Ramblings on the Conflict between Israel and Hamas

Let me start by saying that even the claim that a person or a country has an “absolute right” to defend itself needs to be picked apart. I have heard people preface all their comments about the situation between Israel and Hamas in Gaza as a matter of self-defense and as a right, and I do not accept these arguments uncritically.
In the Talmud we learn about the right of self-defense. We heard the voices of our rabbis telling us that the commandment, “Thou shalt not murder,” means exactly what it says, no more, no less. In other words, there is room for killing, just not the kind that is deemed murder. Murder, of course, has different nuances to it. In legal terms they have degrees of murder.
I have always taken a position on the spectrum of violent responses to injustice on the non-violent side of two historic cases; Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bill Ayers was on my dissertation committee. I consider him a mentor and friend. I strongly disagree with the turn of his faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) which chose to split off and form the Weather Underground. I am not absolute in this opinion because I don’t know how I would respond if I thought my country was engaged in massive atrocities and I had exasperated all civil and non-violent means of preventing this behavior. I know that I have only demonstrated and written letters, taught and lobbied to change things that bothered me about my community’s, my country’s and my people’s behavior. I have done the same about “other’s” like Apartheid South Africa and the JanJuweed in the Sudan, but I have never resorted to violence. This may be a result of personal cowardess, but I like to believe that I have stood by my belief in non-violent means to achieve peaceful and just ends.
A challenge to this thinking comes with the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German, Catholic theologian and pacifist who joined a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. It’s relatively easy to say that I agree with Bonhoeffer and would have done the same. I see Hitler with 20-20 vision. Or do I? For most people, myself included, the various artifacts and histories of the Second World War are enough for me to see Hitler as the closest thing to evil incarnate we know of. Who wouldn’t eradicate such evil? But the point is that in hindsight, it is easier to give Bonhoeffer the thumbs up and question the Weather Underground.
Another question I would like to raise is if there is room to consider not eradicating evil? The Eastern, and possibly Jewish, approach to this question must include the idea that the forces of good exist in contrast to the forces of evil; yin-yang or for Jews, yetzir hatov and yetzir harah.
One of the beauties of studying Torah is that it is rarely absolute. Our sage Hillel overturned what he believed were God’s commandments about debt by creating a legal fiction called a Prozbul. We leave the opposing perspectives of two or more great scholars to guide us as we study Talmud, and we allow for a Mara D’atra, to make determinations about our law on a local level based on specific knowledge of a community. Little within Judaism is absolute.
So is there room for the view that evil should not be eradicated but transformed in Judaism? I am not knowledgeable enough to make this claim, but I will take a stab at something close. From my limited knowledge of Talmud, I would make a case that ultimately we are required to worry first and foremost about our own behavior and commitment to achieving justice. And my reference is a quote from Rav Kahana who said that when a Sanhedrin court of 23 members sees a person, unanimously, as guilty, “he should be absolved of guilt.” The reason given for this leniency is the presumption that if he has been seen by all the same way, he hasn’t really been seen, and I am rather certain that the rabbis always decided to fail on the side of not doing the greater evil.
For me, this brings us back to the main point of the discussions about the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis (also a complicated issue since we have Arab Israelis who consider themselves Palestinian and Jewish Palestinians by birthright before the State of Israel existed).
Is it fair to say in a vacuum that any country has the right to defend itself? Many people remind us about the comment of President-elect Barack Obama who said, “If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”
I am constantly awed by Obama’s thoughtful rhetoric, and here is a good example. He leaves us with a remedy – “everything in my power” which is really very ambiguous. The Sanhedrin had the power to execute a person. They avoided exercising it. It was not an individual power. It was a collective power accepted by the system and people who ascribed to it. Soon Obama will have the power to execute justice through his position as Commander and Chief. He’ll also be the boss of the Attorney General. But when he says, “everything in my power” he is leaving himself room for saying, “this is not in my power.”
President Bush says, "I understand Israel's desire to protect itself.” You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that. Self preservation is near the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It could be argued that self defense is a hard-wired human characteristic. But I am amazed at the fact that nobody ever asks deeply why Israel finds itself in the position of needing to protect itself. The sound bite answer is self defense against Hamas rockets directed at Israeli citizens. The accompanying explanation is always something about giving back Gaza to the Palestinians. The way we fight in the court of public opinion is by painting our enemies as evil - “no partner for peace.” But I am reminded of the slogan, “You don’t make peace with your friends. You make peace with your enemies.” The word “partner” is a metaphor that makes the equation sound like conflict is easy to remedy if you just act as a good partner, but conflict is about adversarial relationships boiling over.
Hamas does bad stuff to Jews. They shoot rockets at our cities, for God’s sake. They kidnapped our soldiers. But that is what happens in a conflict when the parties are not civil.
I ask - what do we do to them? It is just too simple and unsophisticated and unproductive to say that they want to get rid of us and push us into the sea. “Look at their charter,” someone will say. “They want the elimination of the Zionist entity.” OK. Now what?
Faced with a situation like ours, we can try to change them, which we do through our military might, or try to change ourselves, which we don’t do enough, or wait for a third party to initiate the change.
We have the best control over change when it relates to our ourselves. We could stop the settlers from doing pogroms in Hebron. We could stop building outposts against our own laws. We could work to guarantee the human and civil rights of all the people living under our occupation. The problem with this is that it makes us look at our own behavior and be critical. It’s a lot easier to be critical of Hamas. In the short run, it may be more expedient to use force to obtain our objectives. But what does it do to us? What will we become? Do we want their obstinacy to change our character? Can we allow it to happen after all we have been through to protect our Jewish way of life?
Yes, countries and people have the right to protect themselves, but is that an absolute right, and is it diminished by the fact that some things we do are highly questionable? If I punch someone in the face, I will need to worry about defending myself. But do I have an absolute right to do so? Where does that right come from? And is it compromised by my initial behavior?
I am not saying that Hamas would be an ideal “partner” or enemy if we were completely innocent. They would likely still want to push us into the sea. But I’m not as concerned with them as I am with us, because I’m really scared that our overzealous outward concern about their evil has had a terrible affect on us. And I see worrying about my own behavior as the first step in personal and national self-defense.