Moral Clarity

October 14^th, 2023

I think it’s important to take a few minutes today to reflect on what has happened in Israel during the last week. There can be no ambiguity, doubt or prevarication that what Hamas did on October 7^th, and continues to do, was a barbarous act that goes against everything that a liberal society stands for. It cannot be tolerated, excused, justified or explained as other than a blood-thirsty and inhuman act of political opportunism and the calculated mass bloodletting of innocents, Israeli and Palestinian alike, for purely ideological ends. Hamas corrupted the lives of thousands of young Palestinian men and used them to attack, rape, torture and kill more than a thousand innocents in Israel. Furthermore, they did so knowing that hundreds, and then thousands of Palestinians would be horribly wounded and killed in the inevitable responses that they set out to incite. I believe they did this with the sole goal of provoking the State of Israel into a brutally violent response in order to rupture the current peace talks with Saudi Arabia, stir up anger and outrage in the Arab world, and perhaps foment a military coalition in the Middle East to put an end to Israel. Whatever their actual motivations, they have no concern for human life or Civil Society. What they stand for is not what we stand for. We are better than they are – not without flaws, not perfect, but certainly way better than that. If we cannot look at ourselves and at each other and say that without hesitation we have lost our moral compass.

Tragically it is very likely that Hamas will achieve at least their primary goal, and that Israel will unleash a horrible reprisal in Gaza leading to the displacement and death of thousands of Palestinians over the next days and weeks. Barring a miracle I don’t see how this can be avoided. Honestly, I cannot even in good conscience give an argument why it should be. I could not look any of the victim’s families in the face and tell them that they must forgo vengeance, nor could I tell the people of Israel that they should tolerate Hamas as a neighbor ever again. And yet I know that this all too human path is wrong and that it will result in bloodshed and tragedy for years and decades to come. It is clear to me that the human price for Just Vengeance will not and cannot be Just. Hamas is composed of people who hide behind babies’ cribs daring their enemies to shoot. Gaza is an urban jungle of over 2 million people, close to half of which are under 18. Hamas is embedded deeply in the society. Any effort to eliminate it will necessarily cost the lives of thousands of innocents. I have not felt this helpless since the morning of September 11^th, 2001, when I saw the second tower fall. I knew then what my country would do in the name of Justice and Vengeance. Hundreds of thousands died as a direct result, and uncounted hundreds of thousands more as “collateral damage” to the social collapse and political instability that followed. The consequences continue to this day.

It is apparent that October 7^th, 2001, will be seen as an inflection point in the history of the Middle East for decades to come. It will become imbued with significance that extends well beyond the actual events, and will become enmeshed in webs of political and ideological debates and agendas that will inevitably try to coopt it to their ends – erasing parts of the story while exaggerating others – until the human scale of what just happened is lost in a series of more or less cynically opportunistic rhetorical strategies. It is already happening. We must take this time to reflect so that we will not be confused and lose sight of the profoundly human and intimate tragedy that is unfolding before our eyes. It is so easy to become lost in abstraction and prefer the sweeping scale of Historical Forces to the tragedy of a mother seeing her child die repeated over and over again. It is less painful and it spares us from the profound discomfort of our own moral conflict – our own rage and despair, and the profound doubt we all face when we ask ourselves, “What if it were me? What would I have done? What will I do if it happens here to me or my neighbors?” However, I believe that it is only by keeping our hearts open to the pain of countless unknown mothers and children that we can find hope.

People are not killed by armies or politics or History. They are killed, raped and tortured by other people, mostly men. Each murder is a choice emerging from a personal history with myriad possibilities, and each choice to murder without pity is a double tragedy. (I understand if you have little place in your hearts now for men who commit atrocities. There is very little in mine, but I cannot help but imagine the boys they once were and the Pavlovian hell of growing up having hatred rewarded with love, approval and righteous pride.) In any case, where there is choice there is agency and the possibility for change, no matter how slight it appears. Each act of barbarity or mercy is the result of a person at a crossroads, on the bank of a personal Rubicon with their whole life waiting breathless in the balance. Each one can choose, each young man, each general, each president, even now, can choose. Each choice is the result and fulfillment of countless choices and events that have gone before and out of which consciousness has emerged in that specific moment to Decide. We do not know why. We do not know which events or words from the past will rise up in that moment to turn the tide. We don’t know for the young men or the generals, and often we don’t know for ourselves either until the moment arrives. When we reduce men, generals, people and ourselves to mere members of groups, political ideologies or pawns of historic forces inherited at birth, we erase their dignity and agency, while attributing their responsibility to historical/social/political/racial/religious inevitability. That can only lead to hopelessness, despair, and a kind of mechanistic disdain and intolerance for the “Other”. It is easy. It dooms us to passive acquiescence. It is profoundly immoral.

It is obvious, to me at least, that it is our duty to create a world in which people choose compassion over hate and life over death – in which each one of us is empowered at the crucial moment to understand the stakes and to choose with moral clarity and freedom the world we want for ourselves and all our neighbors. That world is a dream, but it is our lot to make it real one choice at a time.

This is what I want to remember on October 7^th from now on.