The Dilemmas of Morality and Power
Daniel J. Elazar
Ours is a topic that can only be talked about today in light
of the hard realities of the world in which we live and of the
position of the Jews and the Jewish state in that world. Today,
we Jews are confronted with the realities of power, its joys and
curses. We must confront the problems of relating morality and
power in contemporary statecraft. This raises at least three
questions:
Is there a difference between individual morality and the
morality of public policy choices for a state or other political
community?
Assuming a less than perfect world, how should political
communities, their leaders and members deal with the problem of
maintaining moral positions under duress or at times of stress?
To what extent does or should a morally relativistic or
morally absolutist position influence one's conclusions with
regard to the first two questions?
We must respond to these questions for at least three
reasons. The immediate one was the spate of callow and
superficial moral criticisms of Israel on the part of the mass
media covering the events of the intifada, joined by the
reactions of "anguished" professional Jewish moralists,
principally but not exclusively in the diaspora, as well as the
usual critics of Israel who exploited the opportunity to the
hilt. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the intifada itself, we
must not leave the moral field to those self-proclaimed moral
arbiters.
Beyond that, the decade of the 1980s witnessed an erosion of
Israel's moral position in the world for real or imagined
reasons. The political consequences of that erosion are clear to
behold, both in the form of new challenges to Israel's position
abroad and in increasing divisiveness and loss of self-confidence
at home.
There is also the larger question of the relationship between
morality and power which confronts every polity in determining
its policies and actions and which we as Jews must fully confront
once again as a result of our return to statehood. Those of us
who have argued that the reestablishment of the State of Israel
is not only morally challenging but enables Jews to test the
norms of their civilization and the premises of their faith in
the most concrete and practical ways, must engage in
consideration of the issues of morality and power as they are
played out in the life and actions of the Jewish State and must
seek to develop guidelines for Israeli and Jewish public policy
through the most serious inquiry into the question.
An appropriate Jewish response should grow out of a
combination of concern for the Jewish political tradition and the
contemporary Jewish public agenda. It should be a response that
is consciously Jewish and deliberately rests upon Jewish sources,
beginning with the Bible. This Jewish grounding should be
combined with a consideration of the concerns and works of
Western political thought. Since we are dealing with universal
questions from a perspective that is at once universal and
appropriately rooted in the concrete situation of a concrete
people, we should be prepared to contrast Machiavelli with Bahya
ibn Pakuda, link Hillel the Elder with Emanuel Kant, and weigh
halakhic consideration, in connection with the principles of
natural law and justice.
In some respects we Jews have been reveling in the joys of
power, of having power, after such a long period of
powerlessness. But now we also have to come to understand some of
the curses of power so that we can perhaps understand better what
the responsibilities for exercising power are and how difficult
these matters can be. It is a lot easier for Jewish intellectuals
in diaspora to complain about non-Jewish cops than it is when the
Jews are the cops as well. But you cannot have power without
having police. Pio Baroja, the great Spanish anarchist writer of
the beginning of the twentieth century, defined the ideal
commonwealth from an anarchist point of view as one "without
priests, without flies, and without policemen." Unfortunately, we
have since learned that one cannot have a world without flies and
also have a world without policemen. Somebody has got to make
sure that those people who are basically garbage dumpers do not
do it. That is at the most minimum level of order, which is why
Pio Baroja is now remembered more as a writer than he is as a
political thinker.
Jews were in a situation where, figuratively and often
literally, we had no policemen for almost 2,000 years. It is not
that we were not involved in politics; we were involved in the
politics of powerlessness. It was the politics of maneuver, of
doing what we could with what little we had, what little we could
offer in exchange for a minimum amount of security that enabled
us to survive as a people throughout the long years of
dispersion.
In many respects, rabbinic Judaism as we came to know it in
its normative state was a set of prescriptions for how to live in
a world in which we were nearly powerless. The sages did not want
a powerless Jewish people, but understood that under the
circumstances they needed to teach their people how to reconcile
the realities of being in a position of minimal power with their
collective needs and how to adjust accordingly. What they did
was to teach Jews how to channel their political yearnings into
spiritual ones wherever possible. Jews accepted that because
they had no choice. While there was a choice, normative Judaism
was not as normative as it later became. It struggled with other
understandings of how to be Jewish and what being Jewish meant.
But at a certain point because there was no other choice it
became the normative brand of Judaism, with various variations,
but basically that was it.
