Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. This is a fact that the ICJ considers plausible in terms of the international criminal responsibility of the state of Israel. At the same time, an overwhelming number of international human rights bodies categorically affirm this. To give just a few relevant examples, we have: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, among others. Along with the above, we have thousands of testimonies from journalists, victims of torture and ill-treatment by the Israeli forces, as well as evidence produced by IDF soldiers themselves, who pose proudly in front of the destruction of Gaza.
The amount of material is overwhelming and deeply painful: images of parents firing parts of their children (this implies that Israel’s indiscriminate bombardments have swept away the bodies of the victims, making it more difficult to identify and bury them); bodies of dismembered children; heads and other body parts thrown into the streets; dogs eating… ¡ People! The smell of burnt flesh in Gaza, according to witnesses, is constant. Genocides used to be very difficult to document. Now, the Palestinian genocide is being shown in real time, and by many sources. The number of victims is much higher than official figures, as there are an undetermined number of missing people behind the ruins of buildings. Childhoods in Gaza are broken.
In the face of this scenario, what can ethics say? For now, ethics has developed a set of ideas fundamental to the construction of international humanitarian law, through the theory of just war. However, this theoretical body has not been designed for circumstances such as those experienced. While the philosopher Jeff McMahan has already brilliantly described why Israel’s “war” against Hamas does not meet the requirements of a just war, here we are facing a situation in which war (in which various warring parties are counted) is transformed into a unilateral annihilation of one party against another, which has no real possibility of a proportional defence.
In addition to the above, there is a desire or intention to eliminate a population group with defined characteristics: the Muslim Arab. The meaning of this genocidal mood lies in various perverse theories that encourage the Israeli establishment alongside US Zionist groups. For example, Betar US, a radical Zionist group to a list of names that included hundreds of Palestinian babies murdered in the enclave, saying: “It’s not enough. It’s not enough. It We demand blood in Gaza!”.
Clearly, the genocide in Gaza is a case of unfathomable evil. We are facing both deeply wicked acts, as well as wicked people. According to the ethics of virtue, the dispositions of character (éthos) constitute a second nature (héxis), which, in turn, will be good or bad depending on whether the person has cultivated a vicious or virtuous character.
In this sense, a vicious person will clearly be a bad person, while a virtuous person will be a good person. Some say – and in a way, they are right – that ethics is not about “pointing the finger”. This is correct in most cases, but not in all. When we are dealing with cases of radical evil, it is necessary to point the finger. Ethics, as a moral philosophy, has the tools to do so: an ethics of virtue can indicate when we are facing people who are good because they incorporate virtues as second nature, or when we are facing bad people, which have incorporated, as Aristotle says, selective habits – in this case of a vicious nature – into their nature. And when the evil is so radical as to seek and promote the death of thousands of people, we are facing a wicked person. Those who are carrying out this genocide are people of that kind.
The perversity we are facing is not only that of the perpetrators. It is also the moral beliefs of those who support genocide and the killing of innocents. They are also wicked, though to a lesser degree than those who, because of these perverse beliefs, give it existence through genocidal acts. The case of the extreme Zionists of Betar US is a clear example. When there are people who systematically deny the dignity of whole groups of people on account of their ethnic, national or other status, they are going against fundamental ideas that have been a not only political and legal but also philosophical achievement, the idea of human dignity.
While the authors may disagree with the attribution of moral status to different types of entities, including human individuals, the systematic elimination of entire groups of people is not embedded within these exceptions to moral status. No author would say that a child or an adult woman would not have moral status simply because they are Palestinian (or under any other condition). This would be an attack not only against the idea of moral status, usually identified with human dignity, but also against fundamental principles of justice and the fundamental rights of the Palestinian population.
Many of these people who hold perverse moral beliefs, and even many of the IDF soldiers who have committed acts of genocide, roam freely through the countries of the “civilized West”, as privileged members of the international community. This community, which is essentially colonialist (and to which some countries that were once colonies have joined by virtue of a standard of living close to those of the “developed” countries), has, with some honourable exceptions, an accomplice silence. And even though many countries have raised their claims and expressed their condemnation of the genocide perpetrated by Israel, this has not materialized in economic or diplomatic policies against that state. Thus, the moral evaluation of the obviously criminal and perverse act committed, and by virtue of overwhelming evidence, does not move the elite of critical countries to speak out clearly against genocide. Thus, political decisions are driven not by principles (as they should be in these cases where the dignity of thousands of people is systematically violated) but by interests.
Finally, there are those who say: we judge ideas, not people. But when it comes to acts that harm the most basic human dignity, is it morally acceptable to just stand in judgment of ideas? Is it not morally obligatory to side with the victim clearly and without hesitation? Suddenly, if a person has perverse ideas, it is possible to show the perverse nature of those ideas, and then, with implacable logic, think that at least people with perverse ideas are not trustworthy. It is true that, in many cases, perverse ideas are cases of invincible ignorance.
Many people who, for example, support bloody dictatorships are in this position. However, this does not seem to be the case for those who have had an impeccable academic track record and who, having all the options to illustrate themselves and perfect their intellect, are in a situation of invincible ignorance. All indications are that these people – again, people untrustworthy – are responsible for their perverse ideas.
