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‘Good vs. Evil’ vs. ‘Weak vs. Strong’
As the fight rages between Israel and Hamas-led Gaza, those supporting Israel shake their heads at progressives around the world. How can a movement which boasts of its dedication to tolerance, feminism and LGBT equality endorse a terror state founded on thuggery and theocracy?
Israel is a modern, multicultural nation in a sea of medieval misery. Women can vote, gays can marry, and Arabs can serve in government. Just over the security fence, women are subjugated, gays are lynched, and there isn’t a Jew to be found (unless he has been kidnapped).
How can the Left be so enamored of the Palestinians? Are they simply immoral? Yes and no.
The Left has a morality, but it is different from that of most conservatives.
We on the Right tend to view struggles as “Good vs. Evil.” Our less religious allies might rephrase this as “Right vs. Wrong,” “Civilization vs. Barbarism,” or, more broadly, “Order vs. Chaos.” Nevertheless, when we see two sides duking it out, we tend to support the Good and the Civilized.
The Left mocks these tired notions of “good” and “evil.” And what is “civilization” but a Eurocentric justification for racism and colonialism? While it’s tempting to call progressives immoral — or at least amoral — the Left has replaced traditional morality with a morality of their own invention.
Progressives have dropped “Good vs. Evil” for “Weak vs. Strong.” The oppressor in any conflict is considered, for lack of a better term, “bad,” while the oppressed victim is an underdog who is worthy of support.
By viewing conflicts through this lens, progressives make several bizarre alliances. They will root for a gun-wielding murderer if the object of his crime was a cop. They will pat the back of a Yippie bomber if his quarry was the Pentagon. And they will support violently homophobic theocrats in Hamas over pluralistic secularists in Israel.
A substitute morality of “weak vs. strong” has a facile appeal since most of us enjoy cheering on the underdog. But if your morality is based on this paradigm, you’ll soon find yourself rooting for a genocidal Hamas over a truly liberal Israel.
Published in General
OK, so Palestinian civilians are not formally the object of Israeli fire… but far more likely to be killed by it, perhaps in part because of Hamas’ tactics, but much more because Gaza is a densely populated city which is being shelled, and the Gazans don’t have the kind of freedom of movement that would make it easy to run away. Are you suggesting it would be reasonable to expect ordinary Gazan civilians (as their homes are obliterated and non-combatant friends and family killed) to be understanding about the situation, if properly briefed in the doctrine of double effect? Or were you making some other point?
There is definitely evil among Islamic terrorists. Hamas is a nasty organization, and I have no doubt that many of their people are in a pretty appalling state of moral decay. But evil can be understandable of course, and if you want to avoid creating it, or want to address it after it’s been created, it is well to try to understand it. I don’t believe that most Palestinians deserve to be written off as “evil”, but I do think there’s a lot of hate, anger, desperation and terror among them, for reasons that are, yes, fairly easy to understand in light of their history. That this gives rise to violence is unsurprising, which is not the same as saying that bombing a bus full of children is justified.
To put the point another way: individual Palestinians have definitely done things that should not be excused. But it’s also true that people’s circumstances in life can make it much easier or more difficult to develop virtue or at least avoid extreme vice, and the circumstances of the Palestinians have been pretty harsh for quite some time, for reasons that I think do to at least a very significant extent come back to the actions of Israel and the West. (I think most American conservatives actually realize this on some level and have a bad conscience about it, which is why they are making so many desperate and totally unconvincing attempts to show that the Gazans’ circumstances aren’t and haven’t been very bad, and/or that any hardships they do suffer are entirely attributable to their own failings.)
I believe in good and evil, but I also believe that the desire to distill complex situations like this into a fairly straightforward “good vs evil” conflict is somewhat misguided, and generally quite unfair to many people.
