{"id":387,"date":"2023-10-27T08:15:19","date_gmt":"2023-10-27T08:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.hashiloach.org.il\/?p=387"},"modified":"2024-01-04T16:53:02","modified_gmt":"2024-01-04T16:53:02","slug":"their-legacy-is-our-legitimacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/en.hashiloach.org.il\/their-legacy-is-our-legitimacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Their Legacy is Our Legitimacy"},"content":{"rendered":"
Five years ago, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at my neighbour\u2019s car as she drove with her three small children near the town of Tekoa. Though the car began to catch fire, she succeeded, with amazing resourcefulness, to extract herself and her children and hide in a nearby orchard. Despite the car\u2014and nearly its passengers\u2014 being burned to a crisp, the IDF\u2019s response was lackadaisical: The army \u201csharpened regulations and increased awareness in patrols and observations.\u201d We were all shocked and decided to set out in a protest convoy to the scene of the attack.<\/span><\/p>\n During the protest event, we met with the brigade commander of the sector, who expressed interest in our welfare and wished to show his concern. I naively asked him if his orders to the army would have differed had my neighbor and her children died in the attack. \u201cOf course,\u201d he answered, \u201cThere is an entirely different plan of action for such a situation.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t understand,\u201d I said, confused, \u201cIs the IDF waiting for the people whose welfare they are charged with protecting to be killed to execute a more effective plan for protecting them?\u201d The brigade commander, a man more or less my age, looked at me with unconcealed offense and seemed to assume I had questioned his determination to protect the citizens in his sector. The truth is that I did not doubt his dedication, nor his sincerity, but rather questioned a modus operandi so distorted that by which military action, ostensibly meant to defend civilians, takes place only after the harm to such populations occurs. This concerning model of behavior against which both my common sense and simple morality\u2014per which the duty to fight enemies and prevent their schemes from reaching fruition is axiomatic \u2013 rebelled has unfortunately become more and more common within Israeli leadership in the last generation.<\/span><\/p>\n It is not just hesitation to engage or avoiding the use of force that has proven problematic. There is also another side to this equation: At a certain stage, the number of incidents becomes too great and the number of casualties too awful for the public\u2019s sensibilities. At this point, the IDF casts away its previous caution and sets out on a determined general campaign which \u201cchanges the rules of the game.\u201d Hundreds of air force sorties and tens of thousands of bombardments from tanks and artillery prepare the ground for manoeuvring by whole divisions in a territory which usually lies undisturbed just a few kilometres from the border. The prepared plans are taken out of the drawer, and every hesitation or avoidance of the use of military force disappears at a stroke\u2014overcome by the intoxicating feeling of sacred and righteous morality. The massive use of force is granted legitimacy for a limited, though indeterminate time. This period generally comes out to around until the memory of the casualties which originally drove the \u201cchanged rules\u201d fades., Following this, additional victims will be required to renew the public legitimacy of using force in the eyes of both the domestic and international communities. This cycle then repeats on and on, ad nauseum.<\/span><\/p>\n This model has been in effect for quite a few years, and thus many residents of the Israeli periphery will be all too familiar with it. Its core ideology was present in the eighties and nineties in the Galilee Panhandle, and later reached its peak in the 2000s within the settlements dotting the area now known as the \u201cGaza Envelope,\u201d and of course the settlements of Judea and Samaria.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe land of Lebanon will burn with flames,\u201d threatened Foreign Minister David Levi in February 2000, just a few months before the IDF withdrew from Lebanon in response to the firing of Katyushas on the Galilee. Prime Minister Ehud Barak similarly declared that \u201call of Lebanon will burn\u201d following fire from Lebanon. In practice, however, the IDF\u2019s responses were measured and contained, with the aim of preventing escalation. This policy of restraint continued half a year after the withdrawal, when a Hezbollah force ambushed an IDF patrol on Mount Dov, killing three soldiers and taking their bodies, and a week after that when reserve officer Elchanan Tenenbaum was kidnapped. Israeli restraint continued even when forces from Lebanon began to divert the waters of the Wazani river\u2014one of the main sources of the Hatzbani\u2014as well as when Hezbollah fired anti-tank shells which landed in northern towns and killed an Israeli child. Hezbollah\u2019s ultraviolent efforts at provocation met Israeli reticence every step of the way; in 2004, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon even decided to free 435 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of Tenenbaum and the return of the bodies of the three soldiers who were killed. In 2005, the IDF prepared a plan of attack called Icebreaker for action in anticipation of escalation on the northern border but avoided using it despite another (failed) kidnapping attack in November 2005 in Kfar Ajr. In the end, between 2000 and 2006, 15 soldiers and 6 civilians were killed near the northern border\u2014a tiny number compared to IDF losses prior to the withdrawal from Lebanon, but a very high number compared to those of any other area within the Green Line.