Reactive Justice in the Middle East

Selective exculpation and the sublimation of revenge

Immediately after Hamas committed a vicious terrorist attack against Israel on October 7, 33 student organizations at Harvard co-signed a statement authored by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee. It begins, “We the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The statement explicitly exculpates Hamas, and Palestinians in general, for any violence against Israelis, however brutal and senseless. Rapes, dismemberments, immolations, executions, and decapitations are all perfectly justified according to these students because “Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death” by an “apartheid regime.”

These students, as well as many other political leftists, understand the Hamas attack as an attempt by the oppressed to reclaim their agency from their oppressors. As long as violence can be interpreted as a rebellion by the powerless against the powerful, all is supposedly justified. 

To them, Hamas is like a native slave who revolts against a colonialist master. The master dehumanizes the slave, exploits his labor, and keeps him and his people in captivity. The master’s sins are so severe, his spirit so corrupted, that the slave is entitled not just to liberation but also revenge. The slave kills his master, but a quick death would be unjustly disproportionate to the crime. The master has incurred a large moral debt and justice demands a more commensurate payment. The slave’s years of prolonged suffering can only be repaid in a short amount of time if the slave inflicts concentrated suffering. The slave should rape the master’s wife in front of him and burn his children alive before slowly dismembering him. This is better, more proportionate and therefore more just, but it’s still a shame the slave couldn’t do more. He can never really get his life back because he’s traumatized by his enslavement. The master’s debt can never be fully repaid. 

This conception of justice motivated the Harvard students to lay all blame for the terrorist attack at Israel’s feet and it explains why their ilk refuses to condemn Hamas. It’s why they were perfectly fine with all the violence and destruction during the BLM protests/riots of 2020, which caused over two billion dollars in damage, and could not care less about how much women suffer as a result of losing to biologically advantaged transwomen (males) in sports or being raped by them in prisons. Society cannot even approximate equity until oppressed minorities exact their revenge on anyone remotely implicated in their oppression. 

Believing that a truly proportionate reaction to oppression is impossible and that extreme measures are justified yet insufficient is the “woke” secular version of a religious belief in eternal hell. The sinner’s sin has no proportionate remedy, so justice requires that he suffer for all of eternity. Only infinite punishment is equivalent to the immorality of his earthly sins. 

Just like how the ancient Jews consoled themselves with thoughts about their oppressors’ eternal torment in hell, modern “woke” pagans relish the idea that oppressors everywhere will be put through the worst pain imaginable. Resentment inspires these dark fantasies, but they refuse to acknowledge this fact, preferring instead to recast their vengefulness as a desire for justice. Whether it’s social justice or divine justice, the sublimation works the same. It provides the blank moral check that all resentful people crave, justifying religious crusades, ethnic violence, and terroristic slaughters with ease. When sadistic joy becomes the exaltation of justice, any atrocity is permissible. 

Reactive justice holds the powerless to a completely different moral standard than the powerful, selectively exculpating certain populations of responsibility for their actions. It’s a great paradox in progressive thought that it praises itself as empathetic while revoking the agency of anyone deemed oppressed. It condemns other perspectives as “dehumanizing” and immediately proceeds to reduce minority groups to animals who can’t be blamed for acting exclusively out of reactive instinct. The powerful are so agentic that they are tasked with internal work like the overcoming of unconscious bias, while the powerless are so animalistic that anyone who expects them to act on principle or at the very least strategically is an unforgivable bigot. 

Humanizing people means treating them like they are capable of complex thought and purposive action. When progressives defend violent reactivity by minority populations, they dehumanize the very people they claim to be humanizing. They hide behind empathy and ignore the excruciatingly obvious reality that everyone can empathize with sadistic revenge. It takes no mental cultivation, no leaps of imagination or special education, to understand why resentful oppressed people would want to decapitate their alleged oppressors. This most basic of human desires lives in everyone, but the civilized in society take pride in its overcoming, not its thoughtless embrace. 

On the average, a small dose of aggression, malice, or insinuation certainly suffices to drive the blood into the eyes – and fairness out of the eyes – of even the most upright people. The active, aggressive, arrogant man is still a hundred steps closer to justice than the reactive man; for he has absolutely no need to take a false and prejudiced view of the object before him in the way the reactive man does and is bound to do. … Wherever justice is practiced and maintained one sees a stronger power seeking a means of putting an end to the senseless raging of resentment among the weaker powers that stand under it… 

– Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality (1887)