This piece by Jonathan Cook offers a straightforward defense of moral responsibility with respect to Israel (or, in principle, anything else): if you defend what it does, you share moral responsibility for what it does. Because “the West” collectively defends Israel so uncritically (particularly “Western” governments that give Israel both material and moral/political support), “the West” is complicit in Israel’s crimes in ways that it’s not complicit in other, equally unjust, or worse crimes. It’s legitimate in this context for citizens of “Western” governments to single Israel out for special criticism.

One legitimate motive for doing so is to avoid moral complicity in Israel’s crimes via support given to the governments that abet these crimes. There certainly are other, illegitimate motives as well, e.g., anti-Semitism. But the illegitimate motives don’t negate or cancel out the legitimate ones. Their existence just requires disavowal–once again, to avoid complicity in them. In fact, responsible partisans of the Palestinian cause have always disavowed anti-Semitism. It’s pro-Israel organizations, in North America as well as Europe (not to mention in Israel itself), that have served up endless rationalizations for Israel’s crimes, and endless defamations of its critics.

Omar Baddar on “Three Lies About Gaza.” Spot on.

It’s become common wisdom in American political discourse that what distinguishes Hamas’s military tactics from Israel’s is that Hamas deliberately targets civilians while Israel does not. Both halves of this assertion strike me as highly dubious. It’s hardly clear that Israel doesn’t target civilians, whether deliberately or recklessly, but let me save that topic for another day. What’s also unclear is that Hamas deliberately (as opposed to recklessly) targets civilians, but I’ll leave that one for another day as well. The assumption I want to focus on here is whether the targets Hamas is hitting are as unambiguously “civilian” as is widely assumed.

Put more precisely, the issue is whether the targets make or don’t make a causal contribution to combat, and if so, to what degree. A civilian leader who issues a command to his military may  ex hypothesi be a “civilian,” but in his role as commander-in-chief of his country’s military forces may also be responsible for military commands, and in that respect be a morally legitimate target in warfare. An ordinary civilian who makes a self-conscious moral or material contribution to combat undertaken by others, but shrinks from engaging in combat in himself, does not by his reluctance to fight immunize himself from being targeted. He’s taken actions of a kind that mark him out for targeting.

Well, “everyday” for me. Yes, believe it or not, this is the first installment in yet another one of my series that never quite sees completion. I have no idea how, or if, this one ends, but it was inspired (or counter-inspired) by a footnote on the definition of “table” in Michael Huemer’s Ethical Intutionism (p. 280, footnote 6, keyed to text in chapter 8, around p. 201). Huemer is not responsible for my wholesale rejection of his views on this matter. But I’ll get to that disagreement in a future installment. This post is mere philosophical groundclearing for the construction of that forthcoming “promenade among the grandeurs of the mind.”*

It’s that time of year again: warm weather is back, so it’s time for rioting in Jerusalem–also time for American journalists to write the usual uninformative stuff designed to mislead their audiences without coming out and writing literal falsehoods. This piece in The New York Times about recent riots in Jerusalem is a case in point, as informative for what it doesn’t say, and for the questions it fails to ask, as for any information it conveys.

My aim here is not to pick it apart. I’m in Jersey rather than Jerusalem right now, so there’s no way for me literally to contest the claims it makes. Nor is there any particular reason to do so. But having watched American correspondents misrepresent the Al Aqsa riots of 2017 while I was there, and then misrepresent the January 2019 anti-Orban demonstrations in Budapest when I was there, I’ve at least come to develop a sense of what questions to ask of any American news item purporting to describe such an event.