WAR AND THE VALUE OF A HUMAN LIFE

“They made a desert and called it peace.” - Tacitus

A few personal reflections on circumstances that grip the mind and conscience…

The horror of Hamas's wanton massacre of 1,400 Israelis has gripped the attention of the world. But so has the Israeli response, all brought to viewers around the globe through relentless reportage. From the perspective of Israel's public relations, the optics could not be worse. One of the world's most powerful militaries is raining death from the skies on an impoverished, tightly urbanized population, almost half of whom are children without the possibility of escape. The contrast couldn't be more stark. As often noted, Gazans effectively live in a prison without doors. It's claimed that over 10,000 civilians have been killed, including 400 children a day (the numbers remain uncertain) – and the war is just at its beginning stage. The imagery is stark, as buildings in an instant are turned to rubble, no doubt with victims smothered in their collapse. We see street after street of destruction. With scant food and water, fuel to furnish life-saving equipment almost drained, “humanitarian catastrophe” strikes one as inadequate to describe the pain, fear, suffering, and death that this horrendous conflict has wrought. For those sensitive to the lives of others, the unfolding horror of war and the anguish it brings shock the conscience.

The war is pursued in a political context, and it dramatically raises the question of the value of human life. Or, more precisely, the agonizing question of the relative value of human lives. The right to life is foundational to all other rights. Without life, there can be no rights. The historical religions affirm the sacredness or holiness of human beings. It states in Genesis that the human being is created b'tselem elohim, in the image of God. The substance behind that image can be debated. But the presumption is that human beings possess a distinctive attribute that makes them inviolate from abuse.

I am not a believer, but I don't conclude that one needs a theistic foundation to affirm that all people are precious and that all possess inherent dignity and worth. One can get there through other byways. It was Spinoza who observed that all things strive to persist in their own being. All living things, we among them, strive to preserve our lives, and we cherish our lives more than all else. This natural fact alone should lead us to conclude that nurturing, respecting, and protecting human life makes a very powerful claim on us.

But is human life absolute? I would like to believe that it is, but reality and the power of competing claims lead one to conclude that it is not. In the human rights canon, there are a small number of rights that are assumed to be absolute. Among them is the right to be free of torture, murder, enslavement, or genocide. I would add to them the right to a free conscience and to a fair trial. These rights need to be upheld without qualification or exception. But the right to life, however foundational, and however cherished, is not among them.

Unless a person is an absolute and unqualified pacifist, the sanctity of human life can be violated. Most obvious and compelling is the taking of another life for the purposes of self-defense. Most people would conclude that if another person is about to kill me, and the only means open to me is to take the assailant's life to prevent my own death, then I am morally justified in doing so. As an aside, I have always been absolutely opposed to capital punishment for many reasons. Among them is that there are ways of incapacitating murderers short of killing them. However horrendous imprisonment is, prisons are effective in keeping society safe from those who would kill again. Few perpetrators escape. Moreover, strapping a person to a gurney and pumping lethal medication into his veins to make him dead is the ultimate violation, not only of life but of human dignity. Respect for the dignity of others, and ourselves, I believe is our most salient value. Freedom, autonomy, power, and dignity are correlative concepts. With capital punishment, all these human attributes are reduced to zero, and the power of the state in that act is raised to infinity. As with torture, it is the ultimate violation of our humanity, and we should not be doing it.

But the fact of an exception to the inviolability of human life, as in the case of self-defense, opens the door from assessing human life as sacred to moving it to the category of utilitarian calculus. It makes the value of human life relative to circumstance and context. And with that move, the issue becomes morally very complex.

The fact that the lives of some people count more than others is a gnawing truth that chronically afflicts the moral conscience. Public prominence, fame, wealth, political influence, and the social proximity to those making the assessments ensure that life's importance is relative. A place in the spotlight makes a life more valuable than others. In the abstract, all lives are equally important, indeed infinitely so. In practice, some people, again, count more than others.

