For many moral philosophers, Jeff McMahan has been a role model not only for how to do good philosophy, but also for academic virtues such as openness to dissent and the ability to engage constructively with disagreement. In a recent conversation with researchers from the Kyiv Center for Practical Ethics, he reminds us of what good philosophy requires: the application of care, rigor, and impartiality, coupled with an openness to be shown that one might be wrong, concluding that “one of the most important things in moral philosophy is to be epistemically modest.” Beyond this, he is also one of the most influential contemporary war ethicists and has shaped an entire school of thought within the just war tradition.

For an external observer, especially someone familiar only with his academic writing and public commentary on Israel’s multi-front war, particularly in Gaza, this might come as a surprise. Whereas elsewhere he has largely lived up to the above principles, here he seems to have abandoned them altogether. His writings about these issues stand out for extraordinary carelessness, incoherence, and what appears to be obsessive prejudice. The unavoidable impression is that his judgments were already fixed at the outset of the hostilities, and that the arguments serve primarily as ex post justification for conclusions reached in advance.

McMahan’s analysis fails on three levels: first, in the supposed modesty with which he assesses the facts and battlefield realities of the Gaza war; second, in his interpretation of the historical record; and third, in his moral analysis. Facts, history, ethics—McMahan breaks down across all fronts. But he not only fails in his arguments—something that is no great concern, since every philosopher occasionally reaches an intellectual dead end—but, more troublingly, his mode of reasoning and rhetoric contribute to an academic climate in which hatred of Israel can all too easily be elevated into a form of moral cognition.

Facts

As shown elsewhere in greater detail, McMahan often treats factual matters with remarkable carelessness. The pattern sometimes appears strategic to lend his arguments greater rhetorical force. Throughout his writings, he repeatedly emphasizes how favorable (or even “unrealistically favorable”) his assessment of Israel’s conduct is. However, he simultaneously accepts at face value some of the most extreme allegations levelled against the Jewish state and frequently relies on works and sources whose claims have been effectively debunked as part of a steady stream of revelations about journalistic malpractice and structural anti-Israel bias, including within institutions long regarded as reliable and professional.

For example, McMahan treats exaggerated casualty figures originating from compromised sources with remarkable carelessness. He not only relies on such figures but presents them as underestimates. He treats figures as authoritative that have later been acknowledged to be “purely illustrative” even by the very authors who had published these figures. In the same way, McMahan has been criticized for the ease with which he infers “policies and patterns of action” from reported accounts of misconduct, including the alleged intentional targeting of civilians and children. Yet neither the forensic record nor any other available evidence establishes that such casualties resulted from a coordinated Israeli policy of that kind. Factchecking and triangulation yield a considerably less dramatic picture than the one presented in his writings, though by no means an entirely untroubling one. Because none of this excludes the possibility of misconduct or violations of the laws of war. What it does exclude is the confident leap from highly disputed allegations and fragmented evidence to sweeping conclusions about intent and coordinated policy.¹This assessment still holds in light of more recent reports, notably the Pillay Commission’s Conference Room Paper (A/HRC/62/CRP.2), which has been taken to establish the targeting of children by Israeli soldiers. In fact, it demonstrates far less than its sweeping claims suggest. Point-by-point rebuttals indicate that not a single case of deliberate targeting can be firmly established on the available evidence, let alone anything approaching a systematic policy of doing so.

In the early stages of the war, McMahan tended to frame Israel and Hamas in terms of moral equivalence, referring, for example, to “slaughtering” on both sides and characterizing Israel as indulging in key practices of terrorism. More recently, however, he appears increasingly convinced that Israel is the more morally corrupted party, writing that “everything horrendous that Hamas has done, Israel has also done, usually to a much greater extent.” McMahan’s deliberations yield grotesque reversals in the description of events and their moral significance. For example, he downplays the well-documented systematic sexual violence by Hamas as “opportunistic acts of personal indulgence”—a particularly repugnant euphemism for systematic rape and sexual torture—without engaging with the available evidence in a meaningful way, let alone acknowledging it. At the same time, he is willing to parrot some of the most outlandish rape allegations on the Israeli side, including the “rape dog” story advanced by Nicholas Kristof.

