Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

Is the ubiquitous claim to innocence the greatest danger in Gaza right now? Western media, including DW News (Germany), NBC News (USA), BBC News (The UK), and France 24 have all focused primarily on the justification for a military response – largely justified by a claim to innocence supported by Hamas’s hostage-taking of non-combatants in southern Israel on Saturday. The question is: is the myopic claim to innocence the greatest danger?

To be fair, non-combatants ought not to be targeted, should not be used as pawns in a fight for self-determination. I have no doubt that they are innocent in the common meaning of that term. But why is it being invoked? Is it an excuse to justify what Netanyahu has wanted to do, is preparing to do, and has begun to do? 

As has been widely reported, Israel tightened its siege on Gaza today – with American help. To be entirely clear, the existing siege on Gaza has now been tightened – water, air, electricity, communications – all being cut off. Internet communications are being destroyed. Electricity is, today, limited to 3 hours per day. No food or water is allowed to come in. The possibility of humanitarian aid being shipped in from Egypt to Gaza is now blocked. Israel is building up troops in the hundreds of thousands along the Israeli border with Gaza. The American military has sent an aircraft carrier and 4 destroyers off the shores East of Gaza. The genocide has begun. And Israel and the US are responsible. They only needed an excuse of eruptive violence to do it. Please see the footage of the destruction Israel has caused, in just the last 24 hours:

The attacks of missiles and bombs is now underway. Israel declares it is aiming for Hamas military targets, including infrastructure used in its execution of military and defense objectives. People in Palestine know that the missile attacks have not only hit these targets but have also targeted and destroyed hundreds of residential buildings in known residential areas of Gaza – the most densely populated region in the world. Israel, in the first day, told Gazans to leave their homes 10 minutes, by mobile, prior to a missile strike. Those warnings have ceased. Let’s listen to the eye/ear – witness testimony of Hind Khoudary, a journalist in Gaza:

We all know that the Palestinian’s claim to innocence has never made a difference. So why has innocence been granted to Israel? Palestinians have known since 1948 (the establishment of Israel as a country) that no claim to the moral high ground afforded by innocence makes a difference. Killing Palestinians has always been justifiable by non-Palestinians claiming to be innocent.

Palestinians have known explicitly what we all know implicitly: claiming innocence is our greatest danger. Palestinian, Israeli, Arab, Jewish, Muslim, Christian have known that when we face our Ultimate Moral Arbiter, claiming innocence will not admit us into paradise – only requesting forgiveness and confessing our sins restores our right relationship to the creator. Claiming innocence has the opposite effect – it gaslights the one on the receiving end of structural violence. The claim of innocence throughout structural violence is a contributing and necessary cause for eruptive violence. It is, in fact, our greatest danger.

Let me reiterate, a genocide is beginning in Gaza. Israel, with substantial American support, are using the excuse of eruptive violence begun by Hamas on Saturday to conduct it, and to further entrench Israeli structural violence which has been further entrenched with impunity for decades. And their greatest justification for further entrenching structural inequality? Innocence.

As Hannah Arendt condemned Eichmann in Jerusalem in the 1960’s, we must also realize that there is a banality to evil. It is the ultimately boring and seemingly mundane claim that we are simply doing we are simply commanded to do, in the most efficient way possible that indeed may cause the greater evil. We are not at moral liberty to claim innocence anymore. Morality is a great privilege in times of war and genocide. Going for the moral high ground is not a failure of good intentions; rather, it is a failure to think. And thinking is indeed in short supply in the mainstream Western media. Claiming innocence to justify any action will make us morally culpable because it is an abdication of our power to think, and to think together. Innocence is our greatest danger.

No right is an effective right unless it is defended. The Jews know this, and they are about to “defend” it. The way it currently stands in the West, the same is not true for the Palestinians. If they defend it – they no longer are innocent. And if Palestinians are innocent, they will die just the same. Consider this: they may have taken hostages to ward off a genocide. Israel will go get its hostages, but hostages delay, in the short term, a genocide. Hostages are insurance, not against Israel’s and the US’s good intentions, but against their inability to think.

No one is declaring that Israel right to security and interest in prosperity are not legitimate. England and France also had these concerns when they set up residential schools in Canada. America also had these concerns in Vietnam. The Belgians also had these concerns when they divided the tribes in Rwanda. Germany also had these concerns under the Third Reich. What is being disputed is the very intelligence of Israel and the United States, arrogantly assumed to be technologically superior, and widely condemned to be a failure of procedure. But, if we really pay attention, the intelligence failure is threefold: 1) it failed to prevent eruptive violence of Al Aqsa Flood, [no doubt aided by disruptive Iranian communication infrastructure – though, not started by Iran], 2) it was unable to prevent a low-tech invasion of bulldozers and individual air infiltrations by motorized hang-gliders, and 3) it failed to think together what Israel’s ambitions in its normalization project with its Sunni Muslim neighbours would trigger on its own indigenous Palestinian people.

Intelligence is not merely a military term – it is, in fact, a responsibility every citizen.

Day 1: https://idealsandidentities.com/2023/10/07/the-al-aqsa-flood-a-k-a-the-israeli-gaza-war/

Day 2: https://idealsandidentities.com/2023/10/08/al-aqsa-flood-day-2/

Day 3 continued: https://idealsandidentities.com/2023/10/09/al-aqsa-flood-day-3-continued-israel-is-telling-us-that-its-a-genocide/