On February 25th of this year, Airman Aaron Bushnell of the United States Air Force lit himself on fire outside of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. Prior to his self-immolation, he posted a message on Facebook:
Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” The answer is, you’re doing it right now.
He streamed the immolation itself on Twitch, saying the following prior to dousing himself with an accelerant and lighting himself on fire.
I am an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. Free Palestine.
He continued to shout the words “Free Palestine” as he burned to death.
This episode will not be arguing that the actions of Israel in the current conflict with Palestine constitute a genocide; the matter is quite well documented and clearly evident. Everything that we’ve quoted here from Bushnell is the case: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people, and the United States provides moral and material support for that genocide. Our intention here today is to explore what that means for us in terms of duty, responsibility, and complicity.
First, a disclaimer: this essay will be quite critical of the actions of the State of Israel against the Palestinian people. Our critique does not in any way entail support for Hamas and is in no way directed against Jewish or Israeli people in general. Israel is a state, not a person or an ethnic group, and it does not represent the global Jewish population in total. We are focused specifically on the actions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the individual people of his government and the governments of his predecessors, the members of the Israeli Defence Forces, and those people who provide moral or material support to the State of Israel, inclusive of non-Jewish members of other governments, such as that of the United States. The views expressed in this essay are shared by many Jewish people—many of our sources were written by Jews and non-Jewish members of the international community—and it is not critique of Israel which is antisemetic but rather the conflation of Jewish people as an ethnicity with the State of Israel, a narrative which reduces a diverse, complex, and historically-rich people to a particular modern political configuration.
Let’s cover some background and history. A full explication of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is far beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s important that we establish a basis in historical conditions and dispel some common myths and misunderstandings about the conflict.
First, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is new, dating back only as far as the beginning of the twentieth century. Certainly there are many centuries of antecedent, but there’s a popular narrative that the Jews and Arabs of the Levant have always been at war, and that’s not at all the case. The intention behind this narrative is to establish a conflict realism, a popular belief that conflict is inevitable and that there can be no peaceful solution. This serves the interest of the colonial Israeli government by making their actions seem necessary and unavoidable. In fact, both Jews and Arabs have occupied the Levant for thousands of years, and there have been periods of both conflict and peace; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict refers to the specific conflict that began when the Jewish diaspora began a large-scale migration into the Levant in order to establish a Jewish ethnostate in accordance with the political philosophy of Zionism, which saw its proper genesis in the publication of Der Judenstaat in 1896.
During the first half of the 20th century, the British, who had taken control of Palestine after the First World War, attempted to mediate between the rapidly-increasing Jewish immigrant population and the region’s indigenous Palestinian Arabs. Their efforts met with strong resistance from both sides that escalated to a civil war, and ultimately Britain gave up on the entire project, allowing the Jewish colonists to appropriate the territory as the State of Israel on their own terms. During the ensuing war, Israel conducted a violent ethnic cleansing of the territory, an event referred to by Arabs as the Nakba, the Catastrophe. Half of Palestine’s Arab population, around 750,000 people, were expelled and forced into small regions of containment, including the Gaza Strip.
Discourse surrounding the conflict often returns to simplistic and reductionist rhetorical questions such as “Does Israel have the right to defend itself?”, “Do the Jews have the right to a homeland?”, and “Do you condemn Hamas?” While not the focus of this essay, we might as well head such sophistry off at the pass. One, Israel is a state and does not have rights. People have the right to self-defense, individually and collectively, but the actions of Israel do not represent self-defense of any sort. Two, the Jews have not had a homeland for two and a half millennia and the planet’s available territory is already claimed in its entirety. To say that the Jews have a right to a homeland is to say that some other people—the Palestinian Arabs in this case—do not have such a right. Additionally, to the extent that Israel is considered a homeland for the Jewish people—however tenuous and reductive a claim that may be—the argument can be made that Israel need not effectively expand its borders by annexing the land of Palestine. In other words: one can claim that the geographical region of Israel is what it claims to be, a Jewish homeland, without entailing that the geographical land of Palestine need be included in that description. These issues are logically separate, regardless of the pro-Zionist propaganda forcing a conflation. The term “pro-Zionist” is here used not for rhetorical purposes, but for the precise reason that once this simple distinction is made between land-claims, a reality is made clear: Israel’s self-proclaimed right to the land of Palestine is a Zionist prerogative, not a Jewish one. To argue against a certain Zionist claim is then not to argue against the rights of the Jewish people to a homeland, nor even to condemn Zionism wholesale—it is simply one argument against a certain pro-Zionist claim; a claim that happens to actually entail the imposition of force upon a largely non-violent group of people. And yes, condemnation of Hamas is clearly necessary, specifically because it does not represent a true Palestinian resistance movement but rather because it is the tool of the State of Israel to divide the Palestinian people and justify their oppression (Schneider, 2023).