<\/span><\/p>\n And yet, on July 12, 2006, dozens of terrorists launched a coordinated attack on two IDF patrol vehicles on the Lebanese border, killing three soldiers, seriously wounded three others, and kidnapping reserve soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev (who later turned out to have been killed). An Israeli tank which entered Lebanon in an attempt to prevent the kidnapping was hit by an IED, also killing its four soldiers. An infantry soldier who tried to save the tank soldiers was killed as well. Seven more soldiers and six civilians were wounded that day by Hezbollah fire at towns in the north.<\/span><\/p>\n In response, the IDF launched what became known as the Second Lebanon War. In his speech to the Knesset, Prime Minister Olmert gave stark expression to the shared public sentiment that a line had been crossed and that the accumulation of incidents had reached critical mass:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThere are moments in the life of a nation where it must look at reality as it is and say \u2018no more.\u2019 And I tell all of you \u2013 no more. Israel will not be a hostage. Not of terror gangs, or of a terror authority, and not even of a sovereign state.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The significant sense of public outrage finally allowed for Israel to unleash a truly enormous show of military force against its enemies. The IDF deployed no fewer than five infantry and armored divisions and carried out almost 12,000 air strikes. The IDF\u2019s mobilization led to the mass abandonment of South Lebanon, turning 900,000 Lebanese citizens into temporary refugees. Some 700 Lebanese civilians were killed during the fighting, and over 2,500 were wounded. Despite the enormous damage done to the physical infrastructure of Lebanon \u2013 which Lebanon has yet to recover from, almost 15 years later \u2013 it would seem that the military achievement was so modest that the Winograd Committee defined it as a \u201cserious missed opportunity\u201d given the IDF\u2019s size, equipment, and complete air supremacy in the sector. Hezbollah buried some 700 of its soldiers and treated some 1,000 wounded, but most of its missile launching infrastructure remained intact. Beyond the fact that the Israeli rear remained exposed \u2013 44 civilians were killed and more than 2,000 wounded \u2013 the IDF also had many casualties; during a month of fighting, 121 were killed and 628 wounded. The cease-fire went into effect on August 14, 2006, under pressure from the Security Council, due to an international opinion that the moral justification for the IDF\u2019s actions was spent.<\/span><\/p>\n It seems that in this instance, as in many other cases, we see a repetition of such an utterly paradoxical approach to the use of force: First, there is a marked avoidance of force and an effort to contain casualties, all while labelling the other side as aggressive, violent, and evil. This stage continues until a critical mass of victims and casualties is reached in the minds of the public. The moment that happens, the public sentiment emerges that enough is enough, and military force is now fully justified. The use of force at this point in the conflict may be inefficient and disproportional, but at least not lacking in its moral legitimacy, though it does possess a limited time frame for use. When? At such a time and place that the active memory of the victims and casualties which provided the push towards moral legitimacy for the use of force dissipates.<\/span><\/p>\n From Purity of Arms to a Taboo on Arms<\/span><\/p>\n What causes the IDF to be so wildly schizophrenic in its actions? Can we really only employ military force after it has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that we have paid in the hard coin of the killed and wounded? And if we are truly dealing with excessive morality, why are so many of these same inhibitions removed when that ultimate \u201ccritical mass\u201d is attained?<\/span><\/p>\n We can offer many possible reasons, each containing a kernel of truth, but none of them would fully explain this paradoxical phenomenon. Some will argue that this line of thinking stems from an awareness of Israel\u2019s limited diplomatic pull. But this is a partial justification at most, since it is not a specifically Israeli phenomenon that we are dealing with. As we will see below, many western nations have followed a very similar pattern since the end of WWII.<\/span><\/p>\n Another potential reason for the hesitation to employ force could be for a fear of casualties on our side\u2014. a reticence to pay the price required by the use of force. No-one disputes that a high degree of sensitivity to the lives of their soldiers has become a mark of western countries in recent decades. The US, for instance, suddenly abandoned Somalia after the death of 18 American soldiers in Mogadishu in 1993. At the same time, Britain, Germany, and France all refused to endanger their soldiers by becoming involved in the Bosnian War, for fear of revenge attacks against their forces. Even the Soviets stationed in Afghanistan operated under constant pressure from Moscow to avoid casualties at any cost. In fact, a fear of casualties among our forces is what led, along with increased technological means, to the development of the military strategy of precision