When Moral Certainty Replaces Critical Thinking

The column argues that two recent controversies, the mistaken killing of Palestinian infant Sam Abu Heikal by IDF fire last Friday and the dispute over a High Court ruling on Red Cross visits to prisoners, reveal the same social failure: people rush to certainty before they know the facts. The writer says the online reaction to both cases showed how quickly users assign guilt, betrayal, or innocence based on emotion rather than evidence.

Using the Abu Heikal case, the author says the IDF admitted the child was an uninvolved person and called it a case of mistaken identification. That, he writes, is tragic but not proof that soldiers are monsters, because people operating for months in a war zone, under fear, exhaustion, and constant threat, will sometimes make lethal errors. The proper response, he says, is to acknowledge the horror, investigate, understand what happened, and reduce the chance of a repeat.

He then turns to the High Court case, where a three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the state cannot continue to broadly prevent Red Cross visits to prisoners, including terrorists. The court, he says, did not do this out of sympathy for terrorists or to embarrass the government, but because Israeli law required it and the state failed for more than two and a half years to provide a valid legal basis for the blanket ban. Emotional arguments like, “they deserve it,” may be understandable, he says, but they are not a legal standard.

The column concludes that both arguments on social media were driven by tribal loyalty and fake certainty. The real danger, it says, is not only hatred but the replacement of critical inquiry with automatic support for one side and automatic condemnation of the other. Quoting Nietzsche, the writer warns that a society that stops questioning itself becomes less moral and more dangerous, especially to itself.