Israel and Palestine - The Malevolent Machinery
There are a lot of terms used to frame the act of killing humans. These terms carry with them tacit arguments designed to cast the moral nature of the act in all kinds of ways. It’s important to pay close attention to these words when attempting to think clearly and ethically about complex and emotionally charged situations. Here are a few of the terms I’m thinking about: “Terrorism”, “Collateral Damage”, “Self Defense”, “Sacrifice”, “Martyrdom”, “Retribution”, “Liquidation”, “Ethnic Cleansing”, “Extermination”, “Murder”, “Manslaughter”, etc…
Of course, I am thinking about the latest round of killed humans in Israel and Palestine and the whirlwind of media coverage and thinly veiled propaganda which always happens when political figure heads discuss human deaths. In this essay, I am not going to write very much about the historical causes of this violence or recent political maneuvering. My main goal in this essay is to suggest a more nuanced moral conversation about a particular act of killing which is very difficult to capture in any of the terms listed in the previous paragraph, and hides in a little understood blind spot of moral philosophy.
If you do want a discussion of the political and historical knots which have led to the situation in Israel, I highly recommend these two conversations which should be viewed in succession: Rahsid Khalidi - The 100 Years War and The Rest Is Politics - Yuval Noah Harari.
In this essay, I’d like to address the talking point being espoused across the media and political landscape which is used to shine light on the difference in the moral nature of the two “sides” caught up in this bloody exchange. The talking point explains how a moral equivalence between Israeli attacks and Hamas attacks can not be made honestly, even if you call one a provoked response and the other a brutal attack, it does not matter which is which.
The argument is not very complex. In so many words, it’s argued that one side is deliberately trying to target and maximize civilian deaths while the other is trying to minimize or avoid them. Even if the final death count results in an mismatch of the intentions, this, we are told, does not reveal very much. The intention is what ultimately matters in the moral judgment. These arguments point to practices like the use of human shields and doing things like hiding behind schools or hospitals which are things that one particular combatant does in this conflict while the other shuns and abhors those things. We are told that this imbalance is perfectly revealing of their moral statuses. This argument has been repeatedly made by Benjamin Netanyahu, Joe Biden, countless media figures, and many prominent thinkers and authors.
This is a fine point and I do not disagree with it. Let me repeat that before I attempt to thread the needle and add what I think is a crucial nuance to a tired, shallow, and obfuscating piece of moral analysis. I agree that there is a real distinguishing moral difference to explain there. I’ll attempt to keep that in view as I continue and try to explain how the point it is far less interesting or morally exculpatory than it first appears.
As is often my critique of shallow moral philosophizing like this, it ignores the strength of psychology and features of our minds which can convince us of the feasibility and genuineness of our intentions in order to couch certain deaths as “tragically unfortunate collateral damage” rather than something else much more tragic and sinister.
“Collateral damage” or “lives caught in the crossfire” are the phrases which Israeli officials, Israeli allies, and sympathetic media members use to describe the images of dead and starving children which often happen after their bombs drop and during their operations. What we don’t see in those images, we are told, are the dead young men with green bandanas holding rocket launchers who were attempting to fire them over walls. And we don’t see the images of green clad knife wielding masked men holding hostages and attempting to transport weapons through tunnels to abduct or kill more. If we saw those images alongside the dead children, perhaps we’d be able to understand this situation as a classic trolley problem. Heaped on top of this logic is the added information of extra measures taken which happened in the moments before the image of the dead child which were hoping to avoid it. These include “knocking warnings”, “evacuation phone calls”, “evacuation orders”, “foreign aid” or other such alarm systems. We’re reminded that these types of actions designed to avoid the dead child are not even attempted by the enemy, in fact, the dead child is oftentimes the precise goal of the enemy.
All of this is meant to add up to a complete moral argument that the intention was never to kill the child, but, regrettably, it happened in the service of a consequentialist calculation towards a greater moral aim, namely, eliminating Hamas and allowing Jews to live with security. In other words, the child was the collateral damage. The moral summary of actions of this kind at individual and/or national scales is encapsulated in a simple 4 word sentence: “I had no choice.”
