The primary moral response and natural inclination in the face of catastrophe is to think of the victims first. But the political calculus is more complex. Political leaders of sovereign and semi-sovereign national communities are responsible for the well-being of the people under their direct authority. At a moment of prolonged or severe crisis, malevolent state- and para-state actors are those who lead the people not out of or through, but straight into the abyss of their own making. The catastrophic conflict between Israel and Palestine represents that unique case of political leaders who, putting cruelty first, bear deep responsibility for the suffering of their own people. Indeed, public opinion surveys confirm that as much as Israelis hate Hamas and want to see the organization destroyed, they overwhelmingly want the hostages home and hold Netanyahu responsible for the disaster that fell upon them on October 7. Surveys confirm many Palestinians in Gaza blame Hamas for the catastrophic ruin, the violence and death that this war has brought upon them at the hands of Israel.
The critical analysist is challenged by extreme cognitive dissonance. How is one to hold two truths together simultaneously, the truth about the war and the death, human suffering, and political responsibility? How to do so without trying to explain, contextualize, justify, or obscure the cruelty of the one side by pointing to the cruelty of the other? The challenge requires a stereoscopic view, placing two pictures beside each other, without obscuring the other. Israel under Netanyahu and the ethnoreligious Zionist right and Gaza under Sinwar and Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, are mirror images of breathtaking political cruelty. The responsibility of each for the suffering of their own people lies at the core of the suffering they inflict on each other. Israel under Netanyahu and Palestine under Sinwar suggest the visual form of a diptych, a double image composed of two distinct panels, two portraits of monstrous cruelty, held together by the hinge of a self-inflicted catastrophe.
[I]
Measured in relation to brute civilian suffering and death, this is beyond reasonable doubt the cruelest war in the history of the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Hamas assault on October 7 was not an act of “terror” (a relatively isolated or random set of acts directly targeting violence by non-state actors against enemy-civilians). October 7 was a declaration of war, a crime against humanity, a mass atrocity event unprecedented in the country’s history. Civilian targets in Israel were deliberately attacked by Hamas, a para-state actor and governing body, a superbly organized para-military apparatus backed up by Iran, a violent state actor and regional superpower that, for over a decade, has brought only ruin to the region. The government of Israel responds with the overwhelming force of a sophisticated and technologically equipped modern army, killing many thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including children.
Claimed rights to “armed resistance” and “self-defense,” and cheap slogans like “river to the sea” and “total victory” are shameful covers that obscure critical questions regarding moral and political responsibility for the scope of this unprecedented violence and catastrophe. What did people think was going to happen? After the terrible onslaught by Hamas on October 7? As if Israel could just simply “manage the conflict” with the Palestinian people, “mowing the lawn,” while supporting Hamas rule in Gaza? Without either leadership offering a viable political horizon or way out to end the conflict between the two national communities? Did no one calculate the impact of any of this?
What stands out are two types of cruelty.
–The first type of cruelty is defined by political philosopher Judith Shklar as “the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear” (Ordinary Vices, pp.8-9). What Shklar calls an “ordinary vice” in politics, cruelty is manifested in the suffering one political community inflicts on another community, the suffering one community suffers at the hand of another. But cruelty is not simply “ordinary.” In her own estimation, Shklar posits cruelty as “the summum malum, the most evil of all the evil” (ibid). Looking at it in the form of a negative judgment, she writes, “[c]ruelty, like lying, repels instantly and easily because it is ‘ugly.’ It is a vice that disfigures human characters” (Ordinary Vices, p.9).
–The second type of cruelty in politics aggravates ordinary cruelty. It is what I would call “extra-ordinary cruelty.” Extra-ordinarily cruel is the spectacle of self-inflicted cruelty in politics, the abuse and ruin of one’s own people. Self-inflicted cruelty the gravest sin in politics, opposed to political virtue or excellence, namely the skill in governing that secures the welfare of the people, not their ruin and destruction. Perhaps the special domain of the “religious” in politics, as recognized many centuries ago by Montaigne and Montesquieu, cornerstone figures in Shklar’s own analysis, self-inflicted cruelty is psychically and socially self-mutilating.
Political communities are built upon cultural memory, contracts and compacts, and political horizons. They are supremely functional under normal conditions. With their own veins of violence and cruelty creating distinctive lines and patterns, these are the pillars that make possible the life of the polis. The related phenomenon of self-inflicted cruelty manifests itself in the abuse of cultural memory, the violation of social-civil contracts, and the closing-up of political horizons. Self-inflicted cruelty is a symptom and catalyst of uncontained crisis, social and psychic rot, a sign of radical malfunction; as if theorized by Freud. In political life, a disastrous course of action by a leadership cadre undermines the pillars that uphold the social form, exposing the entire political community to destruction and in a drive towards death.
