Gaza-Israel: bankrupt ideas still capture too many of us

One year on, we’ve turned no pages, learned no lessons, made no progress.

Todd Deatherage

Todd is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Telos Group. It forms communities of American peacemakers across lines of difference and conflict, including Israel/Palestine.

A graffitied concrete border wall stands below a blue sky and dusty ground

Border wall between Gaza and Israel.

It’s the first anniversary of October 7, and we’re left with the grim task of finding a way to appropriately honor the dead, stand in solidarity with the bereaved, and mourn with all who mourn. And we do this as we acknowledge our ongoing collective failure and the unimaginable and avoidable loss of so many innocent lives, each one with its own promise and possibility forever denied. In the end, it’s hard to find a way to commemorate the horror of that day because it’s still going on. We’ve turned no pages, learned no lessons, made no progress.

Someday there will no doubt be a grand and somber memorial that tells the story of the brutal October 7 attack. The victims of that day will be remembered, the captives and their fates memorialized. And some day there will be a museum that tells the story of what many already believe will be characterized in the historical record as a genocide in Gaza. To what we already know of the massive destruction of a place and a people will be added details that will be excavated from the rubble, testimonies from the traumatized survivors, heartbreaking tales of orphans and of the destruction of entire families. Maybe these places of collective memory will offer greater context for the world in which the tragedies that created them took place, some kind of “never again” lessons to learn, and no doubt some sharp analysis of the failures that led to these days of great darkness. If these attempts at memorialization are honest, they will hold many of us up to withering critique. We’ll be in the museums too, enduring rebuke for the indifference that led us here or for our zero-sum thinking that could only imagine a world born of and sustained by violence in all its forms.

These are lone and lonely voices in a land besieged by brutality, dehumanization, and ideologies of ethnic and religious supremacy. But they are not unicorns.

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If we don't want the story to be about our blind complicity, but about our courage, we still have time to own our agency. Because this isn't over yet. We can mark this day by remembering that it will continue to be like all the others until we all do our part to achieve a ceasefire, a release of captives, and an end to support for systems of inequality and control. In whatever ways great or small that we can, we have to reject the logic of violence and the ideologies of hatred and exclusion. And to be active participants in cultivating in ourselves and in our communities an imagination for the way each human life is sacred and our flourishing is tied to that of our neighbors.

We do this even as we pause and honor the innocent dead in Israel, in Gaza, in the West Bank, and now in Lebanon. We mourn with all those who mourn. But we do that with people still dying in Gaza, with millions of Palestinians still displaced, with disease and hunger rampant, with Israeli hostages still being held, with massive street protests calling for a ceasefire being ignored, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis still displaced from their homes in the north and the south, with Hezbollah rockets still falling and now with the war more fully advancing into Lebanon, with a wider regional war ever a distinct and terrifying possibility, with settlers rampaging in the West Bank with impunity, with ideological zealots setting the terms of debate, with economic catastrophe as hundreds of thousands of West Bank Palestinians have endured a year with no income, and with palpable fear among Palestinian citizens of Israel.

The bankruptcy of the ideas that have prevailed this past year remain firmly in control and continue to capture the imagination of too many. And yet there are those who know that violence begets violence begets violence, and that this is how we got here, not how we get out.

I spent a day in New York City last month with four members of the Parents Circle/Families Forum, an organization made up of 700 Palestinian and Israeli families, each who have each lost a loved one in the conflict. In addition to the pain of loss they share, they also share a commitment to a rejection of the very notion of revenge and an embrace of the work of reconciliation. Four members of this group traveled to the United States for a two-week tour to help us understand our part in their shattered and unjust reality and to let us know that there is another way if we can find the courage to pursue it. That way is mutuality. It is an embrace of security, dignity and freedom for all the people of their traumatized shared homeland, Israelis and Palestinians alike, in equal measure.

Each member of this unlikely tribe has a unique story of personal loss, and as they speak, they tell of the worst day of their lives, over and over again. But there is exponential power in the fact that these stories are told in one voice. Two members visiting the U.S. are mothers, one Israeli and one Palestinian, who have lost children in the conflict and have been transformed by the deep realization that they share the same pain. One was a young man whose ten-year-old sister was killed by an Israeli border policeman and after some years of anger-fueled stone throwing as a teenager, he began to channel his trauma into the work of resisting occupation and violence via the collaborative work of justice, freedom and security through reconciliation. And one of the newest members of this work is a man whose mother, an internationally recognized Israeli peace activist, was killed in a kibbutz on October 7. He has chosen to pick up his mother’s work and devote himself to a just peace for himself and for all his neighbors, Palestinians included.