I do think that there are circumstances in the world where one can utter that sentence and retain their moral integrity. For example, I like to think of myself as a good person. I also think a good person doesn’t support nations which are engaged in a mechanically systemized genocide (No, I’m not talking about Israel there. I’m talking about China.). China is engaged in a mechanical systemized genocide against its Uyghur population. I purchase products which are made in China. In fact, I not only regularly purchase them, I am likely ignorant of all of the Chinese manufactured parts of the objects which are in my view at this very moment. And a large part of me doesn’t even want to know that information, and would be irritated to have the tally revealed to me. And, even worse, it’s nearly certain that I will be purchasing Chinese products many more times over the next month. So, am I a good person?
The relevant question I wish to suggest goes like this: “Can I, with my moral integrity intact, look around at these Chinese made objects, and utter the sentence “I had no choice.”?” Yeah, I think I can. Of course, I could attempt to boycott all Chinese made products. But it would take a rather gargantuan effort to do so in my current circumstance. I suppose it is technically possible. But at some point, which must be self-evaluated, one can keep their integrity and shake their head and decide that it is simply asking too much of them. This practice of examining one's moral integrity is something that I am expounding in book form and have been thinking about a lot lately. But to preview the fuller argument, it’s up to us to measure whether we are actually in a consequentialist trolly problem like nightmare, or we are simply telling ourselves a justifying and rationalizing cover story for other less-savory psychological motivations - in the case of Chinese made products, perhaps these would be convenience, laziness, selfishness, or even racism.
But the important point is this: if one can legitimately understand themselves to be in such a consequentialist trap, I contend that what they have discovered is not some sort of clarifying moral prescription or moral permission to take the next action which inevitably produces collateral damage, but rather, they have discovered the existence of a political problem - one which must be solved in order to free one from the consequentialist prison of “having no choice”. This is especially true when the non-choice involves generating loads of dead bodies or propping up genocidal systems.
This type of moral analysis that I am advocating results in a redefinition of political systems which approves of those which allow for individuals to exercise and explore their moral integrity and condemns those which wedge their citizens into trolley problems where the only way to keep their moral integrity intact is to actually conclude that they “have no choice”. I contend that this philosophical shift would help us break free from the democracy vs totalitarian conversation which has dominated but failed to explain the last century.
So, can this framework help us understand the Israeli claims of “collateral damage”? We have to ask ourselves if the intention of eliminating Hamas is genuine. We have to ask if it is achievable, We have to ask if it is really believed. And if so, we have to ask if the actions which claim to be in service of that aim are almost certain to backfire and embolden Hamas. And, more importantly, we have to ask if the executors of all of these actions know all of this to be true and have examined their moral integrity fully before telling the world and themselves that “they have no choice.” This is where moral philosophy and trolley problem consequentialism which has dominated the moral and political conversation since the industrial revolution fails miserably to incorporate the weight of psychology.
I have no doubt that Israel wishes to eliminate Hamas. I do however greatly doubt that they actually think it can be bombed out of existence. I also greatly doubt that they think a complete siege of the entire population and denial of basic survival materials will help eliminate Hamas. See, the previous decades of experience for evidence of my claims. The 9/11 comparisons have been floating since Hamas’s rampage on October 7. And, to further that comparison, just like in the US’s situation in 2001, a deeply divided domestic populous led by a religious right wing administration immediately garnered a unified super-majority of hurt, angry, and energized people as well as a sympathetic global eye from economically and militarily powerful countries. But it’s been rather depressing to see how little anyone has seemed to learn from the US’s response to 9/11 - which by any rational account was a civilizationally catastrophic disaster which featured false justifications for wars, undefined and impossible aims which seemed incongruous with the military actions that were proposed to achieve them, and about 350,000 dead bodies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the ranks of the US military. The US waged a “war on terror” where we tried to “smoke them out of their holes” and liberate Iraq and Afghanistan. Again, I have no doubt that the US intended to do those noble things. And perhaps they even began to believe that they were achievable. But at some point in the next 20 years, especially in Afghanistan, it grew harder and harder to believe that each bomb that was dropped near children was still in service of an achievable goal. It is possible to lose faith in one's consequentialist justification somewhere in the middle of a conflict. This is often where the seeds of PTSD are sown. Producing “collateral damage” is haunting, ugly, and difficult to un-see, but engaging in “murder” is psychologically crippling when the shame can no longer be dampened by a consequentialist story of “having no choice.”
