Last night one of my daughters asked me how we could tell the difference between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” since the “good guys” are the “bad guys” to the “bad guys”, thus making all guys bad. Yeah, I wrote that correctly. In other words, is it really just a matter of whose side you are on to determine who is the good guy and who is the bad guy? She didn’t know it, but she was asking a question about moral relativism vs moral absolutism, and a very good question it was.
An anecdote from the US Civil war is told about a time when Abraham Lincoln was asked whether or not he was sure that God was on the Union side. He responded, “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.” Lincoln rightly understood that there must be some standard above and beyond “sides” that determines right and which flows from God. Christianity is a religion that believes in objective truth and objective morality that is transcendentally grounded in the Tri-une God whom we serve.
It is not only possible, but desirable to be able to distinguish moral behavior from immoral behavior. Since nations are moral actors, we should be able to distinguish moral behavior from a nation vs immoral behavior from a nation. But this isn’t quite as straightforward as identifying the difference between a hammer and an orange because nations are complex critters that are all corrupt in some ways, and some more than others. I have no more illusions about the sins of my own nation than I have of the sins of my own heart. Nevertheless, we should at least make an effort – when nations go to war – to identify the good guy vs the bad guy.
The complexity of this is heightened by the nature of propaganda in the modern world, which spreads at the speed of fiberoptics. Because claiming the moral high ground is advantageous in a variety of ways, sifting through misinformation is quite frustrating. Warring parties have always exaggerated their own effectiveness in killing while minimizing their own casualties, so this is nothing new. But what is new is the speed at which an image can circumnavigate the globe and cause a global backlash, only to find out that the image was artificially generated. Only to find that people have already moved on to the next outrage.
Despite all of this, my contention is that we can choose sides based not only on strategic advantages to our nation, but also by a standard of righteousness external to the parties. We should make sure to the best of our ability that we are on the side of the good guys. There are rules of conduct when it comes to war that represent just warfare and those who violate those rules can rightly be called wicked or evil. None of this indicates how a nation, such as mine, should respond to individual conflicts around the world in the matter of statecraft, but at minimum we should have a clear sense of who is right and who is wrong in the conflict.
The two global conflicts that I am most interested in are the Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Hamas conflict. I want to make the case that Ukraine and Israel are the good guys, and Russia and Hamas are the bad guys. I am not making the case that either nation is perfect, or that we should take a particular military action, or that individual actions of either nation shouldn’t be condemned if they are damnable. And because these things are perfectly straightforward, I submit three considerations that, taken together, make a compelling case for choosing Israel over Hamas and Ukraine over Russia.
Bad Guys Target Civilians
On October 7th, 2023, Hamas directed military forces to invade Israeli territory for the purpose of brutally murdering, raping, kidnapping, and terrorizing civilians, some of whom were at a music concert and some of whom were at home celebrating the Jewish holy day of Simchat Torah. Over 1200 Israeli’s lost their lives and over 250 were taken as hostages into Gaza. Hamas has never denied targeting civilians and, two years later, still holds 48 civilian hostages. Some hostages have been returned alive, but most in body-bags, including four year old Airel and 10 month old Kfier. To further their abominations, Hamas initially returned the wrong bodies of these brothers to their father, whose wife was also killed in the terror attack. These are the actions of cowards and fiends who used took the lives of civilians in the most brutal way possible to provoke Israel into a retaliatory response for the purpose of bringing about a global backlash to Israel. This strategy seems to be working as anti-Israel sentiment has grown. If only the just condemnation of Hamas’s attack and refusal to return hostages was met with the same global outrage.
For the past several months, Russia has been sending drone and missile attacks into cities like Kyiv and Odessa, intentionally targeting non-military and non-infrastructure targets like apartment buildings. The new technological capabilities of the drones along with the sophisticated aiming systems for the missiles negates the possibility that these are accidental. Instead, Russia is attempting to erode the will of the Ukrainian people by targeting civilian structures.
