My apologies for the irregularity of RSA Daily for the past few days; I've been travelling over to the US and have only just settled for long enough to clear my inbox and compile a bulletin.
As you know, I don't normally wade into foreign affairs. It's not my area of expertise and it's not strictly within the RSA's sphere of interest.
But the 'situation' in Gaza brought to mind a president’s column I wrote a few years ago and it seems (tragically) to
still apply. Here's what I wrote:
"I am sure many RSA members feel strongly about the awful situation in Gaza. Since the latest conflict began on 8 July [2014], more than a thousand Gazans have been killed and many thousands injured, many of them children. About fifty Israelis have
died.
The stark difference between these numbers is shocking, and leads to one of the most common arguments about the 'situation' in Gaza – that Israel’s actions are disproportionate compared with
those of Hamas.
And yet … what if you happened to live within a few kilometres of a community that kept lobbing rockets into your community?
In the 1970s I lived in Israel for about 18 months on the shores of the Dead Sea – “Ha makom ha yafe b’olam – the
most beautiful place on earth.” It was after the Six Day War of 1967 and the ‘73 Yom Kippur War. There was a Labour Government in place and the idealism of the kibbutz movement was still influential.
One young Israeli friend used to tell me of his recurring
nightmare of being trapped in a burning tank half way across the Sinai; another of his girlfriend who’d disappeared in Europe while on a Mossad mission.
I travelled to the Banias in the northern hills of the Golan Heights and saw how close
Syria and Lebanon were – literally just a stone’s throw. It was easy to feel sympathy with a people trying to find a way to live in peace with displaced neighbours.
The Prime Minister, Yitzak Rabin, later shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Shimon Peres and Yasser
Arafat.
And then, the hope of peace evaporated. The conservative Likud party won office; Rabin was assassinated by a radical orthodox Jew; the break-up of the Soviet Union led to thousands of
conservative Jews settling in Israel
and changing the balance of power.
Now, the situation is intractable. It’s almost as if the Israeli government is playing a high stakes game of 'tit-for-tat'.
In game theory, tit-for-tat is the name given to a strategy that explains how otherwise competing actors can eventually co-operate to achieve stability. The idea is that each actor will respond in kind to the other’s action, a kind of 'equivalent retaliation'. If one side lashes out, the other side will retaliate, but if the first side co-operates, the other side will also co-operate.
But this doesn’t seem right. It’s not as if the Israelis and the Gazans are equivalent actors in a computer simulation. This is more a David and Goliath situation.
What could the Israelis do to break this 'death spiral' of destruction?
A utilitarian might say, “What action would result in the least suffering?” and urge the Israelis to accept a relatively small number of deaths on their side and stop causing the large number of deaths on the other side.
But deontologist might argue, “The death of
innocents on either side is unacceptable” and sympathise with the Israelis trying to protect their children.
But this argument doesn’t feel right, and I think it’s because with might comes not right but responsibility.
In the classic Melian Dialogue, Greek historian Thucydides contrasts two irreconcilable forces: power and honour. The inhabitants of the small island of Melos refuse, despite threats of annihilation, to submit to the demands of imperial Athens, claiming to do so would be to abandon all honour.
The
Athenians argue that “The strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must” – a classic formulation of the doctrine of ‘might is right’. While the Athenians prevail in the short term, killing the Melian men, enslaving the women and colonising the island, Thucydides points out that they eventually overreach themselves and lose the Peloponnesian War some years later. The inevitable result of hubris
– overbearing arrogance.
It’s incontrovertible that Israel is the most powerful actor in the Middle East and Gaza is puny by comparison. But no matter what Gaza does to Israel, with that power comes a proportionately
greater moral responsibility for achieving an end to this death spiral.
To ignore this responsibility, to indulge in disproportionate tit-for-tat, to batter with might as if that confers right, is to lose the battle for honour.
In the end, hubris will be answered."
