The seemingly unstoppable Israeli ultra-violence in Gaza and now Lebanon is a paradigmatic example of what happens when structural social and political problems become personalized. When people think about social structures as the source of problems they can reason constructively about how to fix them. However, when they think of distinct groups of people as the problem, the passion to destroy the enemy is aroused. The decision-maker cannot rise above their enmity and lashes out, ensuring that the history of trying and failing to solve a social and political problem by eradicating the enemy will be repeated. Failure and mass life-destruction are guaranteed in equal measure.
The locked-in pattern of kill and response currently plaguing the Middle East is another sad case in point. Presenting its operations as a response to evil, the current Israeli leadership cannot see what is obvious to almost everyone else: that it does in spades what it accuses Hamas and Hezbollah of doing– indiscriminately killing innocent civilians. The 8 year old daughter of the Hezbollah member killed in the exploding pager attacks is hardly responsible for her father’s political convictions. But instead of rising above the provocations and appealing directly to those Israeli’s in the street demanding a ceasefire, Hamas and Hezbollah militants respond in kind, giving Israeli fundamentalists exactly the rhetorical ammunition they need to work around growing global condemnation of their way of conducting the war and to continue it with even greater destructive force.
There are of course deep historical causes to this conflict, but there is also a subjective dimension which must be exposed and understood. Self-righteousness in a political cause fuels the cycle of life-destruction. As soon as any group or movement convinces itself that it is at war with an irrational, evil enemy, it becomes capable of the most outrageous atrocities. It cannot understand its actions as atrocities because it does not see suffering human beings on the other side but only an enemy, a thing to be exterminated. Once that ethical blindness to the underlying humanity of the people constructed as the enemy takes hold, rational argument cannot get leaders to change course.
That political struggles always involve two sides and that both sides construct a narrative to justify their actions does not mean, as Nietzsche argued, that there is no right and wrong but only clashes of perspective and afterwards the winner defines the truth. There are structures of power and those that benefit from them and those that suffer. Struggles are justified when ruling structures deprive groups of what they manifestly need as human beings: basic life-security and life-resources as well as control over social institutions where history has shown separate institutions to be necessary for basic life-security and access to life-resources. Perhaps we will evolve beyond nation states and distinct societies towards a new cosmopolitan system of political and social organization in the future. Right now, oppressed people and nations require control over their own state in order to protect themselves from the predations of the more powerful states in which they are forced to exist without rights, protection of the law, and, perhaps most importantly, respect as fellow human beings.
Struggling for the basic conditions of survival is to struggle for the most universal of human needs. Any group who enforces a system that structurally deprives other human beings of what they manifestly need because they belong to some demonized identity-group knowingly harms those victims. One can say, with justice, that they behave in an inhuman way. No one is obliged to suffer inhuman treatment meekly and without response. The hard part is to struggle against the inhuman structures and the groups who impose and maintain them without dehumanizing the opponent and conceiving liberation in terms of their liquidation and destruction.
I have been thinking about the ethical foundations of creative and transformative political struggle while working on a new book about the moral economy of peace. I was motivated to undertake the new work first by the political irrationality of the Russia-Ukraine war and convinced to continue by the on-going horror show provoked by the October 7th attacks. As part of this research I have recently been reading the work of B.S. Chimni, a Marxist critic of international law but also a sensitive thinker influenced by Gandhi’s philosophy of militant non-violence. Unlike most Marxists, Chimni is interested in the impact that different subjective ethical dispositions have on the effectiveness of struggles for fundamental social change. Reflecting on how he was led through Marx to Gandhi, Chimni wrote that he “wished to understand the meaning and salience of the relationship between self and social transformation. I was seeking a response to the question whether we can bring about human emancipation and protect nature by altering material structures alone or whether it requires an evolved ethical and spiritual self.” (“The Self, Modern Civilization, and International Law,” 1160) His reflections have convinced him that Gandhi’s general political-ethical argument was correct: history teaches that violence can change systems but not create the conditions for all-round human security, need-satisfaction, capacity realization, and life-enjoyment. Leaders who take it as their primary object to destroy the enemy rather than create the conditions for peaceful co-existence and mutually affirmative, egalitarian , creative interaction and relationships. New leaders might succeed in installing themselves in power, but will then prove incapable of ruling in the universal life-interest. History under such leaderships and movements thus ends up being an exchange of one tyranny for another.
