Libertarian Girl

Imagine that you had an Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem, who called for massacres of Palestinian civilians. He was arrested by the Palestinians, and they let him go with the caveat that he stop calling for the massacres. He’s soon back at his same old spiel, praising Jews who kill Arabs and other such nonsense. Soon, he’s assassinated by Palestinian groups.

If you are against killing of any sort, there are two ways of looking at this. A killing is bad, simply because it’s a killing. Or, a killing is good if the person in question would have caused more killings through living. In that way, it’s a bit of self-defense. The problem is, the lines between these can be tricky to navigate sometimes.

As you might have surmised, the theoretical Orthodox rabbi doesn’t exist. The religious official in question was Sheikh Ahmed Hassin, killed by the Israelis in a 2004 airstrike, along with about nine or ten civilians. 200,000 Palestinians (half the city’s population) lined the streets of Gaza City for his funeral, so it’s clear he was loved by the Palestinians despite tendencies some of us might find quite objectionable. His killing might have spurred yet more of what seems to be endless violence. Or, the end of Hassin’s endless calls that annihilating Israel was a worthy calling and goal to work toward may have prevented some young Palestinian from being encouraged to blow himself up in a public square. We can’t really know. Isn’t it, then, a microcosm for this entire conflict?

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Foreign policy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.