Gaza, Tribal Politics and Collective Guilt


By Joseph Levine
The Palestine Chronicle
4.1.09
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=14600



Israel`s current assault on Gaza has sparked controversy in the
mainstream press. But for all their differences, critics and supporters
share a fundamental assumption: that Israel, as a Western industrial
democracy, accepts the Enlightenment idea of the absolute value of
individual human lives, and recognizes the inalienable rights that stem
from it. Against this background, Israeli officials are seen as facing
a tragic dilemma: how to confront threatening forces who do not share
these values ? `Islamic extremists` -- without sacrificing their own
moral standards. Thus, supporters of the action in Gaza ask how else
but with deadly military force can Israel protect its citizens from
rocket attacks, while the critics insist that the bombing, with its
high human costs, is anyway a poor means of ensuring Israel`s security.
The critics, of course, are correct. But in their tacit endorsement of
the `clash-of-cultures` frame, they let Israel off the moral hook. The
current assault is not governed by a painful recognition of conflicting
demands of human rights; rather it is animated by profound racism,
tribalism, and the ancient doctrine of collective guilt.

To see why I say this it is only necessary to engage in a simple
thought experiment. Suppose Hamas terrorists were hiding out in Tel
Aviv (or Los Angeles, or London, for that matter -- the exercise is
equally illuminating applied to the U.S. and or any other `civilized`
Western state). Would an assault of the sort we have seen against Gaza
even be contemplated? Would Israeli officials grimly but
dispassionately calculate the cost-benefit ratio concerning a massive
aerial assault on Jewish neighborhoods? Would American and European
officials condone such an attack? Would the pundits express their
sympathy with Israel`s terrible dilemma? Of course not! The very idea
of such an action would be recognized immediately as morally
outrageous, and anyone who proposed it would be treated with contempt.
You can hear the voices: What, are we just like Hamas? They don`t
respect human life, but we do.

Except, of course, `we` -- members of the self-consciously enlightened
West -- don`t - any more than `they` do. If we really acted out of the
values we claim to espouse, then there would be no asymmetry in our
reactions to the suggestion in the thought-experiment. Either we would
acquiesce in the decision to sacrifice the people of a Tel Aviv
neighborhood for the sake of the greater good, or ? more likely ? we
would have to see Israel`s current assault against Gaza as morally out
of bounds. The fact that the cases do not immediately strike us as
parallel? a regrettable necessity in one case, a moral atrocity in
another ? betrays the existence in us of two very primitive, anti-
Enlightenment impulses: racial/tribal chauvinism, and a belief in
collective guilt.

The first one is obvious. If we are honest, we`ll admit that the men,
women, and children of Gaza seem different from Israeli Jews and other
`Westerners` ? they are `Other,` not fully human. We vehemently disavow
such judgments, of course. But if we don`t believe it, what explains
the result of the thought experiment? Why would we not be willing to
kill hundreds of `us` in order to protect the rest, when we are
prepared to kill as many as necessary of them? It`s simple: they just
don`t count as much as we do.

But maybe not. Someone might object that there is a morally relevant
difference between the two populations: because Hamas is a Palestinian
organization, it is morally justifiable to put Palestinian lives at
risk in order to protect Israeli citizens. But this objection simply
lays bare the second anti-Enlightenment element in the modern Western
psyche: the notion of collective guilt. But why should the mere fact
that Hamas is Palestinian justify imperiling the lives of Palestinians
who are not Hamas fighters, who are not personally responsible for the
terrorist acts the organization commits? It is only if one believes
that all Palestinians are made guilty in some way, simply by -- how
else to put it? -- being of the same tribe as Hamas. How else can one
find a basis for distinguishing between potential victims who are
innocent and Palestinian and those who are innocent and like `us?`

Collective guilt is a notion that is as morally primitive and abhorrent
as any of the ideas supposedly espoused by `religious extremists.` This
is why collective punishment is prohibited by international law.
Moreover, embracing the doctrine of collective guilt means abandoning
the moral high ground. Terrorists always appeal to the notion in
justifying the taking of life. Al Qaeda viewed the victims of the World
Trade Center bombings as minions of the Great Satan, just as Hamas
views its victims as collaborators in the occupation. If we wish to
repudiate such thinking, we must not indulge it in ourselves.

Once we give up belief in collective guilt and relinquish allegiance to
the tribe, there is nothing left to distinguish the very real victims
of Israel`s assault on Gaza from the imagined victims in my thought
experiment. Indeed there is no morally relevant difference. Vociferous
outrage is the only humanly decent response to Israel`s brutal assault.
It is what`s demanded by those Western, Enlightenment values we all
supposedly hold dear.


- Joseph Levine is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst. He contributed this article to
PalestineChronicle.com.

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