I’m not a huge fan of “relevance” in the educational curriculum; there’s a lot of essential liberal learning (to say nothing of STEM learning) that is not directly pertinent to unfolding events. But with the world on fire, unfolding developments (in the Middle East, Ukraine, and elsewhere) are relevant to the liberal arts through the nexus of citizenship. That’s the nexus where the news media meet higher education; where it’s the media’s business to determine and convey relevance and significance. Everything we learn is, in one way or another, for (political, cultural, or economic) citizenship.
There is nothing else.
Israel-Palestine is the case in point. Reasoning won’t solve the Middle East – but it’s the only place to start. And reasoning also means starting with shared facts. Facts are not normally the main points of contention; moral and political differences are. But we have to agree on some facts to have any useful debate. Facts, by definition, are at least potential points of agreement – and they’re all we’ve got.
As citizens, it’s our business – if not quite our duty – to try to understand what is happening. But facts mean little without context – a broader sense of what they mean, which are most important, how they fit together, and what caused things to be as they are. Inevitably, moral and political judgments follow. How we fit things together depends on our values and our consequent worldviews.
Maybe you can see where I’m heading. Israel-Palestine is being treated as a binary moral choice, when in actuality it’s a paradigm of moral and historical complexity. And that’s assuming certain premises: first, the Oct. 7th Hamas attack on Israel was a war crime; second, Israel has a right to reduce Hamas, if it can; third, reducing Gaza City to rubble is a war crime as well, regardless of who started it or how. The murder, rape, and abduction of innocent Israelis doesn’t make the killing of one child every ten minutes in Gaza any nicer.
It’s easier and more satisfying to take one side and be blind to all other considerations. But one can be appalled by the atrocities of October 7 and also by the ongoing slaughter of civilians in Gaza. In fact, seeing more than one side (and not just via lip-service) is what I’d call a baseline of moral adulthood. There’s a lot of lip-service out there right now, and not enough moral grown-ups.
Getting this right isn’t easy, and there’s more to be said than I can say here. But it’s not enough to assert that each side has murdered innocent civilians. (It’s not even clear to what extent Hamas represents the Palestinian people.) But it seems to me that to preserve one’s humanity, one must put humanity first, regardless of prior events. (What the Eight Air Force did to civilian Germany would have been inexcusable, except for what the Luftwaffe had done to civilian England; that – and the absolute imperative to defeat Hitler – was the context). As Joshua Leifer writes in Dissent (“Toward a Humane Left,“ Oct. 10th): “to hold everyone’s humanity—that is the task of the hour. To reject calls for retribution, to stand against the dehumanization of Palestinians and the unfolding catastrophe in Gaza, and—yes, in the same breath—to recognize the horror of Hamas’s attack and the categorical unjustifiability of killing civilians.”
At the same time, Israel isn’t targeting civilians; it’s hitting civilians because Hamas is using them as human shields. That clouds, but doesn’t remove, the question of Israeli responsibility.
The hard part is that in certain cases – such as wartime – we can’t always solve the moral equation for humanity as an absolute. In such dire cases we must set aside Kant and the idea of every life being precious and an end-in-itself, because we are forced to calculate how to preserve more life, not all life, or even all innocent life. Instead we must adopt something like John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian calculus of the greatest good for the greatest number. That, at any rate, was my argument in a long-ago essay on “Moral Dimensions of Terrorism” (The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Feb. 1990; available through JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/stable/45289947. A shorter version is at https://jeffreyscheuer.com/essaysandarticles/moraldimensions.)
It would be foolish to suppose that Israel can destroy Hamas, or even degrade it, without innocent people dying. Short of a pause or ceasefire that Israel would never accept, there may be no satisfactory solution to the strategic and moral dilemma. I like former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett’s plan for avoiding a repeat of the Battle of Stalingrad in Gaza City, as described last week by Bret Stephen in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/opinion/israel-hamas-strategy-bennett.html.) It calls for a buffer zone at the border; humanitarian corridors from northern Gaza to the south; and a siege of Gaza City until the Hamas fighters are forced out of their tunnels. It might not work, and it might already be too late. But it beats the alternatives.
Reasoned debate must begin with facts – and end with humanity. That’s because reason isn’t an end in itself; it’s a conduit for preserving and extending our humanity, not more and not less. It must acknowledge the facts on the ground and their context, and morality and history. It must see through different lenses and make complex judgments or it is useless.
What led to the atrocity on Oct. 7 is no less relevant to our understanding than asking what led to past cases of historical savagery. That doesn’t mean it alters our moral judgment. The slaughtering of innocent people is the epitome of evil. But it doesn’t exempt us from thinking about the hard questions of what came before, what follows, and with what moral constraints.
Seeing it all through a single lens – Israel’s moral grievance, or the Palestinian cause, or the need for peace and humanitarian aid – is the easier way to navigate this morass. It’s the simpler way. But it’s the wrong way. Even if we are forced to make a utilitarian calculus to save the most lives – or to avoid a wider catastrophe – critical moral thinking demands that we view this terrain through multiple lenses.