OF HUMAN DISCERNMENT: We admired a statement of values...

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2023

...made by an unnamed group: After the recent murderous attacks—after the hostage-taking was over—various people and various organizations offered various quick assessments.

As we noted yesterday, it's hard to offer a perfect moral formulation in the face of such murderous conduct—in the face of a torturous situation which has lasted these many long years. Writing in the New York Times, Pamela Paul offered this at the end of an opinion column:

PAUL (10/14/23): In an academic atmosphere in which people can be divided between colonizers and colonized, oppressors and oppressed, with individuals judged by their identity, many students don’t seem to understand that you don’t have to be Jewish or Zionist to recognize terrorism. That you don’t have to be right-wing to denounce the slaughter of women and children. Condemning violence and the barbaric rape and murder of civilians doesn’t require taking a side.

It takes basic morality. Everyone at Stanford should know that.

In effect, Paul was denouncing "the slaughter of women and children," along with "the barbaric rape and murder of civilians."

In the most obvious way, she's right! As a general matter, denunciations of that type "don't require taking a side." Presumably, "barbaric rape and murder" are always morally wrong, as is "the slaughter of women and children" (and conceivably, the slaughter of men.)

As a general matter, very few readers of the Times would disagree with those moral precepts. That said, the relationship between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people has a long and complex history, with many killings experienced on various sides.

Which killings count as barbaric? Which killings count as slaughter? We ask such questions for a reason:

By the time Paul's column appeared, many Palestinian women and children had died in Israeli counterattacks. 

In a long-standing situation like this, it's very, very, very hard to reach agreement on which killings count as "slaughters" and which killings do not. That said, we saw one statement in reaction to this new outbreak of killings which started off in a way we very much admired.

Never mind who made the statement! The statement started like this:

[NAME OF ORGANIZATION] believes in peace, equality, and freedom for all Palestinians and Israelis. We deeply mourn the loss of life in the region and unequivocally condemn all hatred and the killing of all civilians. Our sympathy and condolences go out to those who have lost loved ones or have loved ones in harm’s way...

The statement continued from there. It started by expressing deepest best wishes for the innocents on both sides of this endless conflict—Palestinians and Israelis, Israelis and Palestinians both.

Such statements can only set an initial framework. There will be no magical way to resolve this intractable conflict.

That said, we admired the way that statement began. We also admired the way Bret Stephens approached the situation at the start of yesterday's column in the New York Times, without necessarily agreeing with where he ended up.

For now, forget his somewhat fuzzy headline. He started out as shown:

STEPHENS (10/17/23): On Friday the Israeli government gave civilians in the northern Gaza Strip 24 hours to evacuate to the southern part of the territory, in anticipation of a major military offensive. Hamas, for its part, “told Gaza residents to stay put, despite Israel’s deadline,” Reuters reported the same day.

Reasonable people can criticize Israel for not allowing enough time for civilians to get out of harm’s way: There are, especially, elderly, disabled and sick Gazans—and those who help them—who may be effectively homebound.

Reasonable people can also oppose other measures that Israelis have taken in response to the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. It seems neither right nor smart for Israel to cut off water and electricity to Gaza until Hamas’s hostages are returned—not because Israel shouldn’t do whatever it takes to obtain their release but because the people who suffer most from the action are the ones who have the least say over the fate of the hostages. Hamas’s leaders, I’m sure, have amply supplied themselves and their forces with fuel, generators, potable water and other essentials.

We admire the way Stephens began. We say that because he ended up writing a column which bore this aggressive headline:

Hamas Bears the Blame for Every Death in This War

Every death is on Hamas, the columnist eventually judged. We admire the fact that, as he began, he acknowledged that "reasonable people" might not agree with everything Israel proceeds to do, or perhaps with everything Israel has done in the past.

Along the way, Stephens drew a highly unflattering portrait of Hamas. As far as we know, it's a reasonable portrait. With apologies, his portrait included this:

STEPHENS: Murdering Jews is an end in its own right for Hamas, because it believes it fulfills a theological aim. The original Hamas covenant invokes this injunction: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’” Hamas later softened the language from “Jews” to “Zionists” and “kill” to “resisting the occupation with all means and methods,” but the meaning is the same.

Following Stephens' link, a translation of that original covenant is here. For most people in the west, a so-call clash of civilizations seems to be lurking here.

How can reasonable people distribute the blame for the long-running conflict at issue? Obviously, there is no ultimate way to do that. 

Such assessments will always involve hotly disputed matters of judgment. For that reason, it seems to us that every supporter of Israel, from President Biden right on down, ought to start their statements about this matter as that unnamed organization did:

[I OR WE] believe in peace, equality, and freedom for all Palestinians and Israelis. We deeply mourn the loss of life in the region and unequivocally condemn all hatred and the killing of all civilians. 

We want peace and prosperity for all Palestinians as well as for all Israelis. We believe that Palestinians and Israelis are all children on God / members of the one human race. That is the place where we start.

There is no magic solution to this long-running conflict. We liked the way that one statement began, with a declaration of basic western / Enlightenment values.

Ironically, the organization which offered that statement has been hotly criticize for its fuller statement. So it can go at times like these. We thought the start of that statement was admirably on point.

Our suggestion is this:

Before we start assessing blame, we should state our ultimate values. At that point, a basic problem arises:

How in the world—how on earth?—might we move forward from there?

Tomorrow: The tragic perspective