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April 24, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
A
Big Blow to Big Tobacco
April 23, 2002
Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in
Jenin?
John Chuckman
I,
George:
Gomer as Claudius
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
April 20, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Drowning in a Sea of Apathy
Kristen
Schurr
Leaving
Nablus
Bernard Weiner
Israel and the Intifada
for Dummies
Jean-Guy
Allard
A
Coup Signed by Otto Reich
Chris Floyd
The "Grandeur" That Was Rome:
A Letter from the Front
April 19, 2002
Eric Flint
Free
the Books!
David Krieger
A Peace Proposal:
Bring in the Children
Jeff Paterson
Advice
to Recruits from
a Gulf War Vet
Jeffrey St. Clair
From Sen. "Lunkhead" to
Bush Energy Czar: A Year in the Life of Spencer Abraham
April 18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Latin
America's Dilemma:
The Propaganda of Otto Reich
Sam Bahour
Bush is Playing Russian
Roulette with Palestinians
M. Shahid
Alam
A
Colonizing Project
Built on Lies
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Whiteout:
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by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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April 24, 2002
Drowning Children, Palestinians
and American Responsibility
By Todd May
Two facts are clear: that Israelis have needlessly
killed many Palestinians civilians in their recent incursion
into the West Bank and that the United States has greatly assisted
in those killings. The first fact is obvious. The second fact
is nearly as obvious, since it stems both from the billions of
dollars the U.S. supplies Israel each year and Israel's use of
Apache helicopters, F-16's, and American made products such as
Caterpillar bulldozers.
The question is: what is the responsibility
of American citizens in all of this? I'm not talking about the
U.S. government, which is clearly culpable, but regular citizens,
folks who just go to work, raise their families, and, of course,
pay taxes.
Let me start with an analogy. You're
walking along the beach and you see a child drowning in some
shallow waves. You know how to swim. The water isn't very turbulent.
Are you morally responsible if you keep walking? Of course you
are. You could have saved the child at no risk to yourself, but
you chose not to. If the child dies, you should feel responsible
for it.
Have I drawn a proper analogy? In some
ways I have. Palestinian civilians are no more able to resist
their killing than the child could resist the waves. And Americans,
through our taxes, are helping to stir the water.
Some will say there are important differences
between the killing of Palestinians and the drowning child. First,
what can American citizens do? The President and the Congress
can do much to alleviate the situation. They're the ones responsible.
But for individual Americans it is different. The analogy here
would be with someone walking along the beach that couldn't swim.
Surely that person can't be held responsible for saving the drowning
child.
It is true that if one can't swim one
cannot be held responsible for saving the drowning child. But
that does not absolve one of responsibility. One can be held
responsible for not telling the lifeguard about it, and even
urging the lifeguard to do something if it looks as though the
lifeguard can't be bothered to act. In this case, the President
and the Congress would be lifeguards; they can stop giving the
support to Israel that allows Israel to kill civilians. To neglect
to tell them about it would be a failure of moral responsibility.
But suppose one doesn't know what is
happening? After all, since Israel has barred reporters from
the scenes of many of the killings and lied about what it was
doing, the extent of the killing was often_and remains_unclear.
Here again, let's turn to the analogy. You're not sure a child
is drowning: maybe, maybe not. What do you do? You still call
the lifeguard and point out what you might be seeing, and urge
them to check. After all, what happens if you read in the paper
the next day that a child drowned in the water of the beach you
were strolling along?
Recall also that our tax dollars and
our military equipment are contributing to the killing of innocent
civilians, not marginally but centrally. Without those contributions,
the waves would be much smaller and the child might be safe.
Of course there are some people who are
more inclined to excuse Israel's actions. They would argue that
the entire analogy I have proposed is misleading. Rather than
seeing the Israeli invasion as a destructive wave and Palestinian
civilians as helpless children, they would offer an analogy of
the following type. You're walking along the street and you see
a larger kid beating up a smaller one. You learn that the smaller
kid has beaten up the larger kid's little sister. Do you have
responsibility to stop the beating? And here they would answer,
not necessarily.
The problem is that this analogy doesn't
work. First, Palestinian civilians didn't beat up anybody. And
we know, Israeli denials to the contrary, that the Israeli army
killed many of those civilians needlessly. So the attempt to
make Palestinians guilty of a prior crime, as the analogy does,
is mistaken. But even if we leave that obvious problem aside,
there is a second problem. Because if the smaller kid did beat
up the larger kid's little sister, it would have been because
the larger kid had beaten him up and had threatened to keep doing
so. After all, the Palestinians who engaged in violence didn't
do so out of sheer orneriness, but because they have been spending
thirty-five years under a brutal occupation. However, adding
this fact to the analogy changes things. If a larger kid is beating
up a smaller kid for taking vengeance for the larger kid's earlier
actions, then once again you have a responsibility to help the
smaller kid.
But suppose you don't know who really
started it. It's just too complex. Each of the kids is screaming
that the other one started it. In order see the analogy this
way we need to lay aside both the fact that Palestinian civilians
didn't beat anybody up and the fact that it is clear in the case
of Israel and the Palestinians who is occupying whom. This is
about the most sympathetic to Israel one can reasonably be with
the analogy.
What should you do? It is clear that
you are still responsible for pulling the larger kid off the
smaller one. If you do pull him off and the smaller kid did something
wrong, there are ways to rectify that. And if the smaller kid
didn't do anything and you walk away, then you allowed an innocent
child to be harmed. Moreover, if we bring the analogy closer
to home then we should add that the larger kid is beating the
smaller one with a stick that you bought him.
The moral lesson is clear. We Americans,
primarily through our tax dollars and military equipment but
also through some of our private corporations, have contributed
to the killing of innocent Palestinians, many of them children.
We might not be able to stop the killings, at least immediately,
but since it is our resources that are being used, we are responsible
to try to stop it at least to the extent of contacting those
who supply those resources and urging them to cease doing so.
Otherwise, the blood is on our hands
too.
Todd May
is a Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University He can be
reached at: mayt@clemson.edu
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