Killing Will

On the morality of killing

On Saturday, I made an account on X so I could see firsthand the videos coming out of Israel. It didn’t take long to find and watch the video of a naked young woman’s dead body being thrown into the back of a jeep. She seemed to have some broken bones because nothing connected together at quite the right angle, but it was very obviously and recognizably the dead body of a young woman. The men throwing her in the jeep carried themselves with pride, and the whole thing had the air of a hunter displaying a prize buck taken out of the forest. Emotions were too high for this to be enough, so a few men spat on her corpse. Another even ran up to throw a few punches, which I believe was a sort of consolation prize for not having had the pleasure of killing her himself. Dozens of onlookers cheered in celebration.

There was another more disturbing if much less explicit video of a twelve year old Jewish boy —who I strongly suspect is now an orphan— being shoved by some Palestinian children under the instruction of an adult man off camera who laughed at the Jewish boy’s obvious discomfort. The boy seemed dazed and lost. The message of the video was obvious. We have this child now. He is under our power. We will make him suffer. The cycle of hate will continue. I don’t know who will ransom him back, but hopefully someone is out there who still knows him.

There were countless others. If it is a superstition to believe we owe the dead our witness, then I am superstitious. The boy in that video will never know that I cried for him but perhaps God sees it and carries some small bit of that love to him. It is all I can do. There is no other lever I can pull than to know and to remember.

It was enough to take me back to the Stone Age. Worse, it was enough to make me into a lizard. Grab a rock. Go smash someone’s head in and keep smashing until there’s just a bit of pulp and some fragments of bone. As I’ve written before, violence is better than sex. Violence is primal, buried deep inside of you right next to your survival instinct. It feels good to hurt your enemy. I would certainly have to fight back a sense of joy to kill any of the grown men who did this and to be clear, I certainly think killing them is the right thing to do. They haven’t left any other choices.

This has also complicated my feelings about the Palestinian people. And yes, I mean the people not just Hamas. I could well imagine what it might be like to find myself under the oppression of a foreign force simply because I’d been unlucky. I am a civilized person. I wanted them to be free and independent, to have their own rights and own places to honor their own customs. I’ve seen the flip side of the videos above. Mothers and fathers holding the bodies of their dead children, taking tiny bodies out of rubble, shaking them as if unable to believe they won’t just wake up. I have a child. How could I not be wholly moved by their plight?

The celebrations. The fireworks. The parades. The group joy that all of this is happening. Not everyone of course, but the effective everyone. The network of people that gets together to do things as a group. The part of the people that says “this is who we are as a people!” That part of the Palestinian people seems to have surrendered any part of Palestine that might be worthy saving. They elected Hamas and if polls are accurate about half of them actively support Hamas. If as a culture you cheer the desecration of a young woman’s corpse, the slaughter of hundreds of party-goers wishing for your betterment, and the kidnapping of children, I don’t know what light you believe shines within you that should be carried into the future. If I could clap my hands and give the Palestinian people a place of their own I still would, but I am genuinely struggling to find what part of the Palestinian culture is worthy of salvation apart from my general human urge to not see humans suffer.

I’m against the blockade. I don’t believe in collective guilt. I don’t believe in indiscriminate bombing, but then I’m finding it much less believable that Israel is doing any of its bombing indiscriminately. I’m inclined to believe that they are only striking Hamas targets, that when civilians die it is because Hamas has deliberately used them as cover for very cynical and nihilistic purposes, and that Israel doesn’t have any real choice when the alternative is allowing missiles to fall on their people and kill their children. I’d still happily die to save the life of any child, including a Palestinian child. I wish to God I could run in their and make that deal even if it meant my own son would grow up an orphan… because I haven’t sold my soul to the Devil and called it wisdom, or necessity, or imagined anyone who hasn’t done so is simply naive. The thing I’m increasingly unable to not see is that it seems as though a large number of Palestinian people have made this kind of bargain and told themselves that sometimes it’s okay to kill someone who wants you to have a better life, or murder a child, or a drag a woman’s dead body through the streets.

This has a complicated history, which I know better than most but still not well enough. Here’s the basic dilemma: A man and his family are trapped on the highest floor of a burning building. The father jumps out of the window and tells his family to follow after and that he will break their fall. It turns out there was another family below and that family broke the fall of the father. The father of the family from the burning building has killed them all except for the father of that family. Soon enough the family from the burning building have all arrived but the fathers are still locked on the ground because even though the man who leapt from the burning building is responsible for killing an entire family he knows if he gets up that his family will be killed next. There was nothing anyone could have done to avoid the situation and no matter which side of it you’re on, what you’re compelled to do next is within your rights.

That’s a hard thing. It’s a thing to make men sharpen knives and prepare for war. No excuse could be enough. No peace tempting enough to make. So, war it is.

You’re supposed to kill soldiers in a time of war. We have them wear special clothes so you can pick them out of the crowd. If you can’t kill them, then you kill a politician. They have special clothes too and they sometimes even stand up in front of crowds and give speeches. Easy target. And if you are so completely dead set on killing someone you just find a man. Just any grown man with hair on his face. Call it sexism or what have you and on another day I might even agree, but after watching a young woman’s body be paraded through the streets I will tell you what the ages have carved into my bones as a basic instruction manual for who it is okay to kill and who it is not okay to kill in times of war since life started on this planet: you’re supposed to kill men. You’re only supposed to kill men and you’re only supposed to kill someone who isn’t a man if you absolutely, really, sincerely have no other choice. Kill a man. If you did that, I would at least have some basic level of respect. But when you blow off the lid and decide that women and children are fair game? Well, you’ve entered into a whole new arena and the only limit I put on what is acceptable to do in retaliation is the limit for what I am willing to do to my own soul.

And in remembering civilization, I can take a deep breath and put the lizard away back under a mammal’s brain and decide that my limits for what I am willing to do to my own souls are quite severe. My soul is precious. As is yours and everyone else’s even if they have sold it off at bargain barrel prices to the Devil. So please let the people in Gaza have water and food. Strike the targets you have to strike because Hamas is using them to kill your people, but please air drop medical supplies over hospitals because the bastards are going to make sure innocent people get hurt. You’re the good guys. What makes you strong, what makes the other people of the world willing to work with you, is that you don’t shrug off the death or suffering of children.

I do believe in a God, but a rather more complicated one than most people. And while I hear the commandment for mercy and love I think sometimes what that means is imagining the person you have to kill in another life, where things hadn’t gone quite so rotten, and they hadn’t been so tempted to degrade their own soul so cheaply, and that worthier person might look up on their own actions with horror and beg for you to stop them before they can do anything worse. In such a state, I would still kill all the men who could do such things to women and children but in knowing that having killed them I not only ended everything they were about to do but also everything they could ever be, I would refuse to celebrate.