What do you mean by that? What kind of “crushing” would have been advisable, that was not permitted? They catch and punish terrorists, of course, and have been doing so for a long time. They restrict movement and impose curfews and suchlike when they think it advisable. What specifically should they have been allowed to do? It’s not a purely rhetorical question; it’s possible that there is something that would have been effective but that the international community de facto “disallowed”. But in the immediate aftermath of the creation of Israel, and for some years thereafter, they had a lot of international goodwill. Were there advisable security measures that they refrained from taking, either out of soft-heartedness or from fear of international sanction?
To be clear and completely honest here… I do not have any specific recommendation with respect to military tactics in Gaza. I just don’t know enough to say what would be likely to work, what level of civilian casualties should be considered acceptable to bring an end to the violence, and so forth. I don’t understand the nuts and bolts of the military side of it well enough to weigh the prudential questions. Neither do most of us here, I’m pretty sure.
I only object to this tide of sentiment from the right, regularly arguing that the Palestinians are entirely to blame for this messy situation, that they deserve whatever comes to them, that sparing their civilians just shouldn’t be seen as a significant priority, etc. That is not fair, and I’ve read some fairly disgusting sentiments along those lines, in the conservative press and conservative forums. The left has some disgusting sentiments too, along similar lines, concerning Israeli suffering. But being affiliated with the right, I attend more to the disorder in my own house.
Bull pucky Zafar. Gazan’s actions of trying to eliminate every Jew in the world is the reason they are kept out of Israel. Maybe instead of continuing to criticize Israel and her efforts to protect her citizens you might want to think about getting your family out of India.
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/al-qaeda-jihad-against-india-kashmir/1/372757.html
Refugees of war have always historically been absorbed – except in this case. The Arab nations and the UN and the rest of the world created and festered the refugee problem.
Nonetheless, today there are NO REFUGEES.
The Arabs in the PA can rule themselves. The Arabs in Gaza have ZERO Jews within their borders.
Rachel – You should know better!!!
Start by opening Google Earth. LOOK AT GAZA.
It is not a city. There is lots of open space, lots of places to go if someone wanted to avoid an area which has been warned to evacuate.
This is stuff and nonsense.
Gaza is prime ocean-front territory. It was a very beautiful and productive place when Israel controlled it – and Israel left behind the industry which had been built up. The Palestinians tore it down.
Most importantly: If Israel was REALLY about domianting, then they would not have given it to the Arabs and walked away!!! They would have done what they did in Israel, which is annex the place. Israel is home to millions of productive Arabs.
Are you suggesting Israel should Annex Gaza? I am for it.
You have it exaclty backward. Most very poor people live hopeless lives, and they believe that fate wills them to be poor – so they are passive.
Gazans have hope – but NOT for economic wealth, but the destruction of Israel, for which they are willing to sacrifice their own children in order to advance.
160 Gazan children were killed BY GAZANS to dig the terror tunnels.
If Israel was simply consistent and transparent then there would be peace. This, if advertised and prosecuted clearly, would do the job:
1: ANY attack will have an artillery response to the launch point within seconds. Regardless of where that site is. This would destroy hospitals and schools – until the “innocent” Gazans decide it is more risky to allow missile launches from their homes and schools than it is to deny those sites to terrorists.
End of story.
Other options:
2: Always publicly bury the bodies of terrorists in pigskin.
3: Annex all of Gaza.
4: Deport all of Gaza into Egypt.
Why are Palestinians peaceful in Jordan? Because the Hashemites bulldozed rebelling towns. Complete victory.
Israel catches murderers and imprisons them. Hamas captures Israelis, and trades 1 for 1,000.
Israel should change the risk calculus for would-be terrorists. Capture and EXECUTE would-be murderers. Bury their bodies in pigskin. If Hamas’s HQ are under a hospital (as they are), then warn Gaza that “nice guy” warnings are going away. Any launch site is a legitimate target.
Look: In WWII, the Allies decided that cities were legitimate military targets. Dresden, Hiroshima, etc. And even today, as we realize those were horrific events, we can acknowledge that using the bomb probably saved many more lives than it took. It certainly saved more lives of the Good Guys. And that, after all, matters.