air power and counter-fire, thereby sparing the need for a massive entry of maneuvering ground troops into enemy territory. Aerial bombings by unmanned drones, or by pilots operating in conditions \u201csafer than passengers of certain third world airplane companies,\u201d is what allowed the defeat of the Serbian (then Yugoslavian) army in 1999 at the cost of zero NATO casualties. But if the reason for avoiding the use of military power was just about a fear of casualties on our own side, we could have expected that the use of counter-fire and similar stratagems would increase the number of conflicts in which western armies are involved. Yet even in the Kosovo War, which ended with no NATO casualties, western member states of NATO were the subject of public criticism and protest for their decision to use military force at all. It would thus seem that the reason for this reticence was not for the fear of casualties among their forces.<\/span><\/p>\n It may be that the reason for opposition to military force derived from fear of harming civilian noncombatants. In the case of Kosovo, some 500 civilians were killed by aerial bombings, though military officials note that this is a low number relative to the number of bombs dropped. Although it was the involvement of NATO that ultimately prevented continued harm to the Albanians in the region, western opinions remain nevertheless divided on the moral justification for the action. The high levels of precision delivered by the weapons used in this conflict resulted in the army feeling more comfortable with the general use of large amounts of force in densely populated civilian surroundings, leading to increased levels of harm to uninvolved civilians when the use of counter-fire is ongoing or expedited. For instance, the elimination by Israel of terrorist Saleh Shehadeh, considered to be a \u201cticking time bomb,\u201d on July 22nd 2002, was done with a one-ton bomb dropped in the heart of a dense residential neighbourhood in the Gaza Strip, leading to the deaths of another 13 civilians (some of them children) and the wounding of 150 others. The harm to uninvolved civilians, though resulting from the elimination of a terrorist responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Israelis, led to protest by Israeli personnel, accusations in Britain about the war crimes committed by the IDF commanders involved in this action, a civil suit in the United States against the head of the Shin-Bet, and an appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court to investigate the legality of the assassination.<\/span><\/p>\n In the wake of the appeal, the Israeli government decided to establish a public examination committee in order to determine the legitimacy o the army\u2019s actions. In February 2011, the committee stated that the manoeuvre was legitimate due to the urgency of the situation, but that the killing of civilian bystanders was not proportional; Though it avoided assigning criminal responsibility, the committee still criticized the use of military force at all. Even the pilot who carried out the bombing claimed in January 2011 that, \u201cIf I had known that there is an intelligence picture which connects to things which are prohibited to me, I would not have attacked\u2026 the moment I lift off, I become a war machine. Until I know, until that line that I know that I\u2019m doing something not right. Something that is not right is killing just anyone.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n While killing \u201cjust anyone\u201d is certainly morally prohibited, the advancement of technology has given the west, and Israel with it, the unrealistic expectation that it is possible to prevent any and all collateral damage associated with the use of fire, spawning the idea that war is now a surgical, sterile affair.<\/span><\/p>\n In this vein, it could be that the reason for the aforementioned paradox is due to the pacifistic outlooked which has grown popular in the west following the end of WWII. The use of force is considered today to be inherently negative in principle \u2013 not just militarily but also culturally \u2013 and because of this, there is a taboo on the use of force to solve even imminent problems. Europe, argues essayist Alain Finkielkraut, perceives the presence of fascism in every combination of nationalism and force, and therefore categorically rejects the use of military force to resolve conflicts.<\/span><\/p>\n The uniquely Israeli context is also informed by the ethos of \u201cpurity of arms,\u201d first coined by Berl Katznelson at the 21st Zionist Congress in August 1939, immediately after the Arab Revolt: \u201cRestraint means: let our arms be pure. We learn weapons, we bear weapons, we stand against those coming against us. But we do not wish our weapons to be stained by the blood of innocents.\u201d This ethos was adopted by the IDF in its ethical code, written in the nineties, per which \u201cthe soldier will not use his weapons and force to harm people who are not combatants and against captives, and will do all he can to prevent harm to their life, body, dignity, and property.\u201d However, over time the Israeli elite increasingly moved away from identifying weapons as pure, instead siding with the ideology of \u201cavoiding the use of weapons whenever possible,\u201d and even arguing that this moral approach was the original foundation of Zionism. Historian Anita Shapira even wrote that \u201cthe Zionist movement\u2026 not only did not consider the use of force to be a \u2018Jewish\u2019 trait, but even considered abstention from its use to have a moral advantage.