As a matter of fact, describing McMahan’s handling of facts as merely careless is an understatement, given that he already seemed to grasp key concepts of Hamas’s tactics of warfare in his earlier writings. For example, writing on the 2014 war against Hamas, while also being highly critical of Israel and making use of the same somewhat simplistic trolley-case-style numerical reasoning to support his ethics, McMahan constructs his argument on the assumption that Israel’s war was defensive rather than punitive in its aims. He also accepts that “Hamas’s indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel are wrong, as are its storing weapons in schools, private homes, and mosques, its locating entrances to tunnels in the same places, and its firing missiles from civilian areas in a way that attracts Israeli retaliatory fire to those areas.”

Fast forward to the current Gaza war, and McMahan now finds Hamas’s use of human shields “speculative,” while being confident that “Israeli soldiers have used Gazan civilians as shields.” Why? Because, as he puts it, “since Hamas members cannot leave Gaza, which is densely populated with civilians, one wonders where else can they embed themselves.” One might almost be tempted to picture Gaza as having, in the intervening years, turned into an uninterrupted corridor of hospitals, schools, and mosques, with its terrorists appearing merely as victims of unfortunate urban planning.²Gaza has instead extensive underground tunnel systems—interconnected corridors stretching for kilometers and, in principle, capable of offering protection to civilians. The fact that these tunnels were not developed or widely used as protective civilian infrastructure should give McMahan greater reason to pause about the moral sanity and true intentions of Hamas. The fact that Hamas leadership has repeatedly and explicitly described using its own population as human shieldsas part of their military strategy is either conveniently ignored or appears to fall outside of what McMahan regards as credible or relevant evidence. The same seems to hold for the lack of attention paid to the well documented instrumentalization of civilians, including children, as a recurring tactic employed by Islamist regimes.

In short, McMahan engages with facts almost more strategically than carelessly. He makes use of them insofar as they support sweeping and rhetorically bullish claims that underpin his moral analysis, but not in the way he himself takes to be good philosophy.³An added layer of irony is that he criticizes his interlocutors for alleged carelessness in their use of sources, accusing them, for instance, of relying on too few references, or dismissing a particularly forceful objection by reiterating that the evidentiary basis is inadequate. The consequence is that this use of facts trivializes some of the most horrific forms of terrorism seen in recent history, while portraying Israeli soldiers, political leaders, and society more broadly as morally monstrous, so that moral analysis appears almost unnecessary in order to arrive at a verdict. This is not a serious engagement with the available evidence—it is activism, clothed in the rhetoric of academic authority.

History

McMahan’s presents the historical record in a way that fails to live up to the standards of proper academic inquiry. It is obvious that historical accounts are contested, that national narratives often diverge sharply, and that moral responsibility with respect to past events is rarely one-sided or zero-sum. What is difficult to understand, however, is McMahan’s disregard for these complexities in favor of a starkly binary historical account in which the roles of perpetrator and victim appear fixed from the outset of the State of Israel’s foundation, or at least deeply anchored in (very) past events.

For McMahan, the “root cause” of the conflict lies in a fundamental asymmetry in the morally relevant actions of the parties grounded in historical developments. As he puts it: “The basic asymmetry is in what Israelis have done but Palestinians have not—namely, held another people in utter subjugation for decades in their own ancestral land, using the military to enforce an illegal occupation and blockade, invading people’s homes in the night, bulldozing their homes, expelling them from their land, and in many other ways intimidating and humiliating them in order to enforce their submission.” Read in this way, the account leaves the impression that current Israeli military actions are expressions of a long-standing structure of domination, as though the Israeli security apparatus had emerged ex nihilo as an instrument for a sadistic society to indulge its sinister impulses and subjugate others. To assume such malevolent intentions, while not even attempting to entertain the possibility that Israeli actions may be motivated by defense against external threats, seems not only intellectually dishonest but also a serious moral failure.

