The moral high ground I refer to in the sentence as I wrote it in the Nov. 13 article, “Between the River and the Sea” is the one possessed by any people at any time who are the victims of an unprovoked slaughter.
My assumption that the inaugural slaughter of the current conflict between Israel and Hamas was unprovoked (by those who were killed) seems to be the contention with which letter-writer Christopher Spatz of Rosendale in his letter titled “Ring any bells” back on December 6 takes issue. He provides a history lesson recalling a bloody tit-for-tat between Dutch settlers and a subtribe of the Lenape (Minsi) here in the Hudson Valley in order to demonstrate what he felt represents an equivalency between the two situations and in which he essentially assigns all individuals to one of two monoliths.
The first question, as I see it after parsing through the individuals of each group, is whether anyone can be called innocent.
The reporting from the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict so far contends the majority of those slaughtered by Hamas were civilians, with women and children among them. Assuming they had never lobbed a bomb into Gaza or shot a Palestinian, we can take the risk of assuming they were innocent of the acts that an Israeli police or military force may have committed which could have provoked such a response.
Most humans can agree that there are those who, based on their own actions, deserve what they get, and those who are innocent (above a certain age there is a co-mingling of the two). In any case there is consensus among modern people that a child should not be punished for the “sins of the father.”
So the second question as it appears relevant to me is whether slaughtering those humans judged innocent can ever be justified for any reason whatsoever. This seems the complaint and purpose of Spatz’s letter, to spread the blame around.
For my own historical offering, French anarchists and Algerian freedom fighters alike demonstrated at one time or another that leaving briefcase bombs in busy cafés was an acceptable action in light of their own belief systems, regardless of who was killed. In some quarters, this is called the propaganda of the deed.
This belief says it is acceptable to hold all the shareholders responsible, if you will, for the actions of the corporation. That is, civilian members paying the taxes which support an oppressive regime on the one hand or those who benefit from their membership to a moneyed class on the other, deserve what they get as just rewards, regardless of the presence of any signs of advocacy in the victims.
If this belief system is embraced, then every American alive, young or old, is responsible for the civilians killed in president George Bush’s military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, or likewise responsible for those obliterated by Obama’s drone strikes in Yemen. Every American alive during Kissinger’s campaign in Cambodia owes a debt of blood still. Ditto for the innocents irradiated in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
It is my contention that one should never confuse a people with their leader. I don’t confuse the Israeli people with Benjamin Netanyahu any more than I confuse the Palestinian people with Ismail Haniyeh.
I do tend to support underdogs, which in this case are the children, whatever their nationality, who are most often killed because of the motives of political leaders, militaries, business interests and demagogues, religious and secular alike.
The moral high ground for either Hamas or the Israeli military is built on constantly shifting sands, but for either the Israeli or Palestinian people themselves, who by and large I must believe are extricated from the interest of continuing the violence, the moral high ground never shifts. It belongs to the innocent dead or it belongs to no one at all.
The above ‘point of view’ article was written by the author on December 7, as a response to a letter which had been received by HV1 and then published in the letters section on Dec. 6 titled “Ring any bells?” The letter written by Christopher Spatz of Rosendale is reproduced here.
Ring any bells?
In 1663, during the Second Esopus War, Dutch settlers and the troops defending them at Fort Wiltwyck engaged in a series of skirmishes, battles and negotiations with the Munsee Lenape natives. Both the colonists and the natives attacked and destroyed one another’s villages. Both the colonists and the natives committed atrocities against women, children and the elderly. Both the colonizers and the natives took hostages. Both the colonists and the natives negotiated for the release of those hostages: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:The_Esopus_War_of_1663
Ring any bells? The New World, South Africa, the Levant, settler-colonization has changed little in 400 years.
On June 7, 1663, the Munsee attacked Wiltwyck, killing soldiers and settlers, and taking civilians hostage.
On September 5, 1663, Dutch troops sent to rescue the colonists attacked a Munsee palisaded village under construction on a bluff west of the current town of Wallkill overlooking a creek later named the Shawangunk Kill. The settler-hostages were rescued, the fort and crops were torched and most of the natives were massacred.
A Dutch account of the massacre in E.M. Ruttenber’s 1906 Indian Geographical Names describes the scene: “When the Dutch troops left it, it was a terrible picture of desolation. The huts had been burned, the bodies of the Indians who had been killed and thrown into the corn-pits had been unearthed by wolves and their skeletons left to bleach on the plain, with here and there the half-eaten body of a child. For years it was a fable told to children that the place was haunted by the ghosts of the slain….” The massacre ended the Second Esopus War and effectively wiped-out the Munsee from the region. Several sources consider the massacre site the origin of the place-name, Shawangunk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawangunk_Ridge
In Roskoz Most’s Between the River and the Sea, after decades of killing civilians and taking them hostage, the settlers “would have to surrender the moral high ground” responding to the native’s “terrorist actions” killing soldiers and settlers, and taking hostages on October 7.
Applying HV1‘s characterizations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to September, 5 1663, which side would be surrendering the moral high ground, and which side would be the terrorists?”
Christopher Spatz
Rosendale
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