Approximately 100 years ago, a significant body of Jews
founded the Zionist movement on the premise that Jews had had
enough of powerlessness; that the Jewish people had to make it
their business to get back into a situation where, as a polity,
they could exercise normal political power in the normal world.
In other words, they argued that the Jewish people should seek a
state of its own, one which, whatever special qualities it would
have (and there were a wide range of Zionist visions), would be
normal, with both the trappings and the responsibilities of
sovereignty, with an army, with a police force.
After the Six-Day War, Israel passed from having attained a
politics of power to a situation in which Jews began, the truth
be told, to get a little drunk on power, both in Israel and in
the diaspora. Suddenly Jews began discussing Jewish politics in
new terms. While acknowledging that the exercise of power is a
heavy responsibility, basically Jews liked the new situation very
much. We liked being the strong guys on the block for a change.
that is must understandable. When all is said and done, it is
still better to be the strong guy on the block than the weak guy,
even though strength carries with it responsibilities that bring
their own problems. That is where we were for the past twenty
years.
Now in the last few years Jews have begun to confront the
other side of power. It is most blatant, of course, in relation
to Israel, but it is not only in relation to Israel. We can see
other facets of it, even in relation to diaspora communities,
particularly in the United States and France. We are learning
that power is like fire. Power is amoral. It is energy, it is
force. It can be used for good; it can be used for ill. It can
be well-controlled; it can be poorly controlled. It can be
well-directed; it can be channeled; if not properly controlled or
channeled, it can be abused.
In my opinion, the Jewish people made the right decision 100
years ago when we decided to go back to seek a politics of power,
to seek the restoration of our own state that would play a role
in the world. We need power, but we must learn how to control
and live with it.
Quite frankly, I have very little patience with those who
accuse Israel of abandoning Jewish values for reasons of
political and military necessity. Statehood is a serious
business and the State of Israel is not a summer camp for
diaspora Jews. What are "Jewish values" held in the abstract and
used to lecture others as to how to behave in dealing with the
real difficulties of the human condition? It is easy to preach
"Jewish values" when one does not have to pay the price.
The real question is: how do Jews preserve, foster and apply
Jewish values when they must take care of themselves. When I
hear my son, a medic in the Israeli tank corps who was serving in
Samaria in February 1988, tell us how he saved the life of an
Arab youth who wounded him in the leg and was subsequently shot
in self-protection by one of my son's comrades, to me that says
more about Jewish values than any number of articles on the New
York Times Op-Ed page. In that connection, survival is also a
Jewish value and it ill behooves the generation that had the good
fortune to survive or not be caught up in the Holocaust to forget
that.
That does not mean that there cannot be disagreements with
regard to Israel's political and military policies. Israelis,
like all humans, make mistakes and need to reassess matters from
time to time. But there is a difference between recognizing
human error and trying to correct it, and bemoaning the loss of
Jewish values which seem to somehow be best preserved in a
hothouse by people who do not bear the responsibility for the
lives and security of others. I happen to believe that there
have been few governments in history which have been so concerned
with the moral aspects of their exercise of political and
military power -- in Israel's case, for clearly Jewish reasons,
whether traditionally religious or not.
Let me suggest a near consensus that fits squarely within the
mainstream of Jewish political thought. For this there should be
general agreement on the existence of absolute moral parameters,
binding public as well as private behavior, states as well as
individuals, but with much room for consequential moral decisions
within those parameters, more for states than for individuals.
Moreover, there should be a general consensus that moral
decisions require serious consideration of ends and means, with
certain highly moral ends justifying means which if taken alone
would be of questionable morality, while at the same time certain
means are too immoral to be considered, even for the best ends.
Within those parameters there are such basic Jewish political
principles as legitimacy of national self-expression, the
necessity for developing the world community as a community of
nations, the need to wrestle with moral questions in the exercise
of power, and the moral dignity that striving brings to human
actions, even when human behavior is inevitably flawed.
In any case, there should be a strong rejection of
oversimplification. The effort to avoid oversimplification should
unite people whose conclusions with regard to the specific
problems of Israel and the intifada and in relation to the
Palestinian Arabs are very different indeed. It is what makes
this discussion a dialogue in which people talk to one another
from within a common moral understanding rather than separately
or past one another.
