Moral Clarity part 5: Accountability

Leaving the Bring the Hostages home rally at Victoria Square in downtown Montreal, my daughter was carrying an Israeli flag on her shoulder as we walked to our parked car. “Murderer” shouted a passerby. In the upside down world of the bleeding hearts, the 'murderers' are those people who support a democratic nation defending its values and freedoms by trying to bring terrorist hostage-takers to justice. 

In spite of the fears, it was an entirely peaceful event. The Montreal police was out in force, on horseback, and fully equipped in riot gear. But they spent most of it in their cars. If there were counter-protesters I didn’t see or hear them. Someone remarked that at the pro-Palestine rally last week outside Concordia University, there were quite a few Jews and Jewish groups present. There were even Jewish speakers. “Can you imagine Palestinians showing up at a ‘pro-Israel’ rally where Hamas was denounced? Let alone one where a Palestinian spoke? Couldn’t happen. If that doesn’t sum up the difference between the sides, I don’t know what does?”

Of course, that is the ultimate point. As a democracy, Israel is accountable to its citizenry. The ‘leadership’ of the Palestinians, insofar as there is any leadership at all, more like militant factions, is completely unaccountable. In fact they use the Palestinian people to pursue their organizational political goals, and are mainly accountable only to their patrons in Tehran. The old criminal adage applies, 'Follow the money'. In this case, those who are duped into supporting the Palestinian 'cause' are in reality siding with the oppressive theocrats in Tehran. But not only is Israel accountable to its citizens, as a member in the community of nations, it's also subject to international standards and pressures. 

Over the decades the Palestinian power-holding class has become expert at manipulating international public opinion to gain sympathy. The use of human shields serves three very effective purposes. It protects the terrorists and their infrastructure physically. It creates human fodder for their international campaign for sympathy. And it terrorizes and subdues their own population. For the terrorist organizations there is no downside to creating a humanitarian disaster, and actually plenty of upsides.    

Holding Hamas and the other militant Palestinian factions accountable is the only moral imperative at this time. It will be cheered by all parties who actually have a stake in the conflict, including the Palestinians. 

Moral Clarity part 4: The Artist’s Dilemma

Big pictures and little pictures.

Artists get into the details, and it’s their sensitivity to detail and skill at transforming that sensitivity into a creative, vibrant and relatable product, be it a story, a song, or a painting, that marks their craft. When an artist gets it right, work that focuses on the particularities of the human experience, can become something universal, it resonates profoundly, and we see our own personal experience reflected in the art. The little picture, becomes the big picture. 

Because they focus on the unique details of the individual human experience, artist’s cherish and champion the right of individual self expression. It’s why they fight against censorship, the banning of books, and maximally defend the free expression of ideas. Creativity requires individual freedom. Artists can’t be artists without it. 

So why the blind spot when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict? Why do so many members of the artistic community seem to side politically with the autocrats, theocrats and terrorists, over the only democratic society in the Middle East that protects and values individual liberty and self-expression? 

It’s because artists tend to see themselves as marginalized, and suffering (the old trope of them suffering for their art). They tend to side with the powerless, oppressed and victimized because that’s how they see themselves, which makes sense. Artists often find themselves in opposition to power, since they only have one loyalty, and that’s to express the truth as they understand it. The expression of truth often conflicts with the interests of those who hold power, so artists can be a threat to the status quo. It’s why artists are frequently targets of the regime. 

This is the nature of the artist’s dilemma. On the one hand they can’t very well side with the regime, because that would be like siding with the powerful against the powerless and marginalized. On the other hand, they should be siding with the regime if it represents and protects the values of individual liberties and human rights that they cherish and require to be artists.

Artists are humanitarians. The humanitarian position should always be to oppose the oppressors. For artists the oppressors must be those who would take away the right of individual belief, thought, and self expression. Every artist taking a political stand needs to ask themself one ‘big picture’ question: Would I be allowed to practice my art freely in that society? If the answer is no, then that’s the side they should be opposed to. In the Israel-Palestine conflict, the answer is clear. 

Moral Clarity part 3: Making connections, making separations

We need to talk about genocide.

The definition of 'genocide' is the deliberate and systematic killing of a group of people, usually from a particular nation or ethnic group, with the aim of destroying that nation or group entirely. 

What Hitler did to the Jews is genocide.

What Israel is doing in Gaza, or has done in the West Bank, is nowhere close to meeting the definition of the term 'genocide'. If Israel were genocidal against the Palestinians, they would never have treated Palestinians in their hospitals, or given them permits to work in Israel, or allowed them to study in their universities. They would have never allowed Gazans, or West-Bankers to self-govern. So the moment you hear anyone use the word 'Palestinian' together with the word 'genocide' you can surmise that they have fallen down a propaganda rabbit hole that conflates words and meanings that have no connection, and from which they don't have the means (or desire) to extricate themselves. 

Another thing about the phrase 'the events of October 7th'.

