Cruelty Is The Point: The Flagellation of Mahmoud Khalil

(Repost from Substack: originally published August, 29th 2025)

This is the second part of a series on the value of Anti-Cruelty over Anti-Hypocrisy. The first is linked here. 

II. Mahmoud Khalil & The Paradox of The Perfect Victim

The daily horrors of life in Gaza are unacceptable. What makes the public discourse so difficult is that we are collectively operating from an anti-hypocrisy mindset as opposed to an anti-cruelty one. You hear this line of thinking everywhere - people will not budge on caring for Palestinians if you do not first satisfy the requirement of self-flagellation on behalf of crimes against Israel. Anti-hypocrisy demands purity from victims. Anti-cruelty has no such pre-requisites.

When Mahmoud Khalil appeared on The Ezra Klein show, many were outraged at the following exchange:

Klein: Oct. 7 happens. What do you think that day?

Khalil: [I was at the cinema with my wife, Noor]…When I left the cinema…I started to receive all these notifications. To me, it felt frightening that we had to reach this moment in the Palestinian struggle.

Coming from a different informational context (that has not historically highlighted the suffering of Palestinians), it is understandable to initially feel disgusted when you think someone is offering excuses for murdering and committing unspeakable acts upon any civilian population. How could he possibly say that the horrors of October 7th “had” to be reached? But, the most difficult thing in all of this is to recognize that often what we assume someone to be saying is a simplified version of their whole truth. Khalil continues:

“What I know is that targeting civilians is wrong. That’s why we’ve been calling for an international independent investigation to hold perpetrators to accountability. It’s very important, for those of us who believe in international law, that this should happen…There’s nothing that can justify the killing of civilians — and the international law is very clear about that. We cannot pick and choose when international law applies to us or to others.”

What’s difficult to accept - but necessary to accept - is that when Khalil says “had” to reach this point - he speaks from the inevitability of human nature when all other outlets for resistance have been exhausted and internationally ignored. In recognizing that, one is forced to understand that once radicalized violence, forged from desperation, is pursued, there will be cruelty - which by definition, is brutality in excess of any just retribution. That cruelty is not the wish of many. A mob commits acts as a group that morphs into a monster of its own shape. That does not justify their acts, but it provides an understanding that the whole of a people are not fully responsible for the actions of a mob.

I am not saying you have to agree with this stance. You can believe that there is no version of reality where any killing is merited in resistance; that is a legitimate position. I am not certain of my own morality. But, can we not open our minds to accepting that even if other’s understanding of resistance does not fit into our own narrative of justice, that no acceptable result of such a dichotomy is collective punishment?

A society should not have to be a perfect victim or, face the consequences of wanton cruelty from a corrupt government. Each act of cruelty can be condemned as it comes whoever it comes to, without expecting perfect morals on behalf of the victims. Khalil is asking for a universal rather than conditional condemnation of state cruelty. One need not be Israeli to say Israeli women did not deserve to be raped in order to further the cause of Palestinian self-determination. And one need not be Palestinian to say children should not be starved because members of Hamas committed these cruelties on Israelis. Collective punishment is a war crime.

On the other hand, it is fruitless to say that because someone condemned one of these cruel acts and has not rushed to address the other for reasons of scale, that such a person is a cruel hypocrite. They are subjective. Recognition of cruelty on any degree is an entry point for common ground; for conversation grounded in compassion. If someone then rejects this recognition of cruelty that does not fit perfectly into their narrative (say refuses to accept the daily attacks Palestinians are facing), that is indeed an offense. But, the offense should not be because they recognized a different act of cruelty that they are automatically guilty for not universally condemning all. Keeping score is not the path forward. Taking personal action to reduce cruelty is. The reason is not because it is right that one cause gains more benefit than another. The benefit of such a perspective is that it is more effective in building a coalition than the demands of anti-hypocrisy purity - which self-satisfies but does little to change the fortunes of the disenfranchised.

Assumption of condemnable hypocrisy on the basis of focus only creates a ranking system for acts of justice, which divides people who otherwise share goals of peace and universal prosperity.

The only way some will feel satisfied is if they receive an unequivocal rejection of anything Palestinians do other than lie down and wait to be saved. Khalil addresses this cruel paradox:

“There’s another point to this, Ezra: Palestinians don’t have to be perfect victims. That’s what the world is asking of Palestinians amid the dispossession, the occupation, the killing, all of that. Horrible things happened [on October 7th]. Nothing can justify that. I would do everything in my power to stop that from happening.

But we cannot ask Palestinians to be perfect victims after 75 years of dispossession, of killing people in Gaza, being under siege — at that point for over 17 years. Palestinians in the West Bank being stopped at checkpoints, settlers attacking them at every opportunity. The human dignity of Palestinians was absent — and still is, unfortunately.”

Americans love a perfect victim because much of our national pride derives from being the white knight. But the white knight needs a damsel in distress (even if she is a parody of reality).

Helping Israel fits into a narrative of American exceptionalism. It’s important to the US that Israel is the story of triumph, not of brutality. In our collective imagination, persecuted Jews during WWII are our perfect victims. We are the heroes, the rescuers. Think of the stories you heard of the US liberating Jews in Europe in your history classes. These tales generally remove any agency amongst Jews themselves and assign the whole victory to US Military might in defeating Germany. Little is often said of the many geo-political factors that drove us into the war. It is also rare, to hear discussed in American circles, the stories of Jewish people who acted as spies and risked their lives with what little power they had. We, rightly, hear many Jewish stories of tragedy - but not enough of Jewish agency.

I do not mean to say that the US was not instrumental in changing the fate of Western Europe. But the idea that we did this as some sort of wholly selfless act is a fallacy. We infantilize Jewish people in order to tell ourselves a story about our nations character. The success of WWII, and the liberation of Jews leading to the solidification of Israel as a Jewish state, is central to the story of US Pride and the “Greatest Generation.”

The next generation would find the wars of Korea and Vietnam to be national embarrassments that hardly could be considered won. Not to mention our many conflicts in the Middle East that do not have such clean ends as defeating Germany in WWII.

There is an odd understanding here that to be patriotic is to ignore any instances of hypocrisy. I see it differently: anyone with patriotism should be able to embrace US hypocrisy as our human element. The gap between who we are and who we strive to be is the journey of a nation with aspirations to a greater good. There is nothing wrong with this gap. As I described in my last essay, it is natural - there is no perfectly consistent person.

Now, many look to Israel with a different aspiration. Netanyahu’s government possesses some of the turn-of-the century “manliness” of a nation that takes what it wants and does not apologize. Some of the right embrace Manifest Destiny as the cause of a winner: it is emasculating to have no appetite for conquest. That is a mistake. Aid provides soft-power to the US. War is a gateway to destabilization.

Should some of the children of Gaza grow up to be radicalized, after we have witnessed their origin, would we wipe our hands cleanly of it? Is the whole of Gaza tainted as imperfect victims, or would we understand that actions do not occur in a vacuum? It is strange that we expect people to constantly assess geopolitical context when thinking of the destruction wrought on their own lives.

How tragic it is to beat a man, steal his food and wallet, and - when he reacts violently in desperation - sentence him and his family to death and call it justice. It is not because crimes committed in desperation are not also wrong, but without acknowledging and condemning the origins of cruelty we are only exacerbating societal strain - not strengthening our collective conscience.