There is no value that we might possess that is worth the cost of another person’s suffering.
This is one of the fundamental lessons of anti-capitalism, of anti-imperialism, of any conception of humanity that frames our existence as anything more than a brutal, winner-takes-all struggle of each against each. It is the lesson of much great art, including Ursula K. Le Guin’s unforgettable short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas“; it is the lesson of great thinkers like Edward Said, who used the oppression of the Palestinian people as his foundational example of the cruelty of imperialism (one can scarcely conceive of how he would react if he had lived long enough to see how much worse things would get); and it is the lesson of the solidarity at its most fundamental, as explained by the late, great Richard Rorty, who, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, explained it this way, in a paragraph that lends this entry its title:
In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away ‘prejudice’ or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves by thinking, “They do not feel as we would,” or “There must always be suffering, so why not let them suffer?”
Sadly — for the ‘we’ who are Americans, and for the ‘them’ that are Palestinians — our country has lost this lesson, if it ever had it in the first place. We have never been anti-capitalist, and we have never been anti-imperialist (or, at least, we have confined our opposition to imperialism strictly to rival empires), and we are at risk of losing our humanity outright. Said warned us that “every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all the other empires”, and so goes America: We tell ourselves that we are the great hope of democracy even as we define democracy ever downwards for our own citizens, we tell ourselves that we represent the last spark of freedom even as we restrict the meaning of freedom to the untrammeled exercise of wealth, and we tell ourselves that we stand for peace and harmony even as we sow discord, corruption, fear, and violence throughout the world.
There is no sense in rehashing here the soul-wrenching details of what the state of Israel is currently inflicting on the people of Palestine. Having rendered ancient Gaza a wasteland that they are already beginning to occupy and turn into high-end housing for settlers, they are now pushing the people who once lived there further and further out, away from their homes and families and any reasonable conception of safety. Every single day, innocent lives — the majority of them women, children, and the elderly — are obliterated by Israeli military forces, using weapons almost entirely supplied by the United States. So many have died in the last year that their number will soon surpass the number killed on the Trail of Tears, a moment in American history so dark that it is considered a national disgrace. Starvation is rampant, the entire infrastructure is in ruins, and the endgame is transparently the banishment (at best) or annihilation (at worst) of the Palestinian people from the borders of Israel. It is baffling how anyone with an iota of honesty or moral sense could dispute calling this a genocide, and absolutely contemptible that they would dispute that it is the war crime known as ethnic cleansing.
And yet, as we seem to say constantly in the face of fresh outrages, here we are. A significant segment of the U.S. electorate — indeed, the very segment that identifies itself as being in opposition to fascism, as standing against cruelty to disenfranchised minority groups, as champions of civil rights and the elimination of oppression — has come to believe that the paramount goal of American politics should be the defeat of Donald Trump, even if that goal comes at the expense of an untold number of dead Palestinians. Against the claim that they are rooting for the very administration that has maintained a wall of silence on the slaughter in Gaza, going so far as to deny even Palestinian-Americans who are otherwise stalwart boosters of the Democratic Party a chance to speak, they offer only vague speculation that Trump, by their accounts, would be ‘worse’ for both Americans and Palestinians.
It is hard to know how to respond to this. For one thing, it is difficult to conceive of how things could be ‘worse’ for the people of Palestine. They are being subject to constant bombings, shootings, tank attacks, and other brutalities of a war in which they cannot meaningfully participate. They have little water, no food, and their homes, places of worship, and businesses have been systematically reduced to rubble. Children — infants — are being shot multiple times in the head. An entire generation has been left orphaned, jobless, uneducated, and crippled. Doctors, journalists, and first responders, the very people who only a few years ago were being called our country’s greatest heroes, are being deliberately targeted for death. And this is merely the escalation of a situation which has existed for 75 years in which they have been stripped of almost every civil right and treated with the care and respect normally reserved for insects.
For another, while no one on the left — and let us repeat that: no one — is making the argument that Trump would be good for Palestine (or for America), what he might or might not do if he wins election again is purely speculation. Whatever actions he might take as president in the future (and, when he was president before, he merely carried out the same pattern of arming Israel and supporting their butchery of the Palestinian people without condition that has marked every U.S. presidency since Truman), the worst nightmare imaginable for hundreds of thousands of families in Gaza and elsewhere is already happening now. The fathers holding the bloody, ruined corpses of their toddlers in their arms are in no mood for a lecture about how it could be worse.
But whenever anyone on the left positions American policy towards Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza as a political red line, they are met with condescension at best and hostility at worst from liberals. Don’t we know that we only have two choices and that Trump would be worse? Don’t we know how bad things will be for people in America — for black people, for immigrants, for queer people, for women, for Jews — if Trump wins? Don’t we know that a Trump victory will mean the end of democracy in America altogether, and that’s game over for everyone?
It does no good to point out that we do not, in fact, have only two choices, that refusing to participate in a corrupt system and organizing against it is also a choice, and that we are only faced with this binary because we have refused to take the actions necessary to change it. Democracy has vanished in other nations as well; some lost it, and some never had it in the first place, but that has only spelled the cessation of struggle and the end of freedom for those who were never struggling in the first place and for whom freedom was never truly in peril. I cannot imagine speaking to an immigrant, an African-American, a queer person, a woman, or a Jew and saying people like them have never faced a greater challenge and have never overcome a more meaningful threat than that posed by Donald Trump. If his is a victory that will forever rob this country of its ability to fight, it is because it no longer has any fight in it.
We have seen all this before. We saw it during Vietnam, when the threat of a Nixon victory was considered so unthinkable that the use of napalm on children because their parents wanted to choose their own political system had to be taken off the table. (We are sometimes told that the two situations are incompatible, because there are no American troops operating in Israel. So, too, were there no American troops operating in Indochina until there were, and it is a matter of sophistry who is flying the planes that drop American bombs on the roofs of schools.) The result, of course, was hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people sent to an early grave, and Nixon won anyway.
But let us, at least, take seriously the argument that things will be worse for Americans in America if Trump wins a second term. (We need not speculate about the fate of Americans in Israel.) There is no doubt that Trump’s administration poses threats to nonwhites, migrants, women, queer people, and humanity in general, and no one really thinks otherwise. Even the fiercest left-aligned critics of the Democratic leadership and its indefensible behavior around Palestine are in agreement that Trump is, if not an open white-supremacist fascist, will at least let such people run riot. It may be true that Democrats in power have chosen to move closer to Trump’s positions on trans rights, immigration, crime, etc., but anyone who claims that Trump is a preferable option is not to be taken seriously.
This does not, however, justify giving a rubber stamp to the mass murder of Palestinians. If things get worse for Americans — if more restrictions are placed on abortion, if more anti-trans laws are passed, if Trump’s border policies somehow become even worse than Biden’s, if racist and fascist mobs are empowered here — then I would hope that we, as citizens of this country, have the decency, will, and good sense to fight back against these atrocities, rather than choosing to avoid them by exporting them to another country and to an even more helpless group of innocents. Fascism is to be fought, not to be placated. It is our responsibility to defeat the forces of reaction, authoritarianism, and oppression, not to offload them somewhere else until they inevitably return home. If we purchase our comfort in the coin of innocent lives, if our freedom comes at the expense of another’s persecution, then we have loudly announced whose side we are on, and it is not the side of humanity.
There is no value that we might possess that is worth the cost of another person’s suffering.