It is a sad but unavoidable fact that civilians die in war along with soldiers. At this point in Israel’s war with Hamas, it is likely that more civilians have died in Palestine as a result of Israel’s retaliation than Israeli’s died on October 7th. Nevertheless, no reputable source has provided evidence that Israel is targeting civilians. Rather, the nature of Hamas’ integration into civilian structures such as hospitals and schools, along with tightly packed fighting conditions, have resulted in a disproportionate number of civilians deaths. More about this below.
To the best of my knowledge, Ukraine has not targeted Russian civilians. This could be due to a lack of capability, but so far Ukraine’s incursions into Russian territory have targeted military installations or infrastructure.
Bad Guys Violate Borders
As noted above, it is without question that Russia and Hamas violated the borders of a neighboring sovereign nation. A general principle – the default position of any nation – should be to honor the established borders of other nations. For example, it is without question that the United States has the military strength to violate the borders to our north or our south, but to do so would be to forever alter (for the worse) the relationship between our nations, just as much as it would forever alter the nature of my relationship with my neighbor if I kicked down his door and occupied his living room recliner. It’s hard to come back from such things.
Borders actually matter quite a lot, as Americans are finally starting to realize. Only under extreme circumstances should a nation ignore or violate the borders of another, and the provocation should be clear. For example, America violated the borders of Iran in June of 2025 when we sent bombers to destroy three nuclear construction sites. While this violated borders, there was a long track record that involved decades of diplomacy and warnings that preceded it. The violation was surgical in nature and the targets precise. It was the equivalent of jumping the neighbor’s fence in order to retrieve a frisbee your kid had thrown over. I mean, if the frisbee was a nuclear site producing weapons of mass destruction to be used against an ally in the Middle East and it was retrieved using stealth bombers and bunker busting payloads.
As far as the Ukraine goes, its mere existence as a nation independent of Russia seems to be the provocation for Vladimir Putin to violate its borders. In June of 2022, Putin likened his invasion of Ukraine to Peter the Great’s “recapturing” of territory from Sweden, indicating that he believes Ukraine rightfully belongs to Russia. Some have also argued that Russia was provoked by talk of Ukraine being inducted into NATO as a legitimate reason for this invasion. I find these arguments unconvincing. Ukraine has been a sovereign nation since 1991. While that isn’t a long time historically, there is a sufficient separation from Russia culturally, economically, and politically for Ukraine to consider itself completely independent of Russia. If Ukraine had not armed itself or sought closer relationships with the West, it would only have made itself an easier target for Putin’s aspirations. I don’t believe that Russia’s invasion was provoked by any activity of the West or of Ukraine itself, but is the result of Putin’s expansionist mindset.
Likewise, I do not believe that Israel provoked Hamas into an attack against its civilian population. Hamas simply hates the idea that Israel exists as a nation at all. Israel could not appease Hamas outside of ceasing to exist, and the armies of activist in the West chanting “from the river to the sea” are, largely ignorantly, calling for the genocide of the Jewish people. So, like Ukraine, Israel is not responsible for provoking a violation of its own borders.
Bad Guys Fail to Serve their own Citizens
Government exists to serve the good of its own citizens. Any government that uses its citizens to achieve ends that are only to the benefit of a specialty class is a failure. Government has an obligation to exercise its authority in such a way that the maximum number of benefits are achieved by the maximum number of citizens, and this whole concept needs to be fleshed out and etched in our minds.
Vladimir Putin is essentially a dictator who is willing to let thousands of Russians die to gain the object of his desire: Ukraine. He does not care how many lives are lost in the process. Because he is a dictator and doesn’t have to worry about elections, he can continue this military fiasco for as long as he wants. A democratic nation would most likely revolt and choose a different leader. Along with the rest of the world, Putin is probably shocked that Ukraine fought so effectively (and valiantly) to defend itself and this has cost him much more than he originally intended. Nevertheless, this failure of foresight does not excuse the use of his population as blunt instruments to achieve his grandiose plans.
Consider the following quote from senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk in October 2023 when asked why tunnels were not being built for civilians:
We built the tunnels because we have no other way of protecting ourselves from being targeted and killed. These tunnels are meant to protect us [Hamas members] from the airplanes. We are fighting from inside the tunnels. As for the Gaza strip, you know and everybody knows that 75% of the people in the Gaza strip are refugees. And refugees are the responsibility of the United Nations to protect them. According to the Geneva Convention, it is the responsibility of the occupation to provide them with all the services for as long as they are under occupation.
