The Stories We Tell Ourselves about Peace and Genocide

When the doyen of international relations Hans J. Morgenthau lamented the tension between moral imperatives and the requirements of effective political action (usually related to state security), the tragedy for Morgenthau was the awareness that the only viable ethical choice for political leaders is the lesser evil. 1 Does this contention of the limits of ethics in international relations leave the current destruction of Gaza the lesser of two evils?Hannah Arendt famously reminds us that "those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil." 2 The troubling reality is that Netanyahu's government is not tragically choosing a lesser evil.Rather, it is fighting a struggle "against the forces of evil." 3 The lesser-evil justification is a minimalist moral consideration of sorts that is generally not afforded to the Palestinians, making the Israeli moral landscape far grimmer.4 Anthropologist Didier Fassin asserts that the moral failure over Gaza (however it is conceived) will leave an "indelible trace in the memory of the societies that will be accountable for it." 5 He is right.Not only has this kind of "[c]onsent to the obliteration of Gaza created an enormous gulf in the global moral order" (imperfect 1 Hans J. Morgenthau, "The Evil of Politics and the Ethics of Evil, " Ethics 56/1 (1945), 1-18. 2 Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship, " in Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed.Jerome Kohn (New York, 2003), 17-48, at 36. 3 Quoted in Nava Freiberg, in the Israeli Times, 21 Sept. 2025.4 The just-war theorist Jeff McMahan further argues that the lesser-evil justification falls short when applied to Israel's war in Gaza.Any defense of the Israeli logic of the "standards of proportionality in the killing of innocent people must appeal to a form of justification that is more permissive than a lesser-evil justification." See Jeff McMahan, "Proportionality and Necessity in Israel's Invasion of Gaza, " Analyse & Kritik 46/2 (2024), 387-407, at 397.