the line in the sand

(updated for clarity; see below)

I may be confused about what, in 2007, we’re “allowed to” say about those who are different from us, but I’m pretty clear on what’s right and what’s wrong.

So is Bradley Burston. He agrees with me that suicide bombing is wrong. (He further agrees with me that it’s an abomination that Hamas claims it’s a “natural” consequence of Israeli occupation.) He also thinks it will be the undoing of the longed-for Palestinian state:

Let this much be said: Israel has never devised - not in Dimona, not in underground RAFAEL plants - a weapon against the Palestinian national movement that is anywhere near as effective as the Palestinian’s own suicide bomber.

Let the comments fly in, from bottomlessly self-congratulatory supporters of Palestinian statehood in Australia, New Zealand, Berkeley, from all those places where white people like yourselves exterminated indigenous populations with impunity. And stole the land on which your condo was built.

I support a Palestinian state no less than you. But if you spin your impassioned defenses of suicide bombing as a necessary tactic - a natural tactic - a natural response, you’ll be spinning that line, and waiting for an independent Palestine, for much longer than any Palestinian should ever have to wait.

Maybe, maybe not.

I’m not so optimistic. [update for clarity: I'm not optimistic that the West will hold to the moral demands it has made on Hamas; I think appeasers will seek to erase the moral distinctions between the position of Hamas and that of Fatah.] Indeed, I think that our moral equilibrium—if indeed we had an equilibrium, and one could argue that the biens-pensant of the West had lost theirs prior to the event—has been turned upside down in the wake of 9/11. Michael Walzer was among first to capture it with his spring 2002 essay “Can There Be a Decent Left?”

 I haven’t come across any arguments that seriously tried to describe how this (or any) war [in Afghanistan---the Iraq war wasn't even on the horizon at the time Walzer wrote this. --ed.] could be fought without putting civilians at risk, or to ask what degree of risk might be permissible, or to specify the risks that American soldiers should accept in order to reduce the risk of civilian deaths. All these were legitimate issues in Afghanistan, as they were in the Kosovo and Gulf wars. But among last fall’s antiwar demonstrators, “Stop the bombing” wasn’t a slogan that summarized a coherent view of the bombing–or of the alternatives to it. The truth is that most leftists were not committed to having a coherent view about things like that; they were committed to opposing the war, and they were prepared to oppose it without regard to its causes or character and without any visible concern about preventing future terrorist attacks.

A few left academics have tried to figure out how many civilians actually died in Afghanistan, aiming at as high a figure as possible, on the assumption, apparently, that if the number is greater than the number of people killed in the Towers, the war is unjust. At the moment, most of the numbers are propaganda; there is no reliable accounting. But the claim that the numbers matter in just this way, that the 3120th death determines the injustice of the war, is in any case wrong. It denies one of the most basic and best understood moral distinctions: between premeditated murder and unintended killing. And the denial isn’t accidental, as if the people making it just forgot about, or didn’t know about, the everyday moral world. The denial is willful: unintended killing by Americans in Afghanistan counts as murder. This can’t be true anywhere else, for anybody else.

The radical failure of the left’s response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question: can there be a decent left in a superpower? Or more accurately, in the only superpower? Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left’s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved. Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. But many more have still not brought themselves to think about what really happened.

Walzer’s essay was published five years ago. Have we made progress on that front? Um, no.