Q&A: Participating in demonstrations abroad
Participating in demonstrations abroad
Question
Hello Rabbi. In your opinion, is it morally permissible to demonstrate against a state and try to influence it from the outside when you are not part of it, meaning you live abroad? I’m not talking about a country committing moral atrocities, but more about policy considerations. The judicial reform could be an example, though of course not only that.
Answer
At first glance, it really is problematic, because you are making demands without bearing the consequences. But it’s hard to say that this is morally wrong. Demonstrations are all very well, but the country in question is the one that decides whether to respond to the demonstrators and what, in practice, to do with their demands. So they are only expressing a position, and that is legitimate. If they were coercing it, that would of course be problematic.
But this question is entirely hypothetical. I don’t know of a case where there is a demonstration against a country and it is not about a moral issue. For example, that people would demonstrate against Britain because they drive on the left side of the road, or because the king is 75 and not 50. As far as I can tell, demonstrations against a country are always on the moral plane.
Discussion on Answer
A. If they demonstrate, it will be because some moral issue is bothering them. You can argue about degree. A French citizen who expresses a position is not problematic at all. We are talking about a French citizen who demonstrates against the reform. That doesn’t seem odd to me at all, and it is certainly completely legitimate. Especially as long as there is no agreement about it in Israel. The Frenchman is protesting harm to Israeli citizens and their being trampled by the majority. What is the problem with that?
B. There is room to limit every kind of power. I objected to the example as though in a democracy there must be absolute equality among all citizens. Someone who contributes more naturally has greater power, and in my opinion that is perfectly fine. By the way, in Jewish law, power grants credibility — “it is in his hand” — which according to the Rosh is by virtue of ownership.
A. Okay, I still think it’s possible to distinguish between some of the cases. B. The question is whether the fact that there are so many ways of influencing things automatically makes the proposal to give extra power to the more influential merely theoretical, since you can’t really know who is more influential, compare fields of influence, and so on.
I didn’t write anywhere that I was proposing to give extra power to someone. The fact is that power is not distributed equally. That is not a proposal but a fact. What I wrote was that if someone has extra power, that does not necessarily violate the principle of equality, and there is no need to be alarmed by it.
A. Still, conceptually, it does seem possible to distinguish between issues that are moral in essence — let’s take an extreme example like genocide — and issues that have a moral dimension, but that is not the heart of the dispute. You’d agree with me that it would strike you as odd if a French citizen with no connection to Israel expressed a position regarding the reform, even though it also touches on moral matters. But it wouldn’t strike you as odd if he demonstrated against the Chinese…
B. Regarding what you wrote about doubt and statistics, that the power of an answer is greater: the question is whether there isn’t room to limit that, because influence can be measured in several ways. For example, there is no doubt that whoever founded ZAKA contributed a lot to the country, and yet his power to shut systems down is low. And the fact that an answer can shut systems down does not give it priority, because what we are looking for is a moral justification for why it counts more.