Any place in war from which a sniper is taking shots at you, is a legitimate target of an artillery round.
This is the heart of the matter. But to me, this is a pathology in the Palestinian psyche. The path to a better life is obvious. Those people who don’t make hatred of an enemy their all-consuming passion live better lives. They spend their energy in productive activity and trade with their neighbors. They focus on making a better life for their children, not on teaching those children to dedicate their lives to the destruction of their enemy.
Every day the Palestinians choose to dedicate their lives to hatred, and they reap the whirlwind. The “plausible path” is right in front of them, traveled by most of the world’s people.
iWc, I don’t know where you read this, but your impression of Gaza is pretty badly off base. Did you know that I lived there for a bit? This was back in 2000, when it was, according to you, a beautiful and thriving city. It was not a beautiful and thriving city, I assure you. And there is a little open space, but precious little. I actually had a friend there whose family was some kind of Gazan grandees back in the day (or so I gathered) and they had a large house out in “the country” (such as it is) where I stayed a few times. Going for a walk in the Gazan “countryside” is funny. Walk a mile and you’ll probably run into all dozen or so of Gaza’s Bedouins, poor souls.
Mostly it’s mile upon mile upon mile of shoddy concrete buildings (what we would regard as “unfinished”, but that’s as finished as most things in Gaza ever got). A fairly helpful way to think of Gaza is as something like our Indian reservations (all of the Gaza Strip has about the square mileage of the city of Philadelphia), but of course, unlike our native tribes, the Gazans are not permitted to leave or settle elsewhere.
Although there is lots of controversy about who did most of the “evicting” at the time of the 1948 war (Jewish soldiers or Arab soldiers, or maybe they just fled from the war zone in fear), what isn’t controversial is that the newly created Israel immediately barred the borders and declared lands and homes and possessions forfeit. They agreed to repatriate a fraction of the refugees (which at that time they unquestionably were) in some new place of their choosing if the Arab states would take the great majority of them. The Arab states (hardly in a cooperative mood at the time) declined this not-particularly-generous offer, and there the Palestinians stayed.
If you won’t call them refugees, I think “involuntary occupants of heavily blockaded native reservation” is definitely reasonable.
It sounds very wise and august to straddle the fence and claim moderation.
But face the facts: Israel GAVE Gaza to the Arabs. Instead of building Singapore or Hong Kong, they spent all their time ethnically cleansing their own, and digging tunnels and buying rockets.
Why is it that the PA and Arabs in Israel are being passive? Because they recognize, along with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and Jordan, that Hamas MUST be destroyed or they are a risk to all peoples. Death worshippers are a serious problem.
You said that there is no place for people to run to. That is patently untrue. They may be intimidated by their own not to run, or they may decide to martyr themselves, but when a building is targeted, people can walk down the street. Again: check out Google Earth and see that Gaza has lots of wide open spaces (I did not suggest they are devoid of people).
The Jewish settlements in Gaza were indeed very beautiful – songs were written about them. But the Arabs do not build beautiful things. Not any more.
It is the Islamic world view, not their economic conditions, that have led to this pass. They do not aspire to wealth or creation or productivity. They aspire to kill Jews.
The only things that were consistently blockaded were weapons (and even that was not done very well).
And they are not natives, not in any larger historical sense. Palestinian Arabs, as has been documented numerous times, come from all over the Middle East including (in the ancient world) Greece.
Yes, but why are they still there? Why haven’t the many Arab countries absorbed them after 66 years, as could easily have happened back when there weren’t so many? It’s easy to see why the Israelis wouldn’t want to reabsorb hundreds of thousands (now millions) of enemies. But why did the Arab nations, especially Egypt and Jordan, refuse to open their borders?
The American Indians are not a helpful historical analog, as they did not have dozens of countries whose populations shared an ethnicity, language, culture, and religion, who clearly supported them politically, fought a war for them, but still conspired to keep them cooped up in reservations to make a political point.
