Being The “Moral” Barbarian

Being The “Moral” Barbarian — An Analysis (18 January 2025) by Lawrence Davidson

Part I — A Question

Hanin Majadli, is a brave and clear-sighted Israeli-Palestinian journalist at Haaretz, Israel’s mostly liberal newspaper. She recently (Haaretz, 3 January 2025) asked a question that must be floating about in the minds of millions of Jews: “How is it possible that morality and decency, supposedly the leading values in this [Jewish] household, do not include observing what is happening in Gaza? How can this morality coexist with active participation in a war in which every day Palestinian families are killed, babies freeze to death and children are shot in the back?” The household she is referring to belonged to a soldier recently killed in Gaza. Among his exploits in life was the great fun he claimed to have when torching homes in Gaza. Yet he is being eulogized as having been raised in an environment that represented the best of Jewish values.

This seminally important question is not only relevant to “nice Jewish boys and girls” mutating into barbarians (“cogs in a brutal killing machine”). It is relevant to any group of relatively civilized people exposed to combat within a context that has consistently dehumanized the “other.”

Majadli partially responds to her own question. “The answer may lie in blindness: Many Israelis, including those who are dedicated to Jewish morality, do not perceive Palestinians as equals, but rather, at most, as a backdrop for the Jewish national struggle.”

She is correct as far as she goes, but something is still missing. How do you produce this blindness while maintaining that “moral self-image”? As it turns out, it may not be that difficult. Here is a theory of my own, made up of three parts: (1) Localness, (2) Closed Information Environments and (3) Thought Collectives. These three elements can come together to explain Hanin Majadli’s observation. 

The first thing we should understand is that (1) most of the Jewish citizens of Israel grow up—and have their perceptions shaped—by their local cultural context. This is a ubiquitous process within most national groups and tends to tie the citizenry to a common outlook. The modern nationstate attempts, and largely successfully so, to sustain a sense of loyalty to the state as an integral part of the local culture. (2) States do this through the control of education and mass information. Effectively, this creates a “closed information environment” when it comes to perceptions supporting loyalty. Over time (3) what results from this effort is a “thought collective.” That is, a state where the vast majority of people, whatever their internal differences might be, will perceive an advertised threat (whether it is in fact real or not) to the national state as an threat to their culture and way of life. One important stratagem operating within the “thought collective” is the dehumanizing of whoever allegedly raises such a threat.  

Through this process the citizens’ perception of his or her environment is divided in two—those on the inside (the self-reinforcing us) and those on the outside (the alien “other”). And, one thing the “thought collective” constantly hints at is that the practice of moral virtues is not required when it comes to those who—you believe—threaten your way of life. That is the process Majadili’s observed household has gone through, along with their Jewish neighbors. That process, as she noted, segregates the Palestinians out and confines them to an inferior status. It has made them appear as a threat to the Israeli Jewish way of life. That is why Israeli soldiers can be barbarians and still be praised as “moral.”

Part II — The Case of Antony Blinken

This process of localness, indoctrination and the creation of a thought collective, is almost universal within the modern culture of nationstates. There is one more aspect of this progression, a rather tricky one, that needs to be noted. Individuals who closely identify with communities abroad, either because of ethnic or religious ties, or perhaps ideological ones, can virtually import the events impacting these off-shore communities into their local sphere. That is, make the foreign happening an integral, motivational part of their own local sphere. Here is an American example of this mental maneuver that is every bit as morally myopic as the Israeli perceptions.

On 4 January 2025, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a career diplomat and longtime associate of President Biden, gave an interview to the New York Times. A good part of this interview focused on what the interviewer called “the defining crisis of this era, which is the conflict in Gaza.” The interviewer described the present status of the Gaza Strip, “The latest U.N. figures put the Palestinian death toll at 45,000. Over 90 percent of Gaza’s population is now displaced. The population is starving. All hospitals have been destroyed. In November, a U.N. committee released a report that found Israel’s warfare practices “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.” Blinken was asked for his response.

Blinken is a devotee of the Israeli narrative. He has, along with much of the U.S. public, made it part of his worldview. Therefore, his response reflects this part of the American thought collective. “I was in Israel … five days [after October 7]. I saw horrors beyond anyone’s imagination inflicted on men, women and children. And we were determined to do everything we could to help ensure that October 7 would never happen again.” His referral to “horrors beyond anyone’s imagination” was not a reference to the state of Gaza and its civilian population. Instead, Blinken was changing the focus onto Israel and the October 7 attack—an action, as we will see, of Palestinian resistance occurring against the backdrop of prolonged occupation. According to all the objective evidence to date, it is the Israeli attack on Gaza that goes far beyond self-defense and into a realm “beyond anyone’s imagination.”