Finally, it is often said that, if the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace, but if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide. It’s true that Hamas and Palestinian resistance leaders have used explicitly genocidal rhetoric, and we categorically condemn such language. But Israeli leaders have used such rhetoric as well, and what we’re seeing at present is the illegal collective punishment of 2.3 million people, 99% of whom are not members of Hamas. Further, the Palestinians have attempted peaceful negotiation and nonviolent resistance in the past, only to be met with violence. Peaceful protests along the border from 2018-2019 resulted in 223 Palestinians killed (including 46 children) and 8,079 injured (“And Now for the Whitewashing”, 2021). Many of these injuries resulted from pot shots taken by snipers, who often aimed to injure rather than kill in order to inflict a lasting and memorable torment (R.J., 2024). It can’t be said that Palestinian violence never erupted during the protests, but at most, one Israeli was killed and eleven were wounded (“Report…,” 2019).
None of this justifies the brutality of the October 7th attacks or any other attacks against Israeli civilians, but a substantial portion of the blame must be laid at the feet of Israel, who established the prevailing conditions under which such an attack was all but inevitable.
In my prior essays on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I introduced an ethical theory which I’ve come to call statistical pragmatic ethics, which is based on the concept of statistical determinism.
Determinism has become a prominent topic in popular philosophy and psychology in recent years, especially following the 2023 publication of the book Determined by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky. Determinism is the position that human behavior is in some way determined by biological and environmental factors. We’re certainly in agreement that biological and environmental factors have a strong influence on behavior, but determinists attribute behavior exclusively to those factors. Some determinists are also compatibalists, meaning they believe that determinism can co-exist with free will, but Sapolsky is an incompatibalist who denies that free will exists at all.
I’ve read Sapolsky’s book; it’s quite entertaining and informative but I don’t find that it fully supports his conclusions. However, I maintain that the question of free will, while not answered definitively and finally, has at least been answered sufficiently to strongly inform our decision making. While we cannot yet say that human behavior is fully deterministic, we can at least say that it is statistically deterministic. This is to say that, while we can’t predict individual behavior, we can predict the statistical behavior of individuals within groups. Were this not the case, there would be no such thing as the insurance industry. Insurance is a lucrative product precisely because human behavior is statistically determinate; insurance companies are able to set prices that they have good reason to believe will be profitable because they can reliably estimate the amount they’ll have to pay out for claims.
Now consider the conditions under which Palestinian children living in the Gaza Strip grow up. Suppose you’re a child of about 10 years, born in Gaza City in 2014. You’re likely small for your age, relative to global norms, as a result of malnutrition. You’re hungry and thirsty all the time and have been displaced from your home. You almost never sleep, and when you do you have terrible nightmares. You likely have at least one untreated medical condition or injury due to the dire conditions combined with lack of access to healthcare. The water makes you sick when you drink it. You’ve received no formal education. The idea of normal childhood play is not something that’s ever entered your experience. Two out of every five other children you know have been killed, as well as many of the adults whom you trust to keep you safe. You likely have a caregiver role for even younger children who have been wounded or orphaned. The adults around you tell you who is responsible, and you have no reason to question them.
Now imagine, one night, someone hands you a rocket launcher and tells you to shoot it over the wall. You do so, and the rocket hits an Israeli home and kills an entire civilian family. To what degree are you morally culpable for their murder? We know as a matter of empirical fact that those raised in poverty are less capable of the moral reasoning we normally expect of individuals, and the conditions of privation under which this child has been raised far exceed mere poverty. That doesn’t justify the act—it is still a moral evil, but can we reasonably expect that firing the rocket is something the child would refuse to do on moral grounds? Can we not lay at least some of the blame on those who established the prevailing conditions which led to a child who has a diminished possibility of proper and educated moral reasoning firing a rocket at civilians?