As a consequence, McMahan’s historical account portrays Hamas almost as a passive product of external coercion, deprived of any meaningful agency in its own strategic choices, so constrained even that Israel is said to have robbed them of the possibility of fighting justly for their “just cause for a war of national liberation,” thereby implying that they were effectively forced into committing atrocities of the kind seen on 7 October. For McMahan, Palestinians seem to have, almost by historical accident, chosen the wrong form of resistance, resorting to terrorism instead of Gandhi-style protest. This is a neat thought, but one that does not even make sense when stated in counterfactual terms, since none of the current political leaders, nor their predecessors, nor the ideological foundations of the movement, bear even the remotest resemblance to Gandhi or his politics of non-violence. Moreover, the counterfactual moves from neat to nonsensical, not least because resistance, including in violent forms, has become an integral element of Palestinian political and cultural identity, a way of life and a worldview shaped by the idea of permanent struggle, perfectly capable of being used to justify the atrocities committed by Hamas.

McMahan continuously resorts to other counterfactuals where none are needed, for instance, when he writes “if a two-state solution were really on offer”—as if such an option had not, on two occasions in this century alone, been placed on the table. With the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, there was yet another de facto offer made to Gazans, who instead voted into power Hamas, a regime that directed international aid not toward building their own state, but toward rocket launchers and terror infrastructure to obliterate their neighbor. One might think that these developments, along with two intifadas, help explain the existence of security fences, military presence, and broader security controls, which McMahan portrays as if they were primarily instruments of Israeli indulgence in intimidation, humiliation, and subjugation.

McMahan’s selective disregard of the historical complexities that shape contemporary Middle Eastern realities becomes very obvious when one considers the many ways in which Israeli and Palestinian societies do in fact differ, though not quite in the manner he assumes. To take just one example: his treatment of Israel as a Tätervolk, a collective perpetrator, conveniently overlooks the existence of a substantial domestic peace movement, a vibrant culture of political dissent, as well as longstanding and ongoing criticism of both the political leadership and the Gaza war. Little of this finds a parallel in Palestinian society, even in a much-attenuated form.⁴This is not to suggest that there is no opposition or anti-Hamas protest in Gaza at all. There is, and those who express it display remarkable courage in the face of Hamas’s brutal repression. Yet such opposition remains marginal compared with the breadth of public dissent in Israel. Hamas’s ruthless suppression of these protests only underscores the profound moral asymmetry between the two societies.

Another aspect that is likely to leave even the sympathetic reader puzzled is McMahan’s treatment of the Gaza war largely in isolation from the Middle East. It appears almost as if a set of idealized belligerents were fighting on a battlefield detached from any wider political or historical context, as if combatants were unloaded from a philosopher’s trolley only to perish in trolley-style thought experiments. This seems to explain how McMahan can continuously draw parallels to the Colombian conflict, even though these are marginal at best. It reveals a lack of nuance in noticing the differences between violence perpetrated by religious fanatics and violence perpetrated by crime syndicates or guerrilla fighters. It seems safe to say that while guerilla warfare is bad, “guerrilla warfare pluscertainty of Paradise is much worse.” The confusion regarding the plausibility of peaceful coexistence with, or the effectiveness of non-violent responses to, jihadism, as well as the deliberate engineering of humanitarian crises by Hamas seriously compromises McMahan’s ability to grasp the facts on the ground.

The lack of engagement with some of the complexities of the Middle East context also helps explain a number of broader moral conclusions he draws, including the tendency to place a disproportionate onus on Israel to “extend a hand of friendship to Gaza” in virtue of its relative military strength. This framing risks underemphasizing the role of regional actors and transnational networks, including the intellectual and financial influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar, and Iran and its proxies.

