Moral Equivalence

 17/11/2023, 07:38 The Australian

Calling out Hamas evil demands moral clarity - HENRY ERGAS

Growing up in the shadow of the Second World War, I knew what an existential battle for survival meant. That war had been no ordinary contest. It was a struggle against an adversary so monstrous that the consequences of its final victory were literally beyond calculation. The laws of war required the suffering on the two sides to be constantly weighted – painfully, dreadfully, as the bombing of Dresden and the use of the atomic bomb brought home with stomach-wrenching force. But the enormity of the horrors that would have accompanied the Allies’ defeat ruled out easy judgments. There were no ready scales for comparing the harm a military decision could inflict on innocent civilians against the overbearing significance of freeing humanity from regimes that were the very embodiment of radical evil. When those regimes’ complete destruction finally wrenched a chance of peace out of the rubble of broken cities and the misery of broken lives, the world thought it had drawn the lessons. 

The United Nations, US president Harry Truman declared at the organisation’s founding conference, would “provide the machinery which will make future peace not only possible but certain”. And empowered by a newly established International Court of Justice, international law would be given the means to hold those who committed “crimes against the peace” accountable, removing the need for individual countries to wage punitive war. But the god of our dreams is also the god of our nightmares. From the slaughter fields of Ukraine to the charnel house that is Syria, those aspirations have gone up in flames. As the UN descends into irrelevance, the laws of war, which were intended to protect the innocent, are being used to shelter the terrorists who deliberately place them at risk. 

Hailed as a triumph of civilisation, they have become a tool facilitating barbarism’s relentless advance. That leaves the people of Israel once again facing the fearfulness, the sense of danger, the perception of the struggle’s ultimate character, which pervaded the memories in which I was raised. Like Hitler, Hamas has never hidden its genocidal intentions: the opening passage of its Covenant says “Israel will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”. And in one of his most authoritative texts, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, its recently deceased spiritual leader, wrote: “The latest punishment of the Jews was by Hitler; the next, with the help of Allah, will come from the Muslims.” Those goals have been there for all to see; what Hamas proved on October 7 was that for so long as its military capabilities remained intact, it would relentlessly pursue its interpretation of the Koran’s command to “plant terror in the heart of the enemies of Allah”, eroding, to the breaking point, the viability of Israelis’ daily lives. None of that implies the Palestinians have no grievances; but the Germans had their grievances too. It was, for example, undeniable that there were large German majorities in both the Sudetenland and Danzig, the crisis points of 1938 and 1939. When the Nazis demanded those territories, their claims were, much like Hamas’, couched – and this was the pretence – in the respectable language of self-determination. The London Times, in endorsing appeasement, had no difficulty in describing them as “justified by ethics and policy”. 

It was, however, a grotesque illusion to believe – as the appeasers did – that because no “government with the interests of its own people at heart would expose them to the horrors of war”, a territorial concession here, a bit more power there, would avoid “the ultimate evil of a general conflict”. For the Nazis’ goal was never a greater share of the pie; it was, exactly like the Islamists, to inaugurate, over the charred bodies of their adversaries, a new millennium. Moved not by want but by hate, they had no real interest in agreements, regarding them as mere tactics, all the better to subjugate the enemy. Hamas, which believes “Jews, who are by their nature liars, cannot keep a contract”, has felt free to breach every agreement it has ever entered into; the Nazis’ ethics, if one can call them that, were no better. Confronting them required moral clarity – the moral clarity to distinguish radical evil, which endangers everything that is decent in this world of ours, from ordinary enmity. Instead, the appeasers, by conjuring a moral equivalence between victims and executioners, sowed the confusion that  made the cataclysm all the more certain. 

Today, moral confusion yet again fills the air. And our government, far from correcting the confusion, compounds it – by repeatedly claiming, for example, that Israel, as a democracy, should be “held to a higher standard” than its adversaries. It is, however, surely obvious that the demands of morality do not depend on the nature of a regime: to believe the Holocaust was any less of a crime because it was committed by a dictatorship is so plainly contrary to moral principle and international law as to be absurd. But the “higher standard” claim was never intended to withstand intelligent scrutiny. A weapon disguised as a platitude, it smuggled in a double standard: one for Israel, another for Hamas. And by transforming the virtue of being a democracy into a vice, it served to justify the singleminded focus on Israel, which obscures, if it does not entirely occlude, the atrocities Hamas commits day after day, including by indiscriminately shelling Israeli homes, schools and hospitals. The babies in the hospitals of Gaza, who are the unintentional victims of a legitimate military operation, count; those in the hospitals of Israel, who are the intentional victims of terror attacks, don’t. No less egregious is the constant pairing of vicious anti-Semitism with the taunts some Muslim women have experienced for wearing hijabs. Those taunts are utterly despicable; but an abyss separates their severity from the menaces that have forced the Jewish community to guard creches, schools and synagogues from potentially deadly attack. To pretend otherwise is not merely foolish: by placing murderous rage on a par with ordinary stupidity, it trivialises – and hence excuses – the Jew-hating fury that disgraces our streets. 

The government argues that it is being even-handed, so as not to deepen current divisions. But its lack of clarity has the opposite effect: by relentlessly blurring the line between right and wrong, it gives Hamas’s supporters a legitimacy they do not deserve, fuelling the radicalisation that is tearing us apart. In the end, national unity demands moral direction, not moral equivocation. So too does our ability to face the future, for the unhinging of the nation’s moral compass doesn’t merely extinguish the courage to speak the truth: it erases the courage needed to see it. In a world that is far from being at peace, and where devastating cataclysms are not simply the painful memories of the old but looming threats to the young, that doesn’t just blind – it kills.