The Skeptic's Kaddish 🇮🇱The shape of attention: The reality constraint, §2
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
In my previous post, I looked at a pattern: how attention behaves—how intense it gets, how long it lasts, and how quickly it reaches moral conclusions. If that pattern holds, then the next question is what, exactly, is being judged.
This one focuses on the reality being evaluated.
Before judging behavior, we need to be clear about the situation in which decisions are being made. Otherwise, we’re not really evaluating anything—we’re reacting. That’s the gap I keep running into: strong conclusions formed without a clear picture of the conditions those decisions are made under.
And this isn’t theoretical. This is a real-world decision environment shaped by constraint, uncertainty, and time pressure—in Israel’s case, under ongoing threat. It’s the environment people here are actually living in, even when that part of the picture isn’t always visible from the outside.
The actors and the threat
From Gaza, Hamas has carried out repeated attacks on Israeli civilians, culminating most dramatically in the October 7 assault, which shattered a widespread assumption inside Israel that deterrence had largely contained the threat. In the north, Hezbollah maintains a large rocket and missile arsenal capable of reaching deep into Israel, alongside a long history of cross-border attacks and escalation (CSIS Missile Threat database; INSS analysis).
These aren’t distant or theoretical threats from the Israeli perspective. Since October 2023, tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities have been displaced for extended periods because of ongoing rocket fire and the risk of wider escalation. Even into 2025, Israeli state agencies were still administering evacuation assistance and return grants for affected northern communities (Israeli State Comptroller report).
At the same time, both Hamas and Hezbollah operate within dense civilian environments. There is substantial evidence that Hamas has built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath Gaza’s urban terrain and that both groups have repeatedly operated from or near populated civilian areas, though the quality of public evidence varies between broad patterns and specific site-by-site claims (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; Human Rights Watch Lebanon 2006 report; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools).
None of this makes every military response justified, and it doesn’t erase the obligations imposed by international law. But it does shape the environment in which Israeli decisions are made. Inside Israel, the threat does not feel dormant or hypothetical—it feels recurring, unresolved, and capable of escalating again at any time.
The operational environment
This is not open-field warfare fought between clearly separated armies. In Gaza especially, combat takes place inside one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world, where civilian infrastructure and military activity can exist in close physical proximity.
There is substantial evidence that Hamas has launched rockets from populated zones and built extensive tunnel infrastructure beneath urban terrain (Reuters Gaza tunnel investigation; UNRWA statements on rockets found in schools; Amnesty International reporting on Palestinian armed groups in Gaza).
But this is also where precision matters. Broad patterns are often much easier to establish publicly than site-specific claims. The existence of tunnel systems and civilian-area operations is well documented; claims about the military use of particular hospitals, schools, or residential buildings are often harder for outside observers to independently verify in real time.
International Humanitarian Law exists partly because wars like this are so dangerous for civilians. It requires distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality in attack, and feasible precautions to reduce civilian harm. At the same time, the law also prohibits the use of human shields and requires armed groups, as far as feasible, to avoid embedding military objectives within densely populated civilian areas (ICRC customary IHL database on distinction, proportionality, and human shields).
Even advanced militaries with precision weapons, surveillance systems, and legal review processes have caused catastrophic civilian harm in dense urban warfare. In Mosul in 2017, for example, a coalition airstrike targeting ISIS fighters triggered secondary explosives commanders reportedly did not know were present, collapsing a building and killing more than 100 civilians (RAND analysis on Raqqa; CENTCOM investigation into the Mosul strike).
From the outside, it is easy to imagine that legal rules resolve the dilemma. In practice, they describe a battlefield that remains extraordinarily difficult to navigate.
What evaluation depends on
Judging these situations depends on variables that are often only partially visible from the outside.
Distinction depends heavily on intelligence: whether a target was believed to be military and how reliable the available information appeared at the time. In urban warfare, those assessments are often probabilistic rather than certain, and they can change quickly as people, weapons, and command activity move through dense civilian environments.
Proportionality is also evaluated prospectively, not retrospectively. The legal question is not simply how much destruction occurred, but what military advantage was anticipated and what level of civilian harm was expected before the strike took place. Those are judgments made under uncertainty and severe time pressure.
Intent is harder still. Civilian casualties, even at very large scale, do not automatically establish intent to target civilians or destroy a population. In international law, intent is usually inferred over time from patterns of conduct, directives, operational behavior, and the broader context—not from casualty numbers alone (Genocide Convention).
None of this rules out the possibility of unlawful actions or serious violations. But it does mean that judgments formed from the outside are often based on only partial visibility into how decisions were made, what intelligence existed at the time, and what commanders believed the likely consequences of action or inaction would be.
That gap between aftermath visibility and contemporaneous knowledge is easy to overlook, especially because modern audiences encounter war primarily through images of destruction, casualties, and grief detached from operational context. Those images are real and morally significant. But they do not automatically reveal what intelligence existed beforehand, what commanders believed at the time, or what alternatives they thought were available.
The decision constraint
At the same time, decisions in conflicts like this are rarely made under conditions of perfect clarity.
From the Israeli perspective, the problem is not simply whether military action creates risks. It is that inaction carries risks as well. October 7 deeply undermined the belief that threats from Gaza could be indefinitely contained through deterrence alone, and Hezbollah’s ongoing rocket fire after October 2023 displaced tens of thousands of residents from northern Israeli communities for extended periods (Israeli State Comptroller report; CSIS Missile Threat database).
That doesn’t automatically justify every response, and it doesn’t mean escalation is always the best option. But it does mean Israeli decision-makers are weighing not only the dangers of military action, but also the perceived dangers of failing to respond.
Inside Israel, inaction often does not feel neutral. It feels like a decision with consequences of its own.
Realistic options
From the outside, discussions about war can sometimes imply that there is a clear moral alternative sitting just offstage—a cleaner option that avoids both escalation and ongoing threat. In practice, the choices are usually much narrower and more difficult than that.
A restrained response may reduce immediate escalation in some situations, but it can also leave military infrastructure intact and reinforce the perception that attacks can continue without significant consequence. A larger campaign may degrade capabilities more substantially, while also increasing civilian harm, destruction, displacement, and international isolation.
Even “doing nothing” is not neutral when civilians remain under recurring rocket fire, border communities are displaced, and armed groups openly prepare for future confrontation.
None of this tells us automatically which decisions are correct. But it does mean that the trade-offs are real. The costs are real. And they exist on every side of the decision, not only on one.
Where this leaves us
This is the environment in which these decisions are made: dense urban warfare, imperfect intelligence, ongoing threat, political pressure, legal constraint, and competing risks attached to both action and inaction.
Understanding that environment doesn’t settle the moral questions, and it doesn’t automatically justify particular decisions or outcomes. Serious mistakes, unlawful actions, and genuine moral failures can still occur within it.
But without that context, it becomes much easier to mistake visible destruction for full knowledge of how decisions were reached, what information was available at the time, or what alternatives decision-makers believed they had.
That distinction matters. Not because it eliminates accountability, but because it shapes the difference between judgment and assumption.
In the next post, I’ll move from the decision environment itself to another question: how those decisions are evaluated, and whether the standards being applied are consistent.
- Why I’m going to write about Israel
- The shape of attention