On the international stage, where the political spotlight is turned helps determine this. At the moment, Palestinian lives count for a great deal. Political reasons, and not the intrinsic value of human life, is what elevates their value. Meanwhile, warfare continually rages in the Congo, where more than six million people have been killed in the past few decades and hundreds of thousands of women have been raped and ganged raped. But how many concerned with human rights know about this? Where are the demonstrations protesting the relentless killing? Who cares? Are the lives of Congolese less worthy than Palestinian lives? If attention, public concern, and strategic interest are the indices of the value of human life, the answer can only be “yes.” Yes from the standpoint of an external witness. No from the standpoint of the subjective suffering and death of the victims of violence, whoever they may be. Given circumstances and political context, human lives can readily be held cheaply, and they are. The terrorist organization Boko Haram has for years killed thousands of people in northeastern Nigeria. Their violence only came to international notice when they kidnapped hundreds of girls. The Nigerian army has waged war against Boko Haram for years, in a conflict that is especially brutal, often killing large numbers civilians as they do. Yet the Nigerian government's excesses have brought little international concern or condemnation. Meanwhile Israel's killing of civilians is vigilantly scrutinized. The world has shown great concern for Palestinian lives, as it should. When it comes to Nigerian lives, by the index of attention given, the world cares little. If we believe that human life is sacred, then this discrepancy should be high on the list of ethical concerns. But it isn't.

Employing the justification of killing a human being for the purpose of self-defense, can we morally maintain that collective self-defense is also warranted? If my clan, village, or country is invaded by an army clearly prone to our destruction, is there moral justification in killing the enemy to protect the many who comprise my defined community? If yes, then there is a justification for war.

One can maintain that there is a significant, and arguably categorical, difference between a private, spontaneous act of self-defense involving a single perpetrator and a lone defender, on the one hand, and training legions of soldiers to methodically kill unknown combatants in very large numbers. For pacifists there probably is. For the majority of humankind throughout history and currently, there is not. Killing others who are unknown assailants has been a scourge of humankind since its beginning. So has been the dream of putting an end to war, and replacing it with perpetual peace.

After World War II, which saw the unprecedented killing of more than 66 million souls, the victors came together to create the United Nations, having as its primary purpose putting an end to international aggression. A post-war movement spawned the creation of a cluster of international contrivances to realize that goal. In 1948, the UN proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Though the Declaration is silent on war, it was written with an understanding that individuals need protection, as painfully occasioned by the systematic killing that the World War had just wrought. The period also saw a re-emphasis on the laws of war and the Geneva Accords, which provide protection for those taken captive in war. These international laws are codified under the rubric of “international humanitarian law.” Writ large, they are barriers set up to hem in the worst and most destructive impulses of which human beings are capable.

These efforts come with their problems, as I will attempt to clarify. But if cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker is to be believed, people now are increasingly less prone to die by violence, including in war, than in centuries past, and the construction of such rules and laws has been effective in making it so. It is true that, despite Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Syria, and violence in the Horn of Africa and the Sudan, there are fewer wars raging today than during the Cold War period. Moreover, current warfare is waged increasingly by non-state actors, whereas wars between and among nations, omnipresent throughout history, have declined.

At first glance, creating laws to limit the destructive effects of war appears absurd in that wanton lawlessness seems to be intrinsic to what war is. However, history indicates that they have not been completely ineffective. But they do come with difficulties while implicitly conceding that if humankind cannot abolish war-making, at least we need to try to limit its destructiveness and inhumanity.

The major problem confronting international law, including the laws of war, is that they are not readily enforceable. Domestic laws are legislated. International laws are not. They are created by treaties between nations. Domestic laws within nation-states are enforced by appointed police agencies. But there is no global police force to enforce international laws. They are held together and enforced as long as the mutual self-interest of the parties entering the treaties lasts.

Yet when it comes to international human rights and the laws of war, we have developed evolving mechanisms by which to enforce them. They are fledgling efforts, episodic and difficult to apply. The United Nations had set up special courts to try the perpetrators of genocide in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Cambodia, though the last was especially problematic. There was a temporary court to try and punish the perpetrators of the civil war in Sierra Leone. The practice of universal jurisdiction, whereby persons committing major crimes can be tried in any competent court anywhere, has come back into practice, though examples of its use remain few. In 2002, the United Nations established the permanent International Criminal Court. In its effort to enforce international laws used to punish the perpetrators of the worst crimes, some see the international court as a fulfillment of the process initiated by the Nuremberg Trials established to try leading Nazis after the Second World War. These fledgling efforts to enforce international laws are interesting and important. Their use at present is selective and sporadic. But the question that needs to be asked is, is it better to have limited and imperfect justice than no justice at all? I believe the answer is yes.

A second problem with international law as it pertains to the laws of war is that it is often vague in discerning its application, which returns us to the horrid war raging in Gaza. The Israelis are condemned for the excesses of the violence they are perpetrating in their objective to destroy Hamas. Often invoked is the principle of proportionality with regard to the killing of civilians. The laws of war recognize that in military combat civilians will inevitably be killed. The law allows for this when such killing is incidental to military objectives. It becomes illegal when the killing of civilians is a deliberate military act. But how many civilian deaths are too many? When is that threshold crossed? There is something morbid, even ghoulish, in this consideration. What's lost, again, is the precious humanity of those innocents who are killed. Humanity is drained from human beings as people are transformed into mere numbers, statistics, and anonymous things, little different from inanimate objects.