The extraordinary cruelty laid bare by self-inflicted catastrophe is a symptom that underscores the surreal quality already present as latent in ordinary political life. Left to fester, self-inflicted cruelty draws extreme attention to the incoherence in norms observed by Shklar. “When one begins with cruelty,” she writes, “an enormous gap between private and public life seems to open up. It begins with the exposure of the feebleness and pettiness of the reasons offered for public enormities, and goes on to a sense that governments are unreal and remote from the actualities about which they appear to talk” (Ordinary Vices, 32).
[II]
In medieval philosophy, there is a distinction between primary and secondary causation. The secondary cause of a thing (an action, a state of affairs) is the one most immediately associated with the effect. The secondary cause of thing acts directly upon that thing to create an effect. The person who hits another person is the secondary cause of the suffering experienced by the person who suffers. But secondary causation operates within frameworks established by primary causation. The primary cause of an effect is the ultimate one. In relation to October 7 and the Hamas-Israel war, Israel and Hamas are the secondary cause of the hurt and violence, the catastrophe suffered by Palestine and the disaster suffered by Israel, respectively. Hamas attacked Israel and Israel attacks Hamas. But in the final analysis, the suffering is self-inflicted. Looked at critically at this terrible moment, Hamas stands out as the primary cause of the suffering of the Palestinian people while, at one and the same time, the government of Israel is the primary cause of the suffering of the people in Israel.
In so many respects, the government of Israel, not Hamas, is politically and morally responsible for the cruel suffering of the people in Israel on October 7 and after. This is to take seriously the claim that “auto-emancipation” constitutes the essence of political Zionism. A free people in their own land assumes responsibility for its own fate. The massacres in the south of Israel resulted from decisions made by Israeli military and political leaders over decades. Netanyahu and the religious right supported Hamas rule in Gaza; they did this intentionally in order to deepen Israeli annexation of the occupied West Bank, instead of seeking to secure a modus-vivendi with the Palestinian people under the rubric of a viable two-state solution. As prime minister, Netanyahu is ultimately responsible for the failures of the IDF. Netanyahu’s government left the border unprotected, abandoned the people in the south along the Gaza envelope. He has taken no responsibility for this failure. Cruel is the humanitarian disaster suffered by the Palestinian people in Gaza and the rioting and murdering of Palestinian civilians by settlers and soldiers in the occupied West Bank. Extraordinarily cruel is the willingness to sacrifice on the part of Netanyahu and the religious right the lives of Israeli hostages for the lie of “total victory.” Extraordinarily cruel is the conduct of Netanyahu to join forces with the extreme religious right, prepared to burn down the entire country for his own political and personal expedience. This cruel disaster is intensified by the self-inflicted international and regional isolation of the state and its citizens. Over the course of 2023, the IDF warned the government under Netanyahu about the possible/probable outbreak of a multi-front war against Israel if the government pursued the anti-judicial coup ripping up the social fabric of the country. Israel thought Hamas was contained and the conflict “managed.” Israel and the religious right under Netanyahu’s leadership have done more than Hamas and their Iranian backers to undermine state and society in Israel. Self-inflicted cruelty lies in the refusal to reach out to and work with potential allies in the region in the interest of peace and normalization, a two-state solution, and final resolution of this conflict. All Netanyahu and the ethnoreligious right have to offer the people of Israeli is a violent future of endless occupation and bloodshed, settlements and annexation, death and destruction.
In the final analysis, Hamas, not Israel, is responsible for the cruel toll in human life suffered by the people in Gaza brought upon them after the massacres and atrocities on October 7. The violence of October 7 was an autonomous political decision made by Hamas leaders acting on their own initiative. Since Oslo, Hamas terrorism against Israeli civilians helped crash the Oslo peace process, entrenching the occupation, followed by the siege of Gaza after the violent takeover by Hamas of the territory in 2007. Hamas helped destroy the Israeli left and solidifies the Israeli right and religious right, the very forces most inimical to Palestinian rights of self-determination within a negotiated settlement and compact. They do this intentionally. The direct targeting of civilians is also a cruel, strategic choice. Directed by political-military leaders, Hamas violence reflects no spontaneous or popular outbreak or resistance to occupation. Hamas violence against innocent civilians in Israel is cruelly calculated and organized action intended to demoralize, undermine, and destroy Israeli society. October 7 was a criminal miscalculation intended to provoke a violent regional and local reaction that would trigger a multi-front war against Israel while isolating Israel internationally. The extraordinarily cruel and self-inflicted cost in human life was calculated in advance. Unconcerned with human welfare of the people under its rule, Hamas invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a vast tunnel infrastructure meant to secure their own fighters in a war with Israel that they provoked, and which put their own civilian population in grave harm. Hamas is part of a larger axis committed to the destruction of Israel and willing to martyr the people for the total liberation of Palestine. Hamas, not Israel, is the responsible authority that launched a war that has destroyed Gaza. Left with no effective allies, the people of Gaza bear alone the cruel onslaught of Israeli state power and violence. All Hamas has to offer the Palestinian people is a self-imposed catastrophic future, endless war, violence, and dispossession.
