The Ethical Dilemma Of Suicide Bombing
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Courtesy Of: AxisOfLogic.com
By Gianluca Bifolchi
Nov 11, 2006

With the carnage in Beit Hanoun yesterday, where 20 persons -- mostly women and children -- found their death, an ethical dilemma unfolds. Will it be still possible to use the language of moral reprobation if Palestinian militants will turn back to suicide bombings against Israeli civilian targets?

Human rights organizations underscore the unequivocal character of those passages in international law that absolutely ban the involvement of civilians in the fights.

These organizations (for example Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) are fixed, however, on a basic position that, even when underpinned with scrupulous impartiality, shows more ambiguously by the day: to consider noteworthy only the ius in bello rather than the ius ad bellum, that is those rules about the conduct in war rather than those about the circumstances when military option appears justified.

In other words they are concerned with "good" combat, and not with why a people is using arms against another people.

In the face of what the Palestinians are enduring this philosophy is more and more ambiguous, and those who apply it are a less and less authoritative sources in their easy "impartiality” when it comes to judge how the weaker, the assaulted reacts against an aggressor who holds an overwhelming military superiority and enjoys the conspiratorial silence -- or overt support altogether -- by the strongest countries in the world.

Today Palestinians are a people in despair. Used up as it may be this word is indeed very pregnant: it means they have no reason to hope for the future. On the contrary it is realistic that along the next months and years their situation will deteriorate further.

If they learned something from the USA and the EU is how pointless it is to wait for help from the outside. As for Israel, that knows as it stands, she is determined to take as much advantage as possible.

Yesterday I heard David Grossman -- routinely introduced to the Italian public as an Israeli pacifist -- saying on television that both the peoples are ready to "compromise to share out the land" and that it is time to come back to talk to each other.

Let us overlook the strange choice of terms (by a writer!) that in Palestine there is still land to "share out,” while there is actually only land to give back.

What is more debatable is this convenient representation of a conflict due to the stubbornness of ruling elite who don't listen to the will of peace of the respective peoples.

It is a mystification that concurs to the heap of lies that justify the oppression of the Palestinians.

Israeli civil society may be well ready to compromise -- as we are assured by Grossman -- but it is above all profoundly racist and unable to perceive the relationship with its Arab neighbors (remarkably so the Palestinians) in terms of justice and equal rights.

The principle of "safety" has become a freudian rationalization prone to justify every deed of bullying their neighbors, carried out in the name of Israel's welfare.

The troubles met by Israeli authorities to clear the scarce settlements in the Strip of Gaza are predicating that there won't be any compromise to "share out" the land in the West Bank as soon as Israeli society will sense it as onerous for itself.

Meanwhile, into the firmament of Israeli politics new stars are featured, like the newly appointed far-right minister Avigodr Lieberman, who points to the war carried on in Chechnya by the Russian military as a model of what Israel ought to do into the Occupied Territories.

What hopes are left to the Palestinians, then, to induce them to more constructive ways than the humanly disastrous option of the suicide bombings?

Somebody will object that thus they won't achieve anything. Maybe. What to reply, however, to those among the Palestinians who will answer that they are ready to take on the hazard of a deadly enterprise, rather than to accept the intolerable passiveness to a certain inhumane oppression?

Somebody will raise qualms of the ethical nature on the opportunity to hit unarmed civilians. What to reply, however, to those who will answer that without one prospect of justice they will take at least the revenge of the one eye for one eye?

The most inclined to react against the primitivism of this logic are probably the same ready to afford any justification to the moral atrophy and dwarfism of the Israeli nation.

Myself, I am not ready yet to deem as ethically acceptable the chance that a person who takes a bus to go to work or to school may die by a suicide attack.

But it is high time to realize how highly dubious are the terms of the ethical dilemma as it was hitherto presented.

There is evidently something wrong when the language of moral reprobation is so easily turned to a weapon in the hands of the oppressor. Palestinian terrorism is condemned, Israeli war crimes aren't even cited by their name.

What kind of ethics is it when only the actions of one side are subjected to explicit moral scrutiny, while for the actions of the other there is at best the terminology of political realism that delivers indefinite and vague calls for negotiation? Perhaps only he who has got all the cards in his hands and no chance to lose has any interest in "negotiating"?

In an apologetic key to the powers that be, we are often told of the distinction Max Weber draws between the ethics of principles and ethics of responsibility. It is not enough to take a stand on what looks right or wrong, one needs to point out what share of responsibility one takes toward a given state of things, without which the field of right wrong is not accessible to judgement.

Fine, let's appropriate this notion for once. If a suicide bombing is going to occur in Israel by Palestinian militants, the only ones entitled to condemn it -- if they will deem it right -- will be those who confront openly the oppression that led to it.

© Copyright 2006 by AxisofLogic.com (Translation copyright)

Gianluca Bifolchi is member of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation is Copyleft: it can be freely reproduced provided its author, translator, revisor and site of origin are cited.