A senior Hamas officially openly admits that the responsibility of 75% of the people occupying the Gaza strip are not his concern. This isn’t just a quote; this is how Hamas operates. The reason Hamas hides in schools and hospitals is because to them, civilians are a shield to be used for protection, not their responsibility to protect. The reason civilians are starving (more about this below) is because Hamas will not cooperate with aid agencies to provide food. The reason a ceasefire cannot be reached is because Hamas continues to starve and torture 48 hostages. It is hard for me to have sympathy to anyone supporting Hamas when Hamas could turn over the remaining civilian hostages – or their bodies – and come to a ceasefire with Israel. Just as it was the responsibility of the Japanese government to surrender at the end of World War II in order to protect its civilian population, so it is Hamas’ responsibility to do everything in their power to bring about a ceasefire to this war and they are intentionally not doing that. They want the war. They want the starvation. They want images of wounded children. They don’t care about their own people, because they don’t consider most of them their own people.
On the other hand, Ukraine and Israel are fighting for their own people. Ukraine is in an existential war, so everything they do is to protect their own people from losing their nation to a despotic egomaniac whose rule would not increase the good of the Ukrainian people, but would suck the life out of the nation like a parasite. Likewise, Israel has determined that it will not allow an armed Hamas to exist in Gaza for the sake of their own civilian population. One may not agree with their strategies, but Israel has been perfectly clear from the start of this conflict that it takes its own responsibility to protect its population from terror attacks seriously and Israel has not wavered in that objective. Israel and Ukraine both have morally superior objectives than Hamas or Russia in this respect, and should be respected for it.
Is It Possible for the Good Guys to become the Bad Guys?
Would it be possible for Ukraine and Israel to act in such a way that they would cease to be the “good guys”. Yes, that is a possibility. That is the very case that is being made against Israel today. And so I will say a few things to explain why my support for Israel remains unchanged. First, in an age of misinformation, I choose to trust the side that did NOT intentionally murder, rape, and kidnap innocent civilians. Call me crazy, but I just think people who are so demented that they would intentionally commit atrocities in order to provoke an opponent into a war should also NOT be trusted to communicate any kind of objective reality. If Hamas says it, it probably isn’t true. They are liars on top of being cowards and murderers. One particular story that gained traction earlier this year that illustrates how dangerous it is to believe propaganda is the lie told by an American aid worker regarding Israeli soldiers luring civilians into an aid distribution center only to gun them down. The story was a fabrication and the boy is still alive.
Nevertheless, it is doubtless true that those living in Gaza have suffered and are suffering and I do not doubt or deny that civilians have died during IDF incursions into Gaza. Who has the responsibility and immediate means of alleviating that suffering? Hamas. You know that Liam movie “Taken”, where we watch in admiration as a father relentlessly pursues his daughter at all costs and we cheer him on? Israel is relentlessly pursuing their lost children into the tunnels of Gaza, which – by the way – were constructed with the sole purpose of carrying out terrorist attacks on Israel. As a nation and as a government, Israel is fulfilling its obligation to its own citizens while Hamas is intentionally sacrificing its own civilians.
I am in favor of aid organizations distributing food in Gaza. I am in favor of protecting civilians in Gaza. But without excuse, I hold Hamas responsible for all the suffering that they have brought down upon those people. Which brings me to the charge of genocide against Israel. A charge which is logically incoherent. Hamas itself says that 75% of its own population are refugees. They are not “a people” in the way that the Jews are a people. This doesn’t mean that they don’t matter. In fact, the only reason I can say that they do matter is because Christianity is true and Christ is King. Every last one of them is made in the image of God, and that is the only objective basis for assigning value to human life at all.
I continue to support Ukraine and Israel. They are imperfect actors in conflicts which I do not envy. And to reiterate, I am not making any claim regarding military support or statecraft. That stuff is beyond my experience. But I hope I have sufficient moral clarity to know that the bad guys are the ones who invade another country and target its civilians at the expense of their own civilians.
Nathan Writes 