Gaza, Israel, and Genocide: Some Reflections

 

 

Is Israel committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza? What would it take to answer this question? And would Israel’s actions be any less morally obnoxious even if it is not committing genocide? These are some of the questions I wish to tackle in this post. I will argue that the evidence is unclear; that if Israel is committing genocide it is for the sake of two other goals (revenge and ethnic cleansing); and that regardless of whether Israel is committing genocide, what it is doing is morally revolting.

 

Let me begin by briefly rejecting three reasons as to why Israel is not committing genocide.

 

First, people tend to think of Israel as a country of supreme moral values. Why? Well, it is a safe haven for the Jews after the Holocaust, and victims cannot be victimizers. It is also allegedly (but falsely) the only democracy in the region, and democracies don't commit such horrendous deeds.

 

This reasoning is mistaken. There’s no reason why a victim cannot be a victimizer. Indeed, being a victim might make one refuse to tolerate any amount of harm toward one (“never again”) and to crush the entity committing the harm in the strongest and toughest of ways. Second, democracies have committed horrendous acts before. Consider American mass killings during the Vietnam war, American mass killings of Native Americans, and the Algerians killed by the French. There is also, for those of us who do not adopt the view that anything was morally permitted during World War II, the indiscriminate bombing of German and Japanese cities by the allies. That democracies do not commit atrocities is simply an article of faith. After all, who is to stop them, especially if the people who vote the leaders into office are themselves in the grip of a national hysteria about the enemy that they are fighting? Also, Israel is a country, a state, and like all other states it engages in whatever is politically convenient to maintain whatever it decides needs to be maintained. So there is no reason to think that its conduct is somehow above the usual conduct of other states. Finally, it has a record: its displacement of Palestinians in 1948, its occupation in 1967 of the West Bank and Gaza, and the moral ugliness that these two events have caused provide strong evidence that Israel’s conduct since 1948 has been far from decent. The history books are there for anyone to read.

 

(I don’t deny that Palestinians have engaged in morally atrocious acts: at the level of the conduct of war, both sides have committed horrible actions, though Israel has the lion’s share if we go by number of casualties and who has dispossessed whom.)

 

Second, one might argue that Israel is just defending itself against Hamas, so it is not committing genocide.

 

I do not wish to deny that Israel is defending itself. But it is also possible that it is not just defending itself, and if it is not just defending itself, then it can be engaged in more than one type of action at once: it can be defending itself and committing genocide. Indeed, even if Israel is just defending itself, it might be doing so in a morally abhorrent way: it might be defending itself by or through committing genocide. So this reason is not convincing.

 

Third, one can argue that Israel is not committing genocide because if Israel had wanted to commit genocide it could have done so before. Or that if Israel had wanted to commit genocide it could have done it much more quickly and efficiently than what it is doing now—after all, its military capabilities are quite powerful.

 

But just because Israel could have done something in the past does not mean that it is not doing it in the present, much like just because I could have eaten this apple yesterday does not mean that I am not eating it now. Perhaps the above reasoning assumes that genocide requires an intention (a point I will discuss shortly), and that if Israel had this intention, it would have acted on it already. But perhaps the intention to commit genocide came about after October 7, 2023. Or perhaps Israel always had the intention but was wary of acting on it and needed a cause (which October 7 provided). The point is that even if genocide requires an intention, the intention does not need to be long standing (it could be newly adopted), or that if it is long standing, there could be reasons why the entity committing the genocide had not acted on it before.

 

As to the point that Israel can commit genocide much faster than it is now allegedly committing: yes, this might be so. But just because Israel can commit genocide faster does not imply that it is not committing a slow genocide (since when do genocides have to be fast?). There could be various factors to prevent it from doing so. Annihilating an entire population in a matter of a few days can have its own costs (e.g., swift and actionable world condemnation), whereas elongating it can have its own benefits (e.g., claimed as part of a long process of war to defeat Hamas).

 

My point so far is not to argue that Israel is committing genocide, only that the reasons given for why it is not committing genocide are not convincing.

 

There is general legal and philosophical consensus that to commit genocide requires an intention to do so. (This intention need not use the term “genocide” and can be under be verbalized or thought of as “to kill or annihilate this society.”) Does Israel have the intention to commit genocide in Gaza? Many people have understandably resorted to the pronouncements of Israeli officials to that effect or that imply the intention to commit genocide. For example, the Israeli president Herzog said that “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.” The prime minister Netanyahu said that Israel is fighting the Amalek, a Biblical reference in which God orders the Jews (e.g., in Deuteronomy) to completely obliterate the Amalek (and their livestock, because, after all, the oxen are guilty, too). The defense minister Gallant said that Israel is fighting human animals. The agriculture minister Dichter said that “we are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba” (“the Nakba” refers to the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, when around 750,000 Palestinians left their lands and homes through a combination of fear and active expulsion campaigns by the Jewish militias at the time). The heritage minister, Eliyahu, said that there were “no uninvolved civilians” in Gaza. And Vaturi, the deputy Knesset speaker, said that Israel’s goal is “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”

 

Although some of these remarks exhibit genocidal desires, they need not express intentions. They can also be explained away (and they have been by Israeli apologists): the Amalek and the human animals, for example, need not be a reference to all Gazans, but only to Hamas fighters (somewhat of a stretch since the Biblical references were not only to Amalek fighters, but to the entire nation). Others can be attributed to passions running high, while others need not reflect official Israeli policy, even when uttered by members of the government, because it is one thing to mouth off, and another to officially declare government policy. I submit that such statements are not only reckless, but also reflect moral arrogance and a prevalent mentality among Israeli officials (and even laypeople, as evidenced by some TikTok videos) toward the humanity of Palestinians, the dispensability of their lives, and the willingness to do horrible things to them if necessary. Despite this, they do not provide an airtight case of an intention to commit genocide.

 

Intentions, however, need not be accessed only through verbal pronouncements. In the philosophical debate about artistic intentions, anti-intentionalists argue that we cannot chase after mental, private states in the artist’s head or trust what artists explicitly say about their artwork. Intentionalists reply that artistic intentions tend to be evident in the work itself. So we need only look to the artwork (and perhaps previous artworks by the same artist) to access the intentions and even figure out where the intentions might have misfired or been poorly executed. Whether intentionalists about art make a convincing case is debatable, but one thing they say is true, namely, and generally speaking, that we infer intentions from actions, not just from explicit verbal statements. It is the action that most crucially reflects the agent’s intentions (the agent in philosophical lingo is the person who commits the action). Indeed, if you constantly tell me that you love me but you also beat me up all the time, I’m hard pressed to not pick your actions as revealing what you truly feel about me. Actions, as we say, speak louder than words. This is not to say that verbal statements are not forms of actions (Ludwig Wittgenstein: “words are deeds”), only that we are not confined to them to access intentions, and they might not even be the primary go-to evidence for intentions.

 

Israel’s actions are no exception. Consider: Israel has cut off food, water, electricity to the Gaza Strip, and allows some rations to enter at will. Whatever rations it allows, they are miniscule and hard to administer under constant bombardment. Its bombing has targeted all and sundry and has caused the death (so far) of about 25,000 people and the maiming and orphaning of thousands of others. As I write this (January 25, 2024) Al-Jazeera reports that Israeli tanks “open fire on 200 people queued up for a delivery of desperately needed aid.” Israel’s bombardment has systematically and intentionally destroyed hospitals, schools, universities, libraries, government buildings, factories, mosques and churches, homes, and even cemeteries. To what will the Gazans return (if they are ever allowed to return)? Almost the entire social and cultural infrastructure of Gaza has been destroyed, and Israel is far from finishing its job. In short, Israel is engaging in the systematic destruction of Gaza’s “social, political, economic, cultural, demographic, and other conditions that make it possible for individuals to be linked together” as a group, that make it possible for them to continue to form a society (Mohammed Abed, “The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered,” Social Theory and Practice, vol. 41, no. 2, 2015, pp. 328-356, at p. 340).

 

One might argue that given that most Palestinian Gazans are still alive, Israel is not committing a genocide in Gaza. But, first, the bombing is not yet over. We do not know how things will end. Israel claims that its fight against Hamas is ongoing, so if it has a genocidal intention, it is still being “rolled out” (to use Dichter’s colorful expression, as if we are preparing for the Oscars). There’s also another possibility, which is that Israel’s intention of genocide ebbs and flows depending on how things go.