\u201d This position has been radicalized in recent years to the point of undermining the legitimacy of use of force against even enemy combatants, though it has not been uncritically accepted even in academic circles.<\/span><\/p>\n To this particular explanation we can add the psychological argument\u2014and this may also be true when it comes to collective conduct\u2014that each of us contains an inborn degree of aggression which is restrained by morality. This culturally created brake does not cancel this inherent tendency indefinitely, only prevents its outburst temporarily. Lacking alternative methods of release, this aggression accumulates until eventually it involuntarily bursts forth in a disproportionate and inappropriate manner.<\/span><\/p>\n Yet this explanation fails recognize the other side of the paradox\u2014that the use of force, often disproportionate force, is eventually regarded as morally legitimate by those parties\u2014military, domestic, and international\u2014who had previously seen it as anything but? How is it that the categorical rejection of applied force as mere violence is suddenly reversed, even after some imagined moral boundary has been crossed?<\/span><\/p>\n Another explanation for this modus operandi\u2014in which the use of force is illegitimate in the first stage and then entirely legitimate in the second\u2014may lie in our staggered levels of moral certainty. Perhaps it is simply that we avoid the use of force so long as we lack moral certainty that we are justified in doing so. The same is thereby true in the opposite direction: The moment we are sure that there is moral justification to use force, we tend to employ it. In other words, we ourselves reduce the doubt we feel about the morality of the use of force further and further, until the point it is clear to us beyond any doubt that it is permitted. But even this explanation seems problematic, as patterns of avoiding the use of force exist even when the enemy\u2019s intent is entirely clear. In the examples I raised above, the IDF had no doubt as to the desire of terrorists to kill Israeli soldiers or civilians; no-one questioned the malice of their intentions. Yet still the military waited for the order to open fire and knew it would come only after we took losses.<\/span><\/p>\n We could perhaps argue that in order to openly use force, we must prove not only ill intent, but also capability. A barking dog does not always bite, after all. We could, for instance, argue that stone throwing attacks can be very harmful, but that the odds of this are very low, and that this probability points to low capabilities. But it would seem that a very large number of such incidents has replaced for the low probability of that, and thus increases the capability. In 2020 alone, almost 4,000 stone-throwing attacks took place, as well as 698 Molotov cocktail attacks, 9 stabbing attacks, and 31 shooting attacks\u2014meaning almost 13 attacks of some kind per day, alongside hundreds of attempted attacks in Israel which were stopped by the Shin-Bet. Aside from the defensive efforts of the Israeli forces, the fact that \u201conly\u201d two citizens and a soldier were killed and \u201conly\u201d 46 were wounded does not attest to the enemy\u2019s lack of capability, only their lack of luck.<\/span><\/p>\n We can continue discussing various combinations of circumstances, each of which might provide us with part of the answer for this phenomenon. It is true, for instance, that the use of military force requires a great deal of resources \u2013 logistical, economic, and political \u2013 which cannot be enlisted on a daily basis. As such, there is a kernel of truth in the claim that the complex character of the use of military force has an effect on the moral views of the public and senior policy making officials, rather than vice versa. But it would be hard to accept this argument in toto, especially in light of the efforts of western countries, including Israel, to grit their teeth and avoid, sometimes dangerously, the use of military force.<\/span><\/p>\n In this article, I would therefore like to present a more principled response\u2014one that draws from deep cultural undercurrents, which can hopefully help complete the picture regarding the odd moral conduct of so many western militaries, as well as the radical changes in the way in which the use of force is granted public legitimacy. Why is there an ongoing taboo against the use of force against an enemy with clearly dangerous intentions, so long as his actions did not lead to many casualties? And how do these casualties, at some stage, suddenly grant moral legitimacy to the massive use of force, itself eventually leading to mass deaths and systematic destruction?<\/span><\/p>\n The Justice of the Victim and the Legitimacy Battery<\/span><\/p>\n From the end of WWII until the present, the public security approach of the west has obeyed a paradoxical pattern, morally speaking. According to this pattern, any victim (in the sense of being in a general position of inferiority) is in the right, regardless of the reality of the conflict or its historical facts. This automatic connection between weakness\u2014or \u201cvictimhood\u201d\u2014and justice lacks any sense of justice or logic in and of itself, directly contradicting the fundamental understanding of humanism\u2014be it based on reason or religion. Whether we consider man as an autonomous end in himself and never a means, as Kant put it, or he is a sacred imago Dei as Locke argued, the essence of humanism lies in the distinction between good and evil, made on the basis of critical thinking. Power relations should play no part in these calculations. But the distortion of justice does not end there: Not only is the victim correct, but he even acquires through his suffering the right to make unrestrained use of violence, the normal standards of morality entirely dismissed.