Question: how can a nineteenth-century German philosopher — namely Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel — shed light on the actions of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) toward Palestinian people in 2024? Answer: Hegel provides the most accurate diagnosis of the way the IDF frames its conduct.

Consider the most recent incident in a long line of similar occurrences taking place in the occupied West Bank in parallel with the relentless bombings of Gaza. An IDF incursion into the town of Qabatiya (not far from Jenin) resulted in the deaths of seven Palestinians, some of whom had engaged in a gunfight with the Israeli soldiers. What happened next ended up being filmed and spread like a wildfire in global news. A gruesome video shows “three Israeli soldiers standing on a rooftop. They can be seen pushing a body over the edge of the building. The feet of the body get stuck in what appears to be electrical or telephone cables, and it dangles over the edge, headfirst. One of the soldiers then reaches over to dislodge the person’s feet, and the body tumbles to the ground.” Two other apparently lifeless bodies are dealt with in a similar manner.

In a statement to CNN addressing the incident, a spokesperson for the IDF has repeated what, by now, has become an official mantra: “This is a serious incident that does not coincide with IDF values ​​and the expectations from IDF soldiers. The incident is under review.” Perhaps an utterly exceptional, unprecedented occurrence would deserve this response. But what is the sense of repeating such words on an ongoing, habitual basis? To give but a few examples, in December 2023, as a reaction to the videos of Israeli soldiers defacing a mosque in Jenin, the IDF issued the following statement, “The behaviour of the soldiers in the videos is serious and stands in complete opposition to the values ​​of the IDF.” Prior to that, in October 2022, the use of “excessive violence” by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians in Hebron was met with this official IDF response: “This is a very serious incident which does not align with IDF values, its code of conduct and the behavior expected from IDF soldiers and commanders.”

At the very least, there is a chronic contradiction here between the avowed values and the actions that do not correspond to such values—and this is where Hegel’s philosophy comes in handy. In his 1807 masterpiece, Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel discusses, among other things, topics related to morality. In the section titled “Conscience. The ‘beautiful soul’, evil and forgiveness,” he provides a detailed description of the very contradiction we have identified.

Succinctly put, the “beautiful soul” is a romantic conception of an essentially good individual with a strong moral fiber and principles that remain immune to messy reality and unaffected by the actual conduct, whatever it might be, of the same individual. It is the person we deem to be “pure at heart,” regardless of the empirical evidence of their actions; above all, it is this person’s absolutely positive self-conception, stubbornly maintained despite all evidence to the contrary.

It would not be a big stretch to extend the “beautiful soul” beyond individuals to corporations, institutions, and even states. Hegel, for his part, frankly makes fun of the psychological tricks meant to guarantee the illusion of self-righteousness. “The ‘beautiful soul’,” he writes, “has no concrete reality; it subsists in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity felt by this self to externalize itself and turn into something actual.” The only way for the “beautiful soul” to maintain itself intact is to affirm what amounts to its own lack of “concrete reality” as the truth, all the while closing the eyes to external reality.

Now, the statements the IDF keeps churning out on a regular basis perform the same trick: they affirm aethereal values and principles as the true character of the military and they dismiss what is actual, the events on the ground in Gaza and the occupied West Bank as mere aberrations, inconsistent with these same values. The contradiction, which Hegel spotted more than two centuries ago, becomes even more pronounced when the “beautiful soul” position is actively used by the military, claiming for itself the status of a moral subject. But, although the notion of hypocrisy crops up in close proximity to this term, there is still more going on here than the undeniably thick fog of propaganda and outright lie would lead one to believe.

The entire, rather absurd, situation of an apparent divergence between principles and actions is only possible when a higher premium is placed on the internal sphere of subjective intentions, thoughts, faith, principles, and so on than on the external realm of action, matter, and the world. To deem values or principles paramount and habitual conduct that directly contradicts these—inessential is to subscribe to the absolute idealism, which Hegel does not accept, regardless of the caricature-like image of his thought. The dialectic always transgresses rigid boundaries between the inner, externalizing it, and the outer, which ends up being internalized, with both of these elements mutually transformed. In our case, it is even more absurd that the military institution of a Jewish state indulges in the “beautiful soul” reasoning, because the origins of this conception (and of the primacy of the inner psychic realm) are Christian—and, for Hegel more specifically, Lutheran. On the contrary, in Judaism, practice has priority over faith, which means that the heaviest emphasis is on actual conduct in the world, as expressed in the observance of over six hundred commandments, to which religious Jews are subject.

It is not a surprise that the “beautiful soul” position is equivalent to the moment of madness, if it entails holding onto an internally constructed set of principles, regardless of the evidence drawn from external reality. Such detachment from the outer world is, indeed, psychotic. Hegel writes in conclusion of the relevant section from Phenomenology of Spirit: “Thus the ‘beautiful soul,’ being conscious of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, is unhinged, disordered, and runs to madness, wastes itself in yearning, and pines away in consumption.” The question, however, is not to what extent the IDF is “conscious of this contradiction” (I am certain that it is), but to what extent its insistent affirmation of amorphous values and principles in the face of the current and future atrocities will ring hollow in the ears and minds of its intended audiences.