Moral Issues in Hard Times (A Modified Formulation)

Abstract

The topic of the article is the ethical dilemmas facing humanity as a result of the heinous acts committed during the war on Gaza, and the means used to neutralize ethical judgment on the crimes and address them individually, despite the polarization and the identity politics associated with the war. The article does not start, as it does so, from the premise that ethics are limited to transcendent principles from which judgments are derived by comparison and rational judgment, but that ethics traces back to qualities presumed to exist in humans (such as the instinct to preserve life, aversion to causing physical pain to others, the aspiration for acknowledgment, etc.). These are not ethical principles in themselves but rather form a natural basis for the emergence of ethics (which can simultaneously constitute the nucleus of universal human values). Ethics cannot be sidelined during times of war, arguing that armies are forced to do so. Humans lose much of their humanity when they lose their ethics. The article argues that if Israel and its allies justify their crimes as self–defense, it is a pure lie because Israel is an occupying state, and occupation does not have the right to self–defense. The right to self–defense (a conditional right) lies in resisting occupation. As for describing Palestinian resistance in Gaza as "absolute evil," it is not an ethical judgment as much as it is a strategy aimed at preventing any attempt to understand the background of resistance operations. The article engages in an ethical discussion with Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib about their positions on the war on Gaza, criticizing their bias towards Israel and exposing the fallacies they have fallen into.