There’s a phrase my wife uses with our teen son sometimes: “A reason, not an excuse.”
My son is a good kid. But like teen boys everywhere, he sometimes makes — well, let’s call them errors of judgment. And without exposing his business to the whole world, let’s just say the reasons he makes those errors are often pretty understandable.
But they’re still errors. The reason they happened is not an excuse for them. There still must be accountability.
My wife’s phrase came to mind recently when reading a mostly interesting and good column from the Washington Post’s Shadi Hamid. “Reducing Hamas’s terrorism to a problem of ‘evil’ is a mistake,” says the headline. It gives a quick overview of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and speculates that the current violence didn’t need to happen.
Hamid:
According to one July poll, 60 to 75 percent of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank had positive views of Islamic Jihad and the Lions’ Den — groups just as or even more radical than Hamas. And in a more recent September survey, 54 percent of Palestinians said they supported armed attacks against Israeli civilians.
But it hasn’t always been that way.
As journalist Peter Beinart recently noted, at the height of the Oslo accords in 1996 — when a settlement seemed possible — Palestinian support for the peace process reached 80 percent while support for violence dropped to around 20 percent. Clearly, Palestinians, like any group, are capable of supporting both violence and nonviolence, depending on the circumstances.
What happened between then and now? It’s pretty clear that Israeli leaders — Benjamin Netanyahu chief among them — spent recent decades frustrating Palestinian ambitions toward nationhood, even empowering Hamas because they knew it would make that statehood all but impossible.
So far so good. But I get a touch uncomfortable with this paragraph from Hamid.
This is not to say that Hamas wouldn’t have committed its gruesome killings had political circumstances turned out differently. There is no way of knowing. But it would also be a mistake to dismiss Hamas’s terrorism as mere “evil.” As the philosopher John Gray notes, “A campaign of mass murder is never simply an expression of psychopathic aggression.” To describe the things we can’t comprehend as evil is a cop-out. It allows us to believe something is wrong with “them” but not with us. And, paradoxically, it exposes an unwillingness to take terrorists seriously, reducing them to “crazy” or “irrational” adversaries. They usually aren’t.
Let’s stop here. I want to be careful. And I don’t want to impart meaning to Hamid that he didn’t intend. But.
Hamas terrorism was evil.
Maybe not “mere” evil. Probably not crazy or irrational. But it was evil. And I think it’s important to say so directly, if only because the nuances of Hamid’s argument will probably be lost on a lot of people — some willfully, many not.
But evil: I don’t know another word to describe the violence inflicted on Israelis on October 7. Civilians — including babies and women — were murdered and brutalized. Evil acts were committed. Period. And as is so often the case, those evil acts are begetting what I consider to be more evil acts.
Contra Hamid, I don’t think this makes something wrong with “them” that isn’t wrong with me. As I’ve said too many times in this newsletter, I’m no longer in the church but some rock-hard inclinations stick with me — and one of those remnants is a firm belief that humankind is essentially fallen. I haven’t murdered or tortured anybody, so I haven’t enacted evil on the same level as Hamas. Not nearly. But I believe that kind of evil is potentially in me. And it’s certainly within the “us” we usually think of as being the good guys. I don’t need to recount the evidence for that here.
Not everybody thinks that way, I realize. But I suspect if more of us did we might be a lot more humble as we venture out into the world.
Getting back to the beginning: Are there reasons Palestinians have — rhetorically at least — become more supportive of violence? Yes. Does that excuse what Hamas did? No. Absolutely not. It was evil.
I don’t think that’s what Hamid is trying to say. So maybe it’s unfair to make this argument. I’ll accept that judgment.
For what it’s worth, though, the “reason not excuse” logic applies to Israel as well. Yes, a great evil was perpetrated on its citizens. No, that does not excuse visiting violence and death and a great many innocent people. As my friend Bonnie Kristian pointed out, since Israel’s military response began “more than 3,400 Gazan children have died already, per UNICEF; there’s every reason to think that number will keep ticking up if they don’t get out.”
It can be argued that Israel, because it ostensibly doesn’t seek civilian deaths, is not committing evil. Maybe. But it seems clear at this point that Israel isn’t necessarily doing its utmost to avoid those civilian deaths either. And in any case, the survivors of that violence — whatever their political inclinations beforehand and whatever Israel’s intent — will receive that violence as an evil done to them.
Everybody has reasons. Everybody’s reasons give rise to everybody else’s reasons. And so the violence — the evil — continues on.
Etc.
Thing I wrote: Josh Hawley versus Citizens United: Great, but what game is he really playing?: “It wasn’t a Halloween stunt: Sen. Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican, on Tuesday introduced a bill to block big corporations from spending their vast stockpiles of cash to back candidates in election campaigns. That sounds good. But a bit of caution is probably needed.”
Short-form piece I read: Republicans Are Rationalizing Cruelty Toward Gaza (Will Saletan/The Bulwark): “I’m Jewish. I believe in Israel, and I’m aghast at what Hamas did to so many innocent people on October 7. I strongly support the use of force against the killers. But as thousands of innocent people die in Gaza—not as targets, but as victims of relentless bombardment in a war they didn’t choose—I can’t accept the bigotry, zealotry, and callousness these candidates are espousing. They aren’t standing up against ruthless religious violence. They’re promoting it.”
My social media post of the day:
Thanks for this. I think the essential question is: Can Hamas and Israel coexist? I’m open to arguments they can, but all the evidence to date suggests no ... and that’s not Israel’s fault. Hamas openly has stated its goal is genocide. If that’s correct, Hamas cannot continue to possess the firepower it desires to continue its atrocities. So how can Hamas be sufficiently diminished in a way that doesn’t result in massive civilian deaths and suffering? I don’t know.
I appreciate your nuance, your carefulness, and the spiritual view you're starting from (as always!), and that in an objective moral accounting, Hamas's attack and Israel's counterattack are both evil in the death and suffering they inflicted/are inflicting. But I have a rhetorical concern with using "evil" this way; political actors seem to use it to flatten and deflect (if someone is truly, honestly "evil," what more is there to do than smite them?), in the same way that every mass shooting is accompanied by talk of mental illness.
The nuanced difference between "mere evil" or regular "evil" that you make in the middle of the article ("Hamas terrorism was evil. // Maybe not “mere” evil. Probably not crazy or irrational. But it was evil.) is not what most people are thinking about when considering something evil. The popular usage of evil, I think, actually works to elide any talk of reasons (not excuses!), and those reasons are important, since they are the basis of discussion rather than solely vengeful violence (though I may just be very naïve).