The Return of Moral Equivalence

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, April 07, 2024

 

Antony Blinken, as you might have heard, is worried about Israel becoming the same as Hamas.

 

“Democracies place the highest value on human life, every human life. As it has been said, whoever saves a life, saves the entire world,” he pronounced during a press conference in Brussels late last week. “That’s our strength. It’s what distinguishes us from terrorists like Hamas. If we lose that reverence for human life, we risk becoming indistinguishable from those we confront.”

 

At a certain level of generality, this statement constitutes a truism. Sure, if Israel began sending fighters into Gaza villages to kill, rape, and kidnap civilians, it would be a terror group just like Hamas.

 

Since Israel isn’t doing this, nor will it ever, the Blinken statement represents a shameful smear masquerading as an unassailable moral observation.

 

Israel is a democratic society abiding by Western norms; Hamas is a terror group that evicted its political rival from the territory by force. Israel seeks to discriminate between enemy fighters and civilians; Hamas deliberately targets innocents. Israel apologizes for its mistakes and attempts to rectify them; Hamas makes no mistakes — not that it will acknowledge, at least.

 

Israel honors the laws of war and is trying to maneuver through the extreme difficulties of combating a terrorist group that secrets itself among the civilian population; Hamas flagrantly and unapologetically violates the rules of war and is trying to do everything to maximize civilian casualties for propaganda purposes.

 

And, of course, Israel didn’t start the war; Hamas did, and not as an accident in a hair-trigger situation but with malice aforethought.

 

In short — even if you oppose Israel’s war or how it’s prosecuting it, and even if you despise Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — any hint that the two sides could be comparable is deluded or cynical, the product of an ideologically driven inability to make basic distinctions or of a desire to pander to anti-Israel animus. It represents a return of the worst sort of moral equivalence that characterized much of the Left’s thinking during the Cold War.

 

The phrase came to prominence when defenders of the Reagan administration, most especially the great Jeane Kirkpatrick, pushed back against the effort to elide the crucial differences between the United States and the Soviet Union as they engaged in a long struggle over the future of the world.

 

In a 1986 essay for the Hillsdale College publication Imprimis, Kirkpatrick wrote of the newly prevalent worldview holding that the U.S. and the Soviets “resemble one another in key respects. This image of moral and political symmetry has gained a wide acceptance not only in the Third World, but also among our allies and ourselves.”

 

The way she describes the perverse effects of this thinking in the context of the 1980s-era proxy wars in Central America is so on the nose regarding today’s war in Gaza that it almost hurts.

 

Kirkpatrick wrote of how human rights had been redefined to apply exclusively to governments failing their own citizens. “Terrorist groups,” she noted, “do not violate human rights in the current vernacular; only governments violate human rights.”

 

She illustrated the point by reference to El Salvador’s civil war. “Thus,” she argued, “the government of El Salvador is continually attacked for gross violations of human rights in responding to terrorist assault. Guerillas are not attacked for violations of human rights, although they may massacre half of the inhabitants of a hamlet, dragging them from their beds in the middle of the night.”

 

Sound familiar?

 

“That is not,” she wrote of the hypothetical Communist atrocity, “a violation of human rights by definition: That is a protest of a national liberation movement.” So there is an inherent moral disparity between the attacked and the attacker: “National liberation movements assault societies and when governments respond, they (the governments) are criticized vigorously as repressive and unethical.”

 

Again, this is very apt to today’s circumstances.

 

Kirkpatrick recounted a personal experience:

 

I once encountered in a public presentation the assertion from an earnest young man that the government of El Salvador was guilty of the murder of 50,000, and this was proof, obviously, of gross violations of human rights and a sufficient demonstration that the government of El Salvador was unworthy of U.S. support. The fact is, of course, that approximately 50,000 people have died in El Salvador as a consequence of a guerilla war. But the government is simultaneously held responsible for maintaining order, protecting its citizens, and for responding to violence, so it is responsible for all the deaths in the society.

 

By a similar token, responsibility for all the deaths in Gaza is attributed to Israel, even though Hamas started the war and perpetuates the conditions leading to unnecessary civilian suffering.

 

In another parallel to today, Kirkpatrick noted, “The theft of words like genocide and the language which appears in documents like the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Convention are other examples of systematic comprehensive effort at semantic rectification.”

 

And, a sign that some things never changed, she complained, “In the United Nations, of course, genocide is regularly charged against Israel and only Israel is regularly described as violating the Geneva Convention.”

 

Not everything is the same. Pro-Hamas sentiment is, in part, a function of the romantic view of supposed national-liberation movements that Kirkpatrick warned against in the 1980s. But it also reflects the contemporary belief that Israel is “white” and so inherently in the wrong, as well as simply the ancient hatred of the Jews — so, the Jewish state is always blameworthy and held to a different standard than other nations.

 

Moral equivalence never went away, of course. It has been a persistent feature of the Left’s worldview for decades, used to undermine the forces of the West and its allies in whatever conflict is at hand, whether it is against Communist revolutionaries or Islamist terrorists. Still, it is remarkable to hear this way of thinking reflected, not just at a rally or a panel discussion on a college campus but in the words of the U.S. secretary of state.

 

“If practices are measured by abstract, absolute standards, practices are always found wanting,” Kirkpatrick wrote. “The communists who criticize liberal democratic societies measure our practices by our standards and deny the relevance of their practices to judgments concerning the moral worth of our own society.”

 

With the change of a couple of terms, this observation would be completely applicable to the Gaza war, and it remains a rebuke to Antony Blinken and all thoughtless and malicious opponents of Israel that he is aping and, clearly, hoping to appeal to.