Think of a soldier who has the image of a dead child in his mind which was the result of an airstrike he ordered. This soldier, I’m sure, thinks of himself as a good person. And he knows that good people don’t usually kill children. So, this terrible image can be soothed by a consequentialist argument which couches it in the service of a greater noble goal which could be achieved. Good people don’t murder children, but good people do sometimes find themselves in trolley problems where “they have no choice” but to take an action which will kill a child, especially when one signs up for combat.
Years later, it must be devastating to witness the Taliban sitting comfortably in charge of that dead child’s village. The only thing which saves this soldier from the moral abyss is to cling to the notion that he really believed that goal was possible at the time. Or he trusted his leadership and fully suppressed his personal doubts and opinions in an act of submission to the wisdom and belief of presidents and generals. But, if the soldier is honest with himself and knows that he didn’t really believe the goal was possible, the awful truth is exposed to himself. Or, even worse, the soldier begins to understand that he was brainwashed into a mental state where questions of moral integrity were strictly forbidden in order to follow orders without hesitation or question. The moral and practical mathematics had already been worked out by higher-ups, he was told. Until it was revealed that they had no plan, or had lost faith in it themselves long ago.
Yes, intentions matter deeply in moral and psychological analysis. And the act of deciphering intentions is no easy task. But let us try in this difficult situation.
The moral philosophers attempting to evaluate the Israel and Hamas conflict take the stated intentions of both as genuine. Hamas on the one hand is explicit in its stated intentions and actions: it wishes to kill Israelis and achieve an end state where the Jews are eliminated and expelled from Historic Palestine. They say so plainly and they are quite consistent with that goal. There isn’t much mystery or psychological analysis needed there. They likely believe that goal deeply and couch every act of rape torture and murder within it to retain their status of being a “good person” or at least a “noble warrior”. And yes, ideology and religion play an important role to forge or encourage the actions by which they hope to achieve their aims and retain their inner divine status. This religious role crucially includes a post-death vision of martyrdom and heaven for certain dead bodies, and a dehumanized un-godly infidel vision on the others. This ideological aspect, as many of us have long understood, is the fatal blind spot of many liberal westerners and it must be considered in the final analysis. Though it is far from the only story, nor is it the only morally deterministic factor which ought to drive military and political policy, or allow its enemies to escape honest moral evaluation themselves.
The current Israeli explicit stated intention is to eliminate Hamas and figure out a way to live in relative security in the region. Note that I am attempting to be careful with those aspects of the Israeli intention because Israel’s political and military regime is currently loaded with people who are rather open about their stated methods of how to achieve the security part which includes extermination of Palestinians or complete Arab expulsion from the West Bank. And previous Israeli administrations were short-sighted in their encouragement of Hamas as well - another obvious forgotten lesson of the US’s relationships with the Bin Laden’s during the Cold War. This is one of the complications of morally evaluating the intentions and actions of democracies. They tend to be messy and multi-voiced. But this point about the makeup of Israeli leadership in the year 2023 can not be forgotten or missed. It appears that some people are evaluating the intentions of Israel with a very outdated moral map which fails to account for the march towards aggressive religiously fueled extremism which has been underway over the last decade. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek emphasized this point well in a recent talk in which he outlines the “prohibition against analysis” which serves to shield Israel from critique, linked to here. This also features a very telling heckler at 12:25 who charges Zizek with relativism. Apparently Zizek opening with “I unconditionally condemn the attack on Israelis close to the Gaza border without any ifs and buts and I give Israel the right to defend itself and destroy the threat” is not enough. It seems that no matter how many times we attempt to be nuanced while shouting that Hamas is a brutal terrorist group whose tactics could never be justified, it is never enough for some people if we dare to offer any context or critique of Israel. It is actually becoming difficult to imagine any scale or scope of military or political response by Israel which when critiqued or analyzed, as Zizek was suggesting, would not be met with jeers and cries of “relativism” or “justification of terrorism”, or even worse “antisemitism”. If Israel flattened all of Gaza with a Nuclear Weapon? If they expelled every Arab from the West Bank? If they flaunted international condemnation even from its closest ally, the United States, to expand settlements in the West Bank under the guise of security? Can Israel do no wrong in the face of its history and its neighborhood?
