by an attack from Hamas, but as the scene of decades-long wanton destruction perpetrated by the rogue army of a deeply sadistic society. These accounts not only fail to meet what is typically required from narration—internal coherence and fidelity to the facts—but go further, explicitly rejecting the demands of rational argument. They are also narrated in a manner that deliberately engages selectively with factual accuracy, relying heavily on so-called thick concepts, terms that blend descriptive and evaluative elements in ways that resist clear analytical separation.

The qualitative monotony of contributions across these three categories is compounded by a quantitative imbalance that appears, at least in part, shaped by editorial preferences and the political sensibilities of publishers. Publication decisions have reportedly been shaped by controversial assumptions on the part of editorial teams. For example, authors have been asked to frame their work in line with the editorial view that Israel is committing serious military misconduct, or to remove material deemed “incendiary,” even after peer review. Some editors are publicly active critics of Israel outside their editorial roles. Arianne Shahvisi, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Ethics, has repeatedly expressed sharply hostile views—for instance, on 7 October, cynically citing Edward Said: “Since when does a militarily occupied people have the responsibility for a peace movement?”—while shaping the journal’s editorial direction through polemical commentary. Similarly, the special issue “Bioethical Aspects of the War in Gaza” in Bioethics highlights the fragility of editorial neutrality. One of its guest editors, Zohar Lederman, has authored sharp condemnations of Israel, including rebuttals of articles judged insufficiently sweeping or unequivocal. The resulting academic record is less a reflection of rigorous debate than of an editorial-publisher nexus privileging a narrow argumentative spectrum. Perspectives insufficiently aligned with prevailing antizionist positions seem to face subtle forms of exclusion, echoing reports from scholars whose work has been discounted because of their Jewish identity or Israeli affiliation.

Toward a diagnosis: The moral supremacy of victimhood

Rather than a single cause, the prevailing antizionist posture in contemporary philosophy appears to emerge from a convergence of ideological frameworks, moral symbolism, disciplinary incentives, and social pressures. Much of the philosophical commentary on the Gaza war operates within a framework shaped by naïve anti-militarist assumptions and a caricatured critique of imperialism, in which the West is cast as structural oppressor and the non-West as presumptive victim. Within this schema, Israel is coded as a Western settler-colonial entity and Palestinians as victims of Western coloniality.

This coding seems to take particular offense at the case of Israel. For an ideological framework that sacralizes victimhood, reliance on state power rather than the purity of suffering amounts to moral defection: Jews are cast as a “fallen” people, having traded the moral capital of victimhood for strength. The rhetoric begins to echo a secularized form of replacement theology: Jews, having betrayed the lesson of their suffering, are superseded by more deserving victims. Paradoxically, Zionism’s rejection of redemptive victimhood thus becomes its primary indictment. Some philosophers articulate this decolonial framework explicitly, for example asserting that “[t]here is no ethics in Israel’s war on Gaza, only power,” or that the “Global North,” has created conditions in which Israel can act with impunity, “propelled by indirect messages from international superpowers that Palestinians have no human rights.”

Once this binary coding is established, moral judgment bypasses empirical inquiry and thrives on narration that confirms the prior coding. These judgments also perform important social functions: they signal allegiance within a broader anti-Western moral community, where defiance of evidence can enhance rather than diminish one’s moral standing like a “costly display.” Social dynamics further entrench the framework. Dissenters often remain silent for fear of reputational harm, professional isolation, institutional shunning, or, in some cases, threats of harassment or violence. The result is a stabilized interpretive regime, maintained by conformity pressures and a “spiral of silence.”

Perhaps the most striking feature of the current philosophical literature is its continuity. Many of the authors issuing condemnations today use the very same vocabulary—genocide, pretextual security claims, systematic devaluation of life—that already appeared in their writings years or even decades earlier. Not only the rhetoric but also the argumentative architecture remains largely unchanged. For Arianne Shahvisi, who has written or co-authored some of the most polemical articles on the Gaza war, Israel has long been among the most “overt examples of coloniality” (published in 2022), a state “hell-bent on the destruction of Palestinian identities” and engaged in “ongoing genocide” (published in 2014). Similarly, Ali Khalidi’s recent claim that “there is no military objective in Gaza” echoes his earlier argument that Israeli security concerns are fabrications serving merely as pretexts for aggression (published in 2015).

This continuity renders much of the work of these authors intelligible not as a response to the moral complexities of an ongoing war but as the continuation of an already established narrative. Within that narrative, 7 October does not function as a moral rupture but as a historical contingency, something that need not significantly alter the framework through which the conflict is understood or judged. It is absorbed into a pre-existing script in which Israel appears as the permanent aggressor and Palestinian violence as reactive or structurally determined. When the roles of perpetrator and victim are fixed in advance, empirical developments, even a brutal assault by a heinous terrorist organization, cannot meaningfully revise the moral story. Within this moral imagination, Israel arguably also functions as a symbolic node in Western self-critique. Condemnation of Israel thereby doubles as a condemnation of colonialism and Western power more generally. This dynamic helps explain why the issue attracts the attention of scholars with little familiarity with the region or the conflict itself, yet who nonetheless participate through petitions and open letters.

Against the temptation of advocacy

A discipline that prides itself on its capacity for rational judgment and its ability to distinguish tragedy from wrongdoing now appears, at least in this case, to have faltered. Too often, the peer-reviewed literature has come to resemble a venue for polemics cloaked in philosophical language, where the veneer of analytical rigor lends credibility to what are essentially political interventions. In some cases, activist scholars appear to exploit this veneer deliberately, while a publisher-editor nexus has been willing, or at least insufficiently concerned, to provide the institutional framework in which such work flourishes. Many otherwise respected scholars seem not to recognize the dynamic at work and allow themselves to be drawn into a discourse that only superficially resembles philosophical inquiry.

If philosophy is to remain more than a vehicle for rehearsing political allegiances under the guise of analysis, it must recover the virtues it so often extols, such as epistemic humility, argumentative discipline, and a willingness to let empirical complexity constrain moral evaluation. The war in Gaza raises difficult questions about necessity, proportionality, liability, and the moral costs of self-defense under conditions of asymmetric warfare. These questions deserve careful treatment, not narrative substitution or stipulative condemnation. The failure here lies not in reaching the “wrong” conclusions than in abandoning the very standards that give philosophical judgment its value. Unless those standards are reclaimed, the discipline risks forfeiting the authority it claims when speaking about the ethics of war.