What I learned from simulating a Gaza-like situation on AI ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, August 25, 2025

What I learned from simulating a Gaza-like situation on AI

Over the past day I started using AI to simulate how different ethical philosophies would interact with my AskHillel/Secular Covenantalism model based on Jewish ethics. I would put SC up against, say, Utilitarians in a situation where they had to compete for scarce resources or decide to cooperate or compete when faced with an external threat, and how their relationship would evolve over time as well as how the general public would react to their decisions. It's been a lot of fun and so far my framework does quite well in many metrics, but not all. (In the metrics that moral people would prioritize, it does very well.)

But then I came closer to home.

I would simulate a country like Israel that adopts the Secular Covenantalism framework to deal with Gaza-like dilemmas - ceasefires, rockets, hostage-taking, propaganda campaigns - and see what happens when they’re forced to decide these difficult decisions under pressure.

Like Jews, they argued. One voice demanded retaliation to protect lives, another urged restraint for human dignity, a third insisted truth must trump spin. Every round ended in compromise: often slow, argumentative, and untidy. But those compromises worked. They saved lives, preserved civilian dignity, and stayed within the boundaries of law and ethics.

But they were making these decisions in an environment where other philosophies could criticize them in the court of public opinion. I ran one simulation against social justice thinking and another against Marxist thinking and criticism.

Social Justice collapsed everything into one equation: strong = guilty, weak = righteous. A hospital packed with weapons? “That’s just a racist trope.” Hostages dragged into tunnels? “Desperation, not a crime.”

Marxism was even cruder: all violence by the “oppressed” was revolution, all peace deals were traps, and all rules were bourgeois tricks. In both cases, reality didn’t matter: only the story did.

The results were stark. SC consistently won on the ground - it acted ethically, minimized lives lost, and won the war militarily. But in the public relations battle, Social Justice and Marxism consistently won. The Jewish-derived framework protected lives; social justice and Marxism projected empty slogans.

And the world preferred the simple, one-dimensional messages from these movements over what the Secular Covenantalists decided.

Of course, Israel itself is not an algorithm. This was an oversimplification in many ways. In real life, decisions are made under pressures the simulations can’t capture. Rockets and terror attacks don’t wait for committee meetings and debates, as the model did. Coalition politics, regional alliances, and public morale all weigh in. And unlike a sterile model, Israel carries the weight of Jewish history: the memory that if Jews miscalculate, the cost is annihilation. That changes the cost/benefit analysis, since a single wrong move can be catastrophic.

But the major factor missing in the criticism of the secular "Israel" was antisemitism. I didn't put Jews in the model, so the criticisms were not motivated by antipathy towards Jews. .

When I changed that, and added a latent, subconscious antisemitism into the mix, things got much uglier. And they started looking a lot like the world we live in now.

Every Israeli act of self-defense is immoral by definition. Every forensic report is propaganda by definition. Every hesitation is hypocrisy by definition. With antisemitism baked into the culture, the PR slogans don’t just dominate the conversation - they become the conversation. The antisemitism is precisely the factor that changes the conversation from being against "privileged" or "bourgeoise" into slanders like “genocide” accusations, proposals of sanctions and the grotesque spectacle of a Jewish state framed as the world’s greatest human-rights violator. It’s not a double standard, it’s a single standard: Jews lose.

This is what happens when morality collapses into public relations. Ethics stops being about obligations, outcomes, or human flourishing, and becomes about branding. A hashtag is now more moral than a hostage rescue. A viral image counts for more than a 100 page report. The strong are always wicked, the weak always pure. It’s not moral reasoning - it’s moral marketing.

And it is brutally hard to fight.

Even if an entire alternative moral media infrastructure was built, it doesn't stand a chance against sound bites. Real life is not black and white - but people want to see black and white in their news feeds.

Fact-checking is pointless when the game isn’t about facts but "vibes."

In the simulations, AskHillel/SC won the ground but lost the crowd. Social Justice and Marxism won the crowd but far more would have died if they had their way. That is the world we live in today: a world where the people who actually care about lives are called monsters, and the people who excuse murder position themselves as moral.

When ethics becomes PR, reality itself becomes immoral.