Who is David and who is Goliath? That question, either overtly or by innuendo, underpins the endless debate about the war in Gaza. Everyone is busy explaining to whoever will listen how they are the “little guy” being tormented by a bellicose giant.
The importance of this issue is clear in the remarks of one of Israel’s more interesting public intellectuals, Professor Moshe Halbertal. Halbertal, a left-leaning, religiously observant philosopher, helped draft one of the most recent iterations of the Israeli Army’s code of military ethics. He has also been quite outspoken about what he sees as violations of that code in the prosecution of the war, and about it being a fundamentally just cause. But his remarks about this David and Goliath issue are the most interesting.

“You have Al Jazeera standing at Shifa Hospital and the wounded are coming in,” (Halbertal said), referring to an Arab news outlet. “So you have this great Goliath crushing these poor people, and they are perceived as victims. But from the Israeli perspective, Hamas and Hezbollah are really the spearhead of a whole larger threat that is invisible. Israelis feel like the tiny David faced with an immense Muslim Goliath. The question is: who is the David here?”

My response? Who cares!! It’s a bad question, whose only purpose is to abet the conscience of one side or the other. It actually makes no difference and misses the point of the Biblical story entirely. The reason that David is the good guy in the story is not because he is small, it’s because Goliath represents a hostile, militarist culture that seeks the destruction of their neighbors.
The fact that David is small in the story is simply an artistic device designed to show how victory goes to whomever God chooses, even when they don’t appear to be strong. The point of the story is not, as so many readers mistakenly interpret it, that small is inherently good. It simply alerts the reader to the notion that bigger is not necessarily better.
Fundamentally, the issue is not who is little and who is big. It’s who is good.

And while we can certainly debate that, both about Gaza and many other issues, we should not skip that debate in favor of simply trying to prove who is smaller. That is a race to the bottom in which people compete to see who can claim to be the smallest, weakest and most victimized in order to justify their most hideous acts. It’s what Hamas has done for years to justify suicide bombings and what they blame Israel for doing vis-a-vis Jewish experience in the Holocaust.
I do not think that both claims are equally valid, but certainly the experience of Jewish suffering does animate Jewish consciousness in profound ways and does influence Jewish thinking about many things. And the fact that a thinker as sophisticated as Halbertal would frame the conversation around the David/Goliath metaphor is deeply disturbing.
Why would any group want to frame the validity of its actions based on its relative weakness? More importantly, because Halbertal is correct about this, why do so many of us get sucked in to that claim so often? Because we are lazy about tough decisions and suffer from moral cowardice about the need to make tough decisions. On top of that, we often feel guilty about our own power and ability to make choices, especially when we make bad ones.
So instead of putting our ideas on the line and saying that we did something because it was the right thing to do, or because we really believe in it, we appeal to our own weakness and powerlessness to justify what we did. We make choices and then explain them away by saying “what could we do, we had no choice”. Sometimes that is the case, but far less often than we tell ourselves.
We have created a culture that actually worships powerlessness, and worse, anyone who presents themselves as powerless even when they have power. That is really dangerous. In fact, the only thing more dangerous than the worship of power is the worship of powerlessness. It not only insulates the actor in any given situation from taking responsibility for their actions, it also provides an automatic sense of moral righteousness to all those who support the supposedly powerless. And automatic, unquestioning righteousness is always a bad thing.
Let’s stop hitting the moral crack pipe of who is David and who is Goliath, and ask ourselves if we are comfortable with the choices we are making. Because if we are not, if we are simply getting by on a claim of being the picked-on little guy with no alternatives, we are probably not so good, no matter what size we happen to be.