Gaza Shattered the Myth of the “Most Moral Army”

One of the most consistent claims Israel has made over the years is that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is the most moral military in the world — a claim taken for granted by Israelis themselves and by many others around the world. In his speech at the UNGA on September 24, Netanyahu reiterated the absurdity of that claim, stating: “I salute the courage of our brave soldiers—Jews, Christian, Druze, Muslim. The most moral army in the world, the IDF.” The egregious violent assaults on Palestinians by the IDF in so many different settings, times, and circumstances raise the cynical question: if the most “moral military” in the world is capable of committing such heinous crimes against tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians only because of who they are, how much worse can a corrupt, bloodthirsty army be?

The war in Gaza has stripped the “most moral army” myth naked for the whole world to see. The IDF flagrantly committed nearly every category of war crime imaginable: torture; ethnic cleansing; indiscriminate killing; starvation; attacks on humanitarian zones; wholesale destruction of commercial infrastructure; demolition of homes; extrajudicial execution; strangulation of movement; assassinations of journalists; blocked medical supplies; and attacks on hospitals and health clinics. The sheer number of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the IDF led to a near-global conclusion that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

How did an army that preaches “purity of arms” fall this far? Herbert Kelman, in his classic study of “sanctioned massacres,” showed that ordinary soldiers commit atrocities when three conditions converge — authorization, which suspends normal moral judgment; routinization, which removes any occasion to raise moral questions; and dehumanization, which strips victims of identity and community. All three have been supplied to the IDF in abundance.

There is, however, a fourth pillar of sanctioned massacre: self-exemption, the abdication of personal responsibility behind the claim, “I was only following orders.” In that moment, the soldier does not merely obey; he relinquishes his own moral judgment, even when the command is manifestly illegal and its execution constitutes a war crime—an order he has both the right and duty to refuse.

During the war in Gaza, there have been repeated reports of Israeli pilots ordered to release 2,000-pound bombs on sites where they knew hundreds of civilians could be killed. On the ground, some soldiers reportedly greeted the resulting devastation with cheers—not as a source of shame or horror, but as though the destruction of human life were an act of courage.

The World Health Organization verified 735 attacks on healthcare facilities between October 7, 2023 and June 11, 2025. By May 2025, 94% of Gaza’s hospitals and clinics had been damaged or destroyed. The “most moral army in the world” knowingly bombed the place where premature babies are kept alive by machines.

The IDF has not only attacked the body, but the mind. Nearly the entire education system of Gaza—98% of all schools and 95% of all universities—were damaged or destroyed, a near total erasure of learning. Save the Children confirmed that as of July 2026, 21,000 children were killed, and as many were left permanently disabled—an entire generation physically broken, thanks to the most moral army in the world.

The final obscenity is not simply that people are killed, but that the soldier’s conscience is extinguished before the bomb ever falls.

There are six mutually reinforcing forces that explain the horrific transformation of the IDF from “purity of arms” to “sanctioned massacre,” which social psychology has long since named.

First, dehumanization from the top. When the former Defense Minister Galant announced a total siege with the words “we are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he was portraying Palestinians as subhumans. Although that’s not an explicit order to kill civilians, such language can strip away moral restraint, signaling that Palestinian lives are of lesser value and that violence against them carries diminished ethical consequence.

Second, the existential mindset. Israeli political psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal has spent decades documenting the “siege mentality” and the delegitimization of the adversary that sustains intractable conflict—beliefs that cast one’s own side as the eternal, sole victim and deny the other’s humanity. That is where one sees a human being; Israelis see enemies, losing the capacity to identify with the suffering of a distant other. A population defined as an existential threat cannot be a population of victims.

Third, October 7 and the summoning of Holocaust memory. Hamas’s savagery of that day was real and searing. Still, it was immediately transposed into a biblical register when the prime minister told the nation and its soldiers to “remember what Amalek did to you”—a verse whose scriptural sequel commands the annihilation of men, women, and infants alike. Genocide scholar Omer Bartov, an Israeli-born historian, concluded that the IDF’s operational pattern in Gaza came to match precisely that rhetoric. Trauma was converted from a claim on the world’s conscience into a license against it.

Fourth, sanctified vengeance. Albert Bandura’s work on moral disengagement describes exactly this machinery: inhumane conduct is cognitively restructured into something “benign or worthy” through moral justification and sanitizing language, while responsibility is displaced upward and the injury inflicted is minimized. “Mowing the lawn,” “collateral damage,” and “human shields” are not descriptions; they are anesthetics.

Fifth, the long apprenticeship of occupation. Nearly six decades of checkpoints, night raids, demolitions, and military courts habituated a conscript army to treating an entire people as a population to be managed rather than citizens to be respected. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom Isaiah Berlin called the conscience of Israel, warned from 1967 onward that the occupation would corrupt the occupier as surely as the occupied, and coined the term “Judeo-Nazis” precisely to describe what he feared the army would become. What was heresy in 1982 reads today as prophecy.

Sixth, impunity and industrialized distance. Almost no soldier is investigated, fewer still are charged, and killing is now mediated through algorithmic target lists and munitions released from miles away—conditions under which, as Hannah Arendt observed of bureaucratized evil, atrocity requires no monsters, only functionaries who never see a face. An army that is never held to account learns that nothing it does is accountable. Taken together, these forces demonstrate that the “most moral military” was always a myth—a comforting fiction embraced by the perpetrators.

As such, the claim that the IDF is the world’s most moral army has become untenable—not because Israel’s enemies say so, but because Gaza has supplied a record of destruction, deprivation, displacement, and death which every layer of the IDF command structure was aware of, which no slogan can erase.

An army’s morality is not measured by the eloquence of its code, its public relations campaigns, or the trauma it invokes; it is measured by what it does to defenseless people when it possesses overwhelming power.

To call the IDF’s campaign in Gaza a just war, carried out by the so-called most moral military, is not merely a distortion of language. It is an obscenity: an attempt to turn the suffering of the victims into evidence of the perpetrator’s virtue.