Last week, I wrote a Substack Note talking about the predictable rhetorical patterning that haunts not just American but global discussions of Israel and Palestine. There are people wholly devoted to one side or the other who are essentially tu quoque machines who go into particular overdrive when they’re sure that their own side is morally less odious in the wake of a particular event or incident. They issue endless demands for statements that align behind their side, demanding that everyone else feel the exact same outrage in the exact same words that the official outraged offer as mandatory. The other side digs in, doubles down, waits for the morally offensive retaliation that they know will give them a foundation to stand on.
This is costly in terms of any hope for any kind of resolution in the sense that complex combinations of sentiment, testimony and evidence from Israelis, from Palestinians, from observers, from scholars and intellectuals, from people speaking out of similar (or notably dissimilar) cases become unhearable, stripped down only to what affirms or contradicts the proferred orthodoxy of the outraged and their counterparts.
The problem is that tu quoque, complaining that a moral critic is a hypocrite because they’ve tolerated or been indifferent to other similar incidents in other circumstances, is not an entirely inappropriate riposte in a lot of these discussions. I dislike calling it a logical fallacy that has no place in a discussion of the moral and analytic nature of an event like the brutal assault of Hamas on Israeli civilians and the retaliation whose intensity has become a moral crisis of another kind. I think it’s valid to ask about the moral consistency of the working philosophy of a speaker who demands moral consistency and demands that every public figure speak out in a way that achieves that consistency and that every public statement which does not be exposed and punished. E.g., it’s not about the personal ethical conduct of the critic, it is about whether their criticism of the conduct of others in the one case they feel strongly about is coming from a coherent underlying principle.
Coherence is also not necessarily about a particular sequence of rigorous reasoning. Someone with strong national or communitarian loyalties can tell me “the atrocities done to the community that I belong to or deeply identify with are worse than the atrocities done to any other”. That’s an emotionally, culturally coherent structure of feeling. I would rather hear someone lay out their thinking like that instead of pretending to look down from a dishonestly universal height. The reason that many people in this particular debate don’t do that is that either they actually do not have any real membership in or sustained affinity for the side they root for but instead have an instrumental interest in that group or they understand that there is no real reason beyond loyalty and affinity to see one side as morally favored. Most of us scurry for the safe harbor of liberal universalism (and expect the state to do the same) because we understand that the alternative is kill-or-be-killed for everyone, at all times.
When you build out and look for some reason why violence against civilians, disproportionate violence, violence with no real end or goal, violence intended to break the spirit or will of communities and people, violence that terrorizes, is always wrong, you assume obligations at that moment that go beyond the defense of a beloved community or group.
If you argue that anti-colonialism is always a form of justified retaliation against colonial societies and communities, you can’t stop there. The word “always” is doing way too much work here to be allowed as a lazy intensifier. If, on the other hand, you absolutely mean it—that there is nothing done in the name of anti-colonialism that would be unjustified or disproportionate—you have just taken on board an unbearably difficult ethical challenge. You mean to say in this case that if you had a button you could press that could kill everyone you judge to be a settler or colonist, you’d press it. Does that include compradorial elites who worked with, still work with, settlers? The descendants of entire communities who collaborated in some fashion with settlers during the expansion of Europe? The people of the societies who colonized, who are today universally beneficiaries of colonialism? At this point, you can hardly be invoking an argument that collective punishment is always wrong, because you’re calling for it.
What, then, was the moral harm of colonialism which is so vast and universal that all violence against it is legitimate and no violence for it could ever be? It cannot be violence as such, because you have given permission for violence without constraint. Is it theft of land, of patrimony, of culture? How far does that extend as a principle? When does theft become less than a supreme offense? Is it retributive? But then why stop with modern colonialism, or European colonialism? It is a common and stupid sophistry on the right today that all societies have practiced slavery, all societies have practiced imperialism or conquest. This is not at all true. But neither is it possible to draw a bright line at 1492 at this scale to justify unlimited retribution.
If you scratch the word “always”, you have to find a principle that lets you wind back to “justified under the following circumstances”. And here I would agree with anyone making an argument for anti-colonial violence who says it cannot merely be about the intensity or ferocity of actions taken. I will not sit in hindsight judgment on slave revolts where the slaves kill anyone they can who held them in bondage. For the same reason, I’d agree you cannot make the gold standard that there must be a plausible plan that leads to liberation before acting. I wouldn’t charge slaves with that standard, any more than I would second-guess the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943. At this point, we’ve arrived at complicated arguments that are always contextual—precisely the kind of thing that the intense partisans on both sides of the Israel-Palestine often seek to foreclose. As I said last week, this attack was horrific and unjustifiable, which I think is a compounding result of its scale, of the targeting of civilians, of the cruelty of the deaths and injuries, of the seeming lack of any strategic purpose other than ‘get Israel to kill many people in Gaza’. But also that Hamas is an organization that makes plans and a (weak and limited) sovereign that has some responsibility to its community for governance, that is emplaced into geopolitical alliances. It is not a spontaneous conspiracy ‘from below’.