It also explains McMahan’s treatment of deterrence, which he downplays as a flawed argument advanced by “various apologists for Israel’s war,” and his tendency to interpret Israeli military action involving civilian harm or the destruction of infrastructure as being deliberately used to deter entirely uninvolved actors, namely Hezbollah and Iran (who, on this view, Israel has instead provoked to enter the hostilities). This interpretation is difficult to reconcile not only with the scholarship on deterrence but also with the large number of accounts of Israeli military operations that functioned as acts of deterrence. Those have been conducted in a highly targeted manner and aimed at specific individuals or infrastructure—a fact that clearly signals the logic underlying Israel’s approach to deterrence, namely that consequences are borne by culpable leadership and senior decision-makers, and not by innocent civilians.

In short, McMahan disregards historical complexity and nuance in favor of a starkly binary moral architecture that does not even seem properly located in the Middle East, a history in which the roles of perpetrator and victim appear fixed from the outset. This is not a scholarly engagement with a complex historical record—it is postcolonial moral narration that has detached itself from any historical constraint.

Ethics

What strikes one perhaps most is the speed with which McMahan reaches verdicts on moral responsibility. As early as 20 October 2023—before the launch of the ground offensive in Gaza—it was already clear to him (though, as he was not shy to add, “in the fullness of history, will be obvious to all”) that Israel’s military campaign is a “morally disastrous exercise,” an “onslaught on the civilian population of Gaza,” and indulgence in “terrorism’s central practice: collective punishment.” Yet what strikes one too, though perhaps on second glance, is the chronological generosity he grants himself in his writings. The verdict arrives so swift that all his subsequent arguments come across more like a retrospective search for vindication. Ethics of this sort is less a method for discovering what one ought to think but a means of explaining, with considerable ingenuity, why one was right all along.

Unless, of course, there is not all that much ingenuity to be found in the arguments either. The centerpiece of McMahan’s analysis is little more than a rather stale moral equation. Drawing on the trolley problem—a familiar thought experiment designed to illuminate highly artificial cases of side-effect killing—and appealing to special obligations toward one’s compatriots, he arrives at a one-to-five casualty ratio: the saving of one life may justify the death of five innocent people on the opposing side. This ratio is then projected onto both specific military operations and aggregate casualty figures, arriving at the conclusion that Israel’s war fails the test of proportionality and is therefore unjust.

While such a “casualty-meter” may be intellectually exciting, it is arguably of little use to anyone used to thinking about war outside the protected environment of philosophical thought experiments. Numerical exercises of this sort may have their place in the classroom, where runaway trolleys reliably stay on their tracks, but such a conception of proportionality stands in tension not only with centuries of just war theory, but also with virtually every relevant contemporary account of proportionality in the ethics of war, as well as with the laws of war on which military decision-makers rely.

All this might sound faintly amusing, if it wasn’t so serious. Indeed, some more sinister details hide in the fine print of McMahan’s calculations. In another instance, McMahan suggests a hypothetical ceiling of Israeli casualties that the war would need to have prevented in order to count as proportionate according to his framework (on his view, around 700, but this is irrelevant here). He then calculates that, between 2008 and 2025, Palestinian militants were able to “kill 205 Israeli civilians”—oddly adding: “106 of whom have been settlers in the West Bank.” In his final step, he subtracts the latter, concluding that Hamas was able to “kill only 99 Israeli civilians who were not at the time in Palestinian lands, dispossessing the inhabitants.” The implication is difficult both to avoid and to stomach: one hundred and six Israeli lives apparently do not matter to McMahan, despite meeting all the criteria he would ordinarily apply to illegitimate targets of military force. Regardless of what one thinks about the legal or moral status of the settlements, it should be unnecessary to state the obvious: these human lives matter, and as non-combatants they should, in any morally ordinary universe, enjoy corresponding protections.