<\/span><\/p>\n In the past few decades, due to a very dichotomous way of thinking, the use of military force has been seen in the west as problematic and justified only in situations clearly lacking other options. Israel, for instance, faced a French military embargo solely because it struck first against the air bases of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan which threatened to imminently attack it, as well as an American embargo in the wake of the air strike on the Iraqi nuclear reactor. On the other hand, it was provided with an American airlift during the Yom Kippur War because it avoided striking first and was thus branded as the victim. It has been proven that along with the empowerment of the victim comes the moral right to make use of force, no matter how excessive or unrestrained. To once again utilize a local example: Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon declared during Operation Protective Edge that Israel had charged up its international \u201clegitimacy battery\u201d with its previous policy of restraint, and that this policy thereby allowed it to make use of a great deal of disproportionate power when the cost of this restraint became intolerable.<\/span><\/p>\n In the first stage, we see the avoidance of high-intensity military engagement in low-intensity conflicts to \u201cstay on the good side\u201d and avoid using force \u201clike the bad guys do.\u201d Since force is seen in an entirely negative light, we need to present the good guys as righteous victims and the bad guys as murderous monsters. The Palestinians, for instance, make an organized effort to portray themselves as the innocent victims of a bloodthirsty Israeli occupation. They stress in particular cases in which Palestinian children are killed in Israeli attacks, with the aim of casting Israel in a cruel and heartless light. In response, Israel not only makes a supreme effort to avoid harming uninvolved civilians but even records this. In every military operation, the IDF spokesperson releases films documenting the diversion of air-to-ground missiles from its planes and helicopters due to the presence of civilians, including women and children. But Israel also does not shy away from presenting itself as a victim of the murderous Palestinian violence. The Foreign Ministry supported the uploading of gruesome pictures from the murderous attack on the Fogel family in March 2011 to the internet, even beseeching the IDF to keep the children\u2019s bus burned by a Hamas anti-tank missile at the Gaza division base so they can present it to foreign representatives and the UN as evidence of Hamas\u2019 war crimes. This mutual war of justification is no marginal matter: It reinvigorates both sides with the sense that they are morally justified, since such justification is based on weakness and powerlessness. So long as I am a powerless victim, I am identified with the side of the righteous, while the use of force could tar me and make me one of the \u201cbad guys.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Thus does the struggle move from being a conflict, or even a war, violent as it may be, to a grand struggle against monsters committing crimes against humanity. The need to establish such a weighty narrative derives from the public difficulty to morally justify military activity over anything less than historically horrific atrocities. However, the other side of the coin resides in the difficulty that then arises in thoroughly morally justifying our presence in the region without stressing our innocence, helplessness, and victimhood to the point of exaggeration. The military conflict or war thus becomes\u2014via the prism of such extreme moral puritanism\u2014an epic battle of the purely good against the immovably evil. As we can see though, this is not a moral argument of the rational sort and therefore, even though moral clarity may play a role here, is not a decisive one.<\/span><\/p>\n However, at a certain stage, there will eventually be a motion for the unrestrained use of force. This pivot comes from the \u201clegitimacy battery\u201d having been sufficiently charged: the accumulation of sufficiently frequent and serious events which engender a sense of total victimhood. It is, ironically, a state of complete victimhood which allows the crossing of the boundary from a world defined in terms of good and evil to one in which moral standards are nonexistent. For instance, it was the death of \u201ctoo many\u201d people in the Park hotel attack in Netanya on seder night, March 27, 2002, in what was the most serious suicide attack in the history of the State of Israel that broke the Israeli doctrine of restraint practiced during the Second Intifada. This, and only after hundreds of Israelis had already been killed, with Israel continually responding with a policy of containment and restraint. In the wake of the Park hotel attack, Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, taking over all Palestinian cities\u2014an action which made it the de facto occupier of official Palestinian territory. We could say that Israel could not have carried out such a comprehensive change in its operational approach had it not \u201ccharged\u201d its legitimacy battery beforehand through a resonating casualty cost. Even though \u201coccupation\u201d became a dirty word within Israeli politics\u2014with many polls repeatedly showing that many Israelis do not want to control Ramallah, Schem, and Jenin\u2014the occupation of the PA\u2019s cities was considered to be a legitimate response to the circumstances from which it emerged. Even the international community delayed its protests against what it considered to be the root of all evil in Israeli policy.