Moral Calculus in Israel/Palestine
Graham E. Fuller
9 November 2023
How do we understand the moral calculus behind the terrible ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinians?
Zhou Enlai, China’s brilliant former premier under Chairman Mao, had once studied in Paris. Allegedly once asked “What do you think of the French Revolution?” Zhou supposedly replied, "It's too early to tell.” While amusing, there is also great wisdom underlying his ostensible observation. We come to understand the past ever more deeply as we watch its repercussions unfold into the future-- retrospective understanding emerging weeks, months, even years after the events.
As we now witness the horrific events in Israel and Gaza we might consider Zhou’s comment. Early observers were quick to condemn the Hamas attack upon Israeli civilians not only as brutal but also insane and utterly counterproductive. Brutal is beyond question, but how insane and counterproductive was it in reality? And to what ends? What are the long range implications?
Indeed these horrific events are still unfolding; the killing of civilians in Gaza is still far from over. But this is not some insoluble war between religions. It is fundamentally a war between rival Semitic peoples over territory. Muslim Palestinians would not have been any more welcoming in 1948 if the newly arriving Jewish refugees had been Christian, Sikh, or even Buddhist. Land is land. Unlike religion, land at least it is always divisible offering possible solutions. But the present atrocious violence offers none.
This raises the terrible question: when is violence ever justified? Pacifists can legitimately make the case that violence against other human beings is never justified, there is no "good war." Yet many may feel that some wars may be "more just than others"-- a very slippery slope depending on where you stand in the middle of a war. There is still moral debate over the world's first ever use of the American shattering atomic bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed approximately 120,000 people on the spot.Then we recall the infamous remark by former American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when asked before the American invasion of Iraq as to her reviews on the death of some 500,000 Iraqi children resulting from harsh American sanctions that denied medicines to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Albright replied, “it is a very hard choice but we think the price is worth it." One wonders how many Iraqi mothers she had consulted. Victors in war almost invariably believe that they are operating on fundamentally moral grounds. But how is it measured?
Which brings us directly to the Hamas attack and the Israeli response. The Hamas attackers certainly knew that their operation could never overthrow the Israeli state. They surely they knew that they would all die in the operation. But we must recall the concept of "shock and awe.” Remember on the evening of the memorable opening salvos of the US war against Iraq, how we all watched on our television screens the "shock and awe”-- advertised in advance by the US Secretary of Defense? Massive building after building collapsing in dust in the heart of Baghdad. Death delivered not dirty “terrorist-style” from 5 feet away but “cleanly" from 5,000 feet high.
On a far smaller scale , the Hamas attackers surely saw their own mission as explicitly creating a sense of shock and awe. But to what end? Simply to demonstrate the desperate plight of the Palestinians? To humiliate the Israeli state and military? To draw in neighboring states into a broader international conflict? To draw the attention of the world? To die at least with dignity rather than slowly suffocate under oppressive Israeli policies? Or even to radically shift the global geopolitical paradigm?
It reminds us of our own victimisation in iconic 9/11. Shock and awe if we ever saw it. Did it “succeed?" In the end it sent America lurching in violent new foreign policy directions from which we have yet to recover, beyond anything Bin Laden could have dreamed. A tectonic shift.
Surely the Hamas attackers would have been well aware of the predictable fury of an Israeli response to their attack. Did they calculate that that Israel would predictably overreact, overreach, abandoning international moral values in a paroxysm of revenge at their own loss of life and political humiliation? Would Gazans approve of this potential price to themselves? Hamas surely would have calculated that Israel's international standing and reputation would be profoundly damaged – certainly across the Global South that largely perceives Israel as a white neocolonial enterprise and an American proxy. But now evident even in the West we see sinking support for Israel among younger generations.
And how rationally has Israel responded? Seemingly with mindless vengeance in the application of their own shock and awe--a policy making any resolution of the Palestinian question ever more remote. Because as we now witness the relentless Israeli bombing of a Palestinian civilians, including camps, hospitals, and the death of 10,000 citizens including 50,000 Palestinian children we have to wonder what kind of Israeli psychology was finding _expression_. "Exterminate Hamas forever” is the stated goal, yes. But bombs do not kill ideas or national causes--they often only increase its ranks among a younger generation. There is no rational argument that Hamas or its nationalist successors can ever be eliminated as an idea when it stands for historical justice for the Palestinians.
Apart from Israel’s reflexive vengeance, even Washington is now reportedly growing more concerned at the apparent lack of an Israeli final game plan and exit strategy from this catastrophe. Could it conceivably be that in the end international outrage might compel Israel to entirely recalibrate its entire strategic paradigm of 75 years in the face of slowly shrinking international support and rising hostility against it? And the emergence of a new global strategic map where even China is now seriously entering the diplomatic game calling for a cease-fire and a two- state solution. If this is truly a turning point, a tectonic shift in the crippled geopolitical order of the Middle East, "has it been "worth it?” And if so, for whom? For Israel it finally comes down to yielding up land to Palestinian sovereignty? Or for 10,000 Gazans losing their lives for this nationalist cause.
If ever the world will rise up and say "enough is enough,” it might be nowAfter all, it is no longer simply a matter of Jewish and Palestinian lives but a crisis that now threatens to draw in formidable military skills of Hizballah Shiites, militias in Iraq and Yemen are doing the same. Iran is so far behaving with relative caution but has made clear its own red lines that Washington needs to heed to avoid a general Middle Eastern military conflagration. Russia and China too ultimately have their own redlines and a military presence to support their own allies and above all to remove the longterm failing hand of American monopolisation over a faux “peace process."
There is an old saying that "no crisis should ever be wasted.” Israel did not want to pass up the opportunity of this crisis to make further major steps towards the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians out of Gaza. On the other hand could it be just possible that we are at a turning point in the shifting of geopolitical tectonic plates? There may be legitimate questions about how seriously "the world" will act to bring decisive change. But Gaza far more likely is having deeply significant impact upon international Jewry. Israeli actions do not represent the values of Judaism to which large numbers of Jews in the West subscribe. If Israel loses — as it seems to be — the support of much of American Jewry then Israel's brutal international policies will likely cost Israel any automatic US backing in its future policies in the region. That would be a highly significant tectonic shift. Other elements of international organizations could perhaps adopt responsibility for future administration of Gaza.
That is my hope, but I am not holding my breath.
But maybe only major shifts of this sort will enable more objective analysts to judge whether the amoral calculus of Hamas in the end demonstrated a deeper but ruthless instinct for changing the nature of international geopolitics than even Israel has? Or will it be just more meaningless blood down the drain, once again?
"Too early to tell.”
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Graham E Fuller served as a CIA operations officer for twelve years in the Middle East and later served as Vice Chairman of the national intelligence Council overseeing all national forecasting.