Israel, Palestine, and the Consequences of Moral Coarsening

The unintended consequences of Israeli strikes on Iran

This Saturday President Trump will celebrate “the greatest missiles in the world… the greatest submarines in the world… the greatest tanks in the world… the greatest weapons in the world” with a $50m parade in Washington to coincide with his 79th birthday. A Maga-supporting crowd will be bussed in, Putin-style, to show its enthusiasm.Unfortunately those weapons may soon be in evidence in the Middle East, if Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netan…

Israel, Palestine, and the Consequences of Moral Coarsening

Bodies of Palestinians in the Al-Alam area of Rafah, June 3, 2025. (Photo by Abdallah F.s. Alattar/Anadolu via Getty Images.)A recent Netflix documentary recovered and re-colored video footage of the Blitz in London during the war. I’d been brought up only a couple of decades later and the Blitz was still embedded deep in the national psyche. My own great-grandmother had been killed by a bomb hitting her home, and my mother often recounted being…