The Zionist pioneers reluctantly pursued statehood to begin
with. They were reluctant to establish an army. (Indeed, the
choice of the name Israel Defense Forces was designed to reflect
the Zionist commitment not to have any army.) The IDF that
developed spends extraordinary amounts of time -- appropriately
-- in trying to teach its soldiers Jewish values and their
practical connections with the IDF mission. We have seen some of
the results of that in the IDF's recoiling from the excesses that
developed out of the Arab outbreaks, a situation which by its
very nature provokes excesses.
There are some who are far less attuned to these moral
dilemmas than others. There always are such in every society.
And there are times when even those who are attuned will not live
up to their own moral commitments. But overall, in my opinion,
Israel continues to have an excellent record in this regard, one
that has cost any number of Israeli lives over the years.
Despite media reports to the contrary, Israel has not lost or
basically changed its sense of purpose or vision. On the most
immediate level, Israel is still a place where Jews can find a
secure home, where every Jew lives by right and not by
sufferance, and where Jews can develop as a people and not simply
as individuals. On a second level, Israel remains committed to
the principle that it should be the place where the dominant
culture is Jewish and where authentic Jewish cultural development
-- good, bad, or indifferent -- is part of the life of everybody
in the state (including the non-Jews), and not merely small
groups of intellectuals or ultra-Orthodox. At the highest level,
despite all the difficulties, Israel is still pursuing the Jewish
dream of striving to become a good society, even as it strives to
become a normal one.
It is this combination that sometimes goes unnoticed among
Israel's critics. To be a society of saints requires that others
be normal and do the saints' dirty work for them. That is the
approach of those who set themselves in ivory towers, of Essenes,
or Christian utopian communities. We Jews have had enough of
that kind of sainthood. For us it has cost too much.
It is true that there is a tension in Zionism between the
search for normality, to be like all the nations, and the effort
to build a special Jewishly-informed polity -- a light unto the
nations. Both sides to that tension have their merits. Therefore
the only way to resolve the tension between them is to try to
achieve a synthesis of both, which is what Israel, consciously or
unconsciously, has been trying to do. The big change that has
taken place in the last forty years is that we are wiser now and
understand that this is a more difficult task than the Zionist
visionaries and those of us who followed them originally thought
-- in part because of the hostile environment in which Israel
finds itself, in part because of the cultural baggage which we
brought from the Galut, in part because of elements in the Jewish
character which we conveniently could ignore as long as we were a
persecuted minority and could blame them on others, and in part
because of human nature in general. If the task is much harder
than we thought, this only makes the challenge that much greater.
To confront this challenge we must study our own political
tradition. In this the Bible particularly and halakhic sources
secondarily play a major role. This is not a call for Scripture
to be quoted as proof test as is often the case in theological
discussions of these questions. Rather it is a call for searching
the sources more broadly for political teachings by examining its
case studies of situations and responses to them. Abraham, Joseph
and his brothers, Moses, Joshua, Jeptha, and Samuel provide us
with hard teachings about the relationship between morality and
power.
What can we conclude from all this? There should be a clear
agreement that nations and all but fundamentally immoral states
have the right to survive and the obligation to protect the lives
and security of their members or citizens. In doing so they may
use appropriate methods which in themselves would not be
considered moral from an absolute perspective, such as deceit and
force, provided that they are used in context with appropriate
humility and subject to the limitations of certain absolute
parameters. It is generally understood that, given human flaws,
mistakes will be made and excesses committed, some of which
should be punished if found to be deliberate, but always with an
understanding of the circumstances involved.
There should be further agreement that however high the
obligation of leaders of states to act to protect the lives of
their citizens and those under their protection, they must also
consider the lives and legitimate concerns of those whom they are
confronting. Moreover, since in this imperfect world individuals
may have to pay a more drastic price than do their nations or
states, as for example when an individual sacrifices his life in
a war to preserve his nation which, while paying a price,
survives as a collectivity, that is part of the tragedy of human
existence. It calls for reciprocal concern on the part of the
national or state leadership to try to safeguard the members of
the body politic.
The moral issues posed by Israel's situation are among the
most difficult that humans confront in our time since they
involve conflicting rights as well as interests and the problem
of a people who were committed for nearly 4,000 years to
maintaining the highest of moral standards, even when exercising
political power. No conference, nor for that matter, no
philosopher can be expected to resolve these problems. What is
necessary, however, is to seriously consider them on the highest
plane but with an eye to the most practical application of the
results of that inquiry, without abandoning either the exercise
of political power or the pursuit of justice.
