I can think of many words to describe what the IDF is doing in Gaza. “Moral” would not be one of them.

Perhaps Michael Gove looks at things differently; rather like Frederick Lindeman, Churchill’s right hand man and an advocate of mass area bombing in World War 2, who, when asked for a definition of morality replied: “I define a moral action action as one that brings advantage my friends”.

Only such a skewed perspective could allow him to see systematic algorithms that target air strikes and shelling using a 50:1 ratio of collateral damage (making it ok to kill 50 civilians if a strike manages to kill one fighter), smashed hospitals, schools and water treatment plants, the destruction or damage of over 250,000 homes, the displacement of nearly 2 million people, and the use of famine as a weapon as evidence of a superior morality on the part of the Israeli government.

Perhaps he hasn’t seen the people with white flags being shot in the street, didn’t listen to 6 year old Hind Rajab’s pleading phone call from a car trapped by the IDF, nor hear the IDF bullets that killed her family, nor note the way that the IDF waited for paramedics to get to her before they killed both her and them.

Perhaps he hasn’t seen any of the gloating videos made by IDF soldiers, and some civilians, or the Israeli civilians trying to blockade aid trucks.

Or perhaps he thinks all of this is ok; as his presumption of moral superiority for the IDF is not based on objective criteria, but because they are allied with the UK in the US centred Global North Bloc and therefore “the good guys”; on the side of “democracy” and “human rights” no matter what they actually do.

In a way this is almost Nietzchian. The ubermensch of US allies by definition “beyond good and evil”; and certainly not subject to the International Criminal Court.

Gove’s indignation at the ICC prosector arguing for arrest warrants for Israeli PM Netanyahu and Defence Minister Gallant as well as 3 Hamas leaders, echoes that of Netanhayu himself, who has spluttered his “disgust” that “democratic Israel” (i.e. him) has been put in the dock with what he described as “mass murderers” and threats from the United States to impose sanctions on the ICC.

In the interests of objectivity, it makes sense to look at who has been carrying out murder en masse; and how Hamas matches up to Israel in that respect.

This graph compares the numbers of people killed in Israel on Oct 7th with those killed in Gaza by the IDF since.

1200 Israelis killed on Oct 7th.

35,709 Palestinians killed in Gaza since.

So, almost 30 eyes for an eye… so far.

If Hamas are mass murderers, what does that make the IDF?

If Hamas leaders are culpable for deaths at their hands, how much more culpable is Netanyahu for the deaths at his?

Nearly 30 times… so far.

This is even higher than the ratio of 20 Palestinians for every Israeli killed in the period from 2000 up to Oct 7th 2023, which, once you’re aware of it, goes some way to explaining why it happened.

In quantitative terms, there is indeed, no equivalence. What the IDF have done since Oct 7th, and what they did before Oct 7th, is far, far worse.

And they are doing it in a now futile attempt to reassert by terror and massacre the status quo for a state that occupies and represses another people; against whom it commits continuous and casual violence, systematically discriminates, and has been inexorably dispossessing since 1948.

There is, indeed, no moral equivalence.