 

Second, we need not understand the genocide of a people to mean the physical death of most of its members. Instead, Israel can commit genocide on Palestinian Gazans by ensuring that they cannot form a group anymore by, say, scattering Gazans around the globe. (Apparently Israel is talking to some African states to receive exiled Gazans: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-negotiating-african-countries-expel-palestinians-gaza-report.) Mohammed Abed, in the article cited above, argues that not all mass murder is genocide (insofar as genocide targets groups) and not all genocide is mass murder. He gives the example (p. 338) of sterilizing the members of a group, which means, of course, that they can no longer have any descendants, which would be genocide that does not involve mass murder. What is crucial to genocide is that the members of a group cease to exist as a group. If that is the case, then Israel could be committing genocide in various ways: partly through mass murder, but partly through eviscerating Gazans as a group.

 

The point is that just because not enough Gazans have been killed does not show that there is no genocide (and, honestly, I don’t know how high the number has to be for it to be sufficient for genocide).

 

Still, it is unclear whether Israel is committing genocide because the evidence points to two other goals at which Israel is aiming, namely, revenge (or punishment) and ethnic cleansing. Both of these intentions can be inferred, quite clearly it seems to me, from its current actions and the history of this conflict.

 

So, first, Israel is punishing or taking revenge on the Palestinians as brutally as it can get away with for what Hamas has done (Herzog again: “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible”), not only for killing many Israelis on October 7, but also for wounding Israel’s pride and shattering its image as a highly militarily and technologically capable country—the best in the region, and one of the best in the world. Remember also that Hamas breached Israel’s territory by using quite unsophisticated devices and mechanisms. This must have been quite a slap in Israel’s face.

 

The second intention is the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Gaza. This would relieve Israel from having to deal with Gaza and would allow it to regain the strip as part of its land. Given the level of destruction wrought on Gaza and the number of people killed, we can infer that Israel intends to disperse the Gazans by sowing the terror of death and destruction in their hearts and lives, and by ensuring that they have little to return to. Whether the Gazans are eventually scattered or form a society elsewhere matters little to Israel. What matters is their displacement.

 

The destruction of Gaza, however, is not the only evidence. As I mentioned, the history of the conflict or what this conflict is about—territory—is another crucial piece of evidence. Since even before its establishment as a state, and throughout its existence, Israel has had to deal with the Palestinians, a people whose very presence calls into question, morally and otherwise, the Zionist project of settling historic Palestine and making it the Jewish state. Israel knows very well that Palestinians may press legitimate claims to the land, so the farther they are geographically and temporally from Israel, the weaker their claims are and the weaker that the Palestinians are able to press them.

 

Thus, that Israel has the intention of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians can be well explained by both its current actions and by its long-standing desire to ensure that historic Palestine is as Jewish as possible, which it can achieve by ensuring that the Palestinians are unable to make their case to the same land. In short, Israel is able to pull out one thorn from its side, namely, Gaza (the other thorn is the West Bank, which Israel has been slowly pulling out since 1967 through an active settlement program and all the accoutrements that come with this program).

 

Pro-Israelis like to claim that what Israel is doing in Gaza is just self-defense—that all this destruction and mayhem is to obliterate Hamas. The problem with this claim is that much of what Israel is doing in Gaza seems unrelated to this goal. For example, if, by Israel’s own claims, Hamas operates in the underground tunnels, it is difficult to see how the destruction of above-the-ground buildings helps fight Hamas. For another example, destroying the lives of an entire community, coupled with the refusal to give the Palestinians a proper state, will lead to another Hamas-like group rising from the rubble, once, or rather if, Israel completes this war.

 

One final point. One might wonder whether, just like Israel might be defending itself against Hamas by or through committing genocide (as I agreed above that this is a possibility), why can’t Israel take revenge and ethnically cleanse Gazans by or through committing genocide?

 

Israel can, of course, be doing this. One issue here is whether to commit genocide the genocide has to be done for its own sake or whether the genocide can be committed for the sake of another goal. I see no reason to insist that for an action to be genocide it has to be done for its own sake. Most of history’s examples, actually, are of the second type: of genocides committed for the sake of another goal, especially territorial or racial purification (from the victims of the genocide). So, yes, absolutely: Israel can be taking revenge and ethnically cleansing the Palestinians by or through committing genocide.

 

But consider the following thought experiment: suppose that, somehow, in one day, all Gazans were transported by God out of Gaza to some other territory. Would Israel chase them down and bombard them? Would it even try to dissolve their society without necessarily killing them? I doubt that. It does not seem to me that Israel is interested in killing Palestinians simply for the sake of killing them. It basically wants them out of its hair so it can claim the whole territory to itself. This means that if Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, it is for the sake of something else, which is ethnic cleansing and revenge.

 

Let’s not lose sight of a crucial point. Even if Israel is not committing genocide, what it is doing is in itself morally disgusting. The ethnic cleansing of Gaza of its inhabitants and erasing their history so that Israel—the “light unto the nations”—can be the Jewish state in all of historic Palestine is, as the Bible says, an abomination.

 

It Is the Occupation: A Reply to David Benatar

 

            As I write this, the Israeli bombardment of Gaza has killed more than 8,000 Palestinians, the overwhelming majority of whom are civilians. Indeed, Israel is intentionally killing civilians with massive and indiscriminate bombing, and the only reason we would doubt this is our instinctive trust in the morality of Israel’s actions, bred in the Western mind through years of thinking of Israel as an ethical state that, despite its being an alleged victim of Arab hostility, nevertheless manages to maintain its noble stance. Why would Israel intentionally kill civilians? Because it is lashing out in anger, because its pride at being the region’s strongest military force has been deeply wounded through the attack on October 7 by Hamas, and because it needs to prove that no deed shall go unpunished. Looked at this way, it is not surprising that Israel did not even try to hide its intentional killing of civilians: Israel’s military spokesman, Dan Hagari, stated that the heavy bombing of Gaza is to inflict damage, not to be accurate.

            Yet the image of Israel as an ethical state is deeply ingrained in the Western mind, bred through decades of thinking of Israel as a democracy (which it is, mostly), which implies that it must be good, or at least as good as other democracies are. This is supported by Israeli propaganda (“hasbara” in Hebrew) to the effect that Israel is the victim in a sea of Arab hostiles. And all this is further supported by the rightful sympathy we have for the Jewish people because of the Holocaust. Support for Israel runs deep. It runs deep among lay people, politicians, cultural makers and trend-setters, and, of course, intellectuals.

            David Benatar—one of the smartest philosophers alive, and an innovative and superb intellectual by any standard—has recently published an essay in Quillette defending Israel’s actions (“It’s Not the Occupation,” 21 October, 2023). Because of David’s intelligence and stature (I will allow myself to refer to him by his first name, since he and I know each other and have maintained an on-and-off correspondence over the years), his essay requires a response.

            David rejects the idea of the occupation as the general reason that explains (not justifies) Hamas’s attack because the occupation itself must be placed, according to him, in historical context, otherwise it would “explain nothing.” He seems to argue that the reason that there is an occupation is because Palestinians have always refused a Jewish state in Palestine. He refers to the Arab riots of 1929 that killed Jews as not having been the result of an occupation because there was no occupation then. The problem, according to David, was that Arabs just did not want a Jewish state. He writes, “The problem in 1929 was not ‘the occupation,’ but a refusal to accept any Jewish state in Palestine,” a refusal that contrasts with the Jewish acceptance (admittedly half-hearted at times, according to David) of the two-state solution found in the United Nations’ Partition Plan of 1947. He then compares this Arab rejection to Hamas’s rejection of a Jewish state in 2023, in that both are “rooted in the same claim that the Jewish state is a settler-colonial enterprise,” which he claims is false because Jews were not sent to settle Palestine by any country, because they themselves came from different parts of the world, and because they had ancestral ties to the land: “it is not colonization when those who are driven out of their land return to it.” There is also the issue of those Jews who came from Arab countries and Iran: they, according to David, are refugees, and “refugees and migrants are not colonialists.”

            Another reason, according to David, it is not the occupation is because the Gaza Strip is not under occupation. True, it has been under a blockade, which has brought “hardship” to Gazans, but this hardship is justified because Israel needs to control the flow of arms into Gaza. And although Israel continues to occupy the West Bank, Israel is not solely responsible for this because it “takes two sides to make peace.” The idea here seems to be that were the Palestinians willing to make peace, Israel would not be still occupying the West Bank. And to think that Israel can just unilaterally withdraw is foolish because we should learn the lessons from Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, which has proved to be fatal to Israel.

