As if the start this past September of Jewish year 5775 wasn’t bad enough with the horrid fallout from Israel’s defending itself in Operation Protective Edge. (See my Editor’s Desk column in that month’s issue.) We now are going into secular year 2015 with a bunch of developments and arguments in the news that are making my brain and heart both ache.
Start with the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s “Detention and Interrogation Program,” released Dec. 9 and that will probably be forever known as “the torture report.” It reveals that, in the country that prides itself on the human rights statements of its founding documents, national government officials authorized and committed the brutalization of people and the denial of human rights for the supposed purpose of protecting the country from terrorist attacks.
I don’t know which is worse: the revelations of the sickening things done to the prisoners; the defense of these practices by mostly conservatives and Republicans; or the contention by at least one writer — Eric Posner, professor at the University of Chicago Law School — that the people who carried these out shouldn’t be prosecuted for these clearly illegal acts because that would “criminalize politics.” (His essay is on the Slate website.) Hasn’t “reasons of state” been the justification for tyrannical behavior since time immemorial? Is this country not supposed to be about “the rule of law” such that nobody should be exempt from it?
And yet — please do a thought experiment with me.
Imagine you are a national security person. You have in custody a man you have good reason to suspect is a terrorist who knows where a bomb is hidden and when it will explode. You are totally opposed on moral grounds to torture and will not use it or anything like it to get this person to talk. So you try to persuade him through other means, but he remains silent.
Then the bomb explodes. About 20 people die, and more than 100 are wounded, some maimed for life. Your prisoner hears of it and laughs, saying he knew all along about this bomb.
And then the injured and the families of the dead confront you and say: “Why didn’t you do everything you could have to protect us? Even if torture often doesn’t provide good intelligence, common sense says it must do so sometimes and you should have at least tried it. How could you make abstract morality and this enemy person’s rights and dignity more important than our right not to be victimized? You have failed willfully in your duty, and we are going to do everything we can to destroy your career and make you a community pariah.”
Could you say to these people: “The moral principle is that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil. Torture is so wrong that, yes, it is better that you were injured and your loved ones died than that I as an official of the United States should have tortured anyone.”
Would you be able to do that? I really don’t know if I would be able to do that.
The real choice?
Suffer evil or do it? I am starting to believe that this is the horrid choice that lots of people and nations have to make — and that Israel especially has been and is being forced to make.
I am also starting to believe that there is a difference between demanding this of oneself or of others. It is one thing to say, “It is better for me to endure evil than for me to commit it.” It is another for someone to say, “It is better for you to suffer evil than for me to do it even if my doing it will protect you.”
And it is yet something else for someone who is in no danger to say to someone else who is, “It is better for you to suffer evil than for you to do it even in self-defense.”
That brings me to what I think is the biggest local Jewish community news development of the past month. On Dec. 7, the new Milwaukee chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace held its first event.
Almost needless to say, this is a very controversial group. It disputes the “Zionist narrative” justifying Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and even supports the boycott-divestment-sanctions movement that appears to be primarily driven by people who want Israel destroyed.
Yet JVP also appears to embody an important national Jewish community phenomenon. If one of the speakers at this event, Lynn Pollack of the Chicago chapter, was telling the truth, Milwaukee is one of dozens of U.S. communities that recently have started or are starting new JVP chapters. It may represent a minority of U.S. Jewry, but it appears to be a growing minority and no longer a fringe.
So in the interest of reporting on the Jewish community as it really is, The Chronicle is giving one of its local members space in this issue to introduce the organization and make a case for why its members believe they are acting in good faith for the benefit of the Jewish community.
And yet, I was listening to Pollack and Rabbi Brant Rosen speak and some of the about 70 audience members — including some self-proclaimed non-Jews — ask questions. I heard them denounce Israeli “militarism” and claim that Judaism at its best is not about national sovereignty and can be practiced anywhere; claim that Jews have endured and prospered in the Diaspora, particularly in the United States, and don’t really need a Jewish state, and that the very idea is morally questionable; contend that Israel has failed to be a “safe haven” for Jews; and demand that whatever solution Israel and the Palestinians come to, it must include the Palestinian “right of return” and “equal rights for everyone.”
And I was thinking that these people are either incredibly ignorant and haven’t recently read a good history of anti-Semitism; or are incredibly naïve. But above all, I thought that they are besotted by the abstract moral principle “It is better to suffer evil than to do it.”
And these JVP members and “peaceniks” from a position of safety are demanding that Jewish people in real danger apply this principle to themselves, even if they have to suffer consequences that the JVP members will never have to face.
Both JVP and the “torture report” remind me of Thomas Babbington Macaulay. He was a 19th century British historian famous for his “History of England from the Reign of James II.” Some passages from that work are pertinent to Israel’s situation, including:
“[A] choice between evils is sometimes all that is left to human wisdom. A nation may be placed in such a situation … that what would, under ordinary circumstances, be justly condemned as persecution, may fall within the bounds of legitimate self-defense;…”
I don’t believe we can always say, “It is better to suffer evil than to do it.” And I certainly don’t think it is proper for people who are safe to tell people in danger, “It is better for you to suffer evil than for you to do it to defend yourself.”
But maybe these are false choices, and I am just not wise or insightful enough to see the alternatives? What do you think? Maybe after these and other news events, we need to start this particular New Year with such sobering questions, because it looks like 2015 is going to be asking them of us.
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