It has not been my habit in Attempts 2.0 to speak of current events, nor of politics; I am trying to focus on other complexities here. While I have at times scraped the side of both trendy discourse and politics, I have heretofore stuck to my never-quite-articulated intention—unspoken even to myself—of not putting up anything that couldn’t just as easily go up a week or a month later, or earlier. I don’t want (in contrast to what I often did in Attempts 1.0) to simply comment on the topic of the day.
But.
This week, as I was preparing a substantive essay on a comparatively abstruse philosophical topic, I found that the notion of putting it up in the present circumstances sat bitter in my mouth. If I were to speak, I thought, I needed to speak of the thing that is on my mind—on the minds of most of those I know and care about. So instead of going ahead and talking about the notion of definition (which I hope to do next week), I am going to present some thoughts on the current, ongoing war.
They’re not well-formed thoughts. Attempts, essais, are by their nature provisional: they are about process, not a report of completion; about groping rather than having caught. But this one is even more so: I am thinking aloud about things that are hard to think about, and what comes out is far more raw and tentative than most of what I write here.
But it feels—today, now, here—like the only thing to speak about.
“But why now? Why this? Isn’t derclaring that other topics must be put off because of the current suffering necessarily to be dismissive of other concurrent suffering? The invasion of Ukraine has been ongoing for the entire time you have worked on Attempts 2.0; the dispossession of the Palestinians has been going on your whole life. There are other wars, and other horrors apart from war. Why honor these not those?”
Thus my internal interlocutor: and fairly asked. I have an answer, if not quite as good answer as I might wish.
One difference is simply the nature and scope of the horror. There are thousands dead with more to come. Over a hundred kidnapped and held as hostages; two million people trapped without ability to flee. The blood cries out from the ground.
But it is more than that. There is also the particularly brutal and cruel nature of the attacks. Massacring hundreds at a music festival; killing an old woman, videotaping it with her own phone, and posting it to her own facebook account; the kidnapping of children; the slaughter of children in front of their parents or siblings; the rapes; the displaying of dead bodies accompanied by the chant that God is great. A series of atrocities gloried in; pain eagerly sought and delightedly achieved.
But it is more than that. It is also the horrifically public and present nature of the atrocities. They are being filmed—often by the perpetrators—and posted to social media. Atrocities are turned by the murderers into snuff films and then into propaganda. Murder for clicks. This makes it hard to turn away. I have not watched the videos; but seeing that they’re there, seeing them discussed—it adds a sense of presence that is not true for other horrors. And this is an issue (properly, but still) dominating the American media at the moment. It seems into the consciousness even when I try to focus on other things.
But it is more than that.
The main difference, I think, is that these are my people.
In a very important way, this is an answer that goes against some of my deepest beliefs. I am a cosmopolitan; I think nationalism, like racism and all other forms of human tribalism, are major drivers of human misery; I think human beings have a moral obligation to try to care for all human life equally. The death of any child anywhere is, or ought to be, a matter of equal concern for us all. Any person’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Humanity. So why take these attacks more seriously—or, no, not more seriously: but more personally?
I think there is an answer to this that does not rely upon tribalism, although it can easily spill over into tribalism—the just (or at any rate not unjust) instincts that motivate it are significantly overlapping, if not outright identical, to those which create tribalism, and nationalism. And they should be, in my view, fought, just as the natural human instinct to violence must be fought, and, if unable to be bested entirely, be channeled and kept solely to domains like LARPing, boxing, and the like. Symbolic violence standing in for the lusted real. Here it is easier, for the feeling’s natural course does have a moral channel, and need not be diverted entirely into facsimiles. But still, the temptation to expand them beyond the bounds of moral reason will always be there and must, like a seemingly-peaceful border between enemies, be vigilantly guarded.
All that said, there is a plausible reason to feel it more here, one which I would name community.