Imagine that the Germans and Japanese after WWII had the attitude you ascribe to the Palestinians, if they had never put down their arms but instead committed consistent large-scale terror attacks against the occupying powers. It’s hard to imagine, because who would be so crazy?
By insisting that their own goal is the genocidal crushing of their enemy, the Palestinians are asking to be crushed. Thus, they get this miserable life, which, I suppose, amounts to a genocide of a thousand cuts. I can only assume they prefer the dream of dead Jews to peace and prosperity.
Rachel,
If you were hired by Hamas to be their negotiator with Israel, and you were given full power to make a deal, what would you agree to, assuming that the right of return is off the table? Can you come up with a deal that would eliminate their despair, isolation, and poverty, while also satisfying Israeli security concerns?
If you can think of such a deal, then ask yourself, why don’t the Palestinians think of it themselves, and then agree to it.
Let’s be clear about “right of return”. Right of return to the Palestinian state is on the table. What’s off the table is allowing any Arab who claims to be Palestinian to move to Israel.
The Arab states had multiple reasons for refusing Palestinians, and yes, making a political point was a big one. Obviously they deeply resented Israel’s presence and had no intention of fixing problems that might prove a thorn in the Israeli side. I don’t mind if you assign them some blame for that (it wasn’t particularly admirable to prioritize their hatred of Israel over their love of their Palestinians neighbors), but I don’t see how that can either 1) exonerate Israel or the West of all wrongdoing, or 2) help the Palestinians. So multiple actors have contributed to their problems, or at least spurned them. So what? Only cowards try to pass the buck for problems they helped create because some third party could have cleaned up the mess already and didn’t.
If, say, Mexicans refused to accept some of their own ethnic kindred back after we won control of Texas etc, and we responded by keeping them confined to a small, heavily guarded reservation for decades on end, could we reasonably “wash our hands” of any responsibility for that? That seems absurd.
The situation in occupied Germany and Japan was different in a million ways, so I don’t know how to compare. For starters, they were the aggressors in that war, whereas the Palestinians were mostly just living their lives when war came, and they fled the fighting, and were promptly told they could never come home again. The Allies weren’t engaging in that kind of displacement during the post-WWII occupation. And, it was clear that they planned to give the whole country back into the control of the natives eventually. They were even reluctant to let France play any role in the occupation (and the role it did eventually play was fairly small) because they didn’t want to give them impression that it was anything like conquest. By comparison, the creation of Israel was pretty much conquest. Should I go on? They’re just totally different situations.
Many details are buried under “mostly just living their lives.”
The innocent and pure Arabs who lived in Israel killed Jews when they had the opportunity. The 1929 Hebron Massacre is a pretty good example.
The Arab population in Gaza and Israel has exploded since 1948. So if Israel is engaged in genocide, then genocide must be one of the few things that Jews are really, really bad at.
War leads to displacement. It is a fact, and there is little or no recourse. You would consider me crazy if I went back to Poland to try to move back into my ancestral home.
Well, Netanyahu has refused to speak to the elected Palestinian government, so that in itself makes it quite hard for anyone to agree to anything. There have been no negotiations to speak of for some years. I agree that Hamas is foolish to refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist. But then I also think that Netanyahu’s Likud party is foolish to refused to recognize the Palestinian right to a state, and foolish to keep building settlements in the West Bank which are said in its charter to be a “realization of Zionist values” and an “expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel”. Again, I agree that Hamas does awful things that are rightly condemned, but Palestinians are hardly the only ones being rather intransigent here.
But let’s suppose that somehow Hamas and the Netanyahu government do agree to talk. Now, personally I think it would be nice if the West could negotiate for some attractive resettlement opportunities for Palestinians who wish to emigrate abroad. But also, I would ask for a state including Gaza and the West Bank, with at least a “road map” towards easy movement between them. West Bank settlements moved. Some portion of East Jerusalem under Palestinian control, with access to the Old City. Immediate opportunities for Gazans to resettle in the West Bank if they choose. And the refugees should get some reparations for their lost lands and homes, which they can use to rebuild in the West Bank. (Maybe Israel would pay these, though I’m fine with Western nations chipping in. They want to atone for their role in this anyway, so maybe it would be therapeutic for them.)
