At one point, they told us Israel was a miracle. A refuge carved from tragedy. A nation rising from the ashes of genocide, forged by socialist kibbutzim and post-war idealism. That was the pitch: the moral arc of history bent toward a single state. That was the source of what Jonathan Sumption, in his careful, legal prose, calls “moral capital.”
But capital (moral or otherwise) is not a moral category. It is relational. Accumulated, spent, leveraged. And, as with any form of capital under late capitalism, it must be interrogated not for what it was, but for what it now enables.
Moral capital is what turns atrocity into impunity.
It is what allows a nuclear power to present itself as an existential victim.
It is the alibi of the powerful, written in the past but enforced in the present.
Sumption puts it plainly: that moral capital, built in the shadow of Auschwitz, is “largely dissipated.” But what he underplays (perhaps cannot say) is what that dissipation reveals. Not just a fall from grace, but a structure of domination that was always embedded in the founding mythos. The gap between Tel Aviv’s startup nation image and the ruins of Gaza is not just a public relations problem. It is the historical contradiction coming home.
The Accrual
When moral capital is discussed, it is usually in the soft register of memory and sympathy. But what’s remembered, and what is not, is a question of power. In the early years of the Israeli state, moral capital accrued through a double process: the West’s horror at its own complicity in genocide, and its strategic interest in supporting a regional client power. Sympathy and utility, wrapped in the language of survival.
This capital was sustained through the architecture of liberal Zionism: the kibbutz, the Sabra, the desert turned green. Hollywood played its part, so did British television. From Exodus to The Promise1, the story was one of victimhood redeemed by nationhood. That this redemption required mass displacement of Palestinians was background noise, footnoted in UN resolutions, shunted offscreen, excused as inevitable, or ignored altogether.
To mention the Nakba was impolite. To dwell on it was to invite accusations of bad faith. That too was moral capital: the power to define what suffering counted.
Collateral Morality
This is the contradiction at the heart of Sumption’s article. He does not flinch from describing what Israel is doing in Gaza as collective punishment. He lays out, with forensic clarity, the scale of the destruction: 57,000 dead, nine-tenths of buildings levelled, children starved at militarised checkpoints, aid workers killed by the dozen. He cites international law, the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross. He stops just short of the obvious conclusion: that moral capital has not only run out, it is now actively underwriting atrocity.
Because moral capital, once weaponised, becomes collateral morality. It attaches itself to violence, justifies it, immunises it. Israel’s defenders do not deny what is happening; they redefine it. Starvation is leverage. Displacement is security. Mass death is unfortunate, but contextually justified. Each new war crime is buried in the logic of precedent: if we tolerated this before, why not again?
The transformation is complete: moral capital no longer humanises the state.
It is the thing that allows the state to dehumanise others.
The New Ledger
There was a time when moral capital bought silence. It no longer does. At least not in the same way. The generation that learned about Israel through school trips to Yad Vashem, through Schindler’s List and The Diary of Anne Frank, has given way to one that learns about Gaza through TikTok and drone footage. One side has curators. The other has phone cameras. One has the imprimatur of history. The other has 4K images of infants bleeding out in makeshift clinics. The ledger is changing, and the balance is no longer in Israel’s favour.
This generational shift cannot be reduced to antisemitism, though of course it will be. The strategy of conflating criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews is not new, but it grows more hysterical the more threadbare the moral capital becomes. There is a panic, even among Israel’s most ardent allies, that the apparatus of justification can no longer hold. That young people. Especially in the Global South, but increasingly across Europe and North America. Are no longer buying the narrative that one atrocity excuses another.
This generational shift cannot be reduced to antisemitism, though of course it will be. The strategy of conflating criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews is not new, but it grows more hysterical the more threadbare the moral capital becomes.
The bans on protests. The arrests of student occupiers. The proscription of Palestine Action in Britain. The surveillance of humanitarian groups. The rhetoric of “extremism” and “public order.” This is not about Hamas. It is not about terrorism. It is about the fear that moral capital has reached its limit, and that critique (once marginal) is now majority.
When moral capital depletes, you either reform or repress. Israel has chosen the latter. So have its backers.
Soft Power as Smokescreen
Sumption writes, with judicial understatement, that “Israel is in a position to do whatever it likes to Gaza, and it does.” That is not a failure of policy. It is the very purpose of the military–soft power nexus. Institutions like the Israel Defence Forces, AIPAC, NGO Monitor, and Hasbara International exist not only to suppress Palestinian resistance but to reframe it. Every civilian death becomes a Hamas tactic. Every bombed hospital a justified target. Every journalist killed was in the wrong place, reporting the wrong thing.
This is what moral capital enables once it hardens into ideology. It flows through think tanks, lobbyists, editorial boards. It appears as respectable concern. It speaks the language of nuance and balance. But it functions, always, to naturalise the exceptional violence of the Israeli state.
Even humanitarian aid has become part of this infrastructure. The so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (a militarised apparatus run by Israel itself) was never intended to feed a starving population. It was designed to give the appearance of compliance. A fig leaf for famine. A logistical solution to a moral crisis Israel engineered and now administers. That it has collapsed is no surprise. It was a prop, not a programme.
The real theatre is elsewhere: at the ICC, in the UN General Assembly, in the shrinking space where the law is still imagined to constrain empire.
The Genocide Question and the Return of History
Genocide, Sumption reminds us, depends on intent. This is where even seasoned legalists hesitate. How to prove what a state “means”? Especially when its official rhetoric is laced with euphemism and plausible deniability. But Israel’s ministers have been unusually explicit. Bezalel Smotrich. Itamar Ben-Gvir. Israel Katz. Netanyahu himself. Again and again, they speak of clearing Gaza, of rendering it uninhabitable, of building detention camps and “pressure zones” to facilitate population transfer. These are not slips. They are policy.
The bombing of housing infrastructure (intended to make return impossible) is no longer strategic. It is existential. Gaza must be made unliveable so that Palestinians may be made to disappear. Whether through forced displacement, starvation, or despair, the result is the same: a demographic solution to a political problem.
Genocide, as the UN defined it, is not only mass killing.
It is “conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of a people.”
The famine is not incidental. It is the method.
And here we return to history. Because this is not about October 7th. It is not about Hamas. It is about 1948. It is about what was never reconciled: that a state founded in the wake of genocide was built on the erasure of another people. That contradiction is not rhetorical, it is material. And it returns, as contradictions do, when repression becomes unsustainable and legitimacy runs dry.
It is about 1948. It is about what was never reconciled: that a state founded in the wake of genocide was built on the erasure of another people.
After Moral Capital, What Remains?
What Sumption calls “the dissipation of moral capital” is more than reputational decay. It is a shift in global consciousness. The West can no longer rely on the old stories to justify the present order. And when those stories fail, what is left is the naked structure of force.
This does not mean moral capital is gone. But it is no longer accumulating. It is being spent, and fast. Every dead child in a Gaza refugee camp devalues the currency. Every lawyer silenced, every protest banned, every whistleblower hounded, every school obliterated. All of it drains the account. The interest rate is generational. And the next cohort is not investing.
What Israel is exhausting is not just sympathy. It is time.
And once the narrative breaks, only the violence remains to enforce it.
The question is not whether Israel has lost its moral capital.
The question is what comes after, when the world stops pretending it was deserved.
Foonotes
- Here, moral capital falters. History re-enters. The British role is acknowledged, and Palestinian dispossession becomes visible, not as a side note, but as the core. ↩︎