            David distinguishes himself from full-fledged pro-Israelis by nodding towards some blame that Israel has in all this, which is that it should control Jewish settler vigilante violence against Palestinians, and treat Palestinians with more dignity at Israeli checkpoints. So, yes, maintain the occupation but make it more dignified. (Of course, and to be fair to him, David is writing under the assumption that the occupation is necessary, hence a dignified occupation is a necessary evil. I won’t go into whether an occupation can be dignified.)

            Israel cannot lift the blockade or withdraw from the West Bank because that would be suicide for Israel’s Jews. The same is true for a one-state solution: “Not a single state in the Middle East rates even remotely as well as Israel still does in terms of liberal and democratic freedoms. What reason do we have for thinking that a unified Palestine would be any different, especially with antisemitic rejectionists like Hamas in the polity”? (David does not mention Jewish rejectionists and anti-liberal Jews.) David concludes that the burden of change falls on Hamas: “If it stopped behaving like the fundamentalist, repressive, terroristic regime that it is, and used its resources for building a nascent Palestinian state, it would bring greater prosperity to its citizens, gradually ease restrictions on its borders, and demonstrate that Palestine could exist peacefully alongside Israel. But that, of course, is not what Hamas wants.”

            It is astounding what political bias and a selective reading of history can do to a great mind such as David’s (the irony here is that David himself accuses those who support the “it’s the occupation” mantra of engaging in selective choosing of historical contexts, while he does it himself—but perhaps his essay was heavily edited by Quillette for length). Here are some replies.

            First, although it is true that some Palestinians in the 1929 riots killed Jews, and although this was morally wrong, they were reacting, as David knows, to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The issue here is whether the establishment of such a state was morally justified. From 1929 until the United Nations Partition Plan, various bodies concluded that such a state is unjust to the Palestinian inhabitants, such as Britain’s 1939 White Paper, which declared that the framers of the Mandate “in which the Balfour Declaration was embodied could not have intended that Palestine should be converted into a Jewish State against the will of the Arab population of the country.” But aside from what such bodies believed (they could have been wrong, after all), it is unclear why Palestinians should have had to divide their land with people who were almost all but outsiders to them, simply because this was the Jews’ ancestral land and because Jews were persecuted in some countries in the late 19^th century (Russia especially, where one branch of Zionism was born). The crucial thing to note here is that there was virtually no Palestinian hostility to Jews settling in Palestine prior to the Balfour declaration. Indeed, the relationship between them was overall well, with many Palestinians working as laborers in various Jewish farms. The problem arose when Zionism sought to have a state in historic Palestine, reflected in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and, even earlier, in the increasing Jewish immigration sponsored by Zionism, which was well-known to the Palestinians at the time as the movement that sought to establish a Jewish in Palestine. In this regard, and unlike the early Jewish settlements, Jewish settlements sponsored by the Jewish National Fund forbad the use of Arab labor in Zionist settlements. Thus, it is one thing to claim that the Palestinians were hostile to Jewish immigration to Palestine, and it is another to claim that they were hostile to it because it constituted the first steps toward establishing an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine, even if in only a part of historic Palestine, at a time when Jews were a small minority in the land and when the Jewish immigrants were seen as utterly foreign to the area.

            No one knows how history would have changed course had Zionism not insisted on a Jewish state in Palestine and had another Jewish representative body asked for a generous immigration policy. Given the amicable relations between Arabs and Jews at the time, I suspect that a limited immigration policy would not have been rejected. As a matter of fact, Palestinian leaders agreed to the limited Jewish immigration adumbrated in the 1939 White Paper. The issue here is not the justification of a Jewish state, period, but its justification in Palestine, a territory that had had its own inhabitants (including Palestinian Jews) for centuries. A moral Zionism would not have attempted to carve out a state only for Jews in a land whose majority population was Arab, despite the hardship that Jews had been undergoing and their ancestral ties to the land. A moral Zionism would have been content to allow those Jews who had wanted to immigrate and live on the land as co-citizens to do so (in this regard, there were cultural Zionists who were against the concept of an exclusive Jewish state). Alas, the mentality at the time was to look down on Arabs and Palestinians as backward, and to downplay, if not entirely neglect, their interests. Chaim Weizmann, Lord Rothschild (a wealthy British Zionist), and many others wanted all of Palestine to be a Jewish state, and argued against the wording of the Balfour declaration of having a Jewish state in Palestine, which implied that the state would be on only part of the territory. Moreover, the concept of transferring the Arab population out of Palestine was also alive (see on this point see Nur Masalha, A Land without a People: Israel, Transfer, and the Palestinians, 1949-1996). Quotations from Zionist leaders at the time are aplenty (Chaim Weizmann: “The Arab is primitive and believes what he is told.”) European Jews were heir to this mentality, despite their own hardship at the hands of other Europeans.

            Second, assuming that ancient history is accurate and that the Jews of today are descendants from the Jews of ancient times, why does David believe that if people were driven out of their land centuries ago they cannot colonize it centuries later it by taking it over from another people? What is the obstacle to being both a descendant and a colonizer? He seems to think that the fulcrum is being native to the land: that if Jews were inhabitants in the past, then by returning they cannot be colonizers.

But I am not convinced: genetic evidence, which is much stronger than any biblical history or archeological record, shows that all human beings descended from Africa. Does this make the modern European colonization attempts of Africa not colonization? Or consider a more recent case: If Muslims now returned to Spain and attempted to carve out parts of it for a state, with their own settler populations brought with them, they would clearly be colonizers. Perhaps the retort would be that Muslims were not the first inhabitants of Spain. Fair enough. But then why think that Jews were the first inhabitants of the lands of Canaan? The ancient history of that region is murky at best.

Moreover, even if Jews were natives to the land, the way that they return to it can be a form of colonization. It is true that no country sent the Jews to settle Palestine and that they came from different parts of the world. But it is not a conceptual truth that colonialism must be state-sponsored. Moreover, most Jews went to Palestine under the auspices of the various arms of the Zionist organization, including the Jewish National Fund. I see no reason an organization-sponsored program of taking land is not, let alone cannot be, a form of colonization. In addition, there were state-sponsored Jewish settlements in Palestine: Great Britain sponsored Jewish immigration to Palestine, and even Nazi Germany worked with Zionist groups to help Jews leave Germany for Israel (see on this Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine). Finally, Israel itself sponsored some form of colonization by moving Arab Jews into Israel: yes, some were refugees, but they were brought in (mostly in the early 1950s) under the auspices of a Zionist Israel, and there is no conceptual reason why a refugee cannot also be a pawn in a colonial settler state.

On this point, David should also consider the role that Israel and the Mossad played in helping create a Jewish Arab refugee problem in the Arab world. That history has yet to be fully told, though some Israeli historian have started the process: “The Jewish Agency ... sought ways to contribute to the instability of the Jewish community, and sent agents who planted bombs near synagogues in Baghdad, in order to create additional terror and insecurity. This did much to bring this ancient community of Babylon back to Zion” (Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine, p. 176; see also Abbas Shiblak, Iraqi Jews: A History of Mass Exodus, and Benny Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars: A History of Israel’s Intelligence Services.)

Another factor to consider is the culture of the people who are moving into a land inhabited by another culture: that is, that a people of cultures different from that of the current natives could be a factor in characterizing the settlements as a form of colonization. I say “could be” because these factors are all up for discussion. My concern is that David does not consider them in his haste to defend Israel. The only factor that matters to him seems to be Jews’ ancestral ties to the land, not how they came to it, not what they wanted to do with it given its current inhabitants, and not their different ways of life compared to the Palestinian inhabitants.

Third, David pays lip service to Jewish (“not always full-hearted”) acceptance of a two-state solution. But there is much evidence indicating that many Israeli leaders wanted the entire territory, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, and that acceptance of a two-state solution was a temporary move at best (see Benny Morris, 1948 and After, and Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine). Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank is testimony to this: it jumped on the slightest provocation to invade the West Bank in 1967 and have not let go of it since then (see Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall, ch. 6).

