The destruction and the hatred that underpin the situation in Gaza are mirrored in the discussion of what is happening there. For the rights and wrongs of what is happening, and the background to ceasefires and their fracture, are rehearsed and retold and fought over, with the same old stories of heroes and villains that have become familiar for the last half-century and more. The hatred on the ground is replayed in the media, sides taken and sides attacked in a replica of the conflict on the ground. To dare to say anything is to join a side; and to join one side invites attack from the other. This has the effect of polarizing opinion; and of silencing all but the hardiest of commentators. Indeed there are heroes and villains here: but now most of all there is grief and pity for the awful loss of life in Gaza, and the brutalizing of the participants, as the horrific events continue. And that grief and pity may drive a new account of heroes and villains, and serve to make things worse, and break the fragile efforts for peace. But there is something desperately wrong here in how evil and harm and injustice are conceptualized, a wrong which will perpetuate the tragedy of what is happening there indefinitely.
Tragedy, however, might help us to see things rather differently. Sophocles’ Antigone describes the aftermath of a civil war in Thebes, the city of Oedipus. Of Oedipus’ two sons, the elder, Eteocles, was challenged by the younger, Polyneices, for the kingship (this is another tragic tale: Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes), and in the ensuing carnage both were killed, amid the slaughter of many others. The Antigone describes the struggles of the return to the rule of law in the city, as Creon, Oedipus’ brother and now king, decrees that the body of Eteocles should be honourably buried, but the body of Polyneices, the upstart invader, should be left for carrion. In opposition to Creon, Antigone, Oedipus’ daughter, insists on giving burial rites to her brother: the action of the play turns on the conflict between Creon’s absolute insistence on the rule of law, and Antigone’s equally absolute insistence on her family duty. In the end no-one wins: Creon condemns Antigone to death, and with her dies Creon’s son. The impasse of the two opposed positions of principle constitutes the tragedy of the play: no good at all can come from it, and whatever the outcome, the lives of all concerned are irretrievably marred. Humanity, as the Chorus observes, may be too clever for its own good.
Many are the things of terror and wonder, yet none is more terrifying and wonderful than man. (Antigone 334)
The tragedy of the Antigone illuminates some of the passionate debate about Gaza. Sophocles’ play is contextualized by its past, by the fate of Oedipus and the pollution of his family. It revolves, thus, around its characters’ repeated representations of the past – representations of what has happened, of what is owed to justice, whether human or divine, insistent claims about who has wronged whom and why that matters. We see, here, just how pernicious these appeals to past wrongs can be – how the constant repeating of who did what to whom, and who did what first, itself drives the action of the play. The very insistence on justice looks to the past: and it is a backward look that blinds the protagonists to the future so far as to eliminate their future altogether. It is this very insistence on being right, on one principle trumping another, on taking sides and having a final ordered answer that precipitates the tragedy. Humanity is indeed too clever for its own good.
Whoever thinks that he alone is wise in thought or that in speech or spirit he has no peer – such a man will be laid bare, revealed as empty. (Antigone 705 ff., Haemon speaking to his father)
Recent discussions of the Israel/Palestine conflict seek to show justification for the actions of one side or another by describing the appalling wrongs that have undoubtedly be perpetrated by both sides. This description is itself taken to appeal to justice; and such appeals seek to enlist the observers on one side or the other, to adjudicate just who is the villain and who is the victim, on pain of a charge of inhumanity (if the appalling sufferings of Gaza are ignored) or of bigotry (if Israel’s right to self-defence is ignored). The disputes in the media echo the struggle on the ground; and they seem as irreconcilable. But this appeal to justice may do immeasurable harm. For, as Sophocles shows, thinking about justice in this way focusses the whole discussion on the past, and makes it blind to where the future might be reconstructed, from where things are right now. Justice, however, need not be – only or at all – about retribution. Instead, it can look to the future, to the ways in which a proper settlement may respect each of the citizens of each side, and may give each a life worth living. Justice of this kind should not insist on its past. Conflict and the search for retribution are about what each party has done; peace and the justice of fairness must be about the future. It will only be possible when the past is not brought in as a constant refrain, when retributive justice is not the dominant theme, not only of the conflict itself, but of the commentaries about it. History may be a lesson; but it is a dangerous ground for complaint.
The appeal to retributive justice not only focuses attention on the past; it also makes us forget the lessons of tragedy – that the human condition is one in which there may be no right answers, nor complete solutions, but where any outcome is mired in regret and muddle and compromise. For compromise may be the best we can manage in situations such as this. Here again some of the commentary on the situation is Gaza misleads us into thinking that there may be a determinate solution, a way of calculating what to do next. In part this is a question of taking sides; and in the present situation in Gaza, that serves to proliferate the problems (of victimization, of destruction, of bigotry and prejudice on either side). But in part it is encouraged by the commentaries which attend to numbers – the numbers of the dead, of the combatants, of the square miles of Gaza, of the years of the blockade, of the genocide of Jews or Palestinians present or past, of the executed, of the enlisted, of the cost of these wars to either side.