These are lone and lonely voices in a land besieged by brutality, dehumanization, and ideologies of ethnic and religious supremacy. But they are not unicorns. There are others there whose stories need to be told and whose work needs our support.

My church is preaching a sermon series reflecting on the leadership and choices of the kings of biblical Israel and Judah. Their stories are old but their inclinations to violence, their neglect of care for the poor and the widow, and their lack of concern for justice are timeless. In a recent sermon I was struck by my pastor’s observation that even those of us who have regularly engaged with the Bible all our lives don’t always know much about the kings, but we do know something of the prophets. They are, in his words, “the ones who hold the story for God.” And in times like these, as we descend ever deeper into darkness and inhumanity, they are the ones who share in the pathos of God, to borrow from rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. But they also show us the way out. Warmongers in the Middle East and here in the West are creating massive destruction. We too easily and readily live within the world created by their corrupted imagination. We can’t ignore them. But we don’t have to listen to them. Listen to the prophets, those who hold The Story of God’s shalom, of his kingdom of justice and peace. They are still among us. One of our responses is to make sure we’re listening to these voices, amplifying them, and following their lead.

As a Christian, over this past year, I have found myself being drawn more deeply into the life and the person and the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. The deep love of the maligned and suffering, enemy-loving Jesus, he who was accused by the religious establishment, executed by one of the great empires of history, mocked and spit upon, all for the threat he posed to those addicted to power, control, exclusion and the violence needed to enforce it all. This is the Jesus who boldly declared liberation of the captives, vision for the blind, food for the hungry--a new kingdom of justice and mercy, of wholeness and shalom.

None of these things I believe absolve me from acting. Jesus is not my cop out, he’s my way out. What if we who seek to follow him were to repent of our propensity to violence, our fascination with the zero-sum binaries we use to create hierarchies of exclusion, and our failure to demonstrate our love for God by showing love of our neighbor? We might not solve all the problems that are destroying us but we’d at least stop contributing to them. And imagine what a more generative and healing presence in the world we would be if we joined our voices with others of different faiths and none who also believe in a world more just and whole. I would argue that the world in all its diversity and complexity needs Christians to mark this day and this moment is by taking Jesus so seriously that we start to live out his calling to be active participants in the work of justice, healing and repair and living reminders that all are made in the image of God, violence begets violence, and the simple truth of Mother Theresa who said, “If we have no peace it’s because we’ve forgotten we belong to each other.”

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Justice

29 February 2024

5 min read

Dignity: why people matter

How dignity underlies our ethics and law.

Charles Foster

Professor Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a member of the Oxford Law Faculty.

A pupil in a classroom looks around and into the camera.

Indus Action

You think that you matter: that you are significant. I agree with you. I think the same about myself.

We all think we are significant, and that our significance requires us to behave and to be treated in particular ways. One of the main functions of the law (perhaps the function of the law) is to regulate this sense of significance: to protect my sense of my significance and to stop it interfering with the sense of significance that others have.

A common name given to this sense of significance is dignity. It is a defining characteristic of humans. We see it as soon as we see behaviourally modern humans – who came on the scene about 45,000 years ago. We laid our dead tenderly in the earth, clutching flowers and amulets, rather than leaving them out as food for hyenas. We carved our faces into mammoth ivory because we knew that there was something about our faces which should endure. We believed that we had souls and that other things, human and non-human did too. This made eating other ensouled things a real problem. We evolved solemn liturgies of oblation and satisfaction to solve it. Our walk through life and death was elaborately choreographed, because it wasn’t proper to stomp and blunder. Comportment mattered because we mattered.

These were astonishing assertions – so astonishing that no big society has ever taken them completely seriously.

Jumping from pre-history to history, dignity, like other precious resources, was appropriated by the rulers, who said that they and only they had a right to it. The hoi polloi never truly believed this; they knew their own worth and moral weight. But the rulers told an artful story. The gods had dignity, they said, and the gods gave it to their favoured ones – typically the royals and the heroes. The royals were the gods’ embodiments or regents, and so the thrones of Mesopotamia and Egypt were invested and affirmed by divine dignity. The capricious gods of Olympus gave dignity at particular times and for particular purposes to their particular favourites, who therefore became demi-gods for a while.