Fourth, let us assume that the Palestinians were wrong to reject the United Nations Partition Plan and that they were not even morally justified (a tall order) to do so. That was in 1948, and today we are in 2023. What was morally justified then in terms of rejecting a nascent Jewish state is no longer so today. Lots of things have changed since then, and Palestinian rejection in 1948 is not the same as their rejection of 2023, so a leap from 1948 to 2023 elides a lot of crucial history. Israel is now a sovereign nation, with generations of Israelis who have been born and raised there, with their own ways of life, language, and all the other cultural and political aspects of a nation-state. Very few Palestinians think that they can (or even desire to) get rid of Israel. This is so for several reasons: (1) Israel is militarily one of the most powerful nations in the world, and it can depend, if it needs to, on virtually unlimited U.S. support. (2) Israel has the political backing of almost the entire world. (3) This backing includes most Arab states who have made their peace with the idea that Israel is here to stay—no Arab country today even imagines itself going to war. Not even Iran (decidedly not an Arab country) would go to war with Israel given the latter’s nuclear arsenal. Even Syria, supposedly the only remaining Arab country with a hostile posture toward Israel, was on the verge of completing peace talks with Israel during the regime of the current president’s father, and the stumbling block was who gets access to the waters of Lake Tiberius. And most important, (4) The Palestinian leadership, since 1967, has accepted Israel’s existence, either formally or informally, and was willing to have a state in what remained of historic Palestine. To compare the rejectionism of today with the rejectionism of 1948 betrays a lack of historical perspective, a lack of sensitivity to how things have changed during these years, and motivated (perhaps) by the desire to defend Israel no matter what.

Why is this important? It is important because since 1948, and since 1967 especially, successive attempts have been made to have a Palestinian state, all of which have failed for one main reason: Israel’s double-consciousness of having as much land as it can have, and of wanting peace with its neighbors so it can live with some ease and peace of mind. But note that Israel, soon after it acquired the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1948, started a settlement program that has since then increased with every successive Israeli government, including and especially labor-led governments. Indeed, as soon as Israel occupied the new territories, Levi Eshkol, the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, declared, “there should be no illusion that Israel is prepared to return to the conditions that existed a week ago [when Israel did not have the territories].” Israel’s settlement program belies its claims that it wants peace—at the very least, it sits in tension with that claim.

The settlement program, if you think about it for a minute, is mind-boggling if placed next to the idea that Israel wants peace: Did Israel not know that moving Jewish settlers into Palestinian territories would create friction and violence? As cynical as it sounds, one cannot help but think that this was all planned: move in settlers, expect Palestinians to be upset, move in more settlers, expect violence, and then cry “Foul!” and deny that Palestinians really want peace. This is, in essence, the game that Israel has been playing since 1967. From the start, Israel never wanted a two-state solution, as evidenced in the sayings of Zionist leadership in 1948 and Israel’s on-the-ground actions: if Israel had really wanted a two-state solution, it would have never settled the West Bank, certainly not to the extent that it has, and it would not have annexed East Jerusalem after heavily settling Jews in it and in its surroundings. Indeed, Jewish settlements are today vast and are planned in such a way as to make the West Bank look like Swiss cheese, not to mention all the apartheid-like separation of the Palestinians from the Israeli Jews there. It is virtually impossible to have a territorially coherent state in the West Bank. And lest someone trots out the removal of the settlers from Gaza as evidence that Israel is interested in peace, a reminder that the Gaza Strip (and the Sinai Peninsula for that matter) were never as important to Israel as the West Bank (and the Golan Heights, mostly for strategic military reasons). Israel’s desire to keep the West Bank, especially for religious and historical reasons, is deeper than its desires for Gaza.

One expected response is to bring up the various accords that have been agreed to between Israel and the Palestinian leadership that have gone nowhere. So the temptation is to mention the Oslo Accords and the Camp David talks, especially the latter, which were scuttled at the last minute and after which Ehud Barak, the Israeli Prime Minister then, accused the Palestinians of not wanting peace because he offered them more than any previous prime minister has and they still rejected the offer. What happened at Camp David is still in dispute, though one issue seems to have been that even though Barak gave the Palestinians a generous offer, it was only comparatively so, and it did not satisfy Palestinian aspirations for a proper state. Moreover, there seems to have been a disagreement about clarifying the meaning of certain words, such as “control,” “sovereignty,” and “authority,” with Israel preferring to leave them vague and the Palestinians insisting on clarity. Part of the Palestinian leadership’s insistence on certain things must be understood with the background of the failure of previous agreements to bring the Palestinian people any real progress. Simply put, Arafat was worried about taking to his people yet another half-baked agreement that does not give them true sovereignty and that does not address major issues, such as the status of Jerusalem and the refugee problem. Part of the Israeli hesitation for clarification seems to have been Barak’s fear of going back to the Israeli public with a clear agreement that would anger it and undermine his ability to run again for prime minister. (An excellent account is Clayton Swisher’s The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Process.)

I have gone into some detail about the history of the conflict to make three points. First, anyone who wishes to write intelligently and insightfully about this conflict needs to know their history. We cannot jump from 1948 to 2023 as if nothing has changed and as if the sole reason for the stalemate is Palestinian rejectionism, which is what David seems to imply.

Second, the Palestinian situation since 1948 has been steadily worsening, as any person who cares to objectively look at this conflict can easily surmise, with little hope for any just ending. Simply put, most Palestinians do not see a light at the end of the tunnel. So, when supporters of Palestine claim that “it is the occupation,” we should not understand this slogan narrowly, to refer to actual Israeli boots on the ground. We should understand it as referring to an entire system of political, economic, and practical measures that have kept the Palestinians in a chokehold. This is what we mean when say that it is the occupation. Indeed, my colleague Tom Kapitan, may he rest in peace, has argued that what Israel has done to the Palestinians (regardless of specific military actions) is structural terrorism (see the chapter “Terrorism” in our co-authored The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Philosophical Essays on Self-Determination, Terrorism, and the One-State Solution).

David chooses to understand “the occupation” narrowly when it comes to Gaza, and he admits it, but is somehow not moved by it, when it comes to the West Bank. I am not sure why this is. Perhaps Jewish aspirations are, to some people, more important than Palestinian aspirations. Perhaps Jews’ ability to have a state of their own is much more important than the Palestinians’. Either way, to ignore the Palestinian desire for some modicum measure of justice to what has been happening to them since 1948 is not just to ignore history and its lessons, it is to engage in moral self-indulgence at the expense of an entire population.

This brings me to my third point. David’s claim that the occupation doesn’t explain Hamas’s actions fails because the reason Hamas is attractive is the occupation and the sense of hopelessness it perpetuates. To prevent future massacres by Hamas, or other groups that will certainly replace it if Hamas were to be destroyed, is to give Palestinians and their Jewish allies in Israel and elsewhere hope.

A comparison to the war in Ukraine is helpful. Ukrainian leadership has largely avoided the moral slide into committing atrocities against Russian civilians, not because Ukrainians are a particularly ethical people. They avoided a catastrophic descent into inhumanity primarily because the Ukrainian population can still see a light at the end of the tunnel, albeit barely. If the Western support decisively falters, Russia overwhelms Ukraine, and that light gives way to complete darkness, Ukrainians will also start killing Russian men, women and children indiscriminately.

Sun Tzu, the celebrated Chinese tactician and philosopher, famously counseled the students of war to always give adversaries a bridge to retreat across. In denying them their own state, Israel and its western allies are refusing that bridge to Palestinians. They then blame Palestinians for losing their moral composure to hopelessness. This attitude lacks humaneness. Nothing will change unless Palestinians are given that bridge to their own state, to their own free and dignified future. Otherwise, innocents on both sides will continue being slaughtered by Israel, by Hamas, or by some other entity that replaces it. This is not what anyone with a heart wants, especially David, although that’s the foreseeable consequence of the position he takes.

Thus, even if the leadership and cadres of Hamas were to be uprooted, other will replace them. If they do not call themselves “Hamas,” they will use another name. We cannot act as if by treating the symptoms we have treated the disease. And that disease has been incubating and spreading for over seven decades, over seven decades of denial of justice to the Palestinians. As my Lyft driver from Nepal said to me two days ago, “These people need their justice.” It pretty much sums it up.

Anyone who wishes to address this conflict must understand the level of destitution that the Palestinians have come to, what years and years of Israeli military brutality, denial of rights, ridicule, and portrayal of them as terrorists have done to their psyche. It is a miracle that there are still many reasonable voices among them.

So yes, David, it is the occupation.

 

Special thanks to Burkay Ozturk and Rima Kapitan for comments and suggestions.

 

The Palestinian Catastrophe

 

            Anyone who is remotely familiar with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will recognize the title’s reference to the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 (“al-nakba” in Arabic, pronounced “an-nakbah”), when they were driven away from their lands and homes by the Jewish militias at the time under Plan Dalet, which was a master plan developed by the Jewish leadership to take control of areas in historic Palestine that went beyond what the UN Partition Plan of 1947 allotted to the Jews. The controversial part is that it is not known whether the plan aimed to expel the Palestinians so as to make the state as Jewish as possible (given Jewish goals at the time, and given the racist attitudes toward the natives at the time, I would not be surprised that it did so aim) or whether the expulsion happened during the heat of the battle. Either way, the outcome was the same: the dispossession of over 700,000 Palestinians and Israel’s subsequent refusal to allow them to return, and whose descendants now live outside Palestine, either languishing in refugee camps or, the luckier ones, have made better lives for themselves outside a refugee camp.

