Who Counts as Innocent
Until now, I dismissed the claim that some people don’t see Israelis as civilians. Then I was in a discussion where no one disagreed with it.
It started as a conversation about the future. I was talking to a group of serious students of Islam discussing what a free Palestine would look like. Not the slogan, but the substance. What political arrangement, what rights framework, what kind of state or states or shared sovereignty might actually end the suffering. It was the kind of conversation I find genuinely meaningful: people reasoning carefully about justice, dignity, and what it would take for human beings to live without fear. Some argued for a one-state solution with equal rights. Others preferred two states. There was disagreement, but it lived within what I thought was a shared moral universe.
Then someone shared a document. Hamas's Our Narrative—Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, published in January 2024 as a response to international criticism of the October 7 attacks. At first it read like many political documents from conflict zones—a mix of historical grievance, legal framing, and defensive justification. But toward the end, the argument sharpened into something more precise. The document explained that Israel is a society of universal conscription: men and women serve, most adults have military training, many remain in the reserves for life. From that premise, it drew a conclusion. These are not civilians. They are an armed society. An army with a country attached.
I said, as plainly as I could, that I thought this was wrong. That even granting every premise about conscription and reserve service, the move from "this society has mandatory military training" to "therefore there are no civilians here" was a step that should give us pause. That it effectively removed an entire population from moral protection. Someone replied, calmly and with confidence, that Israelis are not civilians. Not as a provocation. As a statement of fact. And the conversation moved forward as if the premise had already been settled.
No one publicly agreed with me. Some defended the position directly. Others avoided the question. One person messaged me afterward, privately, to say they agreed—but hadn't felt comfortable saying so in the discussion.
I had always assumed that claims like "people in the Muslim community don't believe Israelis are civilians" were exaggerations—talking points used to paint us in the worst possible light. I had dismissed that framing as a caricature. Now I wasn't sure. And I realized that what I had just witnessed was not an isolated intuition. It was the surface expression of something structural—a decades-long intellectual project that had redefined the category of civilian within significant currents of Muslim political thought, and that had migrated, largely unexamined, into the community spaces I inhabited. I want to trace that project, to measure it against the tradition it claims, and to reckon honestly with what it means to find it so close to home.
What I heard in that room did not originate there.
Our Narrative is a sophisticated piece of what scholars call "lawfare": the use of legal and humanitarian language to reframe military actions. Hamas cites International Humanitarian Law. It condemns the targeting of civilians in principle. It attributes the deaths of Israeli non-combatants to "complications on the ground" and alleges that some were killed by their own military's Hannibal Directive. The language is calibrated for a Western audience—human rights NGOs, progressive activists, legal scholars. The 1988 Hamas Charter, with its explicit religious justifications for killing Jews, is nowhere referenced. In its place is the vocabulary of anti-colonialism and armed resistance.
But the operative argument—that Israeli society's military structure abolishes the civilian category—is not an innovation. It is the endpoint of an intellectual genealogy that runs from the mid-twentieth century through the present, and understanding it explains why the conversation in that discussion moved the way it did.
The systematic redefinition of "civilian" in modern militant thought begins with Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood ideologue whose writings became the intellectual foundation for virtually every major militant movement that followed. Qutb's innovation was the concept of Jahiliyya—a term originally describing pre-Islamic Arabia's state of ignorance—which he applied to the entire modern world, including Muslim-majority societies governed by secular law. The world was divided into the "party of God" and the "party of Satan," and any society that rejected divine sovereignty was, by definition, in a state of aggression against God's order. The implications for civilian immunity were direct: if participation in a non-Islamic society was itself a form of aggression, then living within it, voting in it, paying taxes to it was not innocence. It was complicity.
Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian scholar who mentored Osama bin Laden during the Soviet-Afghan War, extended this logic in a different direction. Classical Islamic law had always treated jihad as a collective duty (farḍ kifāya), regulated by a central authority that bore responsibility for ensuring the protection of non-combatants. Azzam's fatwa Defense of the Muslim Lands reconceived jihad as an individual obligation (farḍ ʿayn)—equivalent to prayer or fasting—that every Muslim was personally required to fulfill when Muslim land was under attack. This was his version of a unilateral Responsibility to Protect (R2P), and its consequences were immediate: if any individual Muslim could declare and prosecute jihad, the classical constraints that depended on centralized authority simply fell away.
