The rejected ceasefire

Now that Israel has definitely rejected the 48-hour ceasefire, I want to explain why I support the rejection. But before I can do that, I need to lay some groundwork. Freddie is once again on the moral warpath, suggesting that anyone talking about Gaza who doesn't regularly avow either absolute agreement or disagreement with the killing of children is an intellectual coward. Roque usually irks me at Culture 11 and elsewhere but he calls Freddie out correctly on this one: it's a failure to understand the difference between humanist-philosophical investigation, and political-tactical analysis. Plain and simple, Freddie does not know how to separate these two fields, and I would guess he probably would deny that they even can be separated.

That insistence on combining the moral sense with political reality, regardless of the circumstances, boils down for me in one of two ways. The first is a case like Freddie: an total preoccupation with moral theory that leaves its object (Freddie) unable to actually analyze a political conflict and reach a conclusion. Freddie himself admits to the problem in this Hume-like lament, being caught up in endless moral struggle that can never produce results.

The second path is one of the certitudes (or apparent certitudes) of morality combined with irrevocable action. In Freddie's world, if a moral certainty can be determined, it is just as irresponsible not to act on that certainty as it is to bypass the search for such a certainty in the first place. The result is dangerous at both ends: either one reaches a moral conclusion that, while sensible on paper, like manifests itself in radical action; or, to avoid radical action, one avoids all moral questions out of fear of compulsion.

What's nice about breaking down this argument is how the world currently seems to fit into the model. The countries calling for a ceasefire from Israel (appropriately) remind me of Freddie, in that their demands are nothing more than the manifestation of the shallowest moral consideration. "Civilians are dying? Then stop!" they seem to say, answering the question as a grade-schooler writing a letter to God might. Never mind that there is no plan advanced by any of these countries for what is supposed to happen during or after the ceasefire. Never mind that they have contented themselves with utterly ignoring any kind of political-tactical analysis, and therefore have betrayed their lack of seriousness in calling for a ceasefire in the first place. They, like Freddie, cannot be bothered to play in the mud with Israel.

It's a deeply irresponsible attitude, all the more so because these countries -- the EU, the Saudis, the US, Russia, the UN -- are supposed to be stewards of the region. As I mentioned in the last post, this is the latest in a long series of betrayals to both Israelis and Palestinians, that began in '48 and the most recent incarnation of which is the complete failure, not only to do something about Hamas, but even to suggest to Israel any course of action that did not consist of sitting, waiting, and getting shelled.

The second attitude, that of perceived right moral action, is much more in line with the partisans on both sides of the issue. It's ironic to me that Freddie, who prides himself (I assume) on a fair, non-reactionary, objective viewpoint, actually maintains a moral coda that is about two steps away from virulent extremism. Part of the utility (dare I say 'good'?) in maintaining a healthy skepticism of one's own moral sense -- what is derisively called 'relativism' by so many on the far left and far right -- is the inoculation to extremist action. Does Freddie believe that the Hamas terrorists launching rockets are doing so out of tactical sense? They're out there because they concluded that Israel was evil, and that to not actively fight would be the act of 'intellectual cowardice' that Freddie is so eager to charge against the vast pro-Israel blogging cabal. The same goes for the far right Israeli politicians who believe that it's appropriate to burn all of Gaza to glass. They have morally concluded that all Palestinians in Gaza (and elsewhere, and Muslims and Arabs and Persians and maybe even Russians, if they don't watch it) are complicit in the crimes of Hamas, and that it would therefore be more of that dreaded 'intellectual cowardice' to allow a single Israeli to die, when all Palestinians could simply be wiped out.

At the center of all of this ridiculous moral preening remains the thankfully moderate Israeli leadership. They've taken the real message loud and clear: nobody has a sensible moral understanding of this conflict, and nobody has a good idea what to do tactically or politically. So, once more, Israel will be self-reliant, and go its own way. Is the Israeli leadership (and I) guilty of 'intellectual cowardice' for not confirming their belief that Palestinian children should be dying? Maybe. But that brand of cowardice is also saving the lives of very many people right now, whom the sure-footed moral stewards of the Israeli far-right would just as soon see incinerated.

At the end of this awful new dimension to the conflict, the truly guilty parties will be the invokers of moral authority on both sides -- those on the ground who have decided to seek the unconditional destruction of their enemy out of their warped moral sense, and those countries whose facile calls for a cessation of violence were never designed to succeed because their governments couldn't be bothered to develop a tactical solution worth mentioning.