W.J. Astore
A grim historical lesson taught by Thucydides, who wrote on the Peloponnesian War more than two millennia ago, is that the strong do what they will while the weak suffer what they must. Historically, the Jewish people have often been weak. Weak in the sense they had no homeland. They had no army. They were, in a word, vulnerable.
Compounding this vulnerability was prejudice. People who are vilified, who are dismissed as untrustworthy, who are defined as “other,” even as “human animals,” are especially vulnerable to the strong because the vilified rarely attract staunch champions or even sympathetic helpers.
Today, the Jewish people remember and commemorate those who helped them, who stood for justice, who were “righteous gentiles,” at places like Yad Vashem.
There’s a famous saying, the gist of which is that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. During the Holocaust, far too many people did nothing when confronted by the evils of Nazism, and millions died as a result.
Today, the Jewish people are no longer weak. In Israel they have a homeland protected by powerful armed forces. They have staunch allies, including the world’s premier “superpower,” along with nuclear weapons, perhaps 200 of them, enough to wipe out the nations and peoples in their immediate vicinity.
Again, Israel today is strong. Thus it faces the ethical dilemma of the strong: the ability to kill on a mass scale, an ability too easily justified in the name of “defense.” Will Israel illustrate Thucydides’ maxim of the strong doing what they will and the weak—in this case, the Palestinians—suffering as they must?
The hardline Israeli government appears to see mass violence, mass death, and mass expulsion as the only solution in Gaza.
History is replete with examples of the strong doing what they will while the weak suffer. Yet Israel is exercising overwhelming power against weak and vulnerable people in ways well known to Jews who’ve suffered greatly themselves in a long and tortured past.
Palestinians in Gaza are not collectively guilty of crimes committed by Hamas. They are an entrapped and desperate people. What is to become of them?
Israel knows the value of righteousness, of justice for all, of an abiding love for all life, as reflected in the moral exemplars honored at Yad Vashem.
What Israel needs now is moral heroism. What Gaza needs now is mercy.
Bracing Views 