I saw a recent quote from Kevin Williamson that gets straight to the heart of a lot of contagious thinking in the last month:
If Hamas wants to put Palestinian children between Israeli soldiers and Hamas terrorists, then the deaths of those children will rightly be understood as an atrocity—but it is Hamas’ atrocity, not the Israeli Defense Forces’ atrocity.
First response: If only it were that simple.
The person who shared that quote listed it under the heading “Clear thinking.” Many, many people, it seems, share this sentiment. But I really am failing to grasp how this is clear at all.
First of all, it is not in any way clear — especially not from this side of the world — that all civilian deaths in Gaza are in fact a result of Hamas’s use of civilian shields. As we have seen and should know full well by now, the best military technology in the world still kills plenty of civilians just by being wrong about the “targets.”
As bad as the civilian deaths we “accidentally” cause are, the point being made is much more sinister. Namely, that, because this is war (which it is), and because Hamas is so evil (which it absolutely is), and because the enemy is embedded among civilians — therefore, the Israeli Defense Force bears no responsibility for who gets killed by their own warheads while they seek justice. Williamson et al. act as if this point is self-evident. It is not. There isn’t even the slightest hint of self-evidence in it.
There is no case where this sort of thinking applies at all, let alone to any extent that warrants the assumptions propping any of this argument up. If a murderer takes hostages, law enforcement doesn’t drop a bomb on the building and call it a day. “Sad for those hostages and bystanders. An atrocity, yes, but at least we know it’s not our atrocity.” Williamson may think that, since it’s war and not “police action,” the rules have changed. But he’s effectively done nothing but roll his eyes to explain why.
Granted that, as with any comparison, there are differences. While no person or group is free of all responsibility for who dies in the process of carrying out even the most righteous act, I’m not saying that there are never individual situations in war where a decision would have to be made that does lead to civilian deaths — as tragedy. But this “it’s their fault not ours” kind of thinking that Williamson exemplifies leads to civilian deaths as sloth, as the result of nothing more than the ancient sin of acedia! It’s shameful, moral laziness and it excuses so much horrifying death with a wave of the hand and a cursory shrug at responsibility.
You can say, as Williamson so stunningly and dismissively puts it, “This is not a time or an occasion for moral muddiness or intellectual flabbiness.” And, in his defense, at least in Williamson’s case, I wouldn’t for a second accuse him of intellectual laziness. He’s thought a lot about this and I have no doubt that he is much smarter than I am. That’s why I’m accusing him of sloth. It is moral laziness that he and half the western world are unwittingly preaching, while at the same time they claim to be rooting out all “intellectual flabbiness.”
(I know that sloth is a funny word, and that it gets used as virtually synonymous with laziness of any and all kinds. But it’s something much more specific, and it really does help to think of it as a moral laziness. And as such, it’s something that the hardest worker and deepest thinker can be perfectly guilty of. “Something in our soul,” Simone Weil wrote, “has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue.”)
The Williamsons of the world, and their much less thoughtful echoers, may not think (or want) this to be an occasion for moral muddiness, but moral muddiness is our lot, whether they like it or not. And it is the current lot of Israel and Gaza. Calls to forcefully simplify the matter by declaring muddy water clear are about as meaningful as the manager of a mid-level paper company in eastern Pennsylvania stepping out of the break room and declaring bankruptcy.
But while these declarations of moral simplicity may not hold a drop of water, they are anything but benign.
My sense is that, as with all culture war issues, no one involved is capable of speaking to (or, rather, against) anyone other than the worst representations of the other side. Williamson writes as though anyone who disagrees with him simply must be waving a “stop the genocide” sign. (He has, in essence, chosen to counter much of the Left’s moral laziness with his own brand of the same. Fight fire with fire, as they say.) But you can shudder with horror at everything that happened on October 7th; and you can despise the history of Judenhaas with every fiber of your being; and you support Israel’s war against Hamas as a proper seeking of justice and peace — you can do all these things without stooping to the level of moral obscenity.