Convention, Morality and Policy
Presentation to the Rabbinical Assembly, 1988
Daniel J. Elazar
It is a pleasure for me to be here with so many friends and
colleagues with whom I have worked, and have been associated,
over many years. I can talk with you, in a way that I would not
necessarily talk with other groups. This may make me something
of the bad guy tonight, though after Yosef Goell has divorced
politics from morality altogether, I may not be as bad as I
thought I would be.
While I agree with almost everything that Yossi said, I do
think that there is a relationship between politics and morality
that decent nations try to preserve collectively as well as
individually. But there are two qualifiers to that. A politics
of morality can only exist within a system that has rules that
provide room for morality. The international system has never
really had such rules. At times we have come close to
establishing them in some fields, but most of the time we have
not.
Just to give you an example, let us take the United States,
the pre-eminent nation of the modern world that has emphasized
the relationship of politics and morality in its most ordinary
day-to-day activities, where Presidents run on moral platforms
and where every political decision made is subject to moral
scrutiny, often based on the fads of the day, but nevertheless
moral scrutiny. The United States at this present moment is
supporting Iraq against Iran, which means that it is closing its
eyes to the massive use of poison gas, the first such use of
poison gas since WWI, unless you want to include Egypt's use of
poison gas in what is now North Yemen some years ago, to which
the United States also turned a blind eye.
Far worse that that, the United States is playing a leading
role in the effort to turn Cambodia or Kampuchea back to an
anti-Vietnam coalition whose strongest member is the Khymer
Rouge, headed by Pol Pot, so that they can kill another several
millions of their citizens. If you looked at the International
Herald Tribune recently, Prince Sihanouk who was nominal head of
the anti-Vietnamese coalition in Kampuchea, has resigned, gone to
the States, and announced that this is exactly what is going to
happen, that Pol Pot is going to come out of the jungles and take
over and do just that. The United States has been instrumental
in bringing that about, and we will yet hear of the consequences,
I have no doubt, in the next year or two. The United States has
gone so far as to distort the number of people killed. The
newspapers today, and I am sure it is a result of State
Department briefings, now say that only a few hundred thousand
were killed by Pol Pot, instead of the millions that we know were
killed. All this is done by a country which I believe is
sincerely and honestly committed to trying to find some
relationship between politics and morality, but in the
international arena that is a very difficult thing to do.
The other qualifier is that the relationship between politics
and morality is never a simple one. Even examining one's
premises when one seeks to make moral decisions does not often
lead to an easy way out. Unfortunately, all too often you stand
depends upon where you sit, and that is true of moral as well as
other issues. How much is preached in the name of morality by
people who are embarrassed with regard to their relations with
their peers, and whose moral concerns are basically concerns that
their own reputations remain intact, not that morality be truly
advanced! How often is morality preached by people who do not
have to expose themselves to the consequences of their preaching!
How often is morality preached by people who have not thought
through an issue, but rather have gotten some partial information
and have decided to draw dramatic conclusions, usually based on a
false analogy with some other phenomenon with which they are more
familiar! We see a lot of that in so many ways.
Nevertheless, believing that there is a relationship between
morality and politics and the use of power, I believe we have
some serious obligation to begin to come to grips with that in
Israel and within the Jewish people as a whole. Here it seems to
me that the moral issue is not in the field with the soldiers,
but among the policy-makers of Israel and the Jewish world. The
boys in the field are given a very detailed set of instructions
by the IDF. There are some nineteen points, if I recall
correctly, as to how to behave if there are patrolling in Judea,
Samaria and Gaza. When one reads through those detailed
prescriptions, one is left not knowing what to do next. Even
assuming that under a barrage of rocks that can kill, Molotov
cocktails that can explode, etc., one has the time to decide
which of the nineteen principles applies in this case, how does
it relate to some other principle which seemingly contradicts it?
But even if one had time to reflect and to decide, the message
really is that you are out there, it is your hide, do the best
you can in the split second that you have to make the decision.
That is the case in all military combat situations. And this
is, in its way, a military combat situation. To me, that is not
the central moral issue.
Yes, we certainly can strengthen our young people's sense of
right and wrong, and though the ones I talk to really do have the
right sensibilities. If anything, they are angry because they
are being accused of being insensitive when they are trying so
hard. We can punish those egregious abuses that do occur, some of
which occur because even the best of people under certain
circumstances lose their cool, and under other circumstances
there are always some people who are by nature cruel and take
advantage of opportunities. I don't think that is the problem.
When I talk to my son and his friends about beatings that do
occur, their response is that in some cases, they would rather
rough somebody up who is throwing stones at them than shoot him.
For them, that is a considered moral position.
The real moral issues, as I say, are not in the field but
with the policy makers. With a state, we as Jews, for the first
time, have a real moral challenge. Powerlessness does not
involve moral choice. The King of the Khazars was right when he
challenged the moral claim of the Jews in galut. To have no
power and not shed blood is not a great distinction. I do not
happen to think it is a great benefit, either. It is only when
one has the choice to make that one really is confronting a moral
issue. And it certainly is better, if one wants to live, to be
able to make the choice. I myself would prefer the latter
option.
What it does teach, especially to Jews in the Diaspora who
come here (and we delight when they come here to enjoy Israel) is
that Israel is not a summer camp. It can be a lot of fun, but
basically Israel is a life and death matter for those of us who
live here, for our children who are on the line, and for the
Jewish people as a whole. For that matter, it is for those whom
we confront as adversaries, though perhaps less so because we
start from a position of far greater restraint and we end up
using far greater restraint than others might.