It is that weak, crippled sovereignty that should in fact hint at another reason to temper enthusiasm for any and all anti-colonial movements, revolts and actions, which is that anti-colonial movements and leaders do not inevitably represent highly moral alternatives to the grotesque injustices of colonialism. Anti-colonialism is often associated with the radical left but its central tenets have always been liberal in character. Quite without the controlling urging of active neocolonialism or globalization (though they matter too), many postcolonial states have done a proficient job of violating the same kinds of principles that colonial regimes did, or have substituted new structural categories that subsume and multiply the racial hierarchies that the West constructed. So not only do you have to think twice about which kinds of violence you might accept or legitimate, you have think twice about the groups and leaders whose vision you are endorsing or approving.
I don’t mean to be a simple “I’m in the complex middle against both sides” most of the time, but this is a case where it’s appropriate. Many of the people who are offering more or less unlimited endorsement to any retaliation by Israel—or who are arguing that the history of Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians all the way back to the state’s creation is completely irrelevant to any condemnation of Hamas—are just as incoherent if they are trying to find a safe harbor in some more universal or comprehensive vision of just war. The Israeli government since Oslo has persistently undercut any possible Palestinian leadership and deliberately eaten away at the West Bank and East Jerusalem while more or less penning Palestinians up inside Gaza with no hope of any positive change in their miserable circumstances. What, counter-factually, do those who claim they agree this is a problem or a mistake, have to offer Palestinians as a legitimate protest? I suspect it is roughly the same as conservative white Americans who complained that Black Lives Matters protests were disruptive and disorderly and yet who seem to view a football player making a peaceful gesture of protest as a mortal offense for which he deserved to lose his professional livelihood.
On a deeper level, it is hard to escape the impression that the plan, such as it is, of the Israeli right is to reproduce Rome’s actions in response to the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-136 CE, and hope (whether quickly or slowly) to scatter the Palestinians to the world. If in time, as a people in diaspora, they prove as sustained and persistent as other peoples pining for an occupied homeland—the Armenians or the Kurds, for example—well, the current Israeli right may well think they will deal with that future when and if it comes on some far-off day. Whether that’s a conscious plan or a subconscious echo within a certain domain of Zionist thought, it is a million miles away from any kind of liberal universalism or any doctrine of just war—or even from a simple human ability to reason from one’s own experiences and values to understand the suffering of others.
Just war, taken seriously, ought to be a demanding standard, rather than a deep abyss filled to the brim with slippery bullshit. But it is the latter almost all the time, and so rarely the former. The United States government has learned to run out the clock when it comes to admitting that it has engaged in indiscriminate—or at times, very nearly discriminate and deliberate—violence against civilians on a mass scale in its post 9/11 wars, perhaps hoping that no mainstream thinker will really care once the evidence is out there. As it now is. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died in a voluntary war that political leaders in both American parties now view as a complete failure. You cannot say “mistakes were made” when you were warned that those mistakes would be inevitable and futile and when you were quite aware of those mistakes as they were committed.
So I think I have one requirement for the people who are the loudest and quickest to demand letters, make statements, make blacklists or demand cancellations. If it is crying tu quoque, so be it. If you are now demanding that people live up to what you regard as a transcendently obvious moral standard, put an item at the top of your to-do list and put that list on a never-to-be-removed sticky at the top of your computer monitor. The next time some action violates your declared standards, be the first to say so, with the same intensity, even if the actor is the side you normally defend or privilege.
I recognize that at this moment in global public culture, I might as well ask for a flock of pigs to take resplendent flight into the sky of a new dawn.
But that is why many of us are in no mood to make blacklists, demand cancellations, or require strident public declarations from political leaders, because we know that the demands come from people who will only ever claim consistency on these issues when there is a safe consensus about long-ago atrocities. And increasingly, looking at controversies over the content of history education in the United States and other countries, not even then.
Far from demanding statements of anyone, I’d like to see university presidents give up the practice of issuing statements on highly complex and deeply fraught conflicts and controversies – and I bet there are at least a few university presidents (at, e.g., Cornell, Harvard, Penn…!) who would agree with me.
In issuing a statement, the president must claim to speak on behalf of the university community as a whole, but must also take great care to not offend those members of the community who are not really in accord with the presumed universality of that whole. And the only way to not offend is to issue something so bland and generic and anodyne that it might as well be “sending thoughts and prayers.” And even then, the statement is likely to be offensive to at least some students or faculty, who will invariably discover an at least tacit support of A or B in the president’s failure to reference X or Y…
To be clear, I do believe that the university should be a place where students and faculty can study, question, discuss, and debate highly complex and deeply fraught issues and controversies. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to have university presidents routinely issuing faux consensus statements on such issues and controversies.
Well written and well argued. As a mostly trained amateur historian it is impossible to think clearly about the Israel/Palestine issue without knowing its history from the beginning (which anyone can do with a couple days of reading). It helps a lot to know a Palestinian exiled as a young man from Palestine. There are significant moral issues involved as any thoughtful person must acknowledge. I agree with you that Just War thinking may be the most helpful approach to both sides.