The Holocaust did not become a predominant moral and political referent immediately at the end of the Second World War. As Peter Novick observes in his book The Holocaust in American Life, during the war, Western publics were aware in “some general way” of the concentration camps and of Nazi mass murder, but not at all the magnitude or systematicity of what was happening. The film “Judgment at Nuremberg” does a fairly apt job of staging the almost immediate fatigue of American and European audiences after the war with the searing revelations of what had happened. Novick details how the Holocaust came to be known in the way that it has been ever since only during the 1960s and 1970s, fueling public conversations between intellectuals worldwide as well as wending its way into popular culture and everyday awareness.
One vein in those conversations concerned whether one ought to take the Holocaust entirely in terms of its moral meaning, in terms of what it revealed about the nature of evil, the character of the modern state, the hideousness of prejudice and the universal search for scapegoats, the violence of modernity, the dangers of totalitarian power, the relationship between individual responsibility and collective guilt. Alternatively, some insisted that it was important to understand the cause of the Holocaust, to sort through its particular history and weigh various contributing factors: the long history of European anti-Semitism, the development of bureaucratic power and its application to systematic murder, the humiliations and privations of the peace made at Versailles, the reasons for the rise of Nazism, the character of German nationalism and German culture, histories of racial hierarchy and eugenic policy, the roots of fascism and the weakness of liberal democracies during the Depression, the specific political miscalculations of parties and leaders in the Weimar Republic, the personal histories and psychologies of the Nazi leadership, the organization of the German state and military during Nazi rule, the general history of modern nation-states, and so on.
These are potentially compatible approaches, and many scholars and intellectuals have drawn equally from both strains of thought, producing elegant critiques and analyses that address the Holocaust both in terms of causality and morality. But there have also been divergent treatments where writers have argued that to focus on causality risks making the Holocaust explicable and understandable in a banal fashion, to make it one more data point in some comparative analysis, perhaps even to incidentally or unintentionally relieve its perpetrators of responsibility by rooting it in events that precede and supercede their role, defusing their agency or minimizing their role in the mass murder of Jews, homosexuals, Romanies, Slavs and political dissidents. In the opposite direction, some who have explored causality suggest that to refuse that exploration makes the Holocaust so metaphysical, abstract and unique that no lessons can be learned from the Holocaust (or that what is learned is fixed and immovable: that humans are intrinsically evil, that mass-scale government is perpetually dangerous, that national and ethnic majorities are always a threat to minority populations) and nothing can be done to fulfill the promise “never again”, which seems to require understanding how to prevent its recurrence.
This potential opposition is not limited to the Holocaust. There’s something of a similar debate around the Atlantic slave trade. On one hand, many argue that a comparative understanding of enslavement and servility in global history is vitally important; on the other hand, many feel that the particularity of the Atlantic slave trade and its horrors needs to be acknowledged and respected. Some argue that understanding the causal roots of the Atlantic slave trade in terms of early interactions between the Portuguese and West African polities with access to the Atlantic is crucial; others argue that understanding the meaning of slavery in the lives—and deaths—of those subject to its dehumanizing violence and the long shadow of that violence is the only urgent task before us.
We see the vexed relationship perhaps most clearly and urgently in trials and incarceration, in how we encode criminality. British common law and the Napoleonic code civil recognize that intention defines specific crimes and justifies particular penalties. A death caused by negligence is different than a death caused by conscious, deliberate planning. But publics also feel differently about crimes based on the narrative circumstances, on the magnitude of the crime, on the suffering involved. The planned murder of a child by a stranger for reasons of racial or religious hatred is something we understand as worse in some fashion than an adult man intentionally shooting his adult male neighbor after twenty years of mutual feuding over the property line between them. The abrupt murder of a hundred people by a single gunman is something vastly worse for some reason than something like the negligence of the Libyan government towards infrastructure leading to the deaths of 11,000 or more people. Sometimes we feel outraged to be told that an assertion about causality should impinge on moral judgment; we do not want to hear that an assassin ate too much junk food or that a rapist was young, had no prior offenses and had drunk too much alcohol. Sometimes we are disturbed at moral judgment disconnected from circumstance and history, unmoored from how someone found themselves in a situation where they committed a crime or did harm to others.
