Anil Madan
Africa-Press – Lesotho. Which side is morally right in the Israel-Hamas war? A week or so ago, a friend asked me that question. I pondered with my hand over my mouth, as if shutting myself from speaking too soon before thinking.
Recently, the editor asked me to write on this subject. The truth is that I do not feel particularly equipped to speak about morality. Yes, I know the definition of “moral”: concerned with the principles of right and wrong behaviour and the goodness or badness of human character. Or holding or manifesting high principles for proper conduct.
Moral Clarity about the Israel-Hamas War.
Pic – The Daily Beast My view of morality is tempered by a pragmatic sense of reality. First, ever since I can remember, I have struggled to understand man’s seemingly infinite capacity for hatred and evil.
Second, I know intuitively that if Germany had won the Second World War, there would have been articulation of the concept of crimes against humanity or of war crimes. Certainly, there would have been no Nuremberg war crimes trials.
When I read the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scripture known as The Song Celestial, I was struck that its theme is that God, Lord Krishna as he is known, is conveying to Prince Arjun that it is acceptable for him to kill all one hundred of his half-brothers because it is his duty to kill them: one can kill only the body but not the soul because the soul is immortal.
The idea of morality is given fleeting short shrift. When it comes to killing, much of morality as we know it today is concerned with the killing of the body.
Little attention is paid to the soul. And if there is a notion of just war, the notion of necessary killing washes away the unnecessary impediment of morality.
A day of horror, a day of mixed moral messages
October 7, 2023, a day of horror, was a day of mixed moral messages for Israelis. It is not unfair to say that Hamas unleashed a day of moral turpitude and evil, the likes of which has seldom been seen in the history of mankind.
Comparisons to the Nazis immediately sprang to mind. But, as Douglas Murray, a journalist at the Israel-Gaza border explained to Piers Morgan, it was dimensionally worse.
Morgan began, in his usual self-important, pugnacious and ill-informed way: “But what concerns me about what Israel is doing, is not their efforts to get rid of Hamas, but because of the particular nature of Hamas embedding themselves among the civilian population with the massive amount of civilian casualties that will inevitably come, and that figure will grow and grow and grow, are we not, as Barack Obama warned, creating here, just an opportunity for far greater radicalization of all those young Palestinians who watched their loved ones getting killed? Why would we imagine that at the end of all this they would want to do anything other than to become a new version of Hamas in wanting to exact revenge for what happened to their families?”
Before I get to Murray’s response, I want you to ponder the one-sided nature of this question. When Hamas committed its atrocities and young Israelis watched their loved ones getting killed, why would we imagine that at the end of all this they would want to do anything other than to exact revenge for what happened to their families? And if the Israeli nation writ large is a proxy for those who cannot avenge the killings, should we be surprised at the response we have seen?
Murray’s answer was twofold. First, he pointed out that if you follow the logic of what Obama said, then you shouldn’t do anything if you are Israel. You should just sit back and say, “We’ll just wait for the next one.
” Second, he pointed out that Morgan’s question supposes that there is a peaceful population in Gaza that would just love a two-state solution, and then a few bad apples in Hamas. He asseverated that this is not true.
A young German Jewish girl at the music festival was raped and murdered and taken into the Gaza, a mob of ordinary Gazans were spitting on her body, hitting her body, and mutilating it.
He added that during World War II, the German soldiers who were ordered to execute Jews, felt remorse, and often were known to drink heavily to deal with what they had done.
The Hamas assassins and attackers, on the other hand, appeared to enjoy what they did and to take pleasure from killing Jews. And the Gazan population displayed no inkling of moral rectitude as they attacked a corpse.
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