The reason that the current war in Gaza is so barbaric by modern standards, and the reason that it is leaving the modern world morally confused and paralysed, is because it is a religious war, but one being conducted by both sides in terms of ancient bronze-age moral values, rather than in terms of modern civilised values.
People outside Israel find themselves unable morally to reconcile the sheer brutality of what is happening with the justifications presented by both sides for why it is happening.
In respect of the war, both the current Israeli government and Hamas are religiously motivated, but very retrogressively by modern standards.
Their respective bronze-age perspectives, in their own eyes, permits them to perform barbaric acts that were morally acceptable to humanity three thousand years ago, but are no longer so in today’s world.
Their religious fanaticism leads them to believe that their God is actually happy with them exterminating all those opposing their religious objectives.
At the same time, it is very doubtful that the average democratically inclined Israeli or Palestinian seriously believes that the brutal killing of children and women is morally justified, in order to achieve what is a mere political goal that can possibly be achieved, even if with great difficulty, by other means.
The leaders that they are currently following, however, are leading them in a deluded attempt to solve a secular problem by religious means.
About three thousand years ago, when the Abrahamic religions began with the establishment of Judaism, the barbaric behaviour that we have been witnessing in Gaza was generally acceptable when the conflict involved the members of another race or religion. The butchery of women and children was then standard practice.
Primitive past
In the following three thousand years, however, Western humanity gradually became civilised, relative to its primitive past. This process was encapsulated in the 18th century European Enlightenment and the introduction of the Scientific Method, and it accelerated thereafter.
By the 21st century, while warring males in the West were still morally permitted to kill one another under particular circumstances, the conscious butchery of women and children was no longer morally acceptable, under any circumstances.
While still imperfect, humanity had at least made some moral progress. Religion continued to play an important role in the West, in the forms of Judaism and Christianity, but they too had become more humanised.
Not having experienced the Enlightenment directly, or a similar cultural phenomenon, Islam has retained much of the ancient human value system, such as the practice of capital punishment. Despite this, normal Islam also absolutely forbids the killing of women and children, including in wartime.
The brutality that has taken place recently in Israel is driven on both sides by the resurgence of primitive religious beliefs, long ago discredited by the gradual progress of human civilisation.
Fanatical beliefs
Although these archaic and fanatical beliefs are only subscribed to by a small minority in each community, the majority of people in both communities have nevertheless been seemingly supporting the barbaric actions of their religiously driven leaders. If so, this disturbing phenomenon suggests that humans are not nearly as civilised as we like to assume.
It is widely presumed that religion has an important and generally positive role to play in modern human society. But this is questionable if it resurrects fanatical and authoritarian beliefs from the past, to which many people seemingly still remain susceptible.
[Image: Combines https://picryl.com/media/middle-east-herman-moll-the-turkish-empire-in-europe-asia-and-africa-1752-cropped-aae5be/ By Dalle-3, , CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=151793562]
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