Civilian casualties in Germany

In World War II, more than two million German civilians died outside the camps—women, children, and elderly people crushed in bombings, frozen during mass flight, starved during sieges, or killed during expulsions. Most were not Nazis — they were just civilians keeping their heads down.

Yet almost no one today blames the Allies for those deaths. We intuitively grasp the causal chain: those civilians died because the Nazi regime launched a genocidal war, embedded itself among civilians, and left no way to defeat it without horrific collateral damage. The deaths may have come from an American bomb or a Soviet assault, but the blame terminates with Hitler.

Why does that perfectly rational moral reasoning collapse when people look at Gaza? Why do they suddenly insist that every civilian death—despite Israel’s unprecedented evacuation efforts, precision strikes, warnings, and corridor openings—must be blamed on Israel rather than on Hamas, which openly uses civilians as shields and built its war inside dense neighborhoods?

The moral logic humans easily apply to 1945 becomes mysteriously inverted in 2024, as if causal responsibility ceases to matter the moment Israel — ahem, Jews — enters the equation.