This must be stressed because there is an oft used applause line that goes like this “The truth is that if Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace and if Israel put down their weapons, there would be no Israel.” Could there be a more eloquent way to say the words “Israel has no choice” than that? The problem with the expression is the word “peace”. If what one means by “peace” is the absence of any bullets flying, then yes, this expression is basically true (again, I don’t wish to forget the murderous actions and intentions of an increasingly worrisome number of West Bank Israeli settlers who would absolutely still be sending bullets flying at disarmed Palestinians.). But if you change the word “peace” in the original expression to “justice”, you’ll see the problem. “If Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be “justice”...? I think anyone who has even the faintest knowledge of the situation since 1917 onward would be hard pressed to accept that line. And at that point, the “no justice, no peace” chants start and the violence cycle reboots itself with the same linguistic imbalance where one participant would be thrilled to achieve a full disarmament and continue the status quo while the other grows more and more frustrated, angry, and desperate. You can easily guess which side is which.
So, back to the bombs. We will continue to be told that the civilian deaths caused by Israeli strikes and sieges fall into one of three categories. Either they will be 1) “collateral damage”, 2) “unfortunate mistakes”, or, 3) some small number of bad actors who intentionally commit atrocities and they will be prosecuted. What is protected in those categorizations is Israel’s “moral character”. What I am suggesting in this essay is that there is a term which should be introduced which describes an act of killing which has these types of characteristics:
one is about to drop a bomb and it is a near certainty that children will die
it is also a near certainty that the target of the stated intention will die
it also a near certainty that ultimate desired end state will not be achieved or advanced by this bomb
it is also a near certainty that the action will result in even more targets being created which will manifest in the following years
and it is also a near certainty that a deep honest evaluation of one’s moral integrity would reveal that all of this information to be known.
I am suggesting that the name of that action is “The Malevolent Machinery of Futile Inevitability”. I think it’s a tremendously common phenomenon.
If you are convinced at all by it, or even a bit challenged by it as a concept. I would bet that what you are feeling is some kind of objection that Israel “had to do something”. Even if you aren’t sure that a complete blockade, the cutting off of electricity, food, and water to the entire population, an impossibly short timeline for an evacuation order, and continued bombing all while seemingly not rushing with ground troops to attempt to rescue hostages, weren’t exactly the right things to do which would have matched the stated intentions of eliminating Hamas, you still might be insisting that they had no choice but to do “something”. I don’t disagree. I am also not a military strategist. And there is usually some moral slack given in these situations to allow for a period of sloppy and haphazard response. What we don’t want to happen is for momentum to build during that emotional panic which sets events in action which can not later be reconsidered. I am not sure that we are avoiding that fate.
One thing that I didn’t mention in this essay was the “impossibility of doing nothing” because people need revenge, vengeance, retribution, or a sense of justice. I don’t wish to tackle those issues in this essay. I will attempt to do so in my longer form book. But I’d like to suggest that those impulses are also likely futile, and of course, they are widely understood to be much less noble or moral aims than combating terrorism. It is highly unusual for anyone to admit to these as being their true motivation and intention, though of course it is often the best and most honest explanation. But to recall the lessons of 9/11 is to recall the deep pain, anger, and humiliation which morphed quickly into calls for revenge and justice and soon a horribly misguided and disastrous international action. The machinery of the “must do something” feeling was already in place, and before we knew it, we had convinced ourselves that the bombs were noble. “We aren’t just lashing out, we aren’t seeking revenge. We are trying to liberate and save. We are being precise and going after the criminals who perpetrated murder. And we aren’t the same as our enemies.” And we weren’t. Our intentions were not to kill and maim children. That does matter for something. But we were susceptible to all the trappings of psychological pain which desperately seek the comforting consequentialist expression “I have no choice” which morally permits us to kill.
Israel, given its history and existential anxieties, is especially vulnerable to this dark phenomenon. They are human after all. Like all of us.
All of us.