The Duty To Do The Right Thing

Reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s debate with Peter Beinart I’m struck by how frequently Goldberg deploys a tactic of topic-switching. He’s really interested in emphasizing the idea that Israel faces incredibly serious national security threats from Hezbollah and Iran. I think he’s overstating it, but the fact of the matter is that it’s simply not relevant to what Beinart is talking about, which is the maltreatment of Israel’s Palestinian subjects and the prospect of increasing maltreatment of Israel’s Arab citizens. The former simply isn’t relevant to the latter. In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s the United States was faced with serious security threats from Germany & Japan and then later the Soviet Union. It was also engaged in serious mistreatment of African-Americans. The mistreatment of African-Americans didn’t invalidate the legitimacy of the security concerns, but by the same token the reality of the security concerns didn’t mitigate the wrongness of Jim Crow.

And I mean not that it didn’t outweigh the wrongness of Jim Crow, it didn’t mitigate it at all. Not even a little. It just wasn’t relevant. The Israeli government shouldn’t ruling over a population of non-citizens in the Occupied Territories and dispossessing them of their land. The settlements are not a form of defense against Hezbollah. The settlements don’t impede Iran’s nuclear program. On the contrary, elites in Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf tend to broadly share the Israeli government’s outlook on the regional security situation but public outrage at Israeli maltreatment of Palestinians makes it difficult for them to cooperate effectively with Israel. America didn’t have Jim Crow because it was afraid of the Russians, America had Jim Crow because many white Americans liked it that way and many other white Americans didn’t care enough to do anything about it. Israel doesn’t take Palestinian land and build houses on it because it’s afraid of Hezbollah, they take the land because many Israelis want the land and because most of the rest of Israelis don’t care enough to stop them.