That would be as fair as such a difficult situation can get. It would be very hard at this point to get Palestinians to rally around such a plan, in no small part because they’re so politically fractured, but make no mistake… Israel isn’t champing at the bit for this either. It would be very hard to get this to happen on the Israeli side, too.
The Hebron Massacre was terrible, but you’re cherry-picking. If Arabs really were single-mindedly genocidal towards Jews that whole time, they too were very bad at it.
Most of the displaced people were not fighting any wars at the time. They ran away, or were forced out, and then were told they couldn’t come home.
Well you couldn’t just walk up and demand the deed to your ancestors’ house, but if you wanted to return to your ancestral Poland, I wouldn’t call that crazy. And you could probably do it, couldn’t you, if that were really your life dream? Meanwhile though, you live in the United States (I think) where you’re free to move and settle from sea to shining sea, and enjoy as a matter of course civil liberties far greater than most Palestinians have ever had.
I don’t think there’s much of an analogy here.
No. People have tried.
At some point, the only way forward is for people to stop looking backward. We are there.
Israel would do a lot of peace – if they could believe it possible. After all, the Gaza withdrawal was a step in this direction – but a step that did not interest the Arabs.
The Arabs in Israel have FAR more civil liberties than Arabs in any other Arab country.
If you are not willing to concede that, based on the data to date, the best realistic outcome for Gazan Arabs will come about if Israel would annex Gaza, then you are not being logical. Every alternative (especially so-called self-rule) provides a much less rosy result.
Agreed. They always preferred to have other people do it for them. Hence the Mufti of Jerusalem’s alliance with Hitler.
Even now, most Gazans are not actually keen to blow themselves up. But they are not averse to another of their number dying if it means the world condemns Israel.
My view of peace is much simpler: impose it by force, the way it has been imposed throughout history.
Pain now (just like Dresden or Hiroshima) would save a lot of lives in the long run. Israel has always shirked from victory.
Even now, Israel does not seem to have a strategic plan. They will destroy the tunnels and try to destroy the rockets, and then go home while Hamas either rearms, or someone else stages a coup.
But either displacing Gazans into Egypt or annexation (with swift handling of any violence) would be better ideas.
Rachel Lu, why are there no bomb shelters in Gaza for the general population? Why has tons of cement been used to make tunnels into Israel for the purpose of killing Jews? I think your mask is slipping, and your leftist pro-Gaza/Pro Palestinians preference is in full view. Either that or you are sadly lacking in historical knowledge. Watch the following and see what you can get from it.
http://www.patcondell.net/peace-in-the-middle-east/
There is no real support for annexation. Israel doesn’t want all those Palestinians as citizens.
Would it really be impossible for you to live in Poland? Strange. Anyway, being “confined” to the whole United States is the sort of fate that makes moving forward very possible. Gaza is a wildly different story. The situation for Israeli Arabs is a different conversation.
And what do you mean that the Israelis would “make a lot of peace” if they “thought they could”? The Likud government doesn’t seem very anxious to make any kind of peace with Palestinians. With respect, it just doesn’t seem to me like you understand the situation very well.
I wouldn’t try to contend that the Palestinians aren’t suffering from some of their own mistakes, but I think the best we can honestly get to is, “things could be less awful for them if they had gotten all of their people to collectively behave very well under extremely difficult circumstances.” That being the case, the effort to turn Israel into the “good” of our “good and evil” play seems overdrawn.
As I have already argued here recently, I do think we owe them support, as our allies, and considering the promises we have made to them and their people. Some of the demonstrations around the world are hateful and disgusting, smearing Judaism as a faith and invoking the Holocaust in horrible ways. None of that changes the fact that this is a morally complicated situation. Justice is elusive here.