When it comes to proportionality in this conflict, the lead headline in today's New York Times (11/8) reads “Israelis invoking toll of U.S. Wars as Moral Shield.” The Israelis have a point. It is my view that Israel is the object of disproportionate criticism for its abuse of human rights. Given millennia of antisemitism, I contend that the world still retains an unhealthy fascination with Jews. The “Jewish Problem” endures. No doubt, Israel merits criticism. The 56-year occupation of the West Bank and the containment of the Gaza Strip (Egypt is by no means innocent in this regard) enduring violations of human rights as they are cruel and humiliating. They must end. But there are much greater violations of human rights worldwide, which receive scant attention. Some note that Israel is a self-proclaimed democracy and therefore is rightly held to a higher standard. I don't buy it. One does not need to be white, Western, educated, or partake of Enlightenment values to know that torturing people or killing innocent people is blatantly wrong. Whether one is a dictator or the head of a liberal democracy, the same values that speak to the sanctity of life apply. Autocrats well know that. Moreover, virtually every country is a signatory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and needs to abide by its provision and be subject to the world's opprobrium when they don't.

But with regard to the mounting number of civilians killed in the effort to destroy Hamas, Israel is not, at first instance, wrong in pushing back at the United States by citing America's own excesses. They point to the large number of civilian casualties caused by American forces in the battle to take the city of Falluja in 2004 during The Iraq War, and the assault on the city of Mosul in an effort to rout ISIS. But the most glaring example is that 200,000 innocent civilians were instantly vaporized when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war against Japan. It was the most egregious, indeed unique, example of the disproportionate wartime murder of innocent persons in human history. Yet this violation has essentially been swept under the rug, and in my view, the United States has yet to come to terms with the moral violation thus perpetrated.

Prima facie, Israel makes an important point. But their defense is also a most consequential example of the adage that “two wrongs do not make a right.” The violence in Gaza and the rapid increase in innocent civilians killed is occurring now. Israel claims that it makes an effort to spare civilians. They also claim that Hamas strategically uses its vulnerable population as human shields, placing its munitions, missiles, and combatants in hospitals, schools, and mosques, thereby inviting an attack on civilians whose lives mean little to Hamas in its single-minded objective to destroy Israel utterly. It's a cynical and deadly tactic, and a blatant violation of the laws of war, which Hamas makes no pretense of upholding. Perhaps both these assertions by Israel are correct. But the net effect is that innocent people, who are merely struggling to live their lives, are being killed in large numbers.

This conflict has grabbed the world's attention. It has implications and consequences in the region and beyond. It is the responsibility of other nation-states to aggressively strive to help bring it to an end. The United States, despite our hypocrisy, is correct in pressuring Israel into allowing for humanitarian pauses to allow life-saving supplies to enter Gaza. Qatar, which has bankrolled Hamas, needs to maximize its influence toward the release of the hostages. And Egypt, despite its contempt and fear of Hamas, must be open to accepting a large number of Gazans through the Rafah gate. If Lebanon, a nation of fewer than five and half million people, could accept a million Syrian refugees fleeing its civil war, Egypt, a nation of more than a hundred million inhabitants, can assuredly accept a million more. And Saudi Arabia, with whom Israel wants to form diplomatic relations, needs to make such a condition dependent on Israel halting the settlement movement and, as soon as the Netanyahu administration is gone (as I predict it will be), firmly require that Israel restart negotiations toward the creation of a (demilitarized) Palestinian state on the West Bank.

Having pulled back from the Middle East, circumstances have caused the United States to now reengage. President Biden deserves great credit for placing the two-state solution back on the table. However improbable, it is the only solution I can envision that stands a chance of quelling the relentless cycle of violence. The United States needs to get serious in pressuring Israel to that end, tagging that stance to cutting back economic support for Israel. The Israeli tail has wagged the American dog for far too long. The United States must begin to say no. Such a position is not an act of disloyalty. It is just the opposite. The settler movement, which is based on an extremist messianic ideology, is a cancer that is pervading and corrupting Israeli society. Sometimes those at a distance can see more clearly than those caught up in immediate circumstances. So it is here.

The situation will get worse before daylight breaks through. But eventually circumstances will change. Many more people will die; all precious lives. This is war's greatest tragedy.

Political will must be mobilized by all concerned parties to ensure that humanity has the last word.

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