Where we find progress in history it is not a function of the violent overthrow of dehumanized enemies but overcoming the structural constraints that existing institutions impose on the need-satisfying and life-serving use of resources. Progress has indeed required political struggle, but those struggles are progressive not because they kill a hated enemy but because they free resources for the sake of more comprehensive need-satisfaction, self-creation, and life-enjoyment. At the level of human interests, genuinely progressive struggles free the people who are the object of struggle too from their own prisons of ethical narrowness, one-sidedness, and hatred. It is easy to forget that Marx too taught that members of the ruling class were functions of the structures and dynamics of capitalism and that they too were alienated from what is most human in themselves. It is also true that he argued that the ruling classes were happy in their alienation, but that happiness is a delusion if it must be purchased at the cost of other people’s lives when an alternative that satisfies everyone’s shared life-interest is available. Socialism was not about liquidating the class enemy or smashing the state– cliches that resound most hollow when they are intoned by academics sitting safely in their campus offices far from the front lines. Socialism was about creating the conditions in which ‘the free development of each was the condition of the free development of all.” That goal cannot be achieved by people motivated primarily by hatred.
Politically, successful construction of a life-affirmative society requires patience. Patience is contrary to the passionate demand for justice. The sufferer wants an end to suffering right now; they want the complete restoration of what has been wrongly seized; they want, as Walter Benjamin insisted, vengeance for all their murdered ancestors. But the demands for absolute justice are contrary to the facts of human mortality and the pace of human historical progress. Horkheimer was correct to remind Benjamin that the dead are dead for ever; they cannot be brought back to life to enjoy the goods of which they were cruelly deprived. If hatred of what the enemy has done is used to fuel struggles oriented by the impossible goal of making good the sacrifice of earlier generations of victims they will succeed only in creating more victims on the other side. Instead they have to be directed against the system that crushed the dreams and extinguished the lives of past victims and proceed by the argument, expressed while looking the enemy squarely in the eyes, that it is never in the real interests of human beings to deprive other human beings of what they need and to protect that structure of oppressive deprivation by exterminatory violence.
The time is not always ripe for that sort of ethical-political argument. One can imagine the dead rejoicing at the final liberation of their community and one can hope that sheer force of will expressed as courage on the battlefield can accelerate historical change. Unfortunately, societies cannot be radically transformed until propitious objective conditions have emerged: the society cannot be ruled in the old way because its internal structures are collapsing, and the oppressed masses cannot tolerate being ruled in the old way. Hamas and Hezbollah have calculated that Israel is now in such a position. Hamas leader Yayah Sinwar claims that Hamas is prepared for a long war of attrition that will eventually break Israel’s will to fight. The evidence suggest, rather, that every militarized reaction from Hamas’s allies in the region increases Israel’s willingness to fight. Moreover, unlike America in Viet Nam and Afghanistan, Israelis are fighting on their home turf. No academic analogies about parallels between the settler colonialism societies built by Europeans in North and South America and Israel are going to change the facts of international law or the long view of Jewish history. Israel’s pre-1967 borders are legally legitimate and Jewish people have historical ties to those lands in ways that European settlers in the “new world” did not.
But the more important point is that everyone is where they are right now, and the task is not sending anyone elsewhere but addressing the legitimate historical grievances of the Palestinian people wrongly and violently dispossessed in 1948. The most powerful tool the Palestinians now have is the political force of world opinion which is turning more and more against Israel’s unjustifiable scorched earth policy in Gaza (and now Southern Lebanon), but the armed wing of the movement keeps giving Israel political room to breath by continuing an armed struggle that they are not in a position to win and exacts far greater costs from innocent Palestinian and Lebanese civilians than it imposes on Israelis. Both sides must somehow stop valorizing their struggle in terms of exacting a maximum price of pain from the enemy and instead find someway to begin reasoning with each other, starting from the premise that, since neither side is going anywhere, some sort of rapprochement is going to be necessary. If the problems can only be solved by negotiation and compromise, and every day that negotiations and compromise are delayed means more people who could have enjoyed a stable peace are killed and thus removed from the list of being capable of enjoying life, then reason dictates that negotiations should begin immediately. But the passions of enmity and mutual hatred fuel the self-righteousness that blocks recognition of the humanity of the other side. In the pressure of that boiling cauldron, abstract philosophical argument is insufficient to lower the temperature.