For the most part, these numbers are hard to comprehend. Do we really attend to the difference between the death of ten children and the death of twenty? Is the death of ten less appalling, really, than the death of twenty? Surely both are morally and emotionally shocking, in ways that are not quantified at all? But the numbers – and the fruitless debate about proportionality (on this see the sane remarks of Frances Kamm, http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/fm-kamm-taking-just-war-seriously-gaza, who nonetheless encourages the quantitative approach) -- suppose that there is an answer to the question whether the death of ten Palestinian children is or is not proportionate to Israel’s reasonable need to protect itself. Surely that question just does not have an answer that could be understood by a sane person? The practical calculation of action and outcome in terrible situations carries terrifying assumptions with it – assumptions that Sophocles, again, may help us to unthink.
The debate about ‘proportionality’, about whether the response of one side to the action of the other is ‘proportional’ and therefore somehow ‘morally permissible’, has the implication that if proportion is observed, then the action in question cannot be included in the list of the wrongs done by one side since it is somehow permissible ‘in the rules of war’. This making of a list of wrongs is, if I am right, itself responsible for precipitating tragedy: and the talk about the conflict itself precipitates its becoming worse. Moral philosophers are fond of thinking about such questions in ‘what if?’ ways: what if you are able to divert the train at the points and save five lives at the cost of one; what if to save those lives we need to murder someone else, and so forth. But in the dreadful case of Gaza, the ‘proportionality’ question seems to look like this: how many civilians (or children) is it permissible to kill in self-defence? Or how many lethal rockets fired into your territory is it proportionate to ignore? Or how many spies can you execute without trial without turning the balance of world opinion against you forever? Such questions are, surely, utterly grotesque. To suppose that they have a quantitative answer is, I suggest, itself a source of evil.
The grotesquerie arrives, I think, further back in the thinking about impossible situations like this, situations where the appeal to justice, to past wrongs and past crimes, pretends to be a proper accounting. Those appeals suppose that there is an answer to the summing of evils, that there is a right way out of here by exacting the right sort of penalties and acting in proportion. In the situations described by Sophocles there is no such right way; the tragedy arises from the assumption that there is, and from the assumption that appeals to the past can vindicate. The lesson, we might think, should be learned in the rhetoric about Israel and Gaza: both are wronged, and both are wrongdoers. There is injustice here, everywhere and at every turn. But tragedy resides in insisting that this is where the story ends. The possibility of peace, on the contrary, lies in the protagonists’, and their supporters’, finding it possible to stop counting, to stop rehearsing the wrongs done, to forget the past and its wrongs and shames, and to think instead about just distribution for the future – the future that some of the children of Palestine will not see.
Tragedy, however, might help us to see things rather differently. Sophocles’ Antigone describes the aftermath of a civil war in Thebes, the city of Oedipus. Of Oedipus’ two sons, the elder, Eteocles, was challenged by the younger, Polyneices, for the kingship (this is another tragic tale: Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes), and in the ensuing carnage both were killed, amid the slaughter of many others. The Antigone describes the struggles of the return to the rule of law in the city, as Creon, Oedipus’ brother and now king, decrees that the body of Eteocles should be honourably buried, but the body of Polyneices, the upstart invader, should be left for carrion. In opposition to Creon, Antigone, Oedipus’ daughter, insists on giving burial rites to her brother: the action of the play turns on the conflict between Creon’s absolute insistence on the rule of law, and Antigone’s equally absolute insistence on her family duty. In the end no-one wins: Creon condemns Antigone to death, and with her dies Creon’s son. The impasse of the two opposed positions of principle constitutes the tragedy of the play: no good at all can come from it, and whatever the outcome, the lives of all concerned are irretrievably marred. Humanity, as the Chorus observes, may be too clever for its own good.
Many are the things of terror and wonder, yet none is more terrifying and wonderful than man. (Antigone 334)
The tragedy of the Antigone illuminates some of the passionate debate about Gaza. Sophocles’ play is contextualized by its past, by the fate of Oedipus and the pollution of his family. It revolves, thus, around its characters’ repeated representations of the past – representations of what has happened, of what is owed to justice, whether human or divine, insistent claims about who has wronged whom and why that matters. We see, here, just how pernicious these appeals to past wrongs can be – how the constant repeating of who did what to whom, and who did what first, itself drives the action of the play. The very insistence on justice looks to the past: and it is a backward look that blinds the protagonists to the future so far as to eliminate their future altogether. It is this very insistence on being right, on one principle trumping another, on taking sides and having a final ordered answer that precipitates the tragedy. Humanity is indeed too clever for its own good.