The most explicit reformulation came from bin Laden himself. In his 1998 declaration of war and his 2002 "Letter to America," he constructed a new theory of collective liability. American citizens were not bystanders but active participants: they voted for their leaders, paid the taxes that funded the bombs, consumed the economy that underwrote American military power. In a democracy, the people and the state are not separate. He then invoked the concept of reciprocity (qiṣāṣ) arguing that since the American military killed Muslim civilians, Muslims had the right to kill American civilians in return. The civilian category in the Western context was abolished entirely.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi applied this logic specifically to Israel. The enormously influential Qatar-based scholar, whose television program reached tens of millions across the Arab world, issued fatwas during the Second Intifada justifying suicide bombings on the "militarized society" thesis: because Israeli conscription is universal, every adult Israeli is either a soldier, a reservist, or a future soldier, and this status strips them of non-combatant immunity. His position was not static—in his later work Fiqh al-Jihad, he qualified it, noting such operations had become "more questionable" given Palestinian access to other means of resistance, and he explicitly forbade their application outside the Palestinian context. But the core thesis became foundational to Hamas's ideological framework and migrated, through immigrant networks and digital media, into the discourse of American Muslim communities.
What the Our Narrative document does is synthesize these threads and present them in the language of international law for a global audience. The religious scaffolding is concealed. The decolonial framework is foregrounded. But the operative conclusion—no civilians on the other side—is the same one that runs from Qutb through Azzam through bin Laden through al-Qaradawi. The calm confidence I encountered in that discussion was not a spontaneous moral intuition. It was the downstream expression of this intellectual project, now so thoroughly absorbed into certain community spaces that it no longer requires argument. It simply is.
The modern militant argument claims continuity with the Islamic tradition. This is where that claim must be tested.
The word "civilian" is modern—a product of nineteenth-century European legal thought, eventually codified in the Geneva Conventions. But the underlying distinction between those who fight and those who do not is ancient in Islamic jurisprudence, and its protections were, by the standards of any pre-modern era, remarkably robust.
The classical law of war is organized around the concept of inviolability (ʿiṣma), the sacred status of a person's life and blood. The foundational Qur'anic directive is precise: "Fight in the way of God those who fight you, but do not transgress" (Qur’an, 2:190). Early exegetes interpreted "do not transgress" as a specific prohibition on killing women, children, the elderly, and anyone who offered peace. The Prophet's ﷺ instructions to his commanders were explicit: do not kill women, do not kill children, do not kill monks, do not kill farmers, do not kill those who are not fighting you. Muḥammad al-Shaybānī’s (d. 189/805) Kitāb al-Siyar al-Kabīr (The Great Book of International Law), foundational to Islamic international law, systematized these mandates into a tiered framework of protection covering women, children, the elderly, religious recluses, farmers, traders, the sick, and the disabled.
The criterion for immunity was functional: if a person lacked the capacity or intent to fight, the power to pose a threat (manʿa)—their killing was illegal. The question was always specific: is this person fighting? Are they directly engaged in causing harm? Not: what society do they belong to? Or what military service are they eligible for? The immunity was grounded in what a person does, not what they are.
The contrast with modern militant doctrine could not be sharper. Classical Islamic law grounds immunity in action. Modern militancy grounds it in identity. Once identity replaces action as the criterion, the category of the protected compresses indefinitely. Every citizen becomes a potential combatant. Every voter becomes a co-belligerent. Every taxpayer becomes a legitimate target. The classical jurists understood this danger implicitly, which is why they insisted on the specificity of participation as the only valid threshold for the forfeiture of protection. The modern argument doesn't refine the tradition. It inverts it.
The internal Islamic critique of Hamas has been forceful on precisely these grounds. Dr. Salman al-Dayah, a prominent scholar and former dean of Sharia at the Islamic University of Gaza, issued a fatwa denouncing the October 7 attack, arguing that it violated the conditions of legitimate jihad by provoking devastating retaliation, and that Islamic ethics never permit the killing of innocents for political ends. The Global Imams Council and the Amman Message (a 2004 declaration reasserting traditional scholarly authority against militant “freelance” fatwas) have taken similar positions. These are not marginal voices. They represent a tradition that the militant redefinition of "civilian" has actively worked to suppress, and which the conversation I witnessed had no room for at all.
Before all of this, I thought I knew what "Free Palestine" meant. Equal rights, equal dignity, freedom from occupation and fear. Whether the path ran through one state or two didn't matter as much as the underlying principle—that both Palestinians and Israelis were human beings, and that any just solution had to account for both. I assumed that when people around me said "Free Palestine," they were expressing some version of that.
The same phrase can contain entirely different moral visions. Two people can say the same words while imagining completely different outcomes—and completely different populations of people whose humanity is relevant to the outcome. For some, particularly within pluralist or human rights-oriented currents of the movement, the phrase carries the meaning I assumed: equality, coexistence, some form of shared humanity, however hard the road to get there. For others—a vocal and, in the spaces I moved through, surprisingly dominant segment—it means something categorically different: a total resolution in which the other side is not just defeated politically but stripped of moral standing altogether. Not a negotiated peace, but a vindication. Not justice for Palestinians alongside acknowledgment of Israeli humanity, but the erasure of Israeli humanity as a precondition for Palestinian justice.