Still, philosophy is not useless. As Marx said, philosophy is of use where it becomes the servant of history. Here the history of the the supremely patient struggles of Canada’s First Nations might be instructive. They were betrayed by the Europeans they initially welcomed, their lands were stolen by violence and fraud, their cultures were marked for destruction, and yet they have endured. While they have used violence on occasion (the Northwest Rebellion), they have, for the most part, struggled politically and philosophically: they have argued, blockaded, maintained their traditions and languages against overwhelming odds; they have fought in court and in the media, and they have slowly begun to turn the tide. While in the abstract it might have been better for their societies had Europeans never arrived, they understand that the clock cannot be turned back. As Mohawk philosopher and activist Taiaiake Alfred has argued in this regard, there is little to be gained by personalizing historical problems. For that reason he says that he “is not a big fan of guilt as as a political tool. I think what guilt does is it paralyzes people, and it alienates people”(119, All About the Land). Instead, Alfred argues in favour of the descendants of the initial European colonial project to take collective responsibility for the historical fact that the wealth of the current country of Canada was generated through the violent expropriation of First Nations peoples. Collective responsibility has concrete implications: the treaties that were broken must be honoured and lands that were illegally seized must be returned. Treaties are “a fundamental agreement that is solemnized and recognizes the fundamental equality of the two parties.” Treaties create “commitment[s] on the part of the two parties to the agreement. It creates a commitment on the two parties to recognize both the independence of each other and the interdependency of each other on the land. That is what we mean by treaty in the Canadian context.”(118) Restoring Indigenous sovereignty over lands seized by violation of treaties that were purportedly negotiated in good faith does not mean that Canada as it currently exists must disappear; it means that it must be reinvented in a spirit of nation to nation equality and constructive creation for the sake of building a better confederation that is “good for everyone.”(169) Despite the violence Indigenous people have and continue to suffer, they have for the most part eschewed militarized forms of struggle, have survived, and are slowly winning the fight to restore their sovereignty over their traditional lands. One could always argue in the abstract that colonization should never have happened or that it should not have taken 500 years for wrongs to be righted. But history is indifferent to abstract argument. Colonization is a fact and the effects it had on Indigenous lifeways are not easy to undo. But I think that the changing relationship between Canada and the peoples of the First Nations is evidence that violence and mutual hatred can be overcome, if there are real efforts to overcome the structural problems imposed on the historically oppressed groups.
But in the Middle East any sort of constructive dialogue is lacking. Leaders on all sides will shout: the enemy is incapable of reason. To which one must respond: since no one is really talking (by which I mean, really listening) how does one know? Those same leaders will perhaps rejoin: talk is cheap, history proves that real change demands action. Indeed it does, but reason responds that negotiations are actions, concessions and compromises are actions, as are mass protests, strikes, blockades, and boycotts. The most momentous change of the last 50 years, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact happened almost without violence, because the objective conditions were such that the societies could not be maintained. No one who witnessed German youth smashing down the Berlin wall could believe that the Stasi were not gunning them down. And seeing that the Stasi were not gunning them down, those same youth did not pelt them with stones. Instead, East and West Berliners rushed towards each other and embraced and danced.
Well, they were all Germans, one could respond, and that obviously played a role. But it is even more true that we are all humans. When senses are attuned to reality we all know when other people are suffering: anguish sounds the same in every language because it is expressed in shrieks and sobs, not words. We all know when people have been unjustly deprived of what they need, and we all know, in general, what must be done to overcome that injustice. What we have not solved– but it is the most important thing– is how to make the changes that everyone, deep down, knows must be made, before tens or hundreds of thousands of people are killed by people trying to hold back the tides.
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