As we will see, in Blinken’s world, the Palestinians are not worth enough consideration to uphold either international or domestic U.S. humanitarian law. Yet, he tells the interviewer that on that first trip to Israel, he and his team spent “nine hours in the I.D.F.’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, six stories underground with the Israeli government, including the prime minister, arguing for hours on end about the basic proposition that the humanitarian assistance needed to get to Palestinians in Gaza.” There is something bizarre about this description and Blinken is almost certainly exaggerating. The U.S. is the main source of weapons for Israel—including those used in Gaza. The U.S. has laws that preclude its weapons from being used in ways that constitute war crimes or prevent the delivery of humanitarian assistance. These factors provided more than sufficient leverage for Blinken to have forced the issue. Yet these points were never raised by the American team while “arguing for hours on end.”

Blinken claims that he finally did get an agreement from the Israelis to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza through “Rafah, which we expanded to Kerem Shalom and many other places.” The Israelis no doubt lied to him, for they violated this agreement immediately. This did not upset Blinken because he believes that Israeli intentions were good even if the follow through was lacking. After all, he tells the interviewer, “you had in Israel in the days after October 7 a totally traumatized society.”

In all of this, Blinkens prioritizes Israel as if it was an extension of the U.S.—no doubt mimicking the same selective awareness on the part of his boss, President Biden. So while primarily conscious of Israel’s immediate plight, Blinken is apparently unaware or uninterested in the history that brought that situation upon the “Jewish state.” Israel had long ago initiated policies of occupation, segregation, and discrimination upon the Palestinians. They had reduced the Gaza Strip to a vast “open air prison.” It is this history that explains the October 7 Palestinian attack on Israel—the attack which Blinken declares “must never happen again.” But for U.S. policy to achieve that goal, an accurate history, going beyond ideological and cultural biases, must be recognized. Its lessons must be correctly understood. Yet this level of awareness has always been lacking among most American political leaders. Instead, they have imported and assimilated the Israeli narrative which, of course, is a product of Israeli Zionist localness. Thus, the Americans are bound to produce policies that fail to solve real problems, but cause real suffering. 

Part III — The Inevitability of Exceptions

The scenario of localness, closed information environments and thought collectives is a generalization—a theory that helps us understand human behavior. When it comes to individual behavior, things will inevitably get complicated.

Individuals grow into their culture with a lot of initial behavioral baggage, ranging from inherited genetics to early family experiences. Depending on this “baggage,” the individual might be more or less responsive to their thought collective. Think of the results as a bell curve. The vast majority of any population will fall within a center bulge reflecting a general acceptance of their culture and its demands, including morally questionable ones. A minority will fall outside that consensus due to early countervailing influences that later lead to questioning (for better or worse) the informational environment, and ultimately raise barriers to the demands of the thought collective. 

The evolution of Zionist behavior resulting in acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide, has acted as a catalyst that split the Jewish population worldwide on the issue of Jewish ethics. This has happened in conjunction with the Zionist claim that Israel represents all Jews. A November 2024 survey sponsored by the nonpartisan Jewish Electorate Institute, revealed “a striking generation gap in American Jews’ attitudes toward President Biden’s strong support for [and complicity with] Israel.” 47% of American Jews between the ages of 18 and 35, objected to both that strong, uncritical support and, by extension, the Zionist claim that it represented Judaism. “Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace … argue that Israel’s militarism is out of step with … Jewish values [and JVP seeks to] advance a Judaism aligning with our spiritual and moral commitments.”

We do not know the life situations that led today’s American Jewish protesters to choose a path that challenges their community’s thought collective. Let’s assume that some of them were brought up with the same Jewish values practiced in the household mentioned by Hanin Majadli at the beginning of this essay. Let us also assume that many of these households imported the comings and goings of Zionist Israel into their own sphere of personnel American experience. However, their reactions to Israeli persecution of the Palestinians would have been filtered through their brand of American culture. While Israel’s narrative is one of Jewish state-building as a defense against antisemitism, American culture has many narratives, one of which is the struggle for racial equality and the role American Jews have played in it. That narrative challenges the Zionist practices used to fulfill the Israeli narrative. We must also assume that at least some of the childhood experiences of the American Jews protesting Israeli behavior reinforced their decision to challenge the Israeli thought collective. 

Part IV —Conclusion

“Human nature” playing itself out through multiple cultures has produced a messy and mostly violent ongoing history. At least in the modern era (French Revolution forward), cultures have acted to sweep the majority into this history as willing participants—participants who will justify barbarism in the name of local and national values. 

I am not sure there is much hope of the humanitarian minority becoming the majority in the foreseeable future. Cultures do evolve, but slowly and not necessarily in humane directions. They can even regress, as is the hope of Christian Fundamentalists. 

Still, it is important to know what is going on and why. The theory laid out above may help answer Majadli’s question about why some folks go one way or another amidst the tension between genetics, upbringing and the dominant Thought Collective. Most often the Thought Collective overwhelms the individual, but inevitably there will be exceptions.