So we turn our condemnation towards the Israeli government and the IDF, but once we’ve moved to this more indirect model of responsibility, we have to ask how widely we need to cast our net. What about those who support Netanyahu’s administration? What about those opposed to his administration but who pay taxes which support the government and the Israeli defense industry? What about those in other nations, such as the United States, whose governments more-or-less back the Netanyahu administration’s genocidal actions?
To expand on this, I’m going to introduce the social connection model of political responsibility described by theorist Iris Marion Young in her 2011 book Responsibility for Justice.
Young responds to what she calls the liability model of political responsibility, under which we find someone to blame and punish for past wrongdoings. Given some wrong, the questions “whom do we blame?” and “how do we punish them?” are, at least in part, Young says, wrong questions. Rather than asking who is to blame for what happened in the past, we should be asking, who is responsible for changing what happens in the future.
Young describes society in terms of social structures. To understand what this means, consider going to the local Department of Motor Vehicles to renew one’s driver’s license. This activity is a social-structural process: it is a process involving a series of steps that require my interaction with other people in my society, and all such processes fall under the wide umbrella of social-structural processes. So social structures are made of social-structural processes, which are themselves made of the actions of social agents such as myself, the clerk at the DMV, and the other people I encounter in their vehicles on my way to the DMV and at the department itself. Social-structural processes are concrete, material realities: I transport my body to the DMV, sign forms, hand over money, stand in front of a camera, and so forth.
This process is available to me as what Young, drawing from Jeffrey Reiman, calls a channel. A channel, in this context, is a structure which both enables and constrains my behavior in society. I am constrained by the physical structure of the city I live in and the public transportation options available (or, rather, unavailable) to own a car. I am constrained by the actions of law enforcement officials to keep a document with me showing that the state considers me fit and able to safely operate a car. Note the emphasis here on the material reality of the situation: it is not the abstract law which constrains me but rather the empirical fact of how law enforcement officers will behave if they stop me for some reason and find that I don’t have a valid driver’s license. I know that if I go to the right room in the right building at the right time of day with the right forms and the right amount of money, I will receive the necessary document. I am constrained in how exactly I can go about it and I am constrained in having to go about the whole matter in the first place but am enabled to do so within those constraints.
Those channels which are relevant to me in particular constitute my social-structural position. The specific process I’ve described for renewing my driver’s license is available to me in part because of my age. If I were a young child, the DMV would refuse to certify my license. So every individual in a society has a position constituted by their channels and the way in which different social-structural processes affect them given their various properties and characteristics, and the aggregate of these positions and channels and processes across society constitutes social structure.
We can immediately see the recursive nature of social structure. I described how I’m channeled to renew my driver’s license by the actions of law enforcement officers. Their actions result from their own channels by virtue of their positions as law enforcement officers, which are constrained by the expected actions of their superiors, and so forth, in an intersecting network of incredible complexity. What’s more, social structure exhibits what Young, drawing from Anthony Giddens, calls duality of structure. That social structure is dual means that it is constituted by our actions even as it constrains them. My going to the DMV to renew my license serves to reinforce the very process which constrains me. The money I pay for the renewal funds the DMV of course, but even just the very fact that I take part in the requisite social interactions reinforces the entire network in numerous ways.
All of social structure is dual in this way, top to bottom. This means that, if some particular social-structural process is unjust, the responsibility for changing it is shared among those who participate in it. The DMV, to return to our example, is often inconvenient, but may be unjust in some ways as well. If someone can’t pay the fee, they may be prevented from driving, which might prevent them from working and earning wage, so the system would then trap them in poverty without recourse over what might be just twenty or thirty dollars. If you’re a DMV participant and agree that that’s an unjust process, then the responsibility for changing the underlying social structure is shared between you and everyone else who uses the DMV, as well as its employees and bureaucratic overseers at various levels. Those people, including you, are all responsible for making the DMV what it is, and so those people, including you, are responsible for rectifying its injustices. None unilaterally—collective responsibility must be discharged collectively—and some more than others; Young is careful to keep in mind that the mayor or the state’s Secretary of Transportation have more power to effect changes at the DMV and so have more responsibility to correct its injustices. But that doesn’t eliminate your own responsibility, and if you recognize that the situation is unjust but do nothing whatsoever about it, then it must be said that you’re complicit in that injustice. That’s precisely the definition of complicity: to allow injustice to happen when you could work to prevent it and are responsible for doing so.