In the Hebrew world, however, a radically democratic move was afoot. God was indeed dignified, but since every human was made in his image, all humans were dignified too – and in the same way as God. The idea was picked up by St Paul: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek’, he declared. ‘There is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus’.

These were astonishing assertions – so astonishing that no big society has ever taken them completely seriously.

The obscenity of Auschwitz relegated the hyper-spiritualised notion of dignity to the cloister, and Kant’s notion to the Academy. For whatever dignity was, it was outraged there, and the outrage extended to bodies and to the non-rationally-autonomous.

Less ambitious, and so more palatable, was Stoicism’s rather anaemic version of the Imago Dei. All humans were potentially dignified, it said, and each human had a duty to strive to realise their dignified potential. It was much less radical than the Judaeo-Christian conception, but still represented a tectonic break with the royal theocracies of Mesopotamia, Egypt and elsewhere.

This Stoical conception of dignity did useful work. It served to save the notion of dignity from two mortal threats - both, embarrassingly, from the Christian world (though Kant’s relationship with Christian orthodoxy was sometimes uneasy).

There is a strand of Platonised Christianity (drawing on the early Augustine) that spiritualises the idea of dignity. If it prevailed dignity would have nothing to say in hospitals about bowels or bedpans, in bedrooms about sex, in plantations about slavery, in jungles about the fate of trees or toucans, or in newsrooms about anything at all.

Kant located dignity in rational autonomy, so snatching dignity from children, the demented, the unconscious, the depressed, everyone who has drunk a bottle of red wine, and more or less everyone who doesn’t have a PhD in philosophy.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War dignity (almost always undefined) appeared in endless national and international laws and declarations. Fairly recently it has started to have a real legal life of its own, being invoked for many purposes, from prisoners’ rights to reproduce to the right to have your name on your tombstone in the language of your choice.

These specific invocations of dignity sometimes disguise its foundational nature – foundational to human nature itself and to the laws that seek to determine how humans should conduct themselves in society

To say that the Judaeo-Christian account of dignity gives rise to all ethics and law in the western world is a big claim. I make it unapologetically.

To see how foundational it is, ask yourself why you think it is wrong to kick a child, but not a rock. Or why it is wrong to play football with a human head, or do an intimate examination, for the purposes of teaching medical students, on a woman in a permanent vegetative state. In describing the wrongness you will certainly find yourself relying on something that looks suspiciously like human dignity.

The law is often said to be protecting interests other than dignity (such as autonomy, freedom, or bodily integrity), or promoting other values (such as beneficence or non-maleficence). Yet on close inspection, those interests and values will all turn out to be parasitic on dignity. Dignity is the first order principle: the others stem from it.

In the last forty or so years there has been a good deal of academic discussion about just what ‘dignity’ means. There is a growing consensus that it has two complementary parts. First: an inalienable element: the intrinsic dignity possessed simply and solely by reason of being human. This cannot be lost or diminished. It just is. And second, a dignity which is a consequence of the first, but denotes how, in the light of your dignified nature, you should comport yourself. If we say of someone ‘She’s let herself down’, we mean that she has failed to behave with the dignity expected of someone who has the high status of being human.

This account of dignity is derived straight from the notion of the Imago Dei, and from Paul’s gloss. The watered-down Stoical version simply gives encouragement to behave well: it has nothing akin to the inalienable element.

To say that the Judaeo-Christian account of dignity gives rise to all ethics and law in the western world is a big claim. I make it unapologetically. Perhaps you think that it is too extravagant. But it is plain enough that this account, or one of its iterations outside the sphere of Judaeo-Christian influence (there are several), accords as does no other with our intuitions about ourselves and about how we should act, and with the most fundamental axioms of the laws in all tolerable jurisdictions. The most enlightened parts of Enlightenment thinking originate in this account, though they are often embarrassed to admit it.

Whatever we mean by the Rule of Law, part of it is that no one is above or outside it: Jews and Greeks, and bond and free, and male and female are to be treated alike. We’re so used to the idea that we have forgotten its revolutionary roots.