I was part of the generation of North American Jews who were taught that Israel was good and the Arabs were bad. Israel was the victim; Arabs the victor. There were no people in this conflict. Just Us and Them.
Recently, I picked up a book called Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century by renowned British ethicist, Jonathan Glover. After a few harrowing pages, every kneejerk emotional response that had been drilled into me by rabbis, professors, and journalists was gone.
In Humanity,
Glover delivers a devastating account of what normal people are capable of
doing to each other when our “moral resources” are lost. Glover defines the
moral resources and accompanying human responses as: respect for people’s
dignity, sympathy, moral identity (what kind of person we think we are), moral
imagination (when we are able to clearly understand what the impact of a
current norm or official policy will mean for real people), and skepticism.
When the moral resources are lost, hardness towards people, the cold joke (in
Argentina, the machine used to give people electric shocks was called “Susan”
and torture by this machine was called: ‘a chat with Susan’) , sleepwalking
when making decisions that affect real people’s lives (the decision to drop the
Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima) all take over.
The potential for atrocity becomes greater.
Glover
identifies the key challenges to our moral resources as national tribalism and
Belief in ideology. Many 20th c atrocities stem from either one of
these concepts. National tribalism was responsible for Rwanda while Belief in
ideology was responsible for Stalinism and Maoism.
One can
also see how both of these concepts are at play in the Israel/Palestinian
conflict. Jews and Arabs are both guilty
of having their moral resources weakened by national tribalism. Others have
lost their moral resources—notably skepticism—by Belief in a vague, anti-oppression
ideology that singles out Israel for boycotts and divestment strategies.
While not
spending much time on the Israel/Palestine conflict, Glover does make some
observations that could help reconstruct one’s thinking about this problem if
one was prepared to admit that the problem is as much psychological (our desire
to be part of a “group” or to believe in something bigger than ourselves) as it is political. Why, for example, do we
all freak out at the idea of Jerusalem being the capital of both Israel and
Palestine? Why do we outright reject the
idea of one state for both people? Does it really matter if one state is
really the end of Israel as we know it? Is “Israel” or “Palestine” really worth
dying and killing for?
As I read
through Glover and was horrified by the endless graphic examples of murder and
torture and suffering, I felt that he was asking some very tough questions of all
of us on both sides of this conflict: Why are we all clinging to our tribes?
Why can’t we let it all go? Why do we see Israel or Palestine as though they
were people whose well-being must be supported at all costs? Why can’t we see
the suffering that our support costs other people?
Consider this quote relating to the origins of World War I:
Consider this quote relating to the origins of World War I:
Thinking
in terms of the emotions, health, the life and death of an imaginary people
called ‘German’ or ‘Britain’ contributed to the outbreak of war. It turned
attention away from what war would mean for the emotions, the health, and the
lives and deaths, of real people. (p. 197)
When I consider my pre-Glover response to the Israel/Palestinian crisis and examine it against his moral resources and human responses, I was woefully lacking both. I didn’t have a lot of respect for Palestinian dignity. They were fanatical, uneducated and got what they deserved. I was not sympathetic at all to their situation. As for my moral identity, it was wrapped up in my Jewish, pro-Israel identity—my tribal identity. My moral imagination was limited to my Israeli brothers and sisters and to their suffering. It did not extend to my fellow human beings in the West Bank and in Gaza. I had no skepticism at all. Why would I? I was surrounded by like-minded Jews. And without my moral resources, I became hard to Palestinian suffering, I accepted phrases like “they are all terrorists”, “What can you expect from a bunch of Arabs”. I committed Glover’s sin of sleepwalking by blindly accepting the two-state solution as feasible despite the fact that on any given map, there seems to be three-states.
Despite studying several of the genocides so brutally documented in Glover’s book, I was—until fairly recently—utterly indifferent to the plight of the Palestinians. Glover’s brilliance lies in how he explained to me why that was the case and how I needed to reverse my thinking to change that attitude.
To avoid further disasters, we need political restraints on a world scale. But politics is not the whole story….The means for expressing cruelty and carrying out mass killing have been fully developed. It is too late to stop the technology. It is to the psychology that we should now turn.
I needed Glover to tell me to stop reading about politics and geostrategic concerns and Iranian uranium deposits and to change my psychological attitude toward the Palestinians. I needed him to remind me that they are people just like me. And I needed him to show me—as he does throughout his book in Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda—what happens when we forget that people are human beings.
We give this messaging to our children over and over again, but when the emotions of tribal nationalism overcome us or the desire to Believe in an ideology, we revert to Us and Them. This psychological tendency must be overcome to avoid another century like the one that just passed.
Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
By Jonathan Glover
Yale University Press: 2001