It is true that it is the Palestinians who are occupied. I
think we cannot pretend, nor should we look at the situation any
other way, and, on one level, my heart goes out to them. If I
were one of them I would probably be doing the same thing they
are doing. On the other hand, that does not mean we have to lie
down, roll over and play dead. We have a serious conflict here.
If Palestinians see themselves as occupied, for Jews, the lands
are liberated.
We may decide, and I would not be opposed to deciding, that
as part of a true peace settlement we will withdraw from
territories liberated as a result of the 1967 war. But I will
never stop thinking that those territories were liberated. I
will know that when the opportunity presented itself, the Jewish
people failed to supply another million or two million Jews to
change the demographic situation here. I will know historically
that the Jews have similarly failed on at least two other
occasionsin this century. And I will adapt myself prudentially
in response by deciding, in that case, that we do not want to
rule over a million and a half Palestinians, especially in a
narrowly dangerous demographic situation, in a situation where
they are always going to be tempted to act to change their
situation. We will have to cut our own losses in this regard, if
that proves to be possible. But we need not lie to ourselves by
suggesting that our land is not important to us and that we did
not lose the opportunity of two millennia by our own failure as a
people to respond to opportunities that come our way.
I feel for the Palestinians. I understand why they want
their state, their homeland, their self-determination, whatever
word they happen to use. But as Yossi Goell said, not everybody
can have a state and maybe different groups have to achieve
self-determination in different ways. Maybe the Basques are
better off having an autonomous region in Spain than they would
be if they were independent and were fighting among themselves.
As Jews we do not have to solve that problem, but we do have to
worry that the Jews in Israel are secure.
The Palestinians have revolted. They have revolted in a very
intelligent way, using just enough force to make life difficult
in certain parts of the country, but not enough to justify our
bringing in the full weight of our force in response. And indeed
a great part of our problem is the inadequate application of the
power that we have, because we cannot adequately use the power
that is at our disposal. I think they deserve credit for having
been able to do that. On the other hand, as long as they remain
in a situation where the only spokesmen who speak for them
present the issue as "them or us," spokesmen saying that what
they really want to do is dismantle the Jewish state, which is
basically all their spokesmen have been saying, we have to draw
our conclusions accordingly. This may change. I keep having
hopes that it will change. It may be changing tonight. Maybe
Faisal Husseini, who is reputedly the PLO chief in the
territories, actually did appear not far from here at a Peace Now
meeting to talk about plans for co-existence, side by side. I
think that would be a great step forward and might offer some
possibilities. But when Palestinian Arabs tell me quietly that
they really do believe in co-existence but allow all public
statements to be made by those who deny any possibility of even
the meanest kind of co-existence for the Jews in this land, then
I think we have to respond appropriately. And I think that it is
the moral as well as the intelligent thing to do, as long as they
present it as "them or us."
We are embarrassed by power. We are embarrassed by it in
part because, for the first twenty years after 1967, we revelled
in power. We exaggerated the degree to which the power was good,
as a result of our 1967 victory. We are now exaggerating our
embarrassment in having that same power when we need it to
protect ourselves. We should not have gone overboard in one
direction and we definitely should not go overboard in the other.
Some Jews are embarrassed by the fact that some two hundred
Palestinians have been killed, and so few Jews have been killed.
Would we feel better if two hundred Jews had been killed? Would
we feel even better if five hundred Jews had been killed? I do
not understand that argument at all. If we are strong enough to
make them pay on their territory for starting up with us, why
should we be embarrassed by that fact? Granted, none of us want
this to continue. I do not think anybody enjoys it, certainly
not the people who are doing it. But I do not think that losing
more people, having a more equal casualty ratio, is going to make
us feel better.
In that respect, the worst thing that we can do is what too
many in Israel, I think principally in Israel because of the
political situation, have started to do. That is to say, to
spread panic for political gain. This is a time to keep our wits
about us. This is a time to think through policies carefully, to
hold on where we have to hold on, to look ahead to try to find
ways to peace, or to some kind of reasonable interim settlement
if peace is unattainable. Nor is it a time for failure of nerve.
One must have the feeling, looking at the situation from
historical perspective, that when there were forty thousand Jews
here and three hundred thousand Arabs, it was a greater challenge
for Jews to come into this land that it is for us, when there are
three and a half million Jews and 2.2 million Arabs, or whatever,
to try to defend our presence in this land.
I do not see how the Zionist vision can be justified by those
who argue that it is immoral for us to try to maintain ourselves
here. Like Shlomo Avineri, I do not want a separate Palestinian
state. But I am not sure if I read the scenario in quite the
same way. I do think that if a Palestinian state should go to
war against us, we would be at them. and in each of the wars we
have won, we have lost thousand of lives instead of one or two or
three. Is that better? Does that make us feel better? When we
have lost a thousand, two thousand, three thousand Jewish young
people but have won the war? I would like to avoid that. And if
avoiding that means taking the position that we have taken at the
present time, I do not consider that an immoral position. What
if they did not go to war against us? What if they just sent
terrorists across the border every night? Would we invade them?
Would we do the same thing? Where would we stand in that
circumstance? And what if in either case we did win, as I think
we would, what would we do then?
