Yesterday I posted my view that while the Michael Walzer/Avishai Margalit piece on Gaza in the New York Review of Books ends nobly–with the principle that an army must treat others' civilians as it would treat its own–the piece is gobbledygook. It's almost impossible to find a clear moral statement in it. Compare it to the clarity of Philadelphia Jews for a Just Peace. My view is now echoed by a Jewish friend who is part of what I am calling the emerging non-Zionist consensus:
I just read the Margalit/Walzer piece
in NYRB, and I just had to write. You've probably seen it
already. It's embarrassing. This is moral philosophy? Better to
have left it unwritten.
To me it was a stiff, artificial intellectual exercise, rich in
straw men, of profound irrelevance to Israel's war. (They can't even
call it a "war.") Rather than
addressing the real war, they do nothing but respond to a
self-serving need to say something about an appalling war that will
make them look thoughtful. Without addressing jus ad bellum in this
case [the criteria necessary before launching the war], which in my view is at the heart of the matter, why even even
bother. I'm much less interested in the IDF
that's been created than in the politicians who created them and
created this war. Further, I don't even see where self-defense is even
an issue with most of what the IDF and the IAF did in that awful war.
And their offering of their irrelevant "thought experiment" was
laughable. [asking the reader to imagine Hezbollah capturing a kibbutz in Israel] Shame. Not unlike the bizarre discussion with Kasher that
took place awhile back at (I think) the Hartman Institute. I hope that the academic intellectual peers of Walzer and Margalit
will write to NYRB and say that the emperors are naked indeed.
