Introduction
Pomp, circumstance, aplomb, morality, wisdom—strip us humans of these higher desires, and what you’ll be left with, is base instinct. The instinct of self-preservation, of protecting our own. Isn’t that at the base of all our wants and desires as a species? The world’s history stands witness to what is now almost a century of an achingly jarring conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The very elaborate list of wars involving the Israel-Palestine crisis—the Arab-Israeli wars, the Lebanon wars, and all the others, have brought an indiscriminate amount of terror and loss to the civilians, to the extent that they are no longer even certain as to whether their homes will still be standing by dawn the next day or be a mere pile of rubble. What is intriguing is that in spite of the level of upheaval that the Israeli and Palestinian Arab citizens faced, they still democratically elected their representatives as those whom they knew were the organizers and initiators of such violence—Benjamin Nethanyahu and now Neftalli Bennet for the Israelis, and Hamas for the Palestinians in the 2006 Palestine elections.
How many of us today are quick to condemn without ever bothering to appraise ourselves of the complete back-story? A whisper here, a whisper there, and it burgeons like wildfire—and most of us fall prey to the seduction of fallacious moral condemnation and herd conformity. Through the medium of this article, we’ve set out to explain that the hostility between the Israelis and the Palestinians is based on a profoundly deep-rooted vulnerability. This article will attempt to inject some nuance into the matter, so as to prove our conviction that the Israelis are not morally culpable for their actions, as opposed to the views held by millions of people. The determination of the moral culpability of Israel, in the status quo, is highly subjective to people’s individual and arbitrary determination of what makes an actor morally culpable for its actions. As a result, the majority of the opinions formed denounce Israel as morally culpable for its actions, simply after watching civilians dying on social media sites. Before we play juror and award Israel with a guilty verdict for their supposed moral culpability in the ongoing conflict, we must dig deeper and allow ourselves to face and understand a new, and quite understandably, a jarring prospect for most readers—the stance that stands somewhere in the grey space between black and white—does the killing always make the killers monsters? Going forward, we must abandon the ubiquitous belief that every action can be simplified and classified as intrinsically right or wrong and every actor as strictly good or evil. The faulty notion that Israel is to blame is premised on the supposed oppression existing in a vacuum, which it does not. There are structural historic reasons that have incited such a response by the Israelis, reasons that systematically shed them of any moral culpability for their actions.
Moral Culpability and Self Defense
Moral culpability deals with the question of blameworthiness of an actor in undertaking a particular action, in accordance with the distinction between what is morally right and what is morally wrong. Here, it is imperative to note that morality as a concept exists on two levels—one is the individual level, and the other, societal. For instance, where a predominantly conservative right-wing society might consider it immoral for a woman to have multiple sexual partners, that woman, on an individual level, might consider her actions to be completely morally justified. Considering the propensity of individual morality to be used to justify almost any action, owing to its highly subjective and arbitrary nature, our arguments will primarily be based on the morality of the society as a whole, that is, what is considered moral by the overarching societal norms.
On a societal level, self-defence is an exception to culpability from a moral, as well as a legal standpoint. The reasoning for this lies in the fact that when an actor reasonably believes that it faces a direct and imminent threat to its survival, it is morally justified for the actor to undertake action to obliterate that threat. Another interesting and integral factor to consider is the extent of the action undertaken by the actor to neutralize the threat, and this is the point where we distinguish moral culpability from legal culpability.
To systematically explain the concept of the moral culpability of the actors, we formulate the following points:
1. Triggering conditions of the right to self-defence
2. Restrictions on the exercise of that right, and
3. Resources availed in the execution of that right on a state-wide level.
We adopt an objective account of the triggering conditions, but a subjective account of the restrictions and resource availability.
1. TRIGGERING CONDITIONS
Triggering conditions—the basis of determining whether it is morally permissible to engage in self-defence at all, depends on objective considerations and are unaffected by the defender’s epistemic condition. That is to say, at any point in time, if an actor X is faced with a direct threat to its self-preservation due to any action undertaken by an actor Y, it is actor Y who has acted culpably. There is no reason why actor X should have to endure the risk to its self-preservation resulting from actor Y’s wrongful acts. At that time, the triggering condition has been met and actor X has morally gained the right to self-defence.
2. RESTRICTIONS ON THE EXERCISE
Coming to the second aspect of the restrictions on the degree of exercise of the right to self-defence, the determination of whether an instance of self-defence is disproportionate, excessive, minimal, or proportionate has to take into account the defender's epistemic limitations. That is to say, if a threatener Y meets the triggering condition, which is objectively defined, the defender X using apparently disproportionate or even unnecessary force in error at the time due to its epistemic limitations will be morally justified, for, in that case, actor Y is, after all, the one who culpably placed actor X in such a position where judgments about necessity and proportionality had to be made. Once the triggering condition is met, actor X’s beliefs about necessity, probability, and proportionality are morally authoritative, whether or not they seem rational or reasonable by others’ standards in the given circumstances, because the culpability of actor Y gives actor X the moral right to act as deemed necessary, even seemingly in error.