            However, the Palestinian catastrophe is not confined to what happened in 1948. It continues to this day because no fair and satisfactory solution to the original catastrophe has been found. Palestinians continue to languish in refugee camps, or live under Israeli occupation (the West Bank and East Jerusalem) as Israel chips away at their future state by adding more and more settlements, or they live in the “open air prison” that is the Gaza Strip. The main problem for this continuing catastrophe is not, as pro-Israelis like to say, Arab anti-Semitism or Hamas’s hatred for Israel. Groups like Hamas come and go (Hamas itself was born in 1987, some 40 years after the original catastrophe), and they will continue to come and go as long as the major issue is not addressed, which is Palestinian dispossession of land and of rights. Instead, the main problem is Israel’s double-consciousness: on the one hand, its desire to live in peace among its neighbors (not so much for the neighbors’ own sake as much as for Israel’s, though here I would not hold Israel to a higher bar than I would hold any other country), and, on the other, its desire to augment its territory, to increase its area so as to reach what it believes is its historically anointed land (Jews differ on what its borders should be). The problem is exacerbated by the number of Arab countries who were and are willing to normalize relations with Israel without conditioning this normalization on the realization of a viable, independent Palestinian state. (Here, I see Iran’s machinations behind the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, which is to scuttle, at least temporarily, Saudi Arabia’s and Israel’s normalization of their relationship.) In this respect, Arab regimes have failed miserably to come to the aid of their fellow Palestinians, and not a single Arab leader, despite the occasional bombastic rhetoric over the years, has had the genuine interests of the Palestinians at heart, at least not deeply enough to compromise his country’s national interests.

            It is an interesting fact that Israel has been more than willing to have peace treaties with surrounding Arab states, despite past and current hostilities, but not offer a single genuine peace treaty to the Palestinians. For example, the most famous one, the Oslo agreement, proved to be nothing but a ploy to get Palestinian leaders, who, after years of having been deprived of it, were enamored with the power of statesmanship, to do Israel’s bidding while getting little in return (Edward Said anticipated all this and was one of the first people to cry “Foul!” when the Oslo Accords were signed). The reason why Israel is willing to make peace with past enemies but not with the Palestinians is territory: Israel wants no territories from Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and even from Syria and Lebanon (though the Golan Heights and who has access to Lake Tiberius will surely prove a sticking point in future negotiations with Syria, as they have proven in the past).

            Things are different with the Palestinians precisely because of territory: Israel wants Jerusalem and the West Bank and, perhaps, Gaza. But those pesky Palestinians continue to prove a thorn in Israel’s side, a practical, political, and moral thorn. How so? Well, they exist. Their very existence is a constant reminder to Israel of what it has done to an entire people whose land it has taken. I can believe all I want that this land is mine, has always been mine, and that, to top things off, God has promised it to me. But then what do I do with those other people (talk about the problem of “the Other”!) who have come to inhabit this land and live on it generation after generation? The only way for Israel to solve this issue without (much) moral remainder is to give the Palestinians their own state. But, of course, this would mean giving up on the West Bank, and that Israel does not want to do.

            So Israel has maintained the idea that the Palestinians, led by groups like Hamas, want its destruction. I write “maintained” because I have no doubt that this was true early on, when hopes were high that Palestine can be restored to its rightful owners (and before you scream “Bloody murderers” at the Palestinians, remember that it was their land that was taken from them and given to immigrants from Europe, in as need of a safe haven as they might have been, and remember that the destruction was for the state of Israel, as a state, not the murder of Jews). But that was 75 years ago, and now few Palestinians believe that they can get rid of Israel. The most that they can hope for is a single state for both people, and, failing that, a state of their own in part of what used to be their land. Moreover, Palestinians have worked with enough Israeli Jews over the years to know that this mutual living can be accomplished. But the idea that the Palestinians are bent on the destruction of Israel is a useful device for Israel to maintain because it gives it the excuse to continue to acquire land at the expense of the Palestinians while posturing that it is all the Palestinians’ fault. Hence the mantra, by successive Israeli prime ministers since Rabin, that “we have gave them what they wanted and they still attack us.” Never mind that what Israel has given was always accompanied by taking something in return, and that the taking was more than the giving.

            The ideal outcome for Israel—let’s be frank about this—is maximum land acquisition with the fewest Palestinians. This is not a secret to anyone who knows the history of the conflict and what Israeli leaders said about their goals early on. No, not all of them were of one mind about this maximalist solution, but the idea of a Jewish state depends on the idea of a land “without a people” (though, unfortunately, the “without” has to be achieved after the land has been acquired; God, despite His promise to His chosen ones, did not provide them with a land already-without-a-people). This ideal helps Israel achieve its dream of a Jewish state from the sea to the river, while at the same taking out the thorn from its side, regardless of the morality of this pseudo-surgical procedure. Recent voices in successive right wing governments have not wasted time in re-iterating this vision.

            So now Hamas—stupidly, immorally, short-sightedly, recklessly—gave Israel the excuse it needs: the utter destruction of the Gaza Strip without many vociferous objections from the world (though there are some whimpering ones), whose guilt for the Holocaust still silences everyone but the brazen. Israel can now depopulate the Gaza Strip of as many of its inhabitants as it can. Incidentally, Israel does not care about killing Palestinians if it can get them to leave, which is precisely what it is doing by giving them safe passage out of Gaza. It’s a brilliant move if you think about it: under humanitarian guise, Israel, in infinite mercy and compassion, allows the Palestinians to flee with their lives. Egypt will eventually have to take them in (what else can Egypt do?) and good luck expecting Israel to allow them back in. This is a repeat of what happened in 1948. The fewer Palestinians, the better for Israel. Yes, it pays a moral price, but why would Israel care about morality when its entire moral compass has pointed to only its own people? (Here, again, we should not hold Israel to a higher bar than we do other states, were it not for the fact that those people that Israel continues to kick out belong to the land it currently inhabits.) As to the West Bank, only an eternal optimist cannot see that the fate of its inhabitants will soon be the same as that of the Native Americans in North America.

            I sincerely hope that I am wrong about the above.

            To conclude: People are quick to condemn Hamas for the evil that it has wrought, but they are as quick to neglect that Hamas acts out of sheer desperation, out of the sheer desire, no matter how steep the price, to score a victory against Israel, a country whose military might not even its prime ministers fully comprehend, and out of the sheer hopelessness of the slow death that their people has been dying. Although to explain this is not to justify it, I also ask the reader: What options do the Palestinians have? What do you advise them to do? Their lives are going nowhere. Peace initiative after peace initiative has failed them (and, to add insult to injury, they are blamed for the failure). No Palestinian state has emerged, and none is likely to given the current map (just look and see whether a state can be built out of the Swiss cheese that is the West Bank). Their tunnel has been long and with no light at its end. So what should they do? They ought to sit still and “take it like a man.” To suck it up. To bear the unfair burden of history. We have to tell them, “Misfortune has fallen upon you, and you may not extricate yourselves from it by killing civilians. Even as you yourselves die, slowly, surely, with no justification, and with barely an explanation, you may not take the lives of the civilians of your enemy. This is the noble way.”

Fine. But let’s also ask the Israelis to not attend music festivals in the desert while their own country, their own government, has been slowly choking to death the very people on whose land they dance and enjoy the music. If Palestinians are to die a noble death, the least that the Israelis can do is lead a life that comprehends the horrors that they have brought about.

 

House Sitting a Vegan Home

 

            I am vegan for, as they say, the animals (not for health reasons, though the benefits for health are certainly a plus). I also have cats. And no matter what people tell you about cats—that they are less of a responsibility than dogs (which is true in some ways)—they nonetheless require proper attention and care (so much is obvious). Included in this care is ensuring that they are not lonely or alone for long stretches of time. They are also attached to their human owners, so with long absences, they miss us! For some owners, including me, this means that when I travel for a stretch of time (four days or longer), I prefer to have someone—a friend, a family member, a student—stay at my place and be with the cats. Even if they are not used to the person at the start, they eventually get used to them, and that helps ensure that they do not feel lonely or listless; at the least, they feel that someone is with them in the house. (This does not mean that the person has to be with them 24/7, much as I am not with them 24/7 even when I am not out of town. But it does mean that they are not left to an empty house for days on end.)

