Moral Blindness On Gaza

Thoughts on the situation in Israel and Gaza

Any sober look at the historical record, not to mention the modern day, makes it clear that humans have a profound ability to be morally blind—unable to grasp the most elementary moral truths. It’s easy to recognize this on an intellectual level without really grasping it, but sometimes current events make it easy to see that this is so. On the unfolding tragedy in both Israel and Gaza, it takes a peculiar and grotesque moral blindness to hold beliefs that seem to be widespread among many.

I woke up on October 7 to horrifying news. Israel was under attack by Hamas. Hundreds of innocents were killed, more were injured, more were held hostage. Women and children were being shot, houses were set ablaze, leaving those inside to burn to death, and people were beheaded. This was the deadliest day for civilian Jews since the Holocaust.

And from that first day, it was obvious how this would end. Many Israelis would die, Israel would respond aggressively, leaving Gaza completely wrecked. Many more Gazans would die than Israelis—as is often true, the greatest victims of Hamas’s crimes are the people they claim to represent.

One would think that condemning such crimes wouldn’t be a hard call. When people cross a border to start shooting innocent people, chopping off heads, burning people alive, taking hostages to be executed later, and murdering babies, all in a way that will end up far worse for their people in the long run, anyone with an ounce of sense can recognize this as a grotesque crime, as the worst of what humanity has to offer.

And yet I woke up to staggering moral imbecility; people defending Hamas’s crimes. When one hears people defend the murder of innocent Israeli babies, it is not hard to hear the glass crunching at Kristallnacht. One person declared “fuck all of u pple defending Israel the fuck you thought revolution was gonna be peaceful.” Someone else said “what did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” A third said “whoever is in solidarity with our corpses but not our rockets, is a hypocrite and not one of us.” This was apparently directed, rather ominously, “To all the white jews.”

This is, of course, not a revolution. Nor is this decolonization. It is a massacre that will lead to a devastating response, one that we’re already seeing. It will lead to many, many people being killed, mostly in Gaza. When one of the worlds most powerful militaries is attacked by terrorists who set innocent people on fire, it’s not hard to guess that the response will be brutal.

In some very far-left circles, there’s a peculiar love of violence. People act like opposing violence is liberal naivete. Real resistance is violent and is morally necessary. Such people sit in their well-air-conditioned rooms cheering the slaughter of innocent people, a slaughter that will only lead to more slaughter, based on “theory” from left-wing ideologues that they read who occupy the halls of universities. Based on little more than slogans about how “resistance is violent,” occasionally with a brief reference to the Haitian revolution, such people cheer on the massacre of innocent Israeli men, women, and children. Behind the veneer of left-wing radicalism, they cloak deeply evil and appalling sentiments that ought to be called out as such by those of sense and decency.

And yet many of those who have the minimal decency required to condemn, or at least not praise, the Hamas fighters who massacre innocent children display a frightening moral blindness in the opposite direction. They correctly recognize the horror of the attack, and then use it to justify any response, however brutal. This response too represents a failure of humanity and of any semblance of moral decency.

Israel’s response, while psychologically understandable, is ethically unacceptable. Their siege which involves cutting off food, water, and electricity to literally millions of people, is both flagrantly illegal under international law and ethically appalling. The reply to terrorism can’t be to leave millions of people without access to food and safe drinking water and electricity. This is especially so when, as James Reilly has pointed out, quoting Btselem, even as Israel instructs Gazans to leave “The Gaza Strip is closed off on all sides and the residents have no way out. There are no shelters and no way to seek cover from airstrikes.” Leaving millions of people with no way out, no food, no water, and no electricity is not a remotely compassionate response, and it is one that will haunt Israel in the future. Defenders of Israel will be hard-pressed to defend its conduct when it was willing to leave millions of people who cannot leave without access to electricity, water, or food. The people in Gaza will not forget this crime, and it will be used to fuel more violence.

This horrifying crime has been claimed, by various people sympathetic to Israel, to be Israel’s 9/11. And there are many similarities—just as the U.S. was attacked by murderous terrorists, so too were Israelis attacked by murderous terrorists. In both cases, huge numbers of people were killed. But as Lemoine notes, one important feature of 9/11 was the response. The U.S. responded by launching a brutal war on terror which killed literally millions of people—over a thousand times more than died on 9/11 itself.

When a country is brutally attacked, when they witness crimes never before seen committed against their country, they understandably react in extreme ways. But while this provides explanation for their actions, it provides no justification. Israel’s siege on Gaza is a major crime, and one that has no justification, one that will lead to unprecedented death and destruction. Let righteous anger not blind us to the major catastrophe that this is, and hopefully it will be called off soon. Otherwise, many innocent civilians, women, and babies will starve in Gaza, and it will be the fault of the Netanyahu administration’s unwillingness to respond in a just way.