<\/span><\/p>\n It goes without saying that Israel, even in cases where the dogs of war were loosed after paying in the hard coin of high casualties, nevertheless does not commit war crimes or shoot indiscriminately at non-combatants. Even though Israel definitely applies a great deal of military force against its enemies which causes systemic and economic destruction, as in the case of Operation Accountability in 1993 and Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, and although it moves to a policy it considers problematic, as is the case in Operation Defensive Shield, it nevertheless continues to make an effort to avoid harming innocents. In this, Israel \u2013 likely because of a high degree of sensitivity to human life \u2013 deviates from the general norm in western countries. These countries behave differently when receiving the moral legitimacy afforded their victimhood.<\/span><\/p>\n This is what happened during the American-led coalition\u2019s fight against ISIS. The execution clips which the organization distributed from July 2015 onward aroused enormous panic around the world, leading to mass enlistments into the organization\u2019s ranks, but also the charging of their \u201clegitimacy batteries\u201d for the coalition\u2019s extreme use of force. Similarly, on March 24, 2017, American planes attacked settled areas within the city of Mosul in Iraq. The bombed area was considered empty of civilians, but some 200 civilians were still killed \u2013 an inconceivable number of casualties from a single bombing. No one desired these deaths, of course, but the sweeping legitimacy granted to the use of massive military force allowed such criminal levels of intelligence negligence, leading to a catastrophe. More serious examples are not lacking. It will suffice to mention the French transfer of two million Algerian villagers in response to the terror of the rebel group FLN; the American invasion to Panama against the dictator Noriega in December 1989, on the grounds of fighting the drug trade and human rights violations, which cost the lives of hundreds of civilians; the violent involvement of UN forces in Somalia in October 1993 in response to terrorist actions, which caused over a thousand casualties. What allowed for the critical move from the first step\u2014based on a fierce dichotomy of strong versus weak\u2014to the next step\u2014in which the dichotomy disappears\u2014is an act of particularly extreme victimhood which grants the weak the ultimate justification to act outside of the spectrum of good and evil. Through the enormous cost inflicted upon them, the victim is granted a form of moral immunity. He is freed \u2013 at least until the collective memory of that terrible cost dissipates \u2013 from the constricting constraints of morality by his branding as an unconditionally good and pure soul. He is now free to act as he wishes, including by use of force which might have tarnished his reputation beforehand.<\/span><\/p>\n Paul\u2019s Moral Mulligan<\/span><\/p>\n Those familiar with Christianity might notice the similarity between this dynamic of victimhood and power and the theological mechanism of Paul, core founder of ancient Christianity. Paul was not just responsible for spreading the Christian gospel to non-Jewish communities throughout the Roman Empire, but also made a decisive contribution in shaping this message with his unique interpretation of Jesus\u2019 death. Beyond the stories of Jesus described in the Gospels, Paul\u2019s Epistles are the main and decisive foundation of the New Testament. Despite the difference in time and context between modern wartime morality in an age of mass media and the theology of early Christianity in the first century CE, this theological modus operandi still has great power in the current age of secularization, repeating and renewing itself whenever the weak side \u2013 in a military conflict containing moral boundaries of right and wrong \u2013 becomes helpless. At that moment, as a result of his victimhood, he gets to break free of the constraints of those boundaries. At that point, the great violence he engenders is seen as legitimate, and even ennobling.<\/span><\/p>\n With the help of very polarized thinking, Jesus created a very sharp distinction between good and bad. He attacked the Pharisee Judaism of his time\u2014the end of the Second Temple era\u2014which focused on the religious obligation to practical commandments and what he considered the abandonment of the commandments of the heart, demanding more and more tests to merit salvation of the soul in the world to come. Jesus suspected that the unwillingness of the Jews to forgo their connection to this world harmed the sincerity of their faith. His detestation of power and wealth led him to declare what became the famous phrase: \u201cIt is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to come to the Kingdom of God.\u201d For this reason, he automatically condemned the strong, the wealthy, and the man of earthly presence, marking the weak, the poor, and those focused on spiritual life as ipso facto in the right. Thus, at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, one of the most famous texts of western civilization, Jesus marked out victimhood as a defining mark of goodness, purity, and exalted heavenliness:<\/span><\/p>\n\n
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