            This raises the question: Can I permissibly require whoever is staying at my place—let’s call her Ellen—to be vegan in the house? Can I require her to not eat or consume animal products in the house? Even if I can permissibly do so, would it still be somewhat obnoxious, insensitive, obdurate, dogmatic, annoying, inflexible, ungrateful, or thankless of me to ask this of her? After all, Ellen is doing me a huge favor by agreeing to stay at my place. And when I say “huge” I mean huge: she has her own place to which she is accustomed and where she is comfortable and happy. Having to relocate for a week or two and get out of her routine is a big sacrifice. The least I could do, then, is be as accommodating as possible. In addition to ensuring that the house is full of provisions for what Ellen needs, I should also allow her to eat whatever the hell she wants to eat.

This is the issue about which I often butt heads with friends, who tell me that even if I have the right—and some say that I do not have it—to impose a this-is-a-vegan-home rule (let’s call it “the VH Rule”) on house sitters like Ellen, it would be generous, kind, hospitable, flexible, or open-minded of me to not impose the VH rule, and that imposing it would make me, at least somewhat, obnoxious, insensitive, dogmatic, annoying, inflexible, and, most crucially, ungrateful or thankless.

Note that if people ask to stay at my place while they are visiting town or just visiting me, none of these vice-sounding terms would implicate me. This is because in this case I am the one doing them a favor. When I ask them to house sit, however, they are the ones doing me the favor, so I need to suck it up and suspend the VH Rule. Or so some of my friends tell me. (Note that asking people to house sit is not confined only to cases of pet care. There could be other reasons for asking people to house sit, though I won’t go into what they might be.)

I offer three arguments for why not only it is my right to ask people to maintain the VH Rule, but also for why doing so does not implicate me in any of the above-mentioned vices. The first argument is not convincing as it stands, but it has potential. The second two are, I think, strong.

1. The sensible-house rules argument. Imagine that I ask a friend of mine—let’s call him James—to house-sit my house for me. Knowing that he likes to sexually hook up with strangers, I ask him to not indulge his habit in my own house and to not allow any strangers in it; I ask that if he wants to hook up, he should go to their place instead. (This is why I use a James and not an Ellen in this example; women rarely engage in sexual hook ups with strangers.) This is a sensible thing to ask, and usually the reply is something along the lines of, “Of course I won’t! You don’t even need to ask!” This rule is sensible to insist on because no one usually wants strangers in their house. It is on a par with rules such as not leaving on the stove or oven while one is out of the house, or locking the doors at night or while out. These rules are sensible to adhere to because they are not idiosyncratic and they apply to anyone, given that they concern basic privacy or safety issues. If a potential house-sitter responds by saying, “But I am doing you a favor, so you have to allow me to entertain strangers or keep the stove on,” we can agree that the response misses the point. Granted that we are being done a favor, this would not be a license to put at risk the privacy and safety of the house. Being the recipient of a favor does not imply that I have to issue blank checks to the person doing me the favor.

Is asking Ellen to be vegan while in my house a sensible house rule? If it is, then this argument would include it. If it is not, then the argument would not. Because it is plausible that the VH Rule is not covered by privacy or safety concerns, then, if privacy and safety are the only two justifications of sensible rules, the VH Rule is not a sensible one, not in the sense that this argument presupposes. Although there could be a third justification of sensible rules that might include the VH Rule, suffice it to say that this argument can potentially include the VH Rule, depending on whether this rule can be adequately described as sensible, per the argument’s requirements. Now, if it does turn out to be a sensible rule, then, just as I am not being obnoxious or ungrateful in asking James to not bring strangers to the house, I would not be obnoxious or ungrateful in asking Ellen to be vegan while in my home. But I leave this issue open.

2. The religious household argument. Imagine a Jain family (Jains are known for not harming animals in any way, out of their commitment to non-violence)—who needs to be away from its home for an extended period of time, and in whose home, of course, meat is not whatsoever allowed. The family needs someone to house sit. (The example can be changed to any other religion, as long as the religion in question requires that the home be maintained in specific ways that accord with the family’s religious dietary or non-dietary requirements; for example, maintaining a kosher home.) The Jain family would clearly be within its moral limits, so to speak, to ask the house sitter to not have or consume meat in the house. People’s religious commitments generate, within limits, expectations that others not do things contrary to these commitments and to respect them. For example, it would be respectful to not serve pork if one’s dinner guests are Muslim. In the imagined case, the Jain family asked people to house sit, the would-be house-sitters know that the family is Jain (and what this entails), and they agree to do it. They agree, then, to house sit a Jain house, which implies that they agree to house sit a meat-free house. Moreover, in asking the house sitters to maintain a meat-free house, the Jain family is not being obnoxious, insensitive, obstinant, dogmatic, annoying, or inflexible. Instead, it is adhering to its basic religious tenets.

Now imagine a different variation of the case. Imagine that one practice to which the Jain family adheres is taking off their shoes when they enter their house. Although they adhere to this practice, and although the practice might stem from Jain religious tenets, it is not required by these tenets. If they insist that the house-sitting people engage in this same practice, then it would be plausible to claim that the family shows inflexibility, dogmatism, closed-mindedness, and ingratitude for their house-sitters. The point of this example is to distinguish between peripheral practices that the family likes to do and, because they are peripheral, on which the family may not insist that house-sitters abide by without exhibiting the above-mentioned vices, on the one hand, and basic practices on which the family may insist that the house-sitters abide by, on the other.

Now, if we agree that the Jain family is not being ungrateful or thankless in requiring the house-sitters to be meat-free, why not also agree with the (non-religious) vegan case? I see no relevant differences between the two cases such that the Jain family may—even should—insist that the house sitters keep a meat-free home, whereas the vegan family may not, and that if it did it would be convicted of ingratitude, closed-mindedness, or inflexibility. One might argue that in the case of the Jain family the commitment is religious, whereas with the vegan family the commitment is non-religious, and that the former commands more respect from guests than the latter. But we can’t know whether religious commitments command more respect than non-religious ones until we know more specifically what the nature of the non-religious commitments are. In the case of veganism, the commitment is moral, and surely moral commitments command at least as much respect as religious ones. For one thing, religious commitments often reflect moral ones, which is the case with the Jain commitment to non-violence. In this respect, religious values can reflect moral values, so are secondary to them. For another thing, moral commitments are quite serious and command respect from others. If the vegan family is committed to a principle of no-harm to animals, it is not obvious at all why this commitment should not be respected by the would-be house sitters. If one thinks otherwise, one ought to produce an argument to that effect.

There is also the thought that some religious commitments might be immoral in content, though it is difficult to imagine convincing cases in which house-sitters would be asked to abide by them. Still, imagine a case in which in order to maintain a religious home, the inhabitants spit in the direction of their neighbors or hurl waste at their house, because they consider them to be infidels. Imagine that the inhabitants asked the house-sitters to engage in the same practice while the former are away on a trip. We would rightly consider such a request to be obnoxious, the reason being that its very content is abhorrent. The point is that respecting the religious rules of a house on the part of house-sitters depends on the content of these rules. If so, then being asked to be a vegan house-sitter is parallel to the religious case.

3. The straight up moral argument. I describe this argument as a “straight up” moral argument because none of it depends on facts such as whose house it is or on who is doing a favor to whom. It is a straight up moral argument because it states that given what morality requires of us when it comes to animals, every household should be a vegan household. So maintaining vegan households ought to be the norm, and it is those houses that fail to live up to the norm that are falling short.

By way of illustration and elaboration, consider the moral norms that we ought not to sexually molest others and that we ought not to commit murder. If I were to ask my house-sitters to do neither in my house, it would not be a matter of me imposing my own rules, and it would not be a matter of the extent to which I ought to be flexible and hospitable with those who do me favors. Instead, it is simply a matter of moral prohibition, regardless of whose house it is and the nature of the favor in question. Even if the favor granted to me were much, much, much huger than house sitting (you can come up with your own example), it would not license murder or molestation. Molesting and murdering others have nothing to do with granting favors (unless some mafia or other is involved, which actually underscores my point, in that the kind of person to ask me to commit murder in return for doing me a favor would have to be a mafioso or some such similar character).

So, if moral norms prohibit us from abusing animals, such that the way to avoid this abuse is to be vegan, then it goes without saying that people ought to keep vegan households. The fact that I have to actually explicitly request it from Ellen (which is likely not the case with having to request my house sitter to not murder or molest others) says more about majority social practices than it does about me—that the majority of people are falling short of the norm, not that I am somehow doing something vicious or lacking virtue in my so asking house-sitters to ensure that my house is vegan.

