The one thing that’s lacking in this meta-debate: moral consistency.
Consider, for instance, the statement Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) posted in which he declared that people have always been too quick to “condemn any Israeli excesses,” but now “that kind of thinking and criticism needs to come to an end.” It seems Graham sees the “thinking” and “criticism” by Americans as an excellent opportunity to shove aside those whose support of Israel he deems less than unequivocal.
After Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — the only Palestinian American member of Congress — released a statement saying “I grieve the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day,” she was attacked for focusing too much on the fate of Palestinians. Fox News then sent a reporter to demand that she condemn Hamas.
On Sunday, pro-Palestinian activists held a rally in New York, where some made comments expressing satisfaction at Hamas’s attacks. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) condemned the rally, conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens condemned her condemnation for not being sufficiently condemnatory.
It’s not just among members of Congress. Celebrities who made statements of support for Israel were dragged on social media. Student groups at Harvard released a statement condemning Israel, and then the university was condemned for not releasing a statement condemning the students’ statement quickly enough. A law firm with offices around the world released a statement condemning the remarks of one of its former summer associates, as if what some law student said was so important that it required repudiation.
All this condemnation is consistent with how Americans have long debated this subject. For decades, pollsters have asked voters, “Are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?” as though sympathy is a zero-sum contest with a winner and loser.
That’s certainly how many are acting today. It’s almost as if people believe that denouncing the horrific slaughter carried out by Hamas would be nullified if they also express concern about the thousands of Palestinian civilians who are likely to be killed in the Israeli counterattack.
The Hamas attack is often described as Israel’s 9/11, and it is indeed reminiscent of that time. Then, anyone who raised doubts about what would happen next was accused of being “objectively pro-terrorist.” “Moral clarity” was supposedly the highest virtue.
But the problem with moral clarity — that is, defining the entirety of a conflict with the contention that one side is good and the other is evil — is that it winds up being a synonym for simplicity: If you have a complicated view of events, or if you want to understand the history that led to this point, are you lacking in clarity? Is it wrong to express concern about tomorrow’s potential carnage in addition to yesterday’s horror?
You know who does have moral clarity? Hamas has moral clarity. The protesters in Sydney celebrating the Hamas attack with chants of “Gas the Jews” have moral clarity. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government have always had moral clarity, and it didn’t protect his nation’s people, so now they prepare to lay waste to Gaza. “We are fighting human animals,” said Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as he announced that Israel would cut off electricity, water and food to the area as the bombing begins.
Hamas’s barbarism, both in the number of people it murdered (the Israeli death toll has now topped 1,200, proportionally equivalent to 43,000 Americans) and the unspeakable manner in which it was carried out, is already producing a boiling desire for revenge. No one has a good answer to the question of what happens next, but even asking it will be seen as a violation of moral clarity.
So perhaps what we need more than clarity is consistency. I feel Israel’s anguish, fear and rage; I have family and friends there. But I’m horrified by Hamas fighters going house to house and murdering people not because the victims were Jews like me, but because they were human beings. And so are the innocent civilians now being killed in Gaza.
None of us is immune to the tribalistic impulse that was bred in our bones over thousands of generations. But tribalism is the source of most atrocities. If you find yourself thinking that a child killed by a bullet as she cowers in her family’s safe room is fundamentally different from a child crushed by falling concrete when a missile destroys her apartment building based on her religion, then you haven’t found moral clarity. You’ve abandoned moral judgment altogether.
Which some on both left and right surely have. Little good comes of the granular analyses of the latest round of condemnations. Nor does it bring us closer to a future in which the horrors in Israel and Gaza are less likely to recur.
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