McMahan’s account of why Israel’s war fails the condition of necessity is no less remarkable. According to McMahan, when a belligerent has, through its own prior actions or omissions, foreclosed less harmful courses of action, subsequent appeals to necessity are weakened. As argued elsewhere in greater detail, his emphasis on what he terms the “retrospective dimension” of necessity not only produces striking reversals of moral culpability but also yields highly counterintuitive conclusions when applied consistently across other scenarios. It is unsurprising that similar “retrospective” reasoning plays little or no role in domestic criminal law across Western jurisdictions, except at some marginal cases.

This account has some peculiar implications. First, Israel is criticized for allegedly failing to fulfil “duties of justice” towards Palestinians, namely by not facilitating Palestinian statehood, on the grounds that the war might thereby have been avoided. Second, Israel is criticized for not having stationed sufficient “combat-ready forces along the border with Gaza” to prevent the attacks of 7 October. The result is a form of retrospective moral accounting in which Israel is held responsible both for the political conditions that caused the attack and for failing to prevent the attack itself. This is an unusual way of thinking about necessity. Careless or imprudent behavior may be unfortunate, but it is rarely sufficient to forfeit one’s right not to be attacked. Even when careless or morally questionable behavior triggered a threat or made it possible in other ways, the permissibility of self-defense usually depends on the immediacy of the threat and the proportionality of the response. A homeowner is not required to stand aside while intruders proceed with their burglary just because the front door was left unlocked.

McMahan also advances a list of counterfactuals concerning what Israel should have done prior to 7 October, as well as what it should have done instead of going to war. These include, for example, sealing the border and beginning to fulfil its “moral duties” towards Palestinians by initiating international negotiations toward a state not governed by Hamas. When challenged on this point in academic rebuttals, he restates his interlocutor’s argument in a caricatured form, treating it as a kind of running gag in order to dismiss the arguments (given that the rebuttal itself relies on counterfactual reasoning of its own).

To be clear, counterfactuals are of course perfectly legitimate tools of moral analysis. But given how poorly McMahan performs in his analysis of facts and historical context, their value depends on the evidential and historical assumptions on which they rest. Appeals to “what could have been done” are only as strong as the plausibility of these underlying background assumptions. Contrary to what McMahan seems to believe, the historical record offers very little support for the view that appeasing aggressors is a successful strategy. Instead, such strategies have regularly proven counterproductive by resulting in further escalation. There is also a deeper philosophical concern in the above counterfactual that McMahan overlooks. As explained elsewhere: “Such a counterfactual implicitly treats mass casualty violence as a form of political leverage. If applied in practice, it could incentivise future acts of terrorism, as violent actors might expect that their attacks could compel concessions or constrain state responses.”

In short, McMahan’s treatment of proportionality is a superficially elegant but essentially useless armchair exercise with moral rot in the fine print. His reliance on retrospective rationalizations of necessity suggests that Israel’s entitlement to self-defense depends on its own prior conduct or perceived “carelessness.” Yet such a move risks not only a grotesque reversal of culpability but also brushes uncomfortably close to one of the oldest antisemitic tropes: the suggestion that Jews are responsible for the violence directed against them. This is not a form of professional ethics—it is moral performance in the service of foregone verdicts.

The end of modesty

It might be argued that a dispassionate academic rebuttal in the respective journal would suffice here, contra McMahan. After all, much of what is at stake appears to be a question of “disciplinary hygiene”—whether arguments are assessed on their merits, and whether the norms of academic exchange are upheld, and so on. But the picture is not so straightforward. First, the academic-publisher complex increasingly seems to function in a way that treats voices defending Israel’s conduct in war with disproportionate resistance in editorial and peer-review contexts. More broadly, the same seems to be the case for articles written by Jewish or Israeli scholars.

Second—and more troublingly—the tone and atmosphere that permeates McMahan’s work is not limited to journals or podcasts but spills over into academic institutions, in which Jewish, Israeli, or allied academics must fear formal sanctions from their institutions, as well as softer forms of ostracism and professional shunning. These dynamics create a powerful reinforcement effect that intensifies the silencing of dissenting views on Israel and Jews. Maarten Boudry explains how this effect works: individuals wrongly assume they are alone in holding such views and therefore either remain silent or deliberately conceal their position—this then reinforces the appearance of consensus. And it hardly needs saying that silence and indifference alone are not the only problems. Activism on and off campus has often shown little hesitation for intimidation or even violence.