I won’t argue that moral norms do require us to be vegan (many have made this argument already) and I am happy to stick with the above conditional claim—that if they do, then we ought to maintain vegan homes. I will, however, address one objection which goes as follows: Yes, it is true that we all ought to be vegan. But being non-vegan is so common and considered so normal, that asking people to not do it would be, in the current social context, asking too much. It would be like asking people to not have children even if anti-natalism is true: yes, having children is problematic, but so many people do it that it would be too much to ask anyone to not have children.

This objection touches on an important point, namely, the extent to which we may ask people to do the right thing given that an overwhelming majority of people fail to do it. However, one crucial difference is this: I am not asking Ellen to be vegan, period. I am asking her to be vegan only while she house sits for me and, more specifically, only while she is actually in my house. Suppose that she is to house sit for me from the beginning until the end of December. This means that she is free to be non-vegan after the end of December and, more specifically, during December while she is not in my house. Unless she has to house sit for months on end, it would not be too much to request of her given that the moral default is to be vegan, even if the overwhelming majority of people fail to be vegan.

Of course, few people are actually involved in butchering a cow to eat its meat or separating her offspring from her to obtain her milk. But if it turns out that the products we consume are obtained by sexually molesting or murdering others, we would surely have a moral obligation to refrain from consuming these products. The fact that most of us are not directly involved in animal abuse does not give us moral permission to enjoy the products gained from others’ abusing them.

If being vegan is the morally right practice, then refraining from the abuse of animals would be on a par with refraining from murdering or sexually molesting others. If so, then it would be perfectly okay for me to request Ellen to be vegan while house sitting. As a matter of fact, not requesting this of Ellen would mean that I am okay with her engaging, in my house, in a morally profane practice. This indicates that maintaining the VH Rule would not be vicious in any way, and that actually suspending it would be. When it comes to certain actions and practices, moral flexibility does not betoken virtue, but vice.

I then see no moral issue with requiring house-sitters to maintain a vegan practice while house-sitting a vegan home. Of course, they always have the choice to refuse to house-sit. But if they agree, then they have no grounds on which to accuse the inhabitants of the home of being vicious when they request that the home be maintained as vegan.

 

Who’s Afraid of Kathleen Stock?

 

The 8^th edition of The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings (henceforth, PoS8) of which I am the lead editor, was published in February 2022 (the other editors are Jacob M. Held, Natasha McKeever, and Alan Soble). On February 26, 2022, I announced its publication on the Teaching Philosophy group on Facebook. Almost immediately someone (James Stanescu) complained that the volume includes an essay by the philosopher Kathleen Stock, “Sexual Orientation: What Is It?” “You added an essay by Stock?” Stanescu asked, as if the mere mention of Stock’s name was sufficient to make the point. This opened the door for others to complain (e.g., Sara Uckelman: “What, it was ADDED?! Ugh”; Quill Kukla: “Essay by stock? Hard pass” and Kian Bergstrom: a vomit emoji). These remarks generated a limited but perhaps useful discussion among some members of the group about the merits of including work by philosophers and other thinkers who are considered by some to be objectionable.

About a week later, a philosophy graduate student at the University of British Columbia, Alex Bryant, posted on Twitter his disappointment that the anthology included an essay by Stock. He got inundated by other tweets accusing him, among other things, of being a hypocrite for being a student of philosophy while also wanting to de-platform philosophical ideas from being discussed. He was pushed by some of the tweets, especially those by Professor Carole Hooven, to articulate his precise objection to having an essay by Stock included in PoS8, which, to his credit, he attempted to do (more on his attempt below).

The purpose of the present post is to tease out and articulate these objections to the inclusion of Stock’s essay and to show why they all fail. I write “tease out” because, with few exceptions, the objectors did not provide reasons for their objections.

            First, however, a word on the essay itself. “Sexual Orientation: What Is It?” was first published in 2019 in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (vol. 119, no. 3, pp. 295-319), so it was not written specifically for PoS8 (something important to keep in mind for reasons addressed below). The essay is wide-ranging in its scope, though anchored in the topic of sexual orientation. It defends what Stock calls “the Orthodox Account” (OA) of sexual orientation, which is the account that seems to be accepted by most people outside academia, and by quite a few academics.

The OA has various aspects, but the most important three are (1) that sexual orientation is a type of sexual attraction based on the sex of the people to whom the person with the orientation is attracted; (2) that sexual orientation also refers to the sex of the person with the orientation (such that, e.g., that a lesbian is a female human being who is attracted to other female human beings); and (3) that there are only three orientations (maybe even only two, if we think of bisexuals, as Stock suggests, as having not one orientation, but the other two, heterosexuality and homosexuality). Given these three aspects, the OA would be at odds with any account of sexual orientation that denies one or more of (1), (2), and (3), such as an account that conceives of sexual orientation as sexual attraction based on only the gender (not the sex) of the other person; or an account that does not consider the sex or gender of the person with the orientation to be necessary for the concept of sexual orientation; or an account that implies that there are more than three sexual orientations. Let this summary of Stock’s essay suffice for now; below I say a bit more about its arguments.

            The objections to the inclusion of Stock’s essay in the anthology seem to fall into three groups: (a) those based on the identity of the author; (b) those based on the work, in general, of the author, including the essay in question; and (c) those based on the aptness of including that specific essay in PoS8.

Objection (a) is basically that Stock is so problematic as a person that no work of hers should be assigned to students. Amy White wrote on Facebook, “I’ll stick to the previous version [of PoS] until I can find another text. I really don’t want to support a book that includes Stock.” When pressed by Mark Oppenheimer about which other authors White would boycott, White replied, “Any that make a stigmatized group of my students feel even less valid and threatened.” When Oppenheimer asked for examples, White did not reply, but Kelli Potter did, giving Oppenheimer himself as one example, followed by the ever-helpful “lol.” Of course, by White’s logic, an endless list of historical figures would be banned from being taught, rendering entire areas of philosophical studies verboten, and chipping away at the freedom of inquiry that lies at the heart of the discipline of philosophy.

            The fact is that (a) on its own cannot be taken seriously. It needs support in at least one of two forms. The support can be facts about the author’s personal life (the figure is a spouse beater, a pedophile, an animal torturer, etc.), so that, for example, we should not teach Heidegger because he was a Nazi (let’s bracket the question whether his Nazism seeped into his philosophy). Or the support can be (b), the problematic nature of the author’s work. Since Stock, I take it, is not a monster in her personal life, the support for (a) would have to come from (b).

But when we look at (b), we do not find anything that merits the outrage that Stock has been met with. The essay in question defends a commonsensical account of sexual orientation, with which most people would agree. Perhaps the outrage has to do with what Stock has written about gender identity, which has led some people to accuse her of transphobia. On Facebook, Kristina Grob sarcastically wrote, “Yes, it’s a little ridiculous that people are getting all bothered by the inclusion of arguments that undermine the full humanity of others and contribute toward their harm, exclusion, and oppression.”

Grob’s reasoning, however, is worrisome, especially coming from a fellow philosopher. Grob seems to be referring to Stock’s arguments and positions regarding whether transwomen are women or whether transmen are men. Here, it must be noted that the essay by Stock in PoS8 is not about gender but about sexual orientation. Even so, there is nothing in Stock’s views about gender, whether in the PoS8 essay or in general, that undermines “the full humanity of others”—certainly not if we go by the obvious meaning of “the full humanity of others.” Stock does disagree with the claims that transwomen are women and that transmen are men, though she agrees that we should have adequate concepts to refer to trans people (which is one way, I suppose, for accounting for their full humanity). Stock approaches this issue through the lens of conceptual analysis—“what an entity has to have, or be like, to be covered by [a] concept” (Material Girls, p. 143), and the need to delineate certain concepts for particular uses (see Material Girls, ch. 5, where she also argues against some accounts that attempt to subsume trans people under the concepts “woman” and “man”). But this position does not imply, let alone that it is identical with, the claim that trans people are not human or fully human. Moreover, Stock is explicit about this matter in her book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (pp. 176-177; ch. 8; and passim).

Third, it is unclear how Stock’s views have contributed to the “harm, exclusion, and oppression” of trans people. Is this attribution of harm, exclusion, and oppression an empirical claim? If yes, where is the evidence for it? If it is not an empirical claim, what kind of claim is it? Even if Stock’s views have fueled some people’s transphobia, why is she to be held morally and professionally accountable for that? If all it takes to boycott a philosopher’s views is the standard that the views have causally contributed to some people’s bigotry, then we would have to banish most philosophers from our syllabi, since one can argue that some philosophers’ support of, say, the immorality of gay sex or pro-life positions, is sufficient to justify removing their writings from our syllabi because they cause some people to be homophobic or mysoginist.