I said above that “the death of any child is, or ought to be, a matter of equal concern for us all”, but of course I did not mean that (and my readers knew well that I did not mean it) in any absolute sense. The death of a child close to me (and I cannot even begin to type the most obvious example, it is too horrible to be spoken aloud, but I need not: there are plenty of other children close to me whose death would be devastating) is not the same as the death of some child I’ve never met. And this principle extends. The death of a child of an old friend whom I never met is not the same to me as the death of a perfect stranger’s child either: even if I have fallen out of touch with an old acquaintance, my memories of and affections for them will make it mean more than would the death of some child I don’t know and whose parents I’ve never met. But what about the child of an old friend’s sibling? Or cousin? Or neighbor?—Continue this line of thought, and something like community comes into view.
And for me—as, I suspect, for most if not all American Jews—these recent deaths touch us in that sense. I personally know people who live in, or were visiting, Israel; I have friends (and relations) who, while not living in Israel, are Israeli, and so of course have a great number of friends and family there. Far fewer than six degrees of separation stand between me and the slaughtered or the kidnapped. Of course, given the way degrees of separation, I must also be not too many degrees of separation from those innocents in Gaza who are right now being bombed, and who may soon be invaded; but it’s more, and it matters, as least as my experience goes: I don’t know their names and faces.
There are moral limits to this connection, of course. I don’t think—one’s own close relatives aside (that being a trickier philosophical issue that I won’t broach here)—it would be a moral thing to do to trade the lives of those not in my community for those who are, nor to set up policies that favor mine over others. That would cross the line into tribalism, nationalism, or racism. But I don’t think it’s immoral for people to feel differently about the deaths of those in their communities;—indeed, I don’t think it’s possible for people not to, save perhaps for a few saints here and there.1
When a child dies here in Ithaca, I hear about it, and even if I never met them and my son never knew them personally, it affects me. My family and friends and I talk of them repeatedly over the days and weeks and eventually years to come. The ten year old who died of cancer; the middle-schooler who died of suicide: they remain in our thoughts, in our guts; the horrors stick in my throat and swarm in my eyes. But the deaths of children in Syracuse or Binghamton do not, although the latter are no less horrific. Humans live in narratives and specifics, and mourn more one person known than a thousand unknown. Or, to put it differently: the lost children of Ithaca were my neighbors.
Well, this too is my neighborhood, albeit in a different sense. So the cruelty and violence chills me in a deeper way than would a comperable massacre in another country. And so I am writing this, and not what I had planned to share today.
Among the more disturbing aspects of the news this week for me personally has been the reaction of (parts of) the American left. It is one thing to think (as many do, and with reason) that Israel has done terrible things, that its birth was accompanied by an ethnic cleansing, and that its holding a people dispossessed and stateless is an ongoing horror of its own. But to excuse—even glory in—the murders, the rapes, the kidnappings?
I had thought—or perhaps just hoped—that the left had moved beyond the spirit that once defended the gulags of Stalin or the death camps of Pol Pot. That most of the left had learned that violence and evil can come from both sides, and that our highest goal was to create a world of freedom and equality and flourishing and safety for everyone. But it seems we have not. This does not distinguish us from the right, whose calls for Gaza to be turned into a parking lot are no less hideous, but the same “they’re my neighbors” factor that has led me to fixate on the horrors done to friends of friends in Israel have led me to fixate on the horrors spoken by friends of friends in the U.S.
It is worth noting that these celebrations of evil have been limited. For instance, it is true and important that the leaders of the left (Bernie Sanders and AOC, for instance) have not joined the bloodthirsty celebrations. And of course many individual leftists have wanted no part in these celebrations of evil. But even if it has been reasonably few (I am relieved that few of those I have previously admired and respected have done so2). But too many, as any is too many. At the very least they have shown a sociopathic indifference to the horrors that committed by their favored side; far too many seem to simply embrace the murders, full stop. Worst of all are the American (British, etc) leftists, those in the developed world. After all, of those in Gaza one can at least say that their exhaultations are understandable (if not remotely excusable) on the basis of trauma endured and ideological poisoning and limited perspectives available. But the Americans have none of those excuses: it is just ideology cheering murder.
This has been spoken about well; Noah Smith is worth reading on it:
…the bloodthirst pouring out from leftists in the streets and on the internet suggests that there’s a deep sickness in the Western leftist movement. It’s one thing to believe that Israel is an apartheid regime and that war against it is justified; it’s another to believe that massacring random festival goers is an acceptable way to prosecute that war. And even if you do think that our modern definition of “war crime” is too restrictive, and that killing large numbers of enemy civilians is an acceptable way to force a belligerent to throw in the towel, it’s still repugnant to joyfully cheer that slaughter, and to march side by side with those who advocate genocide.
