The Middle East never stays quiet. If the deeper sources of violent conflict in the region are left to fester, any peace and quiet will pass as quickly as it came. A dose of humility is in order.
By chance, as Israel intensified its bombardment of Gaza, I found myself at a summit on “intellectual humility” hosted by the John Templeton Foundation. It felt self-indulgent to discuss a philosophical concept with seemingly little relevance to the conflict. When it came to life and death, did any of this really matter? But what I found was that it did.
Intellectual humility is a trait and a practice that allows one to accept their own limitations. Even if we think we are right, it entails holding open the possibility that we might be wrong. But on a deeper level, humility involves the recognition that the truth itself is more complicated than it might first appear.
The search for truth, even if one finds it, should not involve rigidity. We are all a product of our environments. When it comes to Israel and Palestine in particular, we bring our own preconceptions to any debate — our own selective read of history and our own developed sense of injustice. This is not about a disagreement over facts; it’s about how to interpret them. My hope is that more Americans will understand this, considering how much we disagree with each other over our own founding as a nation.
For their part, pro-Palestinian activists tend to emphasize an original set of injustices that occurred in 1948 when Israel was created — namely, the expulsion of Palestinians from their land and homes — and then the subsequent injustice of a never-ending occupation that began in 1967. Because these are the original sins, everything else can seem like a distraction from the core grievance. Even for Palestinian opponents of Hamas — and there are many — Hamas might be vile, but it is more a symptom of the conflict than a cause.
In a beautiful 2003 valediction for Palestinian American academic Edward Said, Christopher Hitchens reminded readers of his estranged friend’s memorable description of the Palestinians as “victims of the victims,” a phrase as evocative as it is tragic. While performative victimization and trauma-sharing have become faddish in elite American circles, among Palestinians, victimization is very much real and deeply felt.
But victimization isn’t a competition. Why must one form of suffering negate another? It should be possible to acknowledge two things at once. We can — and must — condemn Hamas’s heinous acts against Israeli civilians while refusing to forget that Israel has been a perpetrator of a brutal occupation against Palestinians. Some will condemn this as “bothsidesism,” but there are, quite literally, two primary parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, each with competing — and, sadly, irreconcilable — narratives. How could it be otherwise?
Talking about atrocities after the fact is a minefield. In a time of war, doing it well requires precisely the kind of presumptive generosity toward the other “side” that war itself militates against. Intellectual humility is difficult, but it should be easier for the powerful, because while they have more to lose, they are less likely to lose it.
Today, the Israeli government enjoys the preponderance of power. It must use this power in accordance with the “laws of war,” as President Biden recently said. There is no ethical case for brutalizing the people of Gaza, and it is morally indefensible of Israeli President Isaac Herzog to suggest that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza and that the “entire nation” is responsible.
If the powerful carry certain obligations, what can be said of the weak? The co-authors of “The Puzzle of Humility and Disparity” argue that “humility seems to be an inappropriate response for the oppressed toward their oppressors.” For many of us on the left, there is something distasteful about focusing our finite supply of moral outrage on, for example, the college students who signed on to reprehensible statements excusing Hamas’s murder of innocents.
But this distaste for punching down, while understandable, invites its own dangers. That members of marginalized groups have no moral agency is a pernicious idea (and one that goes against the founding doctrines of Islam). And while it is true that the actions of the Israeli government and the Biden administration are infinitely more consequential than the ridiculous things college students say, morality is not a luxury afforded solely to the strong.
Morality cannot be situational. We are all products of structures beyond our control, but this does not mean we are prisoners to them. The oppressed cannot simply shift moral responsibility onto their oppressors and be done with it. However terrible their circumstances, individuals always retain the ability to make choices.
In a struggle between protagonists with legitimate — and competing — grievances, is moral consistency too much to expect? Yes, it almost certainly is. But asking for it doesn’t hurt. Intellectual humility, as quaint as the idea might seem, demands nothing less.