Every time you hear that phrase, 'the events of October 7th in Israel', it's being used a lot in the media, I want you to pause for a second and think about it this way: As an attempt to isolate 'what happened' in Israel from what 'is happening' in Gaza. In other words, 'what happened in Israel' happened, it can't be changed, but the response to it can be changed. Actually that's wrong. There are currently 220 hostages being held in Gaza. October 7th was the beginning of that one event, which will not be resolved until all the hostages are released. The attempt to separate it into two events is a propagandist's way of disconnecting them in your mind in order to compare them. If they are separate and distinct you may start asking yourself questions about whether 'what happened' to the Israelis and 'what is happening' to the Palestinians are 'equal' or 'proportional'. This is a rhetorical trick. 

Think of it as an active shooter situation in a school, something with which we are unfortunately all too familiar. A crazed gunman goes in to the school, kills a bunch of people, and takes a bunch of students hostage. The police and a SWAT team show up and surround the school. Is this two events or just one? Is there consideration of a proportional response to get the hostages out safely? Of course not. When negotiations fail, if there are negotiations, the police have to go in, guns blazing, to save as many hostages as possible (the lesson learned decades ago from the Columbine school shooting). That's what's happening here. And we're in the middle of it.  

One more thing.

If anybody ever doubted that there is a connection between so-called 'anti-Israel' (anti-Zionism, call it whatever you like) feeling and anti-Semitism, ask yourself this. Why is there a positive correlation between a rise in tensions in the Middle East, and a rise in anti-Semitic incidents everywhere else in the world? Simple. Because they are the same. 

Are You Utterly Insane?!

Stupid question, or maybe not: Are Jews incapable of self-governance? Do we have it in us?

I wish it were a stupid question. But I could not help asking myself when I saw the reports on TV of hundreds of Jews, some in kippot and tallitot, having a 1960s style sit-in at the US Capitol, waving placards that said "Jews for an Immediate Ceasefire" and the like. My first thought, as Israel wages war against the genocidal Hamas terrorists was, I love you, but are you utterly insane?

Yeah, I get that we are a humanitarian bunch, we Jews. Arguably, the Torah gave the (western) world its first universal moral code, one that didn't do away completely with slavery, but it did treat slaves, for the first time in human history, as more than just conquered property. According to one story, the great sage Hillel was once asked to summarize the Torah ('on one foot' as he put it) and he recited the famous Golden Rule, "Love thy neighbour as thyself... That which is hateful unto you, do not do to your neighbour." But later another sage, Ben Azzai, disagreed with Hillel. He said that the essence of the Torah is best summed up in the line, "This is the book of the generations of Adam." The reason? Because that line demonstrates explicitly that we are all connected, part of the same family tree. While he viewed Hillel's preferred dictum as a principle for moral guidance, Ben Azzai felt that the Golden Rule was not sufficient enough to establish the universal underpinnings of morality, one that is more fundamental and less ephemeral than a person's idea of love (or what is hateful). And so we have a tension in our moral tradition between universality and individuality.  

So I completely get the Jewish impulse to want to see in our fellow, especially in our Abrahamic kin, a common humanity. But are we supposed to extend our sense of common humanity unconditionally? Even to those who want us dead? Even worse, to those who consider it the ultimate achievement of their brief time on earth to be martyred in the act of killing us? There is a very well known precedent to that 'turn the other cheek' approach, a delusional Jew who became revered for sacrificing himself for the sins of humanity at the hands of the Romans two thousand years ago. To my fellow Jews with the Jesus complex - please just stop! 

There's a reason you've never heard of Ben Azzai, but you may have heard of Hillel. Hillel understood that there are limits, even to morality. He proposed a corollary to unconditionality when he said, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" Yes, the basis for morality as determined in heaven is universal. We’re all the children of Adam (and Eve). But in practice, in this world, those who refuse to acknowledge the sanctity of all life effectively remove themselves from the human family. With those people we have to be for ourselves, as a means of preserving the sanctity of life. To apply the universal moral standard to those who don't acknowledge it themselves is tantamount to suicide, which is forbidden in our tradition.

It's obvious that the Jews who are responding to the crisis in Israel by sitting in Washington DC (or Paris, or London) waving “Jews For An Immediate Ceasefire" slogans don't face the daily danger of a rocket landing in their living rooms. I still have to wonder if they are suffering from a messiah complex too, one that’s stitched deeply into the Jewish subconscious like old scar tissue. When you've depended on the kindness of strangers for as long as we have, with gruesome results, you'd figure at some point we’d eventually come around to the realization that life isn't just a gift, it requires defending. And now that we finally have the chance to run our own affairs in our ancestral homeland we have the means of doing so. Hillel's dictum is also a good slogan to prove that Jews are capable of self-governance, despite our self-destructive impulses. It takes hard moral choices to be a self-governing people, and if we aren't willing to make those choices we don't deserve it. 

A Thousand Songs

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He had curly hair and a long slim nose,

Wore a hat with a logo and ordinary clothes.

Wore cowboy boots with pointy toes,

A t-shirt and glasses like two big zeros.

I've got a thousand songs inside my head,

And I'll sing every one before I am dead.

He used pretty words, his talk accented,

And everyone he spoke to felt complimented.

