The Right and the Left on Racism (Column 5)
With God's help
Yesterday (Holocaust Remembrance Day), remarks by the Deputy Chief of Staff, Major General Yair Golan, were publicized at the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Massuah. He said that specifically on Holocaust Remembrance Day he is troubled by phenomena taking place among us that remind him of what happened there. The remarks, of course, elicited the predictable outrage (the Pavlovian reflex that follows every mention of the Holocaust), and of course also political criticism that divided, how could it be otherwise, between Right (which condemns and fumes) and Left (which supports).
On a radio program (Aharon Wizner's) that I heard this evening, he said that he had looked for interviewees from the Right who would be willing to express agreement with these remarks, or from the Left who would agree to criticize them, but found none. As the saying goes, Each river flows in its own way ('each river follows its own course'), and, in the words of the Sages, Truth will be absent—it will be made into many separate flocks ('truth will be absent'—it will split into separate camps). Many wonder why the question of racism in Israeli society is also divided between Right and Left. What is the connection between a political worldview and moral questions such as the attitude toward racism or the attitude toward an enemy or toward minorities? Wizner kept returning to this puzzlement again and again on his program, and therefore I decided to write this column.
Clearly, contrary to what is repeatedly said here, most of these phenomena have nothing whatsoever to do with racism. But clarifying what racism is—a clarification very much needed in our confused society—will be done another time. Below I will touch only on one aspect of this question.
It is also clear that there is dishonesty here, and an unwillingness to adopt a complex view, on both sides (see the first column I wrote here, on the soldier who shot. He too will return to us later in this discussion). People are not prepared to say: I am right-wing, but I oppose racist acts toward Arabs; or: I am left-wing, but I do not see these acts as racist (and perhaps I also do not see them as objectionable).
But here I would like to focus on a third aspect, which in a certain sense is the opposite of these two. My claim is that there is indeed a real connection between the dispute over these acts and political worldview, Right or Left. The 'complex' position is specifically not consistent in this case. To understand this, we need to examine a bit more closely the dispute between Right and Left, and what it is connected to. In particular, whether there are unexpected linkages—that is, issues over which Right and Left disagree even though apparently they should not.
The Example of Targeted Killings
Such linkages can be seen in abundance, since in our society everything is disputed between Right and Left. One representative example is the question of targeted killings. This too, as is known, is disputed between Right and Left. Here too one may of course ask why. After all, this is a moral question (is it proper to harm innocent people when trying to kill a terrorist who threatens us?). What does this have to do with political questions such as our right to the land and the like? Even socioeconomic questions, which traditionally are what divide Right and Left, do not seem connected to the political dispute. But perhaps I will deal with that another time.
To understand the question with respect to targeted killing, let us think about a concrete case. A terrorist who is, as it were, a ticking bomb is traveling in a car, and beside him are uninvolved Palestinian civilians (his son, his wife, or simply other people). If there is no other option, may I send a missile at the car and kill them all? The right-winger will of course say yes, whereas the left-winger will usually object (I am not saying that this is always so, but there is a strong correlation between the two domains). Why? What does this moral question have to do with the political dispute between Right and Left?
As I wrote in an article in Tzohar (issue 14, on Operation Defensive Shield), to the best of my understanding, the dispute over targeted killings is not a moral dispute but an ontological one (ontology is the doctrine of being: a field in philosophy, or metaphysics, that deals with the kinds of entities that exist in the world and the nature of being). To explain this briefly, I will preface by noting that in Jewish law (and it seems to me also in accepted moral conceptions) there are two principles that appear, at first glance, to contradict one another:
- It is forbidden to kill another person in order to save myself or someone else. A person does not save himself through another person's life (One must be killed rather than commit murder).
- The law of the pursuer.
At first glance there is a contradiction between them, for according to principle 2, in a situation of pursuit I kill the pursuer in order to save the life of the pursued, and this seems contrary to principle 1. I will not go into the resolution here, since the intuition about it is very clear. I will only say that under the law of the pursuer I kill the one who threatens—that is, the one who creates the danger to life—and this is permitted. By contrast, in case 1 I kill a third party (uninvolved) in order to save the life of a second party, and this is forbidden.
The question on the table is whether harming innocent people in the course of a targeted killing is the killing of a pursuer, in which case it is permitted, or the killing of a third party in order to save someone else's life, which is forbidden to do (even if he is a gentile. I will not go into that here).
Seemingly, it is clear that we are dealing here with harm to a third party, since these are uninvolved civilians. The only one who threatens me is the terrorist. So why do right-wingers think otherwise? Those among them who are committed to Jewish law should have been the first to oppose such an act, should they not? Incidentally, the soldier who shot also killed a person who was not threatening him, and in that sense there is a similar dispute here too (and there as well it is being waged, for some reason, between Right and Left).
It seems to me that the foundation of the dispute lies in the question of who stands before me. Is this a war that I am conducting against the Palestinian people as a collective, or am I fighting against several individuals who threaten me, each separately (as we are incessantly told: most Arabs are good and decent, and terrorism is, of course, the action of isolated individuals)? And here lies the dispute between a left-wing and a right-wing perspective.