Also worth reading is Jonathan Chait, who rightly emphasizes the parallels between the left’s excusing the terrorism of Hamas and the right’s calling for the wholesale slaughter of those in Gaza:
I have no interest in joining the game of measuring which evil is greater. Do you want to believe the position of Shapiro and Baker is less evil than that of the left because Israel’s response is retaliatory and has not yet taken shape? Go ahead. Do you want to believe it is a greater evil because it represents a mainstream faction within American politics and Hamas apologism remains factionalized on the far left? That is also fine…. I insist only that they are both evil. Whatever calculation you make must begin with the premise that the deaths of innocent people are evil.
As he says earlier in the essay, “A moral equation that does not have human beings on both sides is a formula for murder.”
And just this morning as this essay goes (I laughingly call it). to press, Michelle Goldberg joined the chorus with another excellent essay.
(My internal interlocutor: “See? See? This is why we haven’t been doing politics! Because what starts as thoughts turns into a torrent of links, piling up more and more so as not to leave anything out. And generally thinking about each, ‘Gee, they say that much better than I do.’ Because while on other things we have (we hope) original and useful things to say, here everything we think has already been said better by others. Why are you doing this?”
“I thought you were the one saying I should condemn everything.”
“No you bonehead, I was saying you shouldn’t make an exception for this. I think you should go back to correcting people’s misconceptions about Borges stories and talking about the universality of the human experience, thank you very much.”)
Then—yes, I have been doomscrolling—there is this twitter thread from Joshua Leifer:
There's also a deep sense that the left abroad has lost the values it was supposed to stand for. I thought we were leftists because we wanted a world without war, torture, the killing of families & children in their beds. I thought we were leftists because we abhor cruelty, detest violence, and believe in the inherent, even divine, worth of all human life. I thought we were leftists because our struggle was for all people to be able to live with freedom and dignity.
See also this twitter thread from Anna Hájková, and this one from Charlotte Clymer, both of which also speak reason to rage—a perhaps equally important task as speaking truth to power. And, finally, this single, essential point from Eliav Lieblich:
Many "smart" people use the term "colonizer" in the exact magic-solving, unlimited-violence-justifying way that others use the term "terrorist". Exactly the same.
(Update, after mailing: I know that this way madness lies, but I can’t help adding one more link, since this article by Eric Levitz on the problems with the left’s embrace of Hamas terror is perhaps the strongest of them all:
What we actually witnessed was not “the Palestinians” mounting a violent struggle for justice but a far-right theocratic organization committing mass murder in the name of blood-and-soil nationalism. Hamas’s project is antithetical to the left’s foundational values of secularism, universalism, and egalitarianism. And it is also completely at odds with the progressive vision for Palestinian liberation. Western radicals’ predominant prescription for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict is a “one-state solution,” in which Israelis and Palestinians all enjoy democratic equality in a single binational state. Hamas’s atrocities have not advanced this ideal but set it back, lending credence to those who insist a one-state solution is a recipe for ceaseless civil war. This weekend was not a triumph for the left’s project in Palestine but a disaster.
Read it all (link dodges paywall). End update.)
Perhaps I am piling up critiques to make me feel better about those on my side who celebrate murders with glee. Or perhaps I am piling them up because I know all too well that, if not people I know, then people who my friends and acquaintances know, will be among those who raised the banner of murder and called it liberation.
I know there will be those on the right who will say that this discredits leftism tout court (indeed, I have already seen it said). This is nonsense. Not only because the right is doing the same thing, with their calls for genocidal attacks on Gaza (half the population or more of which are children)—like the corruption of Trump or the government sabotage of House Republicans, we simply expect it of them.3 But also because nothing about the (utterly obvious) need for urgent action on climate change, for a mixed economy on the Nordinc model (rather than the vicious ‘let-em-suffer’ model of, well, America), for gay rights and racial equality and all the rest is in any way contradicted by the gleeful delight in murder we have seen.
