Anyone who has ever attended a Jewish Passover Seder knows of the custom to take a knife or spoon and remove a drop of wine from your cup for each of the Ten Plagues, while reciting their names aloud: Blood. Frogs. Lice. Wild animals. Pestilence. Boils. Hail. Locusts. Darkness. Death of the firstborn.
In the Biblical story, God Himself rains these catastrophes down on the Egyptians each time Pharaoh refuses Moses’s demand to “let my people go!” If God Himself punished the Egyptians in this way, then the Israelites and the Jews of today who are their remote descendants are blameless, right? Yes, but, the rabbinic sages who wrote the Haggadah (“The Telling”) some two thousand years ago — the text used at the Seder — were teaching us that even if God Himself did it, we do not rejoice in our enemies’ deaths.
To underscore the point, the rabbinic sages also imagined a discussion between God and His Angels at the climax of the Exodus story, when Pharaoh and his army are drowning in the Red Sea. The angels rejoice, but God rebukes them: Why are you rejoicing when My creatures are drowning? And a custom arose, one that my parents did for me, a firstborn son: you must “redeem” your firstborn son with a “silver shekel” in memory of the firstborn Egyptians whom God slew.
If Judaism teaches us this sober moral lesson in the case of people whom God has chosen to destroy, then how much more so (a fortiori, or kal v’chomer in rabbinic Hebrew) are we forbidden to rejoice at the deaths of all the Gaza Palestinians who were “in the way” when the Israel Defense Force rescued hostages Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv earlier today. And nobody in Israel is rejoicing at the deaths of innocent Palestinian bystanders in the course of their rescue, except maybe a few sick souls. The joy is about the freedom of our captives. (I speak, write, and think as a Jew, and an American-Israeli, in saying this.)
I will add that I do not believe and refuse to repeat any casualty figures from Hamas, which of course is not to deny that a large number of innocent Palestinian bystanders, including children, were killed or suffered grievous injuries. At the same time, the IDF killed a large number of its targets, Hamas “fighters” holding the Israeli captives, and it did so with complete justice.
War Is Not ‘The Trolley Problem’
A completely disinterested philosophical observer might take the position that it was unacceptable for the IDF to kill many more innocent Palestinian bystanders than the four hostages it rescued alive, even though the deaths were accidental. Such an observer might equally well take the position that the IDF was fully justified in what it did, given that Hamas is the aggressor, and it is holding enemy civilians hostage, a major war crime. The blame for the Palestinian civilian casualties, as terrible as they are, falls squarely on Hamas, according to this line of reasoning, so long as the IDF takes reasonable care not to harm the innocents who stand in its way. This latter position is the one that people mean when they speak of “the laws of war.”
The former position is, if not necessarily pacifist, not held by any actual nation. So when those nations, or the UN that is supposed to be their representative, condemn Israel for violating the first principle I outlined, it is a classic instance of “bad faith” —as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on “authenticity” defines it, “Bad faith, a kind of self-deception, involves believing or taking oneself to be an X while all along one is (and knows oneself to be) actually a Y.” Or maybe it’s just plain old hypocrisy.
Because the thing is, there are no “disinterested observers” to this conflict, or none who care enough even to make the argument one way or another. This is not the popular philosophical conundrum known as “the trolley problem,” a contrived and rather tiresome thought experiment about whether, if a trolley switchman sees that the car is about to hit a careless pedestrian, he should move it to another track although he knows that doing so will kill five passengers. You can debate that until the cows come home and the trolley hits one of them, too. This is real life, though, where we don’t have the certainty of knowing how many people will be harmed in advance of choosing a course of action, but we also have emotional reactions because we are talking about actual human beings and not philosophical constructs.
‘Burn the Entire World’
As a Jew and an Israeli, I celebrate the four hostages’ freedom and I mourn the innocent Palestinian dead. I would not be honest if I claimed that the latter tug at my heart just as strongly as the innocent Israeli dead do, and I submit that this is by far the most common human feeling, although it should not and must not lead to indiscriminate slaughter even in wartime, and even of enemy soldiers.
As in so much else, I find George Orwell to be a guiding light in thinking this moral problem through in a time of utter confusion. It is his essay “Reflections on Gandhi” that I have in mind, and the key passage is:
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. … [Gandhi’s] attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think — most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty … and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.
Orwell is speaking of individuals here, but the point applies to nations or “peoples” as well, and if the free-free-Palestines claim that they have taken their position out of pure disinterested love for humanity, they are not being truthful. Everyone who has rallied around the Palestinian flag and is not either Palestinian herself (or Arab or Muslim, in which case complicated loyalties and antipathies are in play) has adopted “transferred nationalism,” in Orwell’s telling phrase from another important essay, “Notes on Nationalism.” And the overwhelming majority of these people, it has become apparent, are what Orwell dubs “negative nationalists,” who care little to nothing for Palestinians but do care passionately about destroying Israel and defeating all “Zionists,” which is to say the overwhelming majority of all the world’s Jews. And that is true even of the small but noisy minority of Jews in the free-free-Palestine camp. (Please note that I have no interest in further debating these well-established points, and will ignore or delete any comments rehashing them.)
There is one final point worth making on this day that Israel rescued four of its citizens from enemy captivity, to the condemnation of much of the world. We hear endlessly that Israel cannot meet its stated goal of destroying Hamas, because “insurgents” always win, “you can’t destroy an idea,” and all the death and destruction in Gaza is only “breeding the next generation of Hamas fighters.” But the first two points are false, and the third is debatable. The reason why can be found in the Washington Post report describing today’s events, which includes a quote from an unnamed Palestinian woman who witnessed the battle: “These people are ready to burn the entire world to get someone they want.” The more Palestinians who get that through their heads, the fewer recruits Hamas and any such future group will have. And then peace will have a chance to prevail — if only the peace of exhaustion.
Emanuel Goldstein 