I’ve argued in a previous post that our challenge during Israel’s war in Gaza is to sustain
our solidarity with the Jewish people while simultaneously expressing our commitment
to the Jewish value of human life and the idea of universal human rights. Now I want to explain why this challenge is
so difficult, and – perhaps – to suggest a way through the dilemma.
The problem
is harder to negotiate than many of Israel’s advocates would have us
believe. Let’s assume for a moment (and I
think this is a correct assumption) that it’s legitimate for Israel to defend
its citizens by attacking Hamas’s rocket launch sites and tunnels in the Gaza
Strip, even when Hamas intentionally locates these in densely populated areas. Let’s also assume that Israel does its best
to comply with international humanitarian law by not targeting civilians,
giving warnings before each attack, and trying to minimise civilian
casualties.
None of this
means that a Palestinian civilian whose home is destroyed or who is killed or
injured has not had her human rights infringed.
This is true even if we argue that Israel’s actions are legitimate specifically
because their aim is to protect the human rights of Israeli civilians. And if Palestinian human rights are being
infringed as the result of Israeli actions, then Israel has to take
responsibility for this, even if every act carried out by the IDF is morally
and legally justifiable.
(The same
goes for Hamas, of course, the difference being that no-one could argue that
Hamas makes any effort to avoid civilian casualties of Israelis – or of their
own people).
The internet
is awash with one-sided, simplistic responses to this dilemma. Half the responses justify Israel’s behaviour
and, as a logical next step, either deny Palestinian suffering or blame it on
Hamas. The other half bewail the abuse
of Palestinian rights and draw the conclusion that Israel’s actions are therefore
morally illegitimate.
To me it’s
clear that both sides only have it half right: it’s entirely possible for legitimate
actions to lead to terrible suffering.
This is the paradox: the fact that Israel’s actions may be defensible
does not absolve us from responsibility for their indefensible results. (Disclaimer:
I’m not making a moral judgement about specific Israeli actions as I don’t have
the necessary military or legal expertise to do so.)
So how
should we respond?
The
religious philosopher, Zionist and peace activist, Martin Buber, has profound
advice to offer on this difficult topic.
In his essay ‘Hebrew Humanism,’ published in 1942, Buber argued that the
Bible is the most important moral and spiritual resource for the Jewish
national movement. But the function of
the Bible is not (as most Zionists had it) only to teach us about our history
and our right to the Land. Rather:
“What it does have to tell us, and
what no other voice in the world can teach us with such simple power, is that
there is truth and there are lies, and that human life cannot persist or have
meaning save in the decision in behalf of truth and against lies; that there is
right and wrong, and that the salvation of man depends on choosing what is
right and rejecting what is wrong; and that it spells the destruction of our
existence to divide our life up into areas where the discrimination between
truth and lies, right and wrong, holds, and others where it does not hold, so
that in private life, for example, we feel obligated to be truthful, but can
permit ourselves lies in public, or that we act justly in man-to-man
relationships, but can and even should practice injustice in national
relationships.”
For Buber,
Judaism teaches that morality is absolute.
There is a difference between right and wrong, and this difference holds
in every area of life, the political and the military no less than the private
and the interpersonal. But Buber is not
naïve about the difficulties of this position.
“It is true that we are not able to
live in perfect justice, and in order to preserve the community of man, we
are often compelled to accept wrongs in decisions concerning the community. But what matters is that in every hour of
decision we are aware of our responsibility and summon our conscience to weigh
exactly how much is necessary to preserve the community, and accept just so
much and no more; that we do not interpret the demands of a will-to-power as a
demand made by life itself; that we do not make a practice
of setting aside a certain sphere in which God’s command does not hold, but
regard those actions as against his command, forced on us by the exigencies of
the hour as painful sacrifices; that we do not salve, or let others
salve, our conscience when we make decisions concerning public life, but
struggle with destiny in fear and trembling lest it burden us with greater
guilt than we are compelled to assume” (my emphasis).
Statehood
means we’re not always able to live up to the demands of justice. Sometimes we have to act for the good of the
community in ways which do not accord with textbook ethics. Shelling rocket launchers in civilian areas
of Gaza would seem to be one of those times.
Buber makes two requirements of us in such situations. First, that we do what is needed to preserve
the community and save life, and no more.
We must never allow ourselves to be guided by the desire for power and
certainly not by the need for revenge.
Second, when
self-preservation leads us to use force, we must retain absolute clarity about
the moral status of our acts. When we’re
forced to do something wrong, under no circumstances must we convince ourselves
that we’re in the right. Morality, or
God’s command, is absolute and universal.
We have to look our existentially necessary but immoral acts in the
face.
The recent
controversy over the publication of the names of Palestinian casualties of
Israeli shelling is a case in point.
Buber would argue that while the IDF’s actions may be justified in terms
of national survival, there’s an accompanying moral imperative to recognise the
harm that we’ve done and the people we’ve hurt.
Refusing to publish the names of the victims is the start of a spiral
towards redefining morality in a narrow, chauvinistic way.
Our job is
to understand the complexity of Israeli military actions, defend them when we
believe they are necessary to protect Israeli lives while squarely
acknowledging the suffering and the immoral results that flow from them, and to
work for the realisation of the Judaism’s – and the State of Israel’s – values
of peace, justice and human dignity.
Why is this
important? Buber believes that without a
moral, spiritual vision at its core, the Jewish state will not survive:
“By opposing Hebrew humanism to a
nationalism which is nothing but empty self-assertion, I wish to indicate that,
at this juncture, the Zionist movement must decide either for national egoism
or national humanism. If it decides in
favour of national egoism, it too will suffer the fate which will soon befall
all shallow nationalism, i.e. nationalism which does not set the nation a true
supernational task. If it decides in
favour of Hebrew humanism, it will be strong and effective long after shallow
nationalism has lost all meaning and justification, for it will have something
to say and to bring to mankind.”
All quotes
from Martin Buber, ‘Hebrew Humanism’ (1942), reproduced in Arthur Hertzberg, The
Zionist Idea, pp 457-459.
