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Collective Responsibility is not a Binary [1]

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Date: 2023-10-31

The events in the Middle East, horrifying as they unfold, are accompanied by talk of “Collective Punishment”- Gaza residents who are not active Hamas members should not be punished by Israel for actions committed by Hamas. Likewise, Israelis have been murdered who never in a million years would vote for or approve of the apartheid-like-action coalition now (just barely) in control of the Knesset.

Both group members were killed under a maximal Collective Responsibility notion- You’re a part of that tribe- therefore you will share the punishment for the actions committed by at least a significant force in that tribe. That’s just plain wrong.

However, at the same time, you cannot claim no responsibility for the actions of the Polis you belong to. This applies to me personally. I didn’t vote for Bush The Younger and his merry crew who started by making small rocks out of large rocks in Afghanistan and rapidly moved to mostly unrelated countries where they nation built Iraq into a new BFF of Iran. With millions of casualties along the way. I never authorized that. But ‘zero responsiblity’, the opposite of complete responsibility isn’t right either.

I am a citizen of this country. I vote. I pay taxes. I elect officials, and one aspect of voting (forgotten by some) is that when elections are over, we have elected a government that represents all of us- which means we really do share in the decision making- good and bad. This is a responsibility for government and societal actions that is somewhere between ‘none’ and ‘complete’.

In Israel, which is more or less at our notion of Democracy (please don’t forget that), albeit a parliamentary version, that sense of at least partial responsibility for everyone I think is also true.

Even though it seems tenuous, Israel still is (barely) a democracy. Much like the US will be (barely) a democracy if whathisname gets re-elected chief bandit. If we signed up for representive democracy, we also signed up for at least some ownership of what we as a country (through private or government action) do- good, bad, ugly, foolish, absurd, and occasionally brilliant.

For places like Gaza, or Russia, this is less clear. My dim recollection (and I’m not going to spoil the thought by researching it), is that Gaza actually split from the Palestinian Authority and elected Hamas to lead. I believe at the time, Hamas was the only group in Gaza that was acting like anything close to a government listening to and helping the citizens.

The recent statements about “Hamas is Not All of Gaza- they aren’t loved there and are terrorists to their own people” are certainly mostly true- but it is true I believe that they functioned, and function, as some kind of government. It’s hard to hold the general citizen of Gaza responsible for Hamas’ excesses- certainly to the point that it’s okay to kill them. Still, there is still some responsibility they must bear.

Israel seems intent on completely destroying Hamas and then withdrawing. This seems like it probably will play out like Iraq. There will be a power vacuum and it’s hard to see whether what replaces it will be peace loving or at least sullenly acquiescent like the West Bank is. We’re likely to get Son of Hamas instead.

Even if Israel decides to nation build- that seems like it will go like Afghanistan did for the US- trying force something on a population whom you keep excessively destroying villages to save them that fell back to the Taliban hundreds of times quicker than South Vietnam fell to the North back in 1975. Israel hasn’t got the money, time nor inclination to nation build, so we won’t see that I think.

So how does even minimal responsibility play into this? It plays here like any moral question- each person must decide if their actions are moral and whether if they are not, they can bear the cost of acting not in their moral interests. I think the neocons and others claim that nations cannot afford to be commanded by morals. I think that is probably true. But individuals must be- and by their association hopefull eventually their nation will end up being morally good too.

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