The Ontological Dispute between Right and Left
My claim (which is of course a somewhat simplistic generalization, but I think there is a great deal of truth in it) is that a right-wing outlook proceeds from a collectivist point of departure. The ontology (the doctrine of being) of the Right is that collectives, such as nations, are entities that exist and act in the world. This is the basis of the right-wing political outlook (which sees the Land of Israel as an asset of our nation). Therefore the Right is also more nationalist. By contrast, the left-wing worldview places the individual at the center. It sees the land, at most, as a resource for the use of its citizens. Therefore it focuses on the rights of the citizen against the collective that seeks to trample him. The right-wing person sees the collective as an entity with significance and rights, and if we are speaking of the extreme Right, then the individual is only a means in the service of the collective (a complete absurdity in the eyes of the left-wing person, since on his view the collective is nothing more than the collection of individuals).
From this we can understand that a right-wing person sees the terrorists who threaten us as acting in the name of their collective. On his view, the war is against the Palestinian people and not against the isolated individuals who hold weapons. Therefore, from the standpoint of the right-wing person, the entire people facing us is a pursuer, since all of it is fighting against us. The one who holds the weapon is merely the practical arm that carries this out. If someone shoots at me, I certainly would not say that only his hand threatens me, but his legs are not guilty and therefore may not be harmed. When a collective object stands before me (like a human organism), all of it falls under the category of a pursuer. So too, in the opinion of people on the Right, harming a Palestinian civilian is harming a pursuer and not a third party. The pursuer is the entire Palestinian people, not only the one holding the weapon. Of course, if it is possible to kill the terrorist without harming others, there is no permission to harm them, but that is not because they are not pursuers; it is because even in the case of an ordinary pursuer, when it is possible to save the pursued without killing the pursuer (He can save him by injuring one of his limbs—that is, by disabling one of his limbs), there is no permission to kill him. Even a pursuer is not liable to death if that is not necessary in order to neutralize the threat.
By contrast, the ontology of the Left is based on an individualist conception, according to which there are in the world only individual persons. They are the ones who act, and it is to them, and only to them, that we must relate. Collectives, such as peoples and states, are at most useful fictions. This is a useful definition of collections of individuals. Therefore, from its standpoint, the enemy is only the one who is actually holding a weapon ('attacks by isolated individuals,' as we have already said). The others are uninvolved third parties whom one may not harm.
If so, the dispute that appears to be a moral dispute is actually an ontological one. Right and Left in fact agree on all the moral principles involved in this topic: it is forbidden to kill Reuven in order to save Shimon, unless Reuven is part of the threat to Shimon and killing him is necessary in order to save Shimon. So what, then, is the question in dispute? It is not the question of what is morally permitted and forbidden, but the ontological question: who is the 'Reuven' in our case? Are there collective Reuvens, or only individual ones? This is a dispute that deals with a metaphysical question—what entities there are in the world—and not with a moral question. The moral dispute is only a consequence, an implication of the ontological dispute.
Back to Yair Golan's Remarks
We may now perhaps understand the connection between the dispute over Golan's remarks and the political Right and Left. Viewing the phenomena that are occurring these days in this country as racism, and comparing them to what happened in Nazi Germany in the middle of the twentieth century, stems from seeing the war as a war between individuals. On a left-wing view, there is no justification whatsoever for harming innocent people, since they are a third party and uninvolved. Not for nothing did Yair Golan refer in his remarks to the soldier who shot (see on this in the first column of mine here). He saw in this a violation of the IDF's values and an act that has something in common with Nazi racism. The reason is that he sees the Palestinian who is not threatening us as a third party, innocent. In this sense he expressed, even if not consciously, a left-wing position, and therefore it is no wonder that people on the Left support his remarks. By the same token, it is not surprising that people on the Right criticize him.
In sum, there certainly is a connection between these issues. In the right-wing conception, these phenomena do not express racism, but at most excessive harm to a pursuer. I will say more than that: in right-wing eyes, even the ugly murder in the village of Duma (where Jews burned an Arab family's house and killed a baby) was not a racist act. It was done against the background of a real struggle and a genuine threat, although it was mistaken and unjustified, since it did not help that struggle and was not carried out under authority (see a similar distinction in the column on the soldier who shot). Again, this follows from seeing the war being waged here as a struggle between us and the Palestinian people, and not between us and a few isolated terrorists. The Left, of course, does not accept this.
Conclusion
Some readers may perhaps be able to infer where I stand in this dispute, but my main purpose here was the analysis itself and not the expression of a position about it. The seemingly puzzling connections between the political dispute and the moral disputes indicate that we are dealing with a dispute whose foundation lies in different ontological conceptions. Who is right? I am not dealing with that here. Is there one side here that is more or less moral? In my opinion, no. Both sides express identical moral positions, and the dispute exists only because of a different metaphysical way of seeing.