McMahan offers no measured or intellectually valuable criticism of Israel or of the current Gaza war. Indeed, he often does not appear to be attempting one. His analytical framework condemns the conduct of the war and the decisions of Israel’s political leadership. But it also portrays Israeli society itself in terms of moral monstrosity in a way that is anything but academically sober. He flattens Israel’s behavior and motives into caricatures of pure evil, designed not to be meaningfully engaged with but simply to be hated. When Israel is described as waging “war against Gazans,” as deliberately targeting children as part of its military strategy (on thin and highly contested evidentiary grounds, and in a manner lapsing into some of the oldest tropes used to demonize Jews), or when a political leader such as Netanyahu is characterized as “as evil as any human being could possibly be,” it is difficult to see how such language can avoid inciting hatred—even if McMahan rejects such implications. This kind of polemical framing seems to be precisely the soil in which today’s intellectual antisemitism takes root and flourishes, whatever the author’s intentions.

No scholar is responsible for every downstream use of his or her work. Yet when a scholar repeatedly does not adhere to minimal academic standards of dealing with evidence, reduces historical complexity to caricature, and at times embeds cynical assumptions in oversimplified moral frameworks, the result is no longer just poor scholarship. It is poor scholarship that enables still poorer scholarship by providing it with the moral authority and intellectual credentials it needs. McMahan’s poor scholarship, predictably enough, does not remain limited to his own work. It reappears in cruder form in the literature it inspires. For example, a recent editorial in the Journal of Business Ethics, citing McMahan, compares Israeli soldiers to Adolf Eichmann and companies doing business with Israel to the SNCF, the French railway company whose cooperation with the Nazi occupation authorities facilitated the deportation of Jews.

Other “philosophical” contributions on the war are even more problematic. They function quite openly as means for laundering hatred toward Israel and antisemitic ideas through the authority and prestige of academia. Some authors make little effort to conceal their ideological commitments. While presenting their claims in the polished language of philosophy journals, elsewhere and at the same time, they redefine 7 October as an act of resistance against occupation, celebrate Hamas as a “federation of liberation,” or describe Jewish citizens of Israel as “parasites in every meaning of the word.” For such bad-faith actors, appeals to philosophical authorities like McMahan provide a convenient mechanism for giving academic legitimacy to views that might otherwise be recognized for what they are: expressions of dehumanizing hostility and racism.

There is little satisfaction in watching a philosopher whose work has otherwise been characterized by intellectual seriousness go so badly astray on Israel, to put it mildly. The contrast between the rigor and integrity that characterize much of McMahan’s work and the mix of obsession and carelessness in this case is hence striking and deeply confusing. One is left searching for explanations: Is he seriously misled down an ideological one-way street on one specific topic? Is he trapped within the logic of his own theory of a just war? Or does he suffer from any other intellectual malady such as Morbus Israel, a “pathological, likely psychologically very stressful anti-Israel horror trip” that distorts judgment while simultaneously reinforcing an exaggerated confidence in one’s own convictions?

Whatever the psychological factors underlying McMahan’s position, there comes a point at which searching for yet another charitable explanation and offering ever more modest criticism becomes a form of evasion. Modesty is certainly a virtue, but one that presupposes at least some degree of reciprocity. McMahan has consistently shown that when Israel stands in the dock, very little remains of the modesty—or indeed of the care, rigor, impartiality, and openness to correction—that he elsewhere regards as constitutive of good philosophy. It is time to call the output what it is: an unhealthy blend of epistemic dreck and moral rot, couched in philosophical jargon that makes it all too easy for others to rationalize their own animus as a form of moral cognition. It is a force multiplier for an academic hate-laundering machinery already operating at full speed, repackaging hostility toward Israel and Jews into something that masquerades itself as intellectual rigor and moral insight.