Fourth, and most troublingly, Grob’s reasoning seems to confuse teaching with—to put it starkly—evangelizing. When I include Kant’s Crimina Carnis section from his Lectures on Ethics in my course on the philosophy of sex, this does not mean that I uncritically teach his views, let alone simply accept them. As a matter of fact, I have always taught the New Natural Lawyers on gay issues, Zionist thinkers on Palestine, and philosophers who think it is perfectly okay to hunt, kill, or eat animals (three issues that I am passionate about). The inclusion of such thinkers does not mean that I refrain from criticizing their positions, let alone accepting them. But I also do not—and many might disagree with this point—push my students to hate Kant or the New Natural Lawyers or Roger Scruton, because the issue is not them as people. Instead, I encourage my students to lay out their arguments clearly and to critically evaluate them. Of course, someone can cogently argue that we should encourage our students to morally condemn these philosophers, and I respect this position. But the minimal common ground in philosophy education should be explaining (or interpreting, as the case may be) arguments and subjecting them to critical scrutiny. This is a crucial part of what it is to teach philosophy.

The last point brings me to another thread on Facebook about Stock’s essay. Roman Altshuler asks whether it is okay to teach racists—or, more accurately I take it, racist works—in a class on racism. He tends to think that it is okay. Altshuler adds, “If yes, is the difference that views on racism and sexism are settled enough that we don’t expect anyone to be seduced by them who isn’t already, while this is not the case with transphobic views?”

Altshuler’s question has two aspects: whether it would be okay to teach, say, racist views in our classes, and whether the answer has mainly to do with whether the issue in question has been settled. To my mind, however, it is difficult to answer the question whether it is okay to teach racist views with an absolute yes or no, even if the issue in question has been settled. Much depends on the course and its purpose. For example, if the course is on the history of racism, then, yes, the students will need to know which racist views have been espoused and how they were argued for. More importantly, to claim that an issue has been settled can mean various things, but one thing it usually means is that we have come to agree that, say, racism is wrong. But that there is consensus that something is wrong does not mean that we agree on why it is wrong. Indeed, philosophers disagree on how to define racism and why it is wrong. And it is not just racism: philosophers still debate why many other practices or attitudes are wrong.

Moreover, even if professional philosophers agree on why something is wrong, our students likely do not understand why that thing is wrong. Given my many years of teaching, I bet that most undergraduate students cannot articulate in philosophical terms why racism or sexism is wrong, especially as they start college. They need to learn philosophical reasoning, and for this there is no replacement for parsing and evaluating arguments, and teachers who deny their students the opportunity to evaluate, say, racist or homophobic arguments are guilty of some form of epistemic paternalism. Incidentally, and for those not familiar with recent editions of PoS, there is a list of discussion questions at the end of each essay, and many of the questions are highly critical of the arguments. This is to aid teachers and students in discussing the material and to underscore the main task at hand, which is the critical evaluation of these essays and their arguments.

In selecting arguments to evaluate, we should select the strongest ones; doing so makes the exercise of parsing arguments intellectually engaging to our students, and it is charitable to those whose arguments we are evaluating. But sometimes there are good reasons for students to see views that are obviously immoral or poorly constructed, and hence easy to criticize. In an introductory course on the philosophy of art, for example, I want my students to learn about aesthetic definitions of art, even if such definitions face easy counter-examples given that much contemporary art is not concerned with the aesthetic. I want them to learn these definitions because I want them to emerge from the class with a familiarity with what has been written and discussed about defining art, and aesthetic definitions fit this criterion. From this perspective, Stock’s views cannot be ignored. Any teacher teaching a course on sexual orientation or on current debates on gender should include Stock’s views on pain of cheating their students of a proper exposure to what has been written on the subject. (In this respect, Jozef Delvaux’s remark on Facebook—that third parties to these debates might want to have a variety of outlooks—is right on the money, and Kukla’s reply to Delvaux that we can include views by Haslanger or Barnes continues to limit whose views are allowed.) If students take a class on the philosophy of gender and they do not read Stock, then they would have been robbed of a full airing of the subject.

One might dismiss the above reasoning by arguing that Stock just does not have enough cache among philosophers writing on sexual orientation and gender for teachers to feel obligated to teach her views. Although Stock’s impact on the discipline can be debated either way, this point neglects another criterion that we use to decide whose views to teach, namely, the importance of exposing our students to as full a range of views on a subject as falls within a course’s constraints. I would venture to say that we have a moral obligation to expose our students in this way, by having them read various views, by inviting speakers with whom we or our students disagree, or by some other means. So even if Stock’s views on sexual orientation or gender are not popular among most philosophers of gender and sexual orientation (and we know that whose views are academically popular has, to put it mildly, political and sociological aspects to it), this would not by itself settle the question of whether to teach these views. This is especially true given that her views would resonate with most members of the public, from where, it bears remembering, our students come (a point especially true of public universities, which are partly funded by the public).

I have been articulating various criteria that philosophy teachers can and do use in deciding on which views to teach: what the course is and its purposes, the importance of evaluating arguments (whether we agree with them or not), the importance of the views to the history of the field, and the importance of having our students learn various points of view on the subject. I don’t claim that these four criteria are exhaustive or that they all need to be satisfied for a view and its arguments to be taught. But they are all very relevant to such a decision.

Still, even if all the above is true, I have not yet fully addressed (c), the question as to whether Stock’s essay should have been included in an anthology such as PoS. I say “not fully” because the last two points under (b) do so to some extent: an anthology on the philosophy of sex and that includes essays on sexual orientation might need to have an essay that defends the “orthodox” view. Still, anthologies have limited space, so why Stock’s essay? The above-mentioned graduate student, Alex Bryant, after being pushed to articulate his reasons against the inclusion of the essay, posted a few tweets about why it should not have been included. Some tweets mentioned that students are statistically at the highest risk of being subject to sexual violence and of being perpetrators (though I am not sure where these statistics come from or their relevance), that students have to deal with the consequences of coming out (again, the relevance of this claim is unclear), and that Stock’s arguments “don’t rise to a disciplinary standard many of us expect, and so should our students.” The third point is obviously quite relevant, but it does not really explain why Bryant takes Stock’s arguments to fail to rise to these standards—after all, the issue is why Stock’s essay fails in this way, and Bryant’s tweet merely pushes the question one step back. (Because after all these tweets we don’t get an answer, I am reminded of the ancient saying about the mountain that goes into labor only to birth a mouse.)

I understand Stock’s essay to consist of two tasks. First, it seeks to explain and clarify the OA, especially in terms used by philosophers (e.g., what it means for sexual orientation to be a disposition and how that is compatible with having sex with members of the sex to whom one is not oriented, and whether sexual desire operates de dicto or de re). Second, the essay aims to argue that there are no good reasons to abandon some aspects of the OA (namely, its basis in sex), which Stock does by rejecting gender as an alternative such basis. She also argues that we have good reasons to retain other aspects of the account (namely, the sex of the person with the orientation). She concludes by arguing against various attempts to understand the differences between sexual orientations and sexual preferences (including an old attempt of mine), and by explaining her view on the matter.

Stock’s argumentative strategy is common to many other philosophical strategies, and her arguments are not obviously invalid or unsound, so that it is clear that they should not be included in an anthology such as PoS. Indeed, many would find the arguments compelling. People are of course free to criticize her arguments, and I expect nothing less in a class room environment or in a research paper. But having criticisms of an argument or position is not a sufficient basis for rejecting the paper’s inclusion in an academic volume such as PoS8. It is also important to add that the paper was previously published in a prestigious journal, whose papers are selected and invited for publication by a committee; it is in conversation with other philosophers who have written on sexual orientation (such as Robin Dembroff’s “What Is Sexual Orientation?, which is also in PoS8); and it fits nicely with other essays in PoS8 on sexual orientation (Brunning and McKeever’s on asexuality, and Rudy’s on zoophilia). Thus, and in addition to the above-discussed criteria, not only are the objections against including Stock’s essay in PoS8 baseless, there are excellent reasons for its inclusion.

At the end of the day, philosophers are free to use or not to use PoS8. If they do use it, they are free to teach or not to teach Stock’s essay. But if they refuse to use the book just because it has Stock’s essay, then they would miss out on a good book, much to their loss and to their students’ loss. Of course, the issue is not just PoS8, but which books we use and why. If philosophers refuse to use books simply because they include philosophical views that we dislike or disagree with, then we would be failing to live up to our professional standards and contributing to dismantling the field itself.