Richard Rorty once remarked that in times of uncertainties and profound transformations, there is a tendency to turn to philosophy for answers. Much to the chagrin of many of his colleagues in university departments of philosophy, he consistently denied, however, that philosophers had — qua philosophers — any expertise that would make them suitable for the role of advisors in the conduct of public affairs. Consider two rather telling examples proving Rorty right:
- (i) A thought experiment in philosophy invites us to identify a moral principle justifying the conduct of a man who, finding himself in a situation in which he can save only one of two persons in equal peril one of whom is his wife, chooses to save his wife.
- (ii) The renowned Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit is reported to have refused to meet a fellow philosopher with whom he was romantically involved in the past (and remained in friendly terms) and who, being terminally ill, came to Oxford to say goodbye, because he was too busy working on a book of moral philosophy titled On What Matters.
What these episodes suggest is that philosophers whose contact with life is limited to their classroom experience are best confined to classrooms. As Bernard Williams famously observed regarding the thought experiment described above, any justification other than “it is his wife” would provide the man with “one thought too many.” Likewise, it is hard to believe that a person who behaved like Parfit in the reported circumstance could have anything valuable to teach the rest of the humanity about “what matters”. In short, even philosophers are not immune from silliness.
One instance of giant philosophical silliness that has lately had a lot of resonance in international affairs is the dismissive attitude towards what is called “whataboutism”, the practice that consists in responding to an accusation with a counter-accusation with a view to undermining the credibility, consistency, or claim to moral high ground of the accuser. It is slowly dawning on experts in international affairs (it was about time!) that despite being labeled as a logical fallacy in philosophy, whataboutism has significant impact in real life, which testifies to the trivial truth that there are important things in this world that are not governed by formal logic of philosophers.
Here, I want to focus on a different type of “what about” question, however, which should equally interpellate philosophers and anyone interested in justice and fairness. In November 2023, a protester claiming justice for Gaza in New York was asked by a reporter: “What about October 7?” The response of the protester took the reporter by surprise: “You keep saying ‘What about October 7?’. What about October 8? What about October 9? What about October 10? What about October 11? . . . ” (he managed to force the reporter to listen until he made it to November 2).
This question is indeed very much worth asking. Last week marked the anniversary of the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Vigils and commemorations were held across the world from Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, and Rome to Melbourne and Washington, and the Eiffel Tower went dark to commemorate the victims of the Hamas attacks. No one who genuinely cares about innocent lives could be troubled by this display of solidarity. It is true, as the UN Secretary General António Guterres pointed out in his statement before the Security Council in October 2023, that “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum” and that “56 years of suffocating occupation” are an important part of the context. Likewise, there is little to add to Saree Makdisi’s wise words that “what’s most remarkable is that anyone in 2023 should be still surprised that conditions of absolute violence, domination, suffocation, and control produce appalling violence in turn.” But saying all this is not tantamount to justifying the killing of civilian population — contrary to what a cheap anti-intellectualist propaganda asserts, trying to understand why something happened is not to justify it. No amount of contextualisation can excuse the killing of innocent Israeli civilians or of their being taken hostage, and the notion that resistance to occupation and oppression can legitimately include an operation like the one launched by Hamas on 7 October 2023 is too appalling to entertain and has no basis in international law or in any respectable morality.
What is troubling is that we have not seen any official commemoration in Western capitals of the terrifying number of victims of Israeli military operations in Gaza. According to an official estimate that was made public on 6 October 2024, 41,870 Palestinians were killed by Israel in Gaza since October 2023 more than 60 percent of whom were children (including 710 babies under the age of 1 and 11,355 children under the age of 18), women, and people older than 60. Was any building lit up in the colours of the Palestinian flag to commemorate the victims of Israel in Gaza? Did the Eiffel Tower go dark? Why are Palestinian lives considered unworthy of any official commemoration in Western countries?
The only valid explanation is that the lost Palestinian lives are not as grievable as the Israeli lives in the eyes of Western leaders.
The response cannot be that Israel, unlike Palestine, is a democracy. This is so not because Israeli democracy is to democracy what electric chair is to chair (a country systematically practicing racial discrimination and commiting torture and sexual abuse in its prisons cannot be dignified with the label of democracy), but because that response is a non sequitur: being a democracy does not entitle a country to collectively punish the inhabitants of another country, to engage in massive indiscriminate killing of a civilian population, to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity with genocidal intent made clear at the highest spheres of the government. The accurate characterisation of a country acting like Israel is that of a “rogue state” (which is exactly what Joe Biden is reported to have said to Benjamin Netanyahu), a label that Israel has been doing everything to truly deserve, including, lately, with its deliberate attacks against the UN peace keeping forces in Lebanon.
The only valid explanation is that the lost Palestinian lives are not as grievable as the Israeli lives in the eyes of Western leaders. It is not “normal” for 695 Israeli civilians and 373 members of security forces to be killed on a single day; but there is nothing abnormal about many more Palestinians dying every day. This “normality” is not just the creation of governments, but also of newspapers, reporters and TV shows that play a crucial role in the “distribution of the sensible” in Western societies that Jacques Rancière defines as a “symbolic constitution” of what is visible, seen or worth noticing. Under that “normality” as described by Judith Butler, “the graphics of Israeli life, death, and detention are more vibrant; it conforms to the norm of human life already established, is then more of a life, is life, whereas Palestinian life is either no life, a shadow-life, or a threat to life as we know it.”
But how has such a judgment about the value of Palestinian life been established in societies that pride themselves on championing human rights? How could political leaders imbued with liberal values with no past record of cruelty show such a level of indifference to Palestinian lives? The response in my view is the same as the one I would supply to the question of how the predecessors of these same political leaders, who also saw themselves as morally irreproachable gentlemen, could commit the atrocities of colonisation. That response was provided by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality:
“the same people who are so strongly held in check by custom, respect, habit, gratitude and even more through spying on one another and through peer-group jealousy, who, on the other hand, behave towards one another by showing such resourcefulness in consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride and friendship, — they are not much better than uncaged beasts of prey in the world outside where the strange, the foreign, begin.”
In short, while Israelis are seen as part of the same moral community, as “our kind of people”, “people like us” (Richard Rorty), the Palestinians are not, instead representing as they do “the strange, the foreign” (the same logic has been at work in the differential treatment of Ukrainian and African refugees). You are right if you think that this sounds familiar because it is familiar: only racism can justify a state of affairs in which Israeli lives are seen as more valuable and more grievable than Palestinian lives.