But it does, and should, give pause. We must always remember that, as Solzhenitsyn famously said, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” And to take care, while battling monsters, not to become monsters ourselves.
Definitely too soon: I have already heard my first Israeli joke about the conflict. But gallows humor is (as Isaac Asimov once put it) a Jewish specialty for well-known historical reasons, so here it is (skip the next paragraph if you (reasonably) think a joke in today’s context is simply inappropriate):
Israeli troops gathering in response to the attacks have a message for American Ashkenazi Jews: please stop sending food here. The situation is hard enough as it is.
So what do I think should be done?
I have no idea.
There are a lot of problems in the world whose solution is obvious; or whose solution is clear even if the path there is obscure; or whose solution, though difficult, I think I can see even through the thick forrest of crooked timber.
But about this—whether the immediate, pressing problem of getting the dozens of souls kidnapped and held hostage by Hamas back safely, or the long-term problem about letting two people equally, freely, and safely flourish in one small land—I don’t know.
The one thing I know is that the killing of children is evil.
“But Israel has been oppressing—”
“The killing of children is evil.”
“But we must retaliate against—”
“The killing of children is evil.”
This isn’t much to know, I grant you. It leaves one hopeless for a place to begin. How do you rescue people or destroy those who have themselves slaughtered children without further killing of innocents? I have no idea. How do you make peace in a land where far too many think only the killing of their side’s children is evil? I have no idea.
But I do know that we must start with the basic principles of morality and humanity; with the principles of just war and of international law. We must protect noncombatants, on both sides. You’re not allowed to kill civilians. [Update: in comments, Georges Schneiderman points out that that is, at best, a radical simplification of the laws of war; you are not allowed to target civilians, proportionality must be maintained, but collateral damage is not itself a war crime. See his full comment below.] We must defend the innocent while being, in Camus’s words, “neither victims nor executioners”.
There are those who would say that this view is trite, even maudlin; what do I want, for all the children of the world join hands and sing together in a spirit of harmony and peace?
And I won’t deny that it’s trite. Nor I will deny that it doesn’t suggest any straightforward action plan. Nor will I say that it is in any way an original thought.4 All I will insist is that, in addition to all that, it is also true.
It’s evil when Israel does it. It’s evil when Hamas does it. That has to be the place to begin.
A few things I’ve seen others say about “what to do next” that strike me as, at the very least, worth reading and considering.
There is this essay on “Israel’s Strategic Cul-de-sac”, which points out that Israel’s strategy over the past decades has simply and purely been a failure:
Even a decisive military victory over Hamas, which is no foregone conclusion, will be squandered if there are no political aims that include the flourishing and dignity of Palestinians. The real lesson of this week is that absent Palestinian buy-in, the safety of Jews in Israel turns out to be an illusion.
A similar point can be found in this interview with Peter Beinart, who says (forgive the lengthy excerpt):
My basic bedrock assumption is that the fate of these two peoples are intertwined. Neither of them are going anywhere. I understand the tremendous sense of fear and rage that would make many Israelis want their government to go into Gaza. There are parallels to the way many Americans felt after Sept. 11. But those emotions did not serve America well. Israel has been blockading Gaza for many, many years now and has bombarded Gaza many, many times. If that were an effective strategy, then what happened this weekend would not have happened.
It’s not rocket science. You can kill members of Hamas and you can destroy their weapons and their munitions. But in the process of doing that, you create much more misery and hatred among people who will then grow up in the shadow of that misery and hatred and want to fight you. People are creative, and so they’ll find a way of getting more weapons.
Ultimately, Israel doesn’t have a military problem. It has a political problem. It has a human problem. And the problem is that you have these millions of people—most of them are not from Gaza. Most of them are the family of refugees that were forced out of their homes in Israel when Israel was created. And if they don’t have the ability to live a dignified, decent life, then many of them are going to try to make sure that Israeli Jews can’t live safe and dignified lives. That’s the way human beings tend to be, all over the world. And if you think of the fate of Israeli Jews and Palestinians as intertwined, I think it leads you to a very, very different way of thinking about ultimately how you deal with Gaza.
He also notes that at times like this such advice falls inevitably on deaf ears; people hear those as words of treason and not wise counsel. Although I think they are the latter.5
More prosaically, there is this point from David Frum:
Hamas is inviting an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza. Generally, it's dangerous to accept the enemy's invitations.