The people who are victims to this conflict become cruel in their own suffering. Ordinary Palestinian people support violence as “armed resistance” while in denial about the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, including systemic sexual assault of Israeli women. Crowds of ordinary people came to participate in the massacres and rapes. Crowds in Gaza City joined in the abuse of Israeli hostages, parading the victims, and jeered at hostages released during the first hostage-prisoner exchange. Ordinary Israelis are apathetic and even hard about the suffering of civilians in Gaza, would be happy to see the complete obliteration of Gaza and the entire population starve. There is the abuse of prisoners of war, the petty cruelties and serious crimes of combat soldiers in the field, extraordinary settler violence, lawlessness and mayhem, and murder spiking in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli police attack citizens, including hostages and their families at rallies and demonstrations. Shklar was right to warn against the temptation “not only to identify with the victims, but to idealize them and to attribute improbable virtues to them as well” (Ordinary Vices, pp.14-15). She predicted what in Israel and Palestine today is “an endless exchange of cruelties between alternating tormentors and victims” (Ibid., p.19).
Illusions of “total victory” and “liberation” without any prospect of victory and liberation keep Israel and Palestine stuck in a new and violent version of the old status quo. The total terror and total fear created by October 7 and the Hamas-Israel war lock in place and volatize all the festering antinomies and hatreds between the two national communities. The depraved political leader is a symbol of society. Netanyahu and Sinwar mirror and sustain each other, each without empathy, without emotion, without regard for human life. Nothing is left but a politics of fear built on ruin and destruction. Everything is breaking, the old Israeli democratic ethos that once sustained the country and Palestinian society along with it. Again, I’m turning to Shklar who saw in fear the reduction of society into “mere reactive units of sensation” (Ordinary Vices, p.5).
[III]
October 7 and the Hamas-Israel war underscore the salience of what Shklar called a “liberalism of fear.” What she meant by the liberalism of fear is a political philosophy that begins with the simple summum malum of human cruelty, the fear it inspires, and the very fear of fear (“Liberalism of Fear” in Liberalism and the Moral Life edited by Nancy Rosenblum, p.29.). Shklar recognized that “putting cruelty first” is not a sufficient basis for political liberalism. It is but the necessary first principle, only “an act of moral intuition based on ample observation, on which liberalism can be built, especially at present” (ibid, 29-30). In Shklar’s formulation, a liberalism of fear puts limits, rights, and responsibilities on domestic state power and the exercise of political violence.
A liberalism of fear can serve as a doctrine for the exercise and imposition of state power at the international and regional level. In the face of this terrifying war, outside powers will need to impose a new social contract, a “peace of no choice,” whether the direct parties to the conflict like it or not. At a political and moral nadir, a “peace of no choice” would be based on the fear that the unprecedented violence and cruelty of this present moment puts the entire regional and international order at grave risk. The international community and regional partners must put an end to this cruelty for their own strategic interests. The Oslo process was a failure. There was not enough regional buy-in. The two parties were left to their own devices and unable to settle the conflict. There was no real fear of total war in the region. After this unprecedented assault on human life, there is now serious cause to impose a solution based on two state solution. This would respect Israeli and Palestinian rights to self-determination secured by international frameworks and regional alliances. Because the alternatives are terrifying.
As for writers, scholars, journalists, artists, activists, students, people with no effective power, a liberalism of fear means not being part of the problem. All of us are at wits’ end, whether we recognize it or not. There really is no clear political way forward after the horror and shock of October 7 and this terrible war. The two-state solution is dead in the water, the one-state reality a whirlpool. The only way forward towards a common good is to focus on the cruelty, the people who cause it and the people who suffer it. To do this without illusion is to understand that there is no clear end in sight, no clear way forward, no total victory, no simple solution. We should all of us want the release of hostages and a stop the war. And then what for the people of Israel and Palestine? Before being “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestine,” the protection of human life demands epistemic humility. For now, “Perhaps the best intellectual response is simply to write the history of the victims and victimizers as truthfully and accurately as possible. That may well be the most useful and enduring accomplishment.” But this is far from simple. As recognized by Shklar, “[No] history, however attentive to the evidence and however discriminating, can tell us how to think about victimhood. Putting cruelty first is only an incentive to do so; it also leaves us in a state of indecision and doubt. How are we to begin?” (“Liberalism of Fear,” p.23).