The disagreement is about who counts as innocent and whether innocence is even a coherent category when applied to the other side. If you believe there are civilians on the other side, certain lines exist even at the extremes. If you believe there are no civilians, those lines disappear, and the range of what can be justified expands without a natural boundary. What makes this so difficult to navigate is that the disagreement is largely hidden beneath shared language. Same slogans, same rallies, same expressions of outrage at Palestinian suffering—and underneath, entirely different answers to the most basic question: does the other side contain people who are not legitimate targets?
Once I saw the pattern clearly in that conversation, I began to notice it operating elsewhere.
The Iranian government's response to the protest movement earlier this year offers an instructive parallel. Protesters were not described as civilians exercising political dissent. They were labeled rebels or accused of spreading corruption on earth. Some were charged with waging war against God. These are Qur'anic phrases which, in theory, carry the death penalty in classical jurisprudence. The legal categories are religious, but the mechanism is identical to what bin Laden and al-Qaradawi employed: redefine the target population so that the protections that would normally apply no longer do. A protester is a civilian. A rebel against God is something else. And once they are something else, the moral constraints loosen.
The same structure operates in how settlers, voters, and taxpayers are described in militant discourse. They are not civilians—they are settlers. They are not civilians—they are participants in the Zionist project. They are not civilians—they are part of an armed society. The content differs; the move is the same. Reclassify the target so that targeting them is not a violation but a justified act of resistance. What makes this move so powerful is its psychological effect as much as its logic. It creates distance. It allows you to see the other side not as individuals with narratives but as components of a system. It compresses a population into a category, removes ambiguity, and once that happens, actions that would otherwise feel impossible become not merely thinkable but morally required.
What I heard in that conversation follows a pattern that runs across all sides in any sufficiently intense conflict. What varies is the vocabulary in which it is dressed. The structure is always the same: take the worst actions of the other side, use them to redefine the entire population, replace individual responsibility with collective guilt, and watch the constraints on violence dissolve.
The most difficult part of all of this has not been the intellectual problem. It has been what it has done to my sense of where I belong.
The American Muslim community is not monolithic. It contains scholars who have been unequivocal about the sanctity of civilian life on all sides, leaders who have signed statements condemning the October 7 attacks in terms that align closely with what I've argued here, ordinary people who would find the "no civilians in Israel" argument as troubling as I do. That is real, and I don't want to obscure it.
But there is also a segment for whom that argument is not troubling at all. Simply correct. And what I have had to reckon with is the discovery that communities where I have felt most at home intellectually and spiritually are not uniformly populated by people who share what I thought were foundational moral premises.
The strangest part of this reckoning has been an unexpected inversion. The more I have read about Zionism and Israel—history, internal debates, the texture of ordinary life there, the moral complexity of a population that contains, like every population, people across the full spectrum of conscience and complicity—the more I find myself extending moral imagination across the line. Not agreeing with Israeli government policy. My disagreements with the occupation, the settlements, and the conduct of the current aggression remain as strong as ever. But I can read about an Israeli family killed on October 7 and feel grief without qualification. I can hold that grief alongside the horror of what is happening in Gaza, without needing to resolve the tension by deciding that one set of victims doesn't count.
What I've discovered is that this capacity to grieve across the line is not universally shared in the spaces I inhabit. And that asymmetry produces a specific kind of loneliness: the loneliness of working from a different set of facts. Not different political conclusions—I still believe in Palestinian freedom and equal rights as strongly as I ever have. But different facts about who is human, about whose suffering is legible, about whether the people on the other side have inner lives that make claims on you regardless of their government's actions.
What I find isolating is not political disagreement. It is disagreeing about the basic composition of the moral world while using the same language of justice and standing in the same rooms. The person who messaged me privately after that conversation understood exactly what I mean. Agreement, for them, required a whisper. A community in which moral clarity can only be expressed in private is not reasoning about ethics. It has allowed political solidarity to substitute for moral argument—and the cost of that substitution falls most heavily on the people within it who are still trying to hold the line.
Any argument about principle should eventually be tested against yourself.
If Israelis are not civilians because of conscription, because they serve in the military, because they are part of a system that produces and sustains military power—then what does that make me? I registered for selective service at eighteen, as every American man is legally required to do. I could have been drafted. I pay taxes that fund a military that has killed civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. I vote, which in bin Laden's framework makes me a participant in my government's violence. I love America, my home. By the logic of the "militarized society" argument, I am no more a civilian than an Israeli reservist.
