Spanish academic and politician Jordi Graupera profiled political philosopher Michael Walzer in the Oct. 22, 2026, issue of The New Yorker (“A Philosopher of War Changes His Mind”). Graupera portrays Walzer as a proud Jew and committed Zionist who has reluctantly been forced to thoughtfully reevaluate his support of Israel’s war against Hamas due to Israel’s actions. But the facts tell quite a different story.
In a January 2024 speech in Barcelona, Walzer noted the difficulty in fighting against an enemy who embeds among civilians. He acknowledged that if – as Israel claimed – one third of the those killed were terrorists, “given the crowdedness of Gaza and given the embeddedness of Hamas, I think that’s a respectable ratio.”
Walzer was correct. According to the U.N., civilians typically constitute 90 percent of wartime casualties. Walzer emphasized Israel avoided excessive casualties under extremely challenging circumstances. It was hardly an extreme assessment, but the audience disagreed.
According to Graupera, “Some in the audience gasped.” During a subsequent question and answer period, one student in attendance expressed his outrage and said he would never read Walzer’s books. Another asked if his Judaism made him incapable of condemning the war.
Even shortly after the Barcelona talk, Walzer told Graupera that he still believed that Israel’s position was “precarious” and could not have avoided the war.
The profile notes that Walzer’s view of the war changed in September 2024, after Israel’s beeper operation that targeted Hezbollah’s ranks in Lebanon. If the pager operation was too much for Walzer, then one must wonder how he expected Israel to exercise its right to self-defense effectively.
Hezbollah joined the war against Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, launching its arsenal against both civilian and military targets. Israel’s pager operation, on the other hand, targeted only members of the internationally designated terrorist organization that was waging war on Israel. John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, described the operation as “a very precise sabotage of an enemy piece of equipment used for military purposes” that “passes all fundamental laws of war.”
Scholars Alexander Yakobson and Azar Gat questioned Walzer’s bizarre reasoning in a paper for the Institute for National Security Studies. They wrote that Walzer’s position “would make it impossible not only for Israel, but for any state, to effectively fight a terrorist/guerilla force engaged in killing its citizens from within a civilian environment…”
A significant part of the New Yorker profile also focuses on a speech Walzer delivered at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem at the end of November 2025. During the speech, Walzer asserted that recent Israeli actions in Gaza “seemed intended to make it ‘uninhabitable, at least by its present inhabitants.’”
But a fundamental flaw in Walzer’s remarks in Jerusalem is his disregard that, by definition, a conflict involves more than one party.
Walzer’s remarks were made roughly a month into the ceasefire brokered by the Trump administration. The actions of Israeli forces at the time were limited only to responding to attacks by Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza, addressing an ongoing and immediate threat. Damage to civilian areas simply reflected the obvious fact that Hamas systematically embeds itself in civilian infrastructure. Israeli forces are under no legal or moral obligation to simply grin and bear it as Hamas fires on them from civilian areas. Under the law of armed conflict, “The party that employs human shields in an attempt to shield military objectives from attack assumes responsibility for their injury…”
Though Graupera omitted it from the profile, Walzer later added another outrageous assessment. He declared, “It may seem odd to say this, but in asymmetric wars the well-being of the civilian population is the responsibility of the high-tech army that is killing many of those same civilians.”
Odd was not the correct word. The comment was immoral and legally illiterate. Walzer had just finished describing Hamas’s human shield strategy and that it wanted to maximize Palestinian casualties. How does that make Israel responsible for Gazans’ well-being? It’s as if Walzer has never considered the perverse incentives his logic creates. What’s to stop terrorist organizations from hiding behind civilians and shooting at other civilians if they know the other side will automatically be held responsible for the resulting harm to civilians?
In fact, no less than Michael Walzer himself wrote in 2006, “When Palestinian militants launch rocket attacks from civilian areas, they are themselves responsible—and no one else is—for the civilian deaths caused by Israeli counterfire.”
Ironically, at the beginning of the Jerusalem speech, Walzer disparaged critics of Israel who “wrote about the war as if Hamas was absent from it.” Minutes later he did exactly that.
Graupera could have engaged in a thoughtful interview, exploring and testing such contradictions and flaws in Walzer’s logic. Instead, Graupera opts for friendly portrayal of the philosopher as a reluctant critic of Israel and its war against Hamas.
By calling Israel’s pager operation against Hezbollah a war crime and its fight against Hamas’s human shield strategy immoral, Walzer betrayed his own principles. Those judgments belie his portrayal as a disinterested observer.