Now consider the scope of political responsibility in a highly interconnected and interdependent world. Each of us participates in social-structural processes that span the entire planet, and we find injustice at every step along the way. Both my social-structural position and my biological position as a human organism necessitate that I own and wear clothing, but purchasing clothing involves my participation in the global textiles market, with its sweatshops, unbalanced international trade, and all manner of other injustices large and small. And here we run into a few potential difficulties with Young’s model. I’ll call the first one the epistemological problem of awareness. I can buy a shirt from an outlet that claims to use ethical production and trade practices, but how can I know whether they’re being truthful about that, or whether they’ve done due diligence sufficient to really be sure about it? What about their suppliers, and their suppliers’ suppliers? Next is the epistemological problem of action: supposing I do know that a process that I participate in is injust, how do we know what to do about it? And third is the practical problem of scale: we individually participate in far more unjust processes than it seems we could possibly do anything about, even through collective action.
The two epistemological problems are the most challenging. To the first, I suggest that the epistemological veil that shields us from the indirect affects of our actions is itself an unjust social-structural process, one of which most of us—anyone listening to this podcast, I’d imagine—are at least minimally aware. If you weren’t before, you are now. We then have a shared responsibility to document and describe social-structural processes in general, informing ourselves and each other about how the world really works.
As far as the practical problem of scale, Young bites the bullet. A common maxim in ethics states that we can’t be morally responsible for things outside of our control, but Young responds that there is no reason to expect that the amount of injustice in the world would conform to our ability to handle it. Actually, in my view, we should expect exactly the opposite—that’s precisely the nature of injustice. So we’re stuck having to adjudicate and prioritize our responsibilities, knowing that we will always be responsible for more than we can actually ever do anything about.
To that end, and also by way of addressing the epistemological problem of action, Young establishes parameters of reasoning, criteria for determining what to target and how to target it. It’s a short list and these parameters are very general; Young’s model is a very high level theory and it’s necessary that the detail work be done at lower levels.
The parameters of reasoning are power, privilege, interest, and collective ability. Who has the most power to effect change? Who benefits from the existing structural injustices? Who has the most direct stake in addressing the injustice? And who are best positioned to organize collective action?
With regards to the Palestinian genocide, those with the most power are the soldiers of the IDF and the government officials of Israel and the United States. But we know already that they’re not going to be changing things on their own, so we move on to those who have the power to influence them: high-ranking members of American and Israeli corporations, especially within the defense industry. As I described in my historical essays on the Israel-Palestine conflict, the conflict and the land are being used as a testing ground for military technology. This is described in extensive detail in the book The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Leowenstein. We’re unlikely to see change at that level either. The greatest weight of responsibility falls on their shoulders, but if we let it rest there, knowing that nothing will be done, then we are unavoidably complicit. The next level is community leadership, especially religious leaders, who have an enormous amount of sway in both Israel and the United States. Many conservative religious voices are deeply entrenched in the religious and eschatological aspects of the conflict, but there are others whom I think might be persuadable. I doubt many of my listeners are members of mainline religious communities, but some might be members of other community organizations.
We’re not going to lay out an entire game plan for how we think resistance should play out; to do so would be to try to individually co-opt what must necessarily be a social process. We can’t tell anyone what they should do or how complicit they are—that’s difficult enough for us to figure out for ourselves. This is about excavating the boundaries of domination, about subverting the narrative that there’s nothing that can be done because none of us can see a way forward as individuals.
Let’s expand our scope here to emphasize the weight of the larger problem at stake.
In her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil philosopher Hannah Arendt proposes that human evil tends, at the largest and most grotesque scales, to be the functional result of the actions of individuals within the systems responsible for perpetuating the egregious violence typically associated with evil. On her view, in order to account for the spectacle of atrocity, one must first understand that the horrors of the 20th century were the result of systems which demanded a minimum threshold of functional loyalty from individuals who, while in their appointed jobs and positions, simply carried out the day-to-day tasks needed to ensure the smooth operation of the subset of the system of which they were a part. Note that this kind of “loyalty” needn’t entail explicit belief in the ideology of the system, instead, all that is required is simply the carrying-out of orders and functions dictated from above. In fact, one could cynically reject the explicit ideology of, say, Nazism—the ideology Eichmann clung to until the moment of his death—or Zionism, as is the case for us today, yet still be complicit in perpetuating violence precisely by continuing to merely “do one’s job” while within the larger context of the State’s demands. This is the essence of the idea of structural violence.