The answer is obviously that I am a civilian. And the answer is equally obvious for the Israeli schoolteacher, the Israeli nurse, the Israeli grandmother at the music festival. The absurdity of applying the argument to myself reveals what it actually is: a conclusion dressed up as a principle. A real principle holds even when it is inconvenient, even when it leads somewhere uncomfortable. If it only applies to people on one side of a particular conflict, it is a strategy—and strategies, unlike principles, offer no protection to anyone, because the next group that wants to justify violence against a civilian population can deploy the same strategy in a different direction.
The argument I heard in that discussion has a structure. One side violates the rules with impunity; the other side is therefore released from those rules. It has genuine force as a critique of the international order—the asymmetry is real—but follow it through and it collapses into something that should give anyone pause: if one side's violation releases the other, the rules have no force for anyone. What replaces them is not justice but power—whoever is stronger does what they will. That is precisely the logic that has been used to justify every atrocity committed against a civilian population in the modern era, including those committed against Palestinians. Accepting it as the operative framework for your own movement doesn't elevate you above your opponent. It places you on the same ground.
The people in that discussion believe they are pursuing justice. I believe they believe that. But the argument they are using is the same argument that bin Laden used to justify September 11, that al-Qaradawi used to justify bus bombings, that the Iranian government used to justify executing protesters. The logic does not become more legitimate because the cause feels more just. It becomes more dangerous, because it travels under the cover of a grievance that is real.
The point of ethical constraints is not that they guarantee a particular outcome. It is that they determine what kind of outcome is worth having. If the path to Palestinian freedom runs through the elimination of the civilian category for an entire population, then what arrives at the end of that path is not freedom in any sense I can recognize. It is victory. And victory and justice are not the same thing.
The most consistent response I encountered in that conversation was some version of: "This is not the time."
In practice, "not now" functions as "never." There is always a reason not to engage with uncomfortable internal questions, always a context that makes the conversation inconvenient, always a risk that raising certain things will be seen as undermining the cause. The questions remain unasked, or if asked, are redirected and defused before they can do the work they need to do.
What this produces, over time, is a community that has substituted political solidarity for moral reasoning—more cohesive on the surface, more brittle underneath. A movement that cannot examine its own principles from within is not stronger for it. It becomes defined by what it opposes rather than what it stands for, increasingly unable to hold internal critique, increasingly vulnerable to the capture of its language by positions it would, in a clearer moment, disown.
There is something specifically corrosive about strategic ambiguity in a community that claims to be about justice. Justice requires applying your principles to cases where they lead somewhere uncomfortable. When scholars and public figures in this community acknowledge civilian protection in the abstract while refusing to apply it to Israelis concretely, the language of justice is being used to perform a moral position with no substance. That is not a small problem. It is how the moral credibility of a movement erodes from within.
If you follow the logic to its conclusion, it forecloses the only future worth wanting.
Coexistence—whatever form it eventually takes—requires, as its minimum condition, the recognition that there are people on the other side whose lives have value not contingent on the outcome of the conflict. If that recognition is absent, the range of possible futures narrows to one: elimination. That is not a future either people can survive—not physically, and not morally.
History is not short of examples of what happens when this threshold is crossed. Dehumanization precedes atrocity not because it causes atrocity mechanically, but because it removes the friction that would otherwise make atrocity feel impossible. Once a population has been successfully redefined as something other than civilian, other than innocent—the actions that follow feel not just justified but necessary. The people in that discussion are not monsters. But they are using a logic that, followed consistently, leads to outcomes we would recognize as monstrous. That is worth saying clearly.
After all of this, my desire to see Palestinians live with dignity and freedom has not diminished. If anything, the years I've spent thinking through these questions have deepened my conviction that the occupation is unjust, that the siege of Gaza is unconscionable, that Palestinian lives deserve the same quality of moral attention that any other lives do. None of that has changed.
What has changed is my understanding of the fractures within the American Muslim community I've been part of—fractures that were there all along and that I had not fully seen. I can still stand in the same spaces, but I cannot do so in the same way, because I now know that the person next to me may be using the same language while operating within an entirely different moral framework. That knowledge changes how I listen, what I assume, what I let pass unchallenged.
The task, then, is not to leave. The Muslim community is multi-vocal, and within it are people who share the commitments I’ve articulated here and feel some version of the same loneliness. The answer to finding them is to say clearly what I believe and to make it possible for others to say the same.
A community cannot claim to be pursuing justice if it cannot agree on who counts as innocent. Justice is not a standard that can survive being applied only to one's own side. It either applies or it doesn't. I keep coming back to the discussion—not to the argument, but to the person who agreed with me and could not say so out loud. That silence is the problem this essay is trying to name. Getting to a place where it can be broken is the only foundation worth building on.