Andrew Pessin
Clarity with Michael Oren, Dec. 15, 2023
“… those who answer “yes” to (Q) are not in much position to complain of the other side killing civilians. If they endorse civilian casualties when these are the direct target of the attack they can hardly object to civilian casualties as collateral damage from the targeting of military threats.”
This post is Part II in a two-part guest series from Andrew Pessin, Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College and Campus Bureau Editor for the Algemeiner.
In Part I, the question (Q) “Is it acceptable to slit babies’ throats, rape little girls, chop off of the hands and feet of teenagers, gouge out eyes, murder children in front of their parents, murder parents in front of their children then kidnap the children, bind entire families together then burn them alive, and livestream all the above—and worse—on a mass scale—in the pursuit of some political aim?” was posed. Read Part I here.
How would you respond to an openly genocidal terror group that doesn’t care about its own civilians?
So far I’ve argued that every decent human being must answer (Q) with an unqualified “no,” and that the “no” answer reveals the true nature of the Palestinian movement as a genocidal Islamist movement seeking to murder all Jews and destroy the West. Once you understand this then everything about the “conflict” looks different including, now, how one might think about Israel’s response to October 7.
If you can’t answer “no” to (Q), then you do not understand the actual threat that Israel faces, and thus cannot understand (and ought not to criticize) Israel’s response.
It’s common for anti-Israelists to insist that people have the right to “resist” their oppression, adding “by any means necessary” as a sanitized way to answer “yes” to (Q), thus justifying violence against Israel and Israelis. But now if people have the right to “resist” their oppression, people surely have the right to “resist” their extermination, and “by any means necessary.” On this view there would literally be no moral limits to what Israel can do in response to Hamas.
That the threat Hamas poses is precisely that of extermination is indisputable. From its founding charter to nearly every action and statement since, as we’ve seen, its goal has been clear. Hamas murdered and wounded many thousands of Israelis throughout the 1990s and 2000s in suicide bombings and other attacks. Since Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza Hamas has launched tens of thousands of rockets and started five full-fledged wars, in addition to perpetrating many individual terrorist attacks. Each war ended the same way, with Hamas still in power—after which Hamas then took the intervening time to rearm and get militarily stronger. October 7 escalated their program to a whole new, barbaric level, and they have promised to do it again and again until every Jew is eliminated.
… [To read the full article, click here]