But again: I don’t know. All I know is this: you’re not allowed to kill civilians.
Start there. And then figure out what to do.
For me, the rush of words, so characteristic an experience of the contemporary age (one thought smash-cutting to another, a joke nested between two cries of pain from opposite sides of the world) fades eventually into other sorts of words, better words, richer words, deeper words, words that I cling to in dark times.
There are lines from Ulysses which resonate. There is “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” from the Nestor section, and from Cyclops:
—But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.
—What? says Alf.
—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred…
—A new apostle to the gentiles, says the citizen. Universal love.
Over the past days I have listened several times to a version of Chad Gadyah—the famous Passover song that reads like a homicidal version of “There was an Old Woman who Swallowed a Fly”, with a compiling, lengthening list of slaughters ending with God slaughtering the Angel of Death. In 1989, the Israeli singer Chava Alberstein released a version of the song with an extra few verses which break not only from the traditional lyrics but the format of the song. Here’s some of them (in English translation):
On all nights, on all other nights, I have asked only four questions. Tonight I have one question more: How much longer will the cycle of horror last? Victor and victim, beater and beaten, When will this madness ever end?
And here’s a cover of Alberstein’s version, sung by the Rana Choir, a group from Jaffa composed of both Palestinian and Jewish Israeli women, which was released during the pandemic (you can tell from the staging!):
I also keep thinking of the six page comic called “This is Information” that Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie did in the wake of 9/11.6 (As of now, someone has posted it online here.) The whole thing is very much worth reading, but I keep thinking of the last four panels:
And in this case, above all, I keep thinking of four lines from Auden’s brilliant poem “September 1, 1939”. It’s one of my favorites (in fact, I have quoted it recently). A great many of the stanzas speak resonantly to many different recent moments and times. But right now, I am thinking of the end of the second stanza (of nine)—mostly the last four lines, or even the last two, but I will quote the entire stanza, just for context:
Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
And that, I fear, is where we are: and were we will stay for the foreseeable future.
"This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think — most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that ‘non-attachment’ is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.” — George Orwell, “Reflecctions on Ghandi”
Although one of the front-page bloggers at Lawyers, Guns and Money wrote a tweet excusing child murder that I will find it hard to move beyond, although they seem to have since deleted it, so I suppose the generous reading is that they posted in haste and saw what they said was horrifying (although I fear that they simply decided that they didn’t want the grief for having expressed views they continue to hold).
One might call it “the soft biggotry of low expectations”.
After I had already written a draft of this piece, I came across this essay on Vox making the same argument.
A day before this interview, Beinart posted this video on his substack which says the same thing in a rawer, more emotional way. The interview is better thought-out and phrased, but if you watch the video, you can hear how shaken and wounded he is; the tremor in his voice makes this version in one way more powerful than the better, later articulation.
For one of the several benefit anthologies that came out shortly afterwards. They make interesting reading now, more than twenty years after, but while some are of mere historical or diagnostic interest, a surprising number of them hold up to a greater or lesser degree. It will perhaps come as no surprise that Moore and Gebbie’s was, by far, the best.
Stephen, I appreciate much of what you have written here. But it just isn't true that "You’re not allowed to kill civilians." You're not allowed to TARGET civilians. But lots of operations that are clearly permitted under the law of war kill civilians. Even if you know that an attack will kill civilians, that does not necessarily make it a war crime; the law of war calls for combatants to make difficult judgement calls involving questions of distinction and proportionality and military advantage. In Israel, as in the US, those judgement calls are often made by military lawyers, although of course that is not always feasible and often commanders in the field have to make rapid decisions on the basis of imperfect information, following the guidance and training they have received. Alas, the Israeli government includes ministers who traffic in genocidal rhetoric, which makes it difficult to trust that a good faith effort will be made to comply with international law. Still, I think it is important to recognize that althugh the deliberate targeting of civilians is a grave war crime, the law of armed conflict permits many actions that kill civilians. Human rights groups and military lawyers often interpret the laws of war differently, and reach different conclusions about what they permit and forbid, but on this principle there is fundamentally no disagreement.