What Arendt shows us through the banal efficiency of the beaurocrat Adolf Eichmann, is that instead of evil being primarily an overpowering spectacle that one can only fight by warring against on the battlefield, the backbone of evil is, to put it simply, willful ignorance. “Stupidity” to be even more concise.
Evil as spectacle is itself an ideological operation perpetuated precisely by convincing the individual that they have no real power to fight against it, cannot really do anything to stop it, and is therefore cleansed of any real complicity—to the point that a “guilty” verdict against an individual who simply does their job within the system would seem a patently criminal offense in and of itself.
And yet, Adolf Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, war crimes, and executed. His defense ultimately boiled down to the phrase we hear over and over again: “I was just following orders”.
Following orders, crunching numbers, drafting plans for railway systems, detailing the logistics for the transportation of cargo, understanding how to maximize occupancy inside train cars, accounting for fuel supplies and food rations, allocating funds and resources to ensure continued operations—all of these mundane tasks were performed by Eichmann and other individuals within the Third Reich, each of them contributing in their own way to the genocide of millions of men, women, and children; contributing to the irreparable trauma inflicted on survivors and their descendants, and to the psychic wound now forever the inheritance of mankind in the wake of unspeakable murder.
Complicity is born of conformity. Evil, then, is often the result of an entrenched underestimation of the systematic sublimation of violence into innocuous structural mechanisms—channels for abstract and alienated cruelty—mechanisms which obfuscate the tangible effects our actions have on other human beings and their environments.
However, as we hope to have made clear: this is not to say that all responsibility lies at the foot of the average individual living in a systematically brutal society who must work and consume to survive. To be sure, overemphasis on the responsibility of the individual is one of the system’s greatest tricks. This tactic obscures the structural base that grounds the violence in Palestine and the world over and thereby tacitly absolves, or defers the eye of justice away from, those who are in fact most complicit—even directly culpable—and therefore responsible for the devastation wrought.
Complicity is complicated; it is multilayered and confounding. So then is the responsibility we incur as individuals. Nothing here is cut and dry, black and white—it is therefore a difficult burden to understand, but no less a moral imperative for that reason. In fact, the layers of dissimulation themselves demand articulation. For our part, we believe that the job of the philosopher lies not in telling others the specifics of what they must do in a given case. Our task is to articulate principles, and commence the destruction of worlds. We bear responsibility as self-appointed archeologists of ideology, but we cannot tell you what level of complicity you yourself bear, nor what responsibility you then shoulder. That task is left to you. But what we hope to have shown is that this is a moral and ethical burden for all of us, not simply an intellectual one.
A situation such as this confronts us not with one more moral issue among many, but rather with the war for the foundations of morality and ethics under Capitalism and modernity more generally. Not only are we confronted with the imperative for whatever action we can take (although it does do this), but also the opportunity to understand the grounding of ethics, and why this grounding is its own justification–universal empathy in the face of the tragic. What we wish to fight for is the recognition that the foundations of ethics and morality resist recuperation into systems of abstract exchange and use-value. The recognition of this basic fact is itself a metaethical imperative for any ethical agent.
Again, nothing here is black and white. However, Eichmann was still condemned for his actions and complicity, and rightfully so. The question that weighs on us now is: how dissimilar are we from Eichmann, or from any number of normal, every day people who enabled gas chambers and mass graves? How will the eye of history perceive our inaction, our silence, and our continued complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people?
And so it bears reminding ourselves one last time of the final public statement made by Aaron Bushnell:
Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.
Free Palestine
Citations
- And now for the whitewashing (24 May 2021). B’Tselem. Retrieved 16 May 2024 from https://www.btselem.org/gaza_strip/20210524_whitewash_time
- Loewenstein, A. (2023). The Palestine laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world. Verso.
- Report of the independent international commission of inquiry on the protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (25 Feb 2019). Human Rights Council. Retrieved 16 May 2024 from https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/CoIOPT/A_HRC_40_74.pdf
- R.J. (2024). Rule number one of nonviolent resistance: It can’t work if it’s misrepresented as violent. In Deluge – Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm. OR Books.
- Schneider, T. (8 October 2023). For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces. The Times of Israel. Retrieved 16 May 2024 from https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
- Young, I.M. (2011). Responsibility for justice. Oxford University Press.