Does our wont to see all IDF soldiers as our kids, the safety of each and every one of whom is irreducibly and axiomatically important to us, prevent us from think morally, or even strategically, about the army?
This is a segment from The “Seventy Short Reasons” Edition.
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Photo: Hadas Parush/Flash90
The problem is not loving your children too much, but not recognizing that your opponents have as intense a love for theirs, using that to bootstrap into possibility beyond aggression. Social organization forces decisions on us for that love; others bind us, rules evolve, we living in mazes of constraints with sometime possibility. Parents can break civil and criminal law, covering up mistakes, overtly lying, so that they can be there for their families. Conscription of just adult youth correlates this bind across the nation: those seeing their children off to the army, those older, remembering when they so did, those with friends of either kind. This social landscape is ubiquitous, inescapable, and to show solidarity, to avoid anger, ostracism, we come to police ourselves and others employing that very threat of ostracism.
Consider the public reaction to police induced deaths in the US. Rarely are police employing deadly force convicted of homicide (although recently there is a slight tendency for them to be fired with no charges made). When trials do occur, acquittal or a hung jury are far more likely than conviction. In the US with its guns, the public wants forceful protection. Even though police have a legal monopoly on force, even though they voluntarily assume risk upon hire, they are effectively held to a lesser standard than a citizen involved in homicide. Now correlate this propensity across parents watching their children man what has become perpetual citizen soldier latent war. These young have the same badge of protection as the police, but they are conscripted, not voluntarily accepting jeopardy for pay or optional love of civic duty. Surely they will be given even more leeway than standard police.
Temptation to use this cultural immunity must be enormous. Elite command and control policies become shielded by the cultural immunity of the young, for these young, not their commanders, are the striking hand. In slow motion conflicts like the occupation and Gaza even more so, for events occur in apparent isolation much of the time, making criticism almost perforce of the young hands involved in the event. Culturally enforced blindness results. Media underplay events which if isolate in other contexts would be sensational. Policy is not questioned for fear of jeopardizing, here, the very promise of Israel as haven for future life, the fruit of future in the soldiered young. But these very same processes occur among your labeled enemies. Evolution is no respecter of person or constructed nation. No group holds a monopoly on social process, good or evil.
During the later Cold War Helen Caldicott, an Australian physician, gained minor Western fame as spokeswoman for a nuclear disarmament movement which focused solely on the children of all sides, none having any responsibility for the nuclear winter they would have to endure after apocalypse. Of course, she had no impact on superpower policy, no smidgen of influence on the collapse of the USSR. But she endured by emphasizing that the very reason for the Cold War, the protection of a future, was invariant to parents throughout the world, thereby conceptually making children hostages to elite calculus on all sides, a rebellion of medical ethic against the patriotism of war. (We enter this dilemma again in climate change but that is another topic.)
Golda Meir’s quote, that “peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us” hides the social binds that a nation, people, or community forge upon itself; it hides the prison we build around ourselves in the name of abstraction, doing so because always elsewhere others are and will do the same thing to themselves, so to us–we organize against you because you organize against us. “Arab” here may be replaced with “Jew”; it is just that the consequences of this view are wholly different when one side has overwhelming military superiority. For who asks what psychic costs soldiers endure in the occupation? Where is the love for those young minds performing acts of minor sometimes to flare of major dominance? Only Breaking the Silence speaks, ostracized, threatened with ban as traitorous.
Helen Caldicott moved to break those binds through evolved medical ethic. Surely a phantastical task. I suspect that, in your land, you will have to bring it down to the real ground. God’s children are never left alone.