An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind

Nov 9, 2023 | About 4 min reading time

I've been feeling frustrated with much of the discussion of Israel and Palestine.

For now, let's ignore the media coverage and the abysmal responses from politicians. It's almost impossible to have a productive conversation about Israel and Palestine. It doesn't matter how closely aligned your opinions might be with those of someone else. If someone can misinterpret your words, they will - and they always can.

It would be easy to dismiss this as bad faith arguments, but I've seen the current state of the Internet. When I criticize the ongoing occupation and someone assumes I support Hamas, I know why. I've seen people using the occupation to justify war crimes against Israeli civilians. When I criticize the actions of Hamas and someone assumes I support Israel, I know why. I've seen people using the atrocities committed by Hamas to justify bombing Palestinians.

I'm not Palestinian, or Jewish, or Israeli. I do not live in a city that is being bombed by a settler-colonial state with no way to leave. I'm not concerned about hate crimes because of my ethnoreligion. I do not live with the fear that I will suffer for the crimes of my government regardless of what my views on them are.

I am simply a person who wants everyone to be safe and free from harm.

Maybe that's idealistic of me.

A pitfall in this discussion that I see arise over and over again is the idea that harm justifies harm. Essentially, it is the revenge mindset. By this logic, if you are a bad enough person, it becomes acceptable to harm you.

This isn't referring to situations where violence is unfortunately necessary to resist systems of oppression. Oppression is violent by its very nature, and violence is often required when resisting violence. Palestinians fighting for their freedom are not wrong to target Israeli military bases, for example. Yet, it seems that often the violence enacted is greater than needed, and often not even targeted at the correct people.

Hamas could have targeted military bases or military personnel in their attack on October 7th. Instead, they took hostage and killed innocent Israeli civilians, including an 85-year-old woman in a wheelchair who they beat with sticks to the point that they bruised her ribs and she reported difficulty breathing. Not only are these war crimes under international law, but they seem to anyone with common sense like they'd be ineffective.

Side note: Hamas released the 85-year-old woman in question recently. She also reports that the conditions for hostages were decent. They received food, clean conditions, and medical treatment. Compared to Israel's treatment of Palestinian hostages, this stood out to me.

Then the Israeli government retaliated, even as families of Hamas victims made it clear they didn't want this. If you look a little closer at Israel's actions in the past month, the justification of wanting the hostages back immediately unravels. If the hostages are being held captive by Hamas... why the hell would you bomb Hamas?

Imagine, for a second, that there's a bank robbery. Everyone inside the bank is being held hostage by the robbers. The police arrive, and instead of negotiating, they announce that they are going to bomb this bank until they free the hostages.

I don't know about you, but I'd want those police fired from their jobs immediately.

Fun (or not so fun) fact: a situation like this led to the coining of the term Stockholm syndrome. A bank robbery took place in Sweden, and when the robbers released the hostages, none of them would testify against their captors in court. Instead, they raised money for their legal defense. This baffled the world, so they coined the term Stockholm syndrome - except it doesn't even apply to this situation.

The police behaved more aggressively than the captors, even endangering the hostages' lives in the process. They pointed guns at the captors while hostages were in the line of fire. One of the captors even tried to protect the hostages from being caught in the crossfire during this. The hostages had to negotiate with their captors themselves. In the end, the police used tear gas which prompted the captors to finally surrender (wait a minute, doesn't that mean they also used tear gas on the hostages?).

Basically, while I meant my example to be an extreme to illustrate the idiocy of the Israeli government, I realized that it's pretty much already happened before. My bad.

Anyways, another point (that not everyone will agree with) is that people can do terrible, fucked up things, and their actions don't justify doing terrible, fucked up things to them. You might want to get revenge on someone for the terrible, fucked up things they've done, sure, I get that. Hurting them back will not undo the damage they've done, though, and it won't help their victims.

I'll admit, I struggle with this one myself sometimes.

Going back to the examples of people who use war crimes to justify more war crimes, though, it's clearly a concept we need to keep in mind. The war crimes committed by Hamas, no matter how terrible, do not justify the collective punishment of Palestinians. The ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine by Israel does not justify the war crimes committed by Hamas. It shouldn't be this difficult to grasp.

I don't think the human psyche likes this concept very much, because it feels easier and safer to point at a person or group of people and say, "If we just attack them, if we just get rid of them, then we'll be safe, and this conflict will end." Maybe that worked for us in prehistoric times, and now our brains have trouble letting go of that idea in the modern era.

Regardless, when it comes to issues like these, it's clear that this is not the solution... because if it was, it would have fucking worked by now.