Said his folks were poor but always paid the rent,

He had a long name but said "Just call me Ken."

I've got a thousand songs inside my head,

And I'll sing every one before I am dead.

He plucked away at his Stella guitar,

Went town to town, never had a car.

Strings out of tune, hardly any gear,

But his voice stayed strong and his message was clear:

I've got a thousand songs inside my head,

And I'll sing every one before I am dead.

Said "My life was my own with a little compromise,

I told it as I saw it with these two old eyes.

One day I'll leave, maybe some will cry,

One thing they'll say, 'At least he tried'."  

I've got a thousand songs inside my head,

And I'll sing every one before I am dead.

A Time for Moral Clarity: Part Two, Proportionality

This one might court some controversy, but I think it has to be said.

We can all agree on one thing. Anyone with a modicum of humanity will feel moral anguish at the loss of a single innocent life, no matter what side of a political conflict it is on. Loss of life is not a numbers game, and to make it one is crass. One innocent death has no more or less moral weight than ten or a hundred. The numbers of innocent deaths doesn't increase or diminish the tragedy. So when you hear people say that there have been 1,000 innocent Palestinian deaths to every 1 Israeli death during the Israel-Palestine conflict, it's their effort at making a claim to which side is the actual victim, and which side is the victimizer. They are trying to turn a moral question into a political one, and doing so usually disingenuously. The reality is that they are all victims. One life has no more or less value as any other, and that's all that should matter. 

But admittedly it's hard not to think in terms of numbers. We do it all the time with just about everything. Quantifying, even when it come to human suffering, gives us a sense that we can determine better from worse, or distinguish winners from losers. Our impulse is to ask, doesn't it matter how many people died on each side? If 1,000 innocent Israelis were murdered, wouldn't it be disproportionate for Israel to respond by killing 10,000 innocent Palestinians? Doesn't that make Israel the aggressor and the Palestinians the victim? From a moral standpoint the answer is no, as explained above. 

Putting the moral question aside for a moment, the matter of proportionality nags at our sense of justice (the punishment has to fit the crime etc.) and demands some form of consideration. In purely political terms, proportionality is determined by the relative power of the sides involved in a conflict. It is a function of how much cost the sides are prepared to accept versus how much they are prepared to inflict. That's it. If one side is prepared to accept a tremendous amount of cost, then the other side must be prepared to inflict a greater amount of damage in order to achieve a resolution of the conflict. In other words, equal proportionality, which may make sense for our notion of justice, makes no sense in terms of politics because it does not end conflict, in fact it perpetuates it. Conflict resolution is only possible when one side overwhelms the other side. So for example, in a political conflict if one side does not place great value on the life of its citizens and is prepared to accept tremendous cost in those terms, then the other side must be willing to inflict great damage in those terms to achieve resolution. 

Up to now, in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Palestinians have been prepared to accept great loss of life and endure great suffering to achieve its perceived objectives, while the Israelis have been unwilling to inflict overwhelming cost in terms of human life and suffering to achieve theirs. This is the reason there has not been a political resolution thus far. Israel has sought to go about its business by tolerating sporadic flare-ups in hostilities, while the Palestinians have tolerated the losses Israel has been prepared to inflict. In a sense Israel has hampered itself since the beginning of this dispute by adhering to a moral standard not shared by its adversary, not that I am advocating that it should behave otherwise. But if the Palestinians adhered to a similar moral standard as the Israelis ie. the way they value human life, their tolerance for cost would have been significantly lower and the prospects for a resolution of the conflict would have been much greater. By this logic, a resolution is only possible in one of two scenarios; either Israel must be prepared to inflict overwhelming cost against the Palestinians beyond what the Palestinians are prepared to accept (essentially forcing them to the negotiating table), or the Palestinians must be less willing to accept the cost Israel is prepared to inflict. I believe, again, putting aside the question of morality, in purely political terms this is the only way to think about proportionality in this conflict. The good news is that both sides always have a say on how the proportionality equation will play out. We always hope that the political calculus will favour placing a higher value on human life and therefore accepting less cost, as opposed to the infliction of overwhelming cost. But as long as there is a kind of 'balance' ie. proportionality, the status quo will remain. 

This Train

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I see it coming, this train,

It's loud and it's long, 

I'm waiting at the station,

And my destination's wrong.

Through a tunnel so dark,

Inside a mountain so high, 

We won't see each other,

Before the other side. 

This train has a driver,

He keeps the wheels turning,

Along tracks of steel,

To a place they call yearning.

Not a single day's passed,

When I doubted your love,

Still some days are bad,

And the nights kinda rough.

I get in these moods,

That can't be explained,

Don't mean to be rude,

It's like I'm on this train.

This train has a driver,

He keeps the wheels turning,

Along tracks of steel,

To a place they call yearning.

It's picking up speed,

The engine vibration,

Wish I could exit,

At the next station.

And then what?

Where would I be? 

You still onboard,

Without me.

This train has a driver,

He keeps the wheels turning,

Along tracks of steel,

To a place they call yearning.