Here, it becomes integral to realize that there exists no objective determination of the degree of proportionality of self-defence that is morally justified on a societal level. That is to say, societal morality has no objective threshold of the degree of self-defence, which if crossed makes the action, in its entirety, transcend to immorality. Thus, we see that once the triggering condition is met, the restrictions on the degree of self-defence to be employed is purely subjective to actor X’s individual considerations of necessity, simply because morality here has to necessarily be an individual concept, rather than a societal concept. Here we arrive at a crossroads with legality, which, unlike morality, cannot exist on an individual level under any circumstance.
As a result, by using disproportionate force as a method of self-defence actor X will be legally culpable for the same, but will not be morally culpable.
3. RESOURCE LIMITATION
In the final aspect of our moral culpability analysis, drawing a page from Darwin’s evolutionary theory of ‘survival of the fittest’, we deal with the morality of resources availed for the execution of one’s self-defence. The actors who’re being alluded to are countries, so the degree of the exercise of the right to self-defence is not only subjective to epistemic limitations, but also to the resource limitations of the country. This becomes relevant once it is determined that actor X, who was threatened by actor Y, has engaged in a disproportionately higher degree of self-defence against actor Y to ensure its preservation, to the extent that it now becomes a threat to the self-preservation of actor Y. At that point, actor X is not morally culpable for this action, as it is not acting out of a desire to issue a threat, but rather on the basis of its own primal instinct to defend itself and its own. However, it cannot be denied that actor X’s actions objectively meet the triggering conditions for actor Y, giving actor Y the right to engage in self-defence as well. At this point, when
both the actors have objectively gained the right to defend themselves against the other, we draw 2 conclusions out of this are-
One, the proportionality of self-defence carried out by both the actors will depend upon their resource availability and epistemic limitations, and consequently that, two, which actor is able to better execute the said self-defence is subjective to the actors’ epistemic and resource limitations, and under no circumstance does it in itself become a metric for holding any of the actors morally culpable.
We thus arrive at the conclusion that when both actors X and Y have objectively gained the right to defend themselves against each other. If at that point, actor X disproportionately executes a much higher degree of self-defence than actor Y owing to its possession of resources superior to those with actor Y, actor X can in no way be held morally culpable for it.
Historical Backdrop
Image: Ottoman Empire, lithograph, published in 1878 via Getty Images
Before WWI struck out, the Ottoman empire had territorial control over Palestine, with the demography consisting of Arabs and Jews. It included what we now call the Gaza strip, the West Bank, and Israel. The Ottoman Empire, however, suffered a cosmic blow in the war, and consequently, the territory of the state of Palestine went to the Allies and was awarded to the British rule, under what is popularly known as the British Mandate for Palestine, with approval from the League of Nations. This is the period in Palestinian history where all the bloodshed we witness today has its root.
The British entered into 2 binding agreements:
1) The McMahon–Hussein Correspondence (1915-16)
This consisted of a series of letters wherein the Government of the United Kingdom agreed to recognize Arab independence in the states under British rule, in exchange for the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. This had under its purview the state of Palestine, as it was a territory of the British inhabited by the Arabs in heavy numbers.
2) The Balfour Declaration (1917)
This public declaration by the British Government announced the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. This move was undertaken by the British to enlist the Jews, then a small minority population, in the wider war against the Ottoman empire.
Even though both of these agreements had the propensity to have many different interpretations, the issue then necessarily became that Palestine was promised as the national
state to both the Arabs and the Israelis by the British. At this point, the 6 ground realities of Israel after the end of WWI that need to be noted and contemplated are:
1. Promised Land- The Jewish people, under the Balfour Declaration of the British Mandate, were promised “a national home in Palestine.”
2. Place of Birth- The land of Israel within Palestine wasn’t just any piece of land where the Jews decided to settle on a whim, but rather, it constituted the birthplace of their very origin, which isn't the case with the Arabs.
3. Minority Population- The demographic distribution of Palestine was such that Arabs were the dominant inhabiting community, and Jews were then an exceedingly small population in comparison to the Arabs in Palestine.
4. Arab Supremacy- The Jews in Palestine were not only surrounded by an Arab majority within Palestine, but even all of its neighbouring nations were chiefly Arab dominated, including Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
5. Nazi Persecution of Jews- This coincided with the time when the Nazis came into power in Germany and started indiscriminate and horrific persecution of the Jews in large numbers under their mandate to eradicate their very existence.