Whoever thinks that he alone is wise in thought or that in speech or spirit he has no peer – such a man will be laid bare, revealed as empty. (Antigone 705 ff., Haemon speaking to his father)
Recent discussions of the Israel/Palestine conflict seek to show justification for the actions of one side or another by describing the appalling wrongs that have undoubtedly be perpetrated by both sides. This description is itself taken to appeal to justice; and such appeals seek to enlist the observers on one side or the other, to adjudicate just who is the villain and who is the victim, on pain of a charge of inhumanity (if the appalling sufferings of Gaza are ignored) or of bigotry (if Israel’s right to self-defence is ignored). The disputes in the media echo the struggle on the ground; and they seem as irreconcilable. But this appeal to justice may do immeasurable harm. For, as Sophocles shows, thinking about justice in this way focusses the whole discussion on the past, and makes it blind to where the future might be reconstructed, from where things are right now. Justice, however, need not be – only or at all – about retribution. Instead, it can look to the future, to the ways in which a proper settlement may respect each of the citizens of each side, and may give each a life worth living. Justice of this kind should not insist on its past. Conflict and the search for retribution are about what each party has done; peace and the justice of fairness must be about the future. It will only be possible when the past is not brought in as a constant refrain, when retributive justice is not the dominant theme, not only of the conflict itself, but of the commentaries about it. History may be a lesson; but it is a dangerous ground for complaint.
The appeal to retributive justice not only focuses attention on the past; it also makes us forget the lessons of tragedy – that the human condition is one in which there may be no right answers, nor complete solutions, but where any outcome is mired in regret and muddle and compromise. For compromise may be the best we can manage in situations such as this. Here again some of the commentary on the situation is Gaza misleads us into thinking that there may be a determinate solution, a way of calculating what to do next. In part this is a question of taking sides; and in the present situation in Gaza, that serves to proliferate the problems (of victimization, of destruction, of bigotry and prejudice on either side). But in part it is encouraged by the commentaries which attend to numbers – the numbers of the dead, of the combatants, of the square miles of Gaza, of the years of the blockade, of the genocide of Jews or Palestinians present or past, of the executed, of the enlisted, of the cost of these wars to either side.
For the most part, these numbers are hard to comprehend. Do we really attend to the difference between the death of ten children and the death of twenty? Is the death of ten less appalling, really, than the death of twenty? Surely both are morally and emotionally shocking, in ways that are not quantified at all? But the numbers – and the fruitless debate about proportionality (on this see the sane remarks of Frances Kamm, http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/fm-kamm-taking-just-war-seriously-gaza, who nonetheless encourages the quantitative approach) -- suppose that there is an answer to the question whether the death of ten Palestinian children is or is not proportionate to Israel’s reasonable need to protect itself. Surely that question just does not have an answer that could be understood by a sane person? The practical calculation of action and outcome in terrible situations carries terrifying assumptions with it – assumptions that Sophocles, again, may help us to unthink.
The debate about ‘proportionality’, about whether the response of one side to the action of the other is ‘proportional’ and therefore somehow ‘morally permissible’, has the implication that if proportion is observed, then the action in question cannot be included in the list of the wrongs done by one side since it is somehow permissible ‘in the rules of war’. This making of a list of wrongs is, if I am right, itself responsible for precipitating tragedy: and the talk about the conflict itself precipitates its becoming worse. Moral philosophers are fond of thinking about such questions in ‘what if?’ ways: what if you are able to divert the train at the points and save five lives at the cost of one; what if to save those lives we need to murder someone else, and so forth. But in the dreadful case of Gaza, the ‘proportionality’ question seems to look like this: how many civilians (or children) is it permissible to kill in self-defence? Or how many lethal rockets fired into your territory is it proportionate to ignore? Or how many spies can you execute without trial without turning the balance of world opinion against you forever? Such questions are, surely, utterly grotesque. To suppose that they have a quantitative answer is, I suggest, itself a source of evil.
The grotesquerie arrives, I think, further back in the thinking about impossible situations like this, situations where the appeal to justice, to past wrongs and past crimes, pretends to be a proper accounting. Those appeals suppose that there is an answer to the summing of evils, that there is a right way out of here by exacting the right sort of penalties and acting in proportion. In the situations described by Sophocles there is no such right way; the tragedy arises from the assumption that there is, and from the assumption that appeals to the past can vindicate. The lesson, we might think, should be learned in the rhetoric about Israel and Gaza: both are wronged, and both are wrongdoers. There is injustice here, everywhere and at every turn. But tragedy resides in insisting that this is where the story ends. The possibility of peace, on the contrary, lies in the protagonists’, and their supporters’, finding it possible to stop counting, to stop rehearsing the wrongs done, to forget the past and its wrongs and shames, and to think instead about just distribution for the future – the future that some of the children of Palestine will not see.
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