Oded Balaban

When politics can hear only calculation, moral objection becomes an accounting error —and the reply, a threat.

Oded Balaban — University of Haifa — balaban@research.haifa.ac.il

There is a word that, all at once, is everywhere. When the British government banned trade with the settlements —speaking, without euphemism, of “ethnic cleansing”—⁠, President Isaac Herzog did not say the measure was unjust. He said it was “a grave miscalculation […] a decision that will fall on the wrong side of history.” The choice of word is no matter of style: it is, itself, the whole argument. It is worth taking apart, for in that single word an entire operation is carried out.

I begin with the dictionary, which is half a confession. “Miscalculation” is not a neutral word: it is a technical term of strategy and game theory. It was born in the Cold War, in nuclear deterrence theory, and there it names the greatest terror of all: that the adversary will miscalculate the other side’s resolve or strength and unleash a war no one wanted. In that universe the actor is a calculator, and the only conceivable error is one of computation. There are no just or unjust deeds; there are shrewd moves and mistaken ones. This is how game theory works, the theory for which Thomas Schelling and Robert Aumann won the Nobel Prize.

So when the word migrates from the academic world into political discourse, it smuggles in an entire metaphysics. To say “miscalculation” is to declare, without arguing it, that there is nothing but calculation: neither good nor evil, only a sum done well or badly.

The question the British boycott raises is moral: is it licit to trade with —and so sustain— the occupation and the terror of settlers on lands that are not under Israel’s sovereignty? By calling it a “miscalculation,” that question is translated into another language: it ceases to be is it just? and becomes is it a smart move, given what we can make you pay? The reply comes in the same register: not an argument but a threat. On 8 September 2026, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announces the closure of the British consulate in East Jerusalem; Itamar Ben-Gvir calls for recognizing Argentina’s claim to the Falklands; and entry is barred to twelve Britons —eleven members of parliament, among them former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn— for “antisemitic or anti-Israel activity.” Pure deterrence logic: a calculator is not refuted, it is deterred —you raise its costs until it “recalculates.”

The same erasure works in the choice between two politically loaded words. Hebrew has two: hitnachalut, which marks precisely a settlement planted beyond the sovereign border, and hityashvut, the neutral word for settling the land —the pioneering of the Negev or the Galilee. The press now uses only the second: “Jewish settlement,” plain and unmarked, as though an outpost on occupied land were no different from a town in the Galilee. Erase the word and you erase the distinction; erase the distinction and the European objection turns unintelligible: if it is all merely “settling the land,” what occupation are you talking about? The vocabulary does not describe the problem, it makes it disappear —and then whoever points to it looks, once again, like a poor calculator.

Here is the trick, double and almost perfect. First the other’s position is stripped of its morality: what he presents as a matter of conscience is redescribed as mere calculation, and mistaken calculation at that. Then it is re-moralized in one direction only: to oppose us is not a rival moral position, it is antisemitism. The upshot is that your morality is disqualified in advance —it is “miscalculation”— and the only morality left standing is the accusation hurled at you. They usher you out of the ethical field through one door and charge you with a sin through the other.

This trick works not only outward but equally inward, toward Israel’s own citizens. Whoever opposes the occupation on grounds of conscience —not as a reaction to a British boycott or any other calculation, but out of a values position he has always held— is pushed to suspend his own view and fall into line with a uniform nationalist stance, as though what stood before him were not a moral disagreement but a test of patriotism.

What truly unsettles is this suppression of the moral question by lexical decree. For in moral matters one does not act by calculation. Max Weber distinguished, a century ago, instrumental rationality —the fitting of means to ends— from the rationality of values; to act morally belongs to the second: to do what is right even when it costs, even against one’s own interest. To measure a moral judgment by the yardstick of calculation is a category mistake, in Gilbert Ryle’s exact sense: one answers a question of one order with the instrument of another. Instrumental reason knows how to ask, with admirable efficiency, does this means serve my end?; the one thing it cannot ask is is the end worthy? Max Horkheimer called this, bluntly, the eclipse of substantive reason by the instrumental. To call the conscientious objector a “miscalculator” is therefore to refuse the only question that matters. Man is reduced to a maximizer of expected utility who can err only in the arithmetic —the old reification, the living treated as a thing, now made the language of the state.

Hence the bitter irony: those who accuse the other of “miscalculation” answer with calculation and threat, not with argument. They have ceased to tell good from evil, the worthy from the base, and hear in his cry nothing but an error in arithmetic.

Set side by side, these words say one thing. “Miscalculation” erases conscience; “hityashvut” erases the occupation; “antisemitism” erases the other’s moral objection; and “voluntary emigration” is by now a fully Orwellian phrase: it erases coercion and replaces it with “will,” all the while making the Palestinians’ lives unbearable. The same operation, over and over. This is why an opposition that also says “hityashvut” and knows only how to bewail the world’s “antisemitism” does not fight this policy: it lends it its language.

I end where I began, with the word. A political language that can hear only “miscalculation” has gained nothing in realism: it has lost its ear for conscience. Whoever reminds it that there are acts that cannot be calculated —that there are things one does not do even when they pay— is not miscalculating. He is doing the one thing a calculator will never do: refusing.