6. Acceptance of the UN Partition plan- Once the British mandate of Palestine was about to come to an end, the United Nations drew up and enacted a partition plan for Palestine wherein it announced the creation of two separate independent states for the Palestinian Arabs and the Palestinian Jews, with the city of Jerusalem as a corpus separatum (Latin for “separate entity”) to be governed by a special international regime under UN trusteeship. The Jews accepted this plan in an attempt to settle the issue. However, the plan received vehement opposition from the Arabs and was repudiated by them.
What we’re left with now is the simple deductive conclusion that the Jews then were a small, vulnerable, and persecuted community, with the constant threat of becoming extinct, and faced by opposition in the Middle East which was comfortably more than 10 times their own size, and were engaged in a quest to regain their right to a land which wasn't only publicly promised to them, but was also the very birthplace of Judaism. Despite all of this, we conclude that it was the Jews who were willing to bite the bullet and agree to a small independent state as directed by the UN in the partition plan, whereas the Arabs took up arms against the Israelis the day following its enactment.
First Arab-Israeli War
Image: Bullet-scarred hospital in Quneitra, Syria which was occupied by Israel for seven years beginning in 1967
In spite of consistently mounting tensions between the Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate, it hadn't till then escalated into a full-fledged war. One day after the UN partition plan came into existence and Israel agreed to it, Palestinian Arabs and neighbouring Arab regions including Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Transjordan, and the others went to war with the Jews. And what was the main intent of the Arab Insurgency? It was to permanently drive out the Jews from Palestine. It was this very objective that propelled all subsequent Arab-Israeli conflicts.
Despite this tumultuous history, in a significant attempt to promote peace with Palestine and to improve its national security, Israel undertook a unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, wherein the IDF forces along with about 8,500 Jewish settlers were withdrawn. Contrary to the Israelis’ optimistic beliefs, what has followed since then has only been unmitigated tragedies, with Hamas seizing full control of Gaza in light of the 2007 civil war between the Palestinian factions, planning covert and surreptitious operations against Israel from what henceforth became Hamas’ operating base (the Gaza Strip), and initiating four devastatingly tragic wars, compelling Israel, together with Egypt, to impose a blockade in Gaza.
Applicability Of The Moral Culpability & Self Defense Analysis To Israel
1. TRIGGERING CONDITION
From the day the Balfour Declaration was signed till today, the Palestinian Arab ideology has remained the elimination of the Jews from ‘their land’, the only difference having ensued being the tilting of resource availability in favour of the Jews, who’ve now risen through the ranks to become a force to be reckoned with in terms of military prowess and national defence systems. The triggering condition was first objectively met by the Arabs the moment they lit the match to the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, soiling the UN Partition Plan for Palestine, as well as in subsequent wars.
2. RESTRICTIONS ON THE EXERCISE
Bearing in mind the gruesome holocaust Jews were subjected to in recent history at the hands of Nazi Germany that wiped away 11 million of the Jewish people, the recurrence of such brutality against their people is still a possibility they have to contend with. By repeatedly taking steps against and inciting a war to eradicate Israeli Jews despite their multitudinous attempts to reach peace, the triggering condition has been met by Arabs. Thus, as per our analysis, the degree of measures employed in self-defence are now subjective to Israel’s beliefs and ideologies about necessity, probability, and proportionality of self-defence, in the absence of an objective societal metric to define the moral threshold for proportionality in acts of self-defence. Thus, Israel’s actions cannot be determined as morally unjustified, because morality here is necessarily an individual concept, and not societal. This is also the primary reason for the fact that even if we have reached a phase in the status quo where the self-preservation of the Palestinian Arabs is now threatened, the Israelis are still not morally culpable for it.
Conclusion
The conflict between Israel and Palestine is an age-old one, and any attempt to simplify the tragedy to a single incident of violence would be a grave injustice. This turbulent history of the conflict is deeply entrenched in each actor’s conduct. Israel is a country that is held to the same standards of conduct as the rest of the developed and progressive world by most, but doing so is unfair because the fact that rings true is that Israel is currently in an idiomatic position—one that is of power, and is yet also one of vulnerability due to its unique placement and the history of its people. The world has been no stranger to the fall of powerful nations in the past, and neither have Jews to that of their people; in an attempt to counter the ever-present threat to its existence, Israel defends itself to the best of its capability. Compulsion precedes what is considered intrinsically morally wrong, thus stripping an actor acting out of compulsion, of moral culpability for that act. For Israel, defending itself through targeted attacks on the Gaza Strip is not a matter of choice but one of compulsion, the compulsion to follow its instinct of self-preservation for its continued survival. And that, in our view, deserves no moral denunciation.