Having spent time under the Israeli occupation, where killings of the sort we saw in Minneapolis are a commonplace, I have just a few simple observations to offer about the killing of Renee Good. The first observation is that we should, in the light of what happened, reflect on the following fact. All human beings have an inalienable right of self-defense, including lethal self-defense, against initiatory assaults on their person that threaten life or limb. This entails that every person in the United States, regardless of citizenship status, has the inalienable and indeed legal right to use lethal force against ICE agents who engage in initiatory assaults that threaten life or limb.

Repeat that to yourself. You have the indefeasible right to kill any ICE agent who initiates an assault against you that threatens life or limb. Granted, the law narrows the exercise of this right to a very, very fine point. I’m not a lawyer, so I won’t try to give you precise legal advice. I’ll just say that the circumstances in which you can legally kill an ICE agent are few and far between. But the relevant, undeniable point is that they exist.

We should never forget this. We should normalize saying it, and normalize acting on it. We should normalize the idea that ICE agents are mortals, and that under certain conditions, we have both the moral and the legal right to kill them. This is not incitement to kill anyone. It’s an observation of moral and legal fact, or put differently, a deductively valid inference from an undeniable moral truth: if we have a right of self-defense, we have one against ICE. If you have trouble thinking this, or saying it, you’ve succumbed to totalitarian thinking. If you find yourself in this situation, my suggestion is that you go out and read Orwell’s Animal Farm, then remind yourself that you’re not a character in it.

Once you understand that, another fact will quickly come into view. For the next week or so, you’ll hear from politicians expressing great outrage at Renee Good’s death. These politicians will also gnash their death very loudly at ICE and its depredations.

That’s fine. I don’t begrudge them. But the hard fact is that the one thing they’ve never done is explicitly to codify our right of self-defense against ICE. There is no federal Right to Kill Wayward Federal Agents Act with the sort of cute acronym that our politicians are so fond of conjuring up. They’ve explicitly codified ICE’s right to kill you, but not the reverse. They’ve codified what happens to you if you kill an ICE agent or two, but left the reverse penalties very, very indeterminate. They’re very, very clear what happens if you say things that sound like “incitement.” But as for your right to fight back when it’s time to do so, they’re discreetly reticent. It’s almost as though they hope you won’t.

It’s worth asking why. Why is it that in the centuries they’ve had at their disposal, and the loud talk they’ve talked about protecting our interests, they’ve done so little to protect the most important interest of all? Why is it that of all the rights we supposedly enjoy in law and the constitution, our right to self-defense against government malefactors is nowhere mentioned in so many words? The best anyone can do is to identify that right within a clause of the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

People sometimes claim to have found a right of self-defense hiding in the penumbras of the phrase “right…to keep and bear arms,” but this is like trying to touch your nose by taking the long way around your head. The Amendment is primarily about the security of the State, secondarily about militias, and in a tertiary way about arms. As for the simple assertion that we human beings have an inalienable right of self-defense against all comers, it’s nowhere to be found–not here, and not anywhere else in the Constitution. Face it: constitutionally speaking, your life is a low priority.

Bullet holes, Deheisha Refugee Camp, West Bank

And yet, the legally undeniable fact is that if you pore through obscure volumes of far-flung judicial decisions, and read between the lines, no competent jurist or legislator can deny that every one of us has a right of self-defense against anyone, including federal law enforcement officers, at least when they initiate aggression against you to the point of threatening life or limb. The right is there, however scattered and inchoate and qualified its expression in the law. If an ICE agent threatens or attempts unlawfully to kill you in a manner indistinguishable from criminal assault or attempted murder, you can rightfully kill him. As I say, no one can legitimately deny that, and yet saying it causes conniptions within our ruling class. I could, for all I know, be arrested for writing it. But at this rate, I could be arrested for asserting that 2 + 2 = 4. There are limits to my reluctance to say the obvious.

The bottom line is this: ICE is protected against the threat posed to them by you and me and Renee Good, but none of us are protected against the threat posed to us by them. The legal presumption is that we pose a threat to them that requires that they have the means to kill us, but there is no comparable reverse presumption in the law. No one has written laws that ensure that we can shoot them in the face and walk away with the full confidence that the law has our backs. When we die, it’s tragic, but as far as our rulers are concerned, life goes on. Kill a member of the ruling class, or its wolf-pack guardians, and they freak out. Kill an ordinary person, and they fulminate awhile, then go to sleep.

Nothing will come of Renee Good’s death until we confront the fact that there are circumstances in which life cannot go on. A decision has to be made as to whose life must be extinguished. And what has to be made clear is that it is not obvious that in any clash between one of us and ICE, ours must always give way to theirs. There are times when their lives must be taken so that we can live. When you find yourself pausing over whether to enunciate a truth so obvious, you’ve reached a kind of moral dead end that demands a U turn.

Each of us has to consult their inner moral GPS and figure out where they are on this. Having spent ten years visiting the West Bank, where this has been a live issue for me, I figured things out a while ago. It’s axiomatic to me that government agents can act so as to deserve death, and axiomatic that when they do, we should weigh our options and if necessary kill them without apology or regret. I avidly follow the news of individual killings in the West Bank (often to figure out whether anyone I know has died), and feel neither glee nor sorrow when I see IDF soldiers killed by local Palestinians. I simply presume, defeasibly, that those who kill such people likely had a good reason to do so, if only from the sheer fact that the IDF is an army of conquest and occupation, and that its members deserve death for this reason alone. This thought neutralizes whatever sympathy I might have had for the “victims.” There is neither reason to gloat nor cry when they’re killed, just a reason to note the operation of justice in the world, to feel a tincture of satisfaction that it does operate, and move on. A similar thought applies to ICE agents.

I am not saying that anyone should go around indiscriminately killing anyone. I am saying that we lack any reason to feel sorry for the purveyors of initiated aggression. They have chosen a path that leads, often enough, to their deaths at the hands of the innocent. I don’t really believe in God, but I believe in him enough to say: God speed their voyage. This is the true and only meaning of the phrase “God bless America.” A just God would rid America of the plagues that beset it, like ICE; he blesses this country when, to whatever modest extent, he does. None of this is consolation for the death of Renee Good, but none of it is meant to be. Don’t console yourself. Understand that her fate is a future we all share. We are all marked for death. But on the bright side, so are her killers. Resilience lies in getting used to both facts, but in remembering which of them is deserved, and which not.