I am a believer in attention to both causality and morality. I also recognize not just the difference between them but the source of tension between the two focal perspectives. They have to be brought into relationship for us to understand both that a better world is possible and to grasp what we have to do in order to get there. Harmoniously integrated, they provide both goals and strategies for social and political life; out of balance with one another, they tear apart any possible politics and leave us in a void.
You have to think about the causes of what’s happened in Gaza and Israel in the last week. You have to keep that thinking from evacuating moral clarity about what’s happened. You have to do that thinking in tandem and then slowly and carefully bring them into relationship.
So yes, it matters that the government of Israel has consistently worked since the assassination of Rabin and the breakdown of the Oslo accords to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian leadership with legitimacy in the West Bank and Gaza with whom they might negotiate a two-state resolution. Yes, it matters that the West Bank is being eaten away by settlements and that Gaza has become an open-air prison. Yes, it matters that Palestinians anywhere are subject to arbitrary repression and dysfunctional authority, whether from Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Israel, or in Jordan. Yes, it matters that Israel’s existence has been threatened since the moment of its creation. Yes, it matters that Israel’s citizens have periodically faced waves of random murder and terrorism, fueling further building of walls and restrictions and bombardments in defensive retaliation. It all matters as a cause of the attack from Gaza and now the strikes against Hamas and Gaza.
The problem for many is that a recitation of causes instantly sounds like a pre-emptive diminishment of moral concern, an explanation intended as a hedge against recognizing agency, against assigning responsibility, against seeing the initial attacks for the inexcusable moral catastrophe that they absolutely are. Even within the tightly circumscribed domain of “combatants attacks against non-combatants that lead to mass deaths”, there’s a difference between indifference to the consequences of dropping bombs and missiles and armed men programmatically slaughtering everyone they can find, a difference between killing everybody as an aim in war and killing people because they’re in between a combatant and their objective. There’s a difference between deciding to murder someone tomorrow and living with and through the scene of past murders. The murder tomorrow is an injustice you can decide not to commit; the murder of past years is something you can seek justice for. Tomorrow’s murder does not produce that justice. There is, in short, a difference in what Hamas just did to Israelis, a moral grotesquery that no one can accept.
What rises out of doing both kinds of work, both kinds of thinking, is an actual politics that can speak coherently both about the world we want, the world the combatants should want, and about what kinds of things we should say and do on the way to it. I find it acutely distressing to come across people whose political compasses I hesitate to call “left” or “right” as much as I would think of their needles spinning in furious incoherence saying things like “If I were hunted down by Native Americans, I would say that was fair and just”. A politics where you counter-factually welcome your own murder is either grotesquely insincere or horrifyingly vacant in terms of what it looks forward to as the end state of political struggle. To say that you understand another person’s rage in causal terms doesn’t mean you invite that rage to harm you, or anyone. Perhaps less distressingly but also in a distressingly recurrent way, this kind of reaction is tactically stupid within public culture. It’s a kind of narcissistic, individualistic seeking of attention, as if it’s too hard to keep your eyes on the people actually in the middle of what’s happening, and in so doing, an undercutting of real work that real people are doing to repair, restore and protect in the middle of an out-of-control wound being widened by the second.
There are other failures to thread cause and meaning together, many of them so predictable in any new chapter of the Israel-Palestine history that you could set your watch by their appearance. The call for a retaliation so fierce that it will permanently deter further attacks is a failure in both terms: it’s an assertion about causality that doesn’t fit with modern global history and it’s a moral failure that contains within it the seeds of genocide. An analysis that understands that Palestinian nationalism became urgent and real in the Nakba has to (but often does not) understand that Israeli nationalism became urgent and real through the very same processes, which again inflects straight into a moral truth about sovereignty and security in the world we live in and might hope to live in.
I frame this all in terms of how we decide to talk together about a moment like this one so that we also understand that how we talk and how others act or will act are not quite the same things. Much as Hamas is not at all “the Palestinians” (or even “all the people of Gaza”), neither is Netanyahu’s government not at all “all Israelis” (a fact that was only a short time ago very plain to all observers). And neither are we looking on in horror and anxiety more than what we are, a global public who care both about the moral stakes of the conflict but also what it might yet cause. It is important that we talk without being too self-important in that talk. It is important that we listen without indulging everything being said. We are right to fear; we need to hope.
Image credit: Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash
I have been wrestling with this all day, Tim. Thank you for this piece. I need to think more. I need to rest briefly from thinking.
Thanks Tim. Helped me structure some thoughts.