The siege of Gaza that has been undertaken by Israel and its genocidal leaders since October 7th cannot be morally excused. With extermination on the horizon it is imperative that one does all they can to call for ceasefire and an end to the occupation. I am not prescriptive about political action; not everyone can march in the street all the time and not everyone can be on the front lines. Sometimes one is elsewhere, sometimes our capacity for action is diminished. It is also, unfortunately, often the case that once the wheels of extermination begin turning, there is little that can be done to stop the process. Injustice is a process, and all processes have their own movement and logic.
The question of what is to be done is sidelined, in our pathetic excuse of a public sphere, by moral pedantry. Despite the 7,028 (as of writing) Palestinians killed by Israeli airstrikes, there is still an active and self-sustaining process of whataboutism, of inchoate associations between Palestinian liberation and terrorism, invocations of the right to self defense (as if Israel were a man accosted on the street), geopolitical analyst hand wringing about the balance of powers, and free speech warriors silent and smug as people are fired and ostracized for daring to oppose genocide.
Let us start then, where I have refused to start, with the Hamas attack of October 7th. The details are well rehearsed but what matters here is that Hamas killed Israeli civilians, often horrifically. It now became necessary to condemn Hamas before speaking of Israel, even as Yoav Gallant, the Israeli Defense Minister, referred to Palestinians as animals and spoke of exterminating them all. As bombs from one of the world’s most advanced militaries rained down indiscriminately on one of the world’s most impoverished populations, pieces began running in the mainstream press about the horrors of the Hamas attacks along with think pieces on how the left has failed a test of decency.
What are we to make of all this? In many ways none of this is new. In his 1979 book The Question of Palestine, Edward Said addresses the question of Palestinian terrorism:
Yet I suppose that to many of my readers the Palestinian problem immediately calls forth the idea of “terrorism”, and it is partly because of this invidious association that I do not spend much time on terrorism in this book. To have done so would have been to argue defensively, either by saying that such as it has been our “terrorism” is justified, or by taking the position that there is no such thing as Palestinian terrorism as such….As a Palestinian, I resent and deplore the ways in which the whole grisly matter is stripped of all its resonances and its often morally confusing details, and compressed simply, comfortably, inevitably under the rubric “Palestinian terror.” Yet as someone who has been touched by the issue in all sorts of ways, I must also say that I have been horrified at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations , the bombing of schools and hotels; horrified both at the terror visited upon its victims, and horrified at the terror in Palestinian men and women who were driven to do such things. Since I do not pretend to write as a detached observer, I have believed that rather than trying to deal frontally with the terror itself, I would do better if I attempted to convey to my readers some sense of the larger Palestinian story from which all these things came. And if in the end the story does not - as it cannot - mitigate the tragedies of waste and unhappiness, it would at least present what has long been missing before such a reader, the reality of a collective national trauma contained for every Palestinian in the question of Palestine.
Within our current discourse the above might read as an apology for atrocity. It is, however, an attempt at moral clarity. To understand this, we must first acknowledge our poor historical memory. This memory is, I think, willfully poor. It is in Israel’s interest to keep things that way. This is exemplified by Israel banning UN workers and officials from traveling to Israel after U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the Hamas attack “did not happen in a vacuum.”
Said’s comments from forty years ago and Guterres’ from this week are attempts to see the structural nature of the situation, to highlight cause and effect. You are against killing? You want peace? Then you must understand the situation ,regardless of if you condemn or condone it. The IDF has shot and bombed civilians in Gaza for decades, prevents most of the population from leaving and subjects them the full militarized force of the law without granting them access to their rights.
The demand to condemn Hamas forcefully and upfront is not, actually, a demand for moral clarity. It is demand that you begin your argument on the defensive and that you begin the chain of cause and effect at a certain point. It is a demand that you understand moral reasoning as an account sheet that must come out balanced, as if harms were as abstract and interchangeable as money.
Moral clarity resists this insidious will to abstraction. It is the ability to grasp the situation, the structures of cause and effect that lead towards any particular outcome, a sense of who has power and who does not and sense of who is capable of annihilating and who will be annihilated. This, to a certain extent, historicizes and formalizes morality. Morality is not a principle applied to all cases then, it is a gathering of the situation, a form of analysis. This requires, paradoxically, individualizing morality (tailoring it to specific situations) as a way to escape individualistic morality.
Moral pedantry erases the situation. It is ahistorical. It is not a form of analysis, but the application of a rule. Free speech absolutism is one example. It does not matter what was said to whom and how and in what way; speech must be defended. The rule must apply no matter what. This is the view of the jurist and the bureaucrat, the two dominant figures of the age. So too the right to self defense, which means more and more the right to never feel any threat whatsoever. A man in your drive way or yelling at you on the subway; self defense against a threat without any question of what constitutes a threat or how such a threat may have emerged in the first place. A right to self defense that ignores the psychosocial history of a nation and its citizens. Elimination as a right, as right itself.
So, the rule is that countries have a right to self-defense. The rule is that killing civilians is bad. These are unobjectionable in and of themselves. But applied as attempts to understand the events in Gaza since October 7th, they begin to flounder, they produce moral confusions. Suddenly one is suggesting that is right to drop 6,000 bombs in six days on a civilian population, that anything can be done. Because the rule must be applied. But the application of the rule is a process, and the process has its own logic. Moral clarity sees this process, knows its unfolding and asks what might bring it to a close. Justice follows moral clarity in this sense, defined, messianically, as interruption. Perhaps not so otherworld as I have suggested, for there is one interruption within reach of global leaders and their respective citizens: calling for and brokering an immediate ceasefire.