Understanding is not condoning

A measured response to any historical event requires the scholar to trace the origins of the event, not its aftermath

Brentford F.C. playing against Aberdeen F.C. By AI.

My old man was a Brentford man, and that was saying something back in the seventies. Nowadays, Brentford F.C., the Bees, as they’re known owing to their white and red vertical stripes … … …, play football in the Premier League, but back in our youth they waddled in somewhat ungainly fashion between the third and fourth divisions. My brothers rooted for Leeds United. We are Scots and, at the time, most of the players for Leeds were from Scotland, and Leeds was where we lived. At least back then, the essence of having a favourite football team was that you supported them through thick and thin. You followed them through some link of affiliation—the place you lived, the place you worked, (in my mother’s case) the place you went on honeymoon (Aberdeen)—but you never chopped and changed to whoever was top of the league. You stayed loyal.

As a consequence, the Saturday night football discussion generally circled around trying to understand why Brentford had lost (they generally … lost) and why Leeds United had done the opposite. There were fewer pundits in those days, experts to give you their professional insight into the game. But, in the end, you might reluctantly switch the TV off after Match of the Day and sigh that, even if your favourite team had lost, you understood why. Understanding why didn’t make you happy about the result, didn’t make you endorse it as a good result, but at least it made it explicable.

That said, you would never hear someone challenge you with a question like Do you condemn Brentford F.C. for losing this Saturday? Just because you understand why Brentford lost doesn’t mean you condemn the loss. It happened; and if you’d known beforehand that Brentford were going to miss the chances that they missed and fail in the passes and assists that they failed in, then you could have almost said ahead of time that they would lose the game. That’s what the football pools was all about in those days: predicting the outcomes of football matches for a wager of ten bob a week based on what you knew about the teams’ prior performance. It was prior performance that gave you insight to your understanding of the team.

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One of my A-levels back in the day was History. I was pretty good at it. The trick in A-level History is to identify causes and translate them into reasons and conclusions. You can add at the end that you thought Metternich was crowded out by the Prussians, or that Napoleon overreached himself, or that, once won, the promise of the English Civil Wars got squandered. But you didn’t get points for simply drawing these broad judgments; you first had to show you’d understood the facts and the reasons for the facts that underlay your conclusions. Understanding why the Russian Revolution occurred doesn’t mean you condone it: it means you have analysed the facts and have understood what led to it. That is called a scholarly approach, whereas dismissing anything and everything that has the slightest whiff of communism to it is not understanding; it is bigotry. A bigot is someone who wants Brentford F.C. to win every week, regardless of how they play and who they play against. A scholar understands why Brentford wins and why it sometimes loses.

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Norman Finkelstein is an American academic who is a world authority on Israel and the Gaza Strip. If anyone understands why the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023 occurred, he probably does. Very soon after those attacks, he gave an interview in which he drew a parallel. First of all, he was taken aback by the attacks. Like the U.S.’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who remarked eight days before the attacks that the Middle East was quieter than he’d known it in some time, Finkelstein thought that Gaza was a dead story: there was nothing more to know about it. When the attacks occurred, he took his time to cogitate about them and finally delivered his analogy in that interview. It was this: what did they expect?

His analogy was drawn from the three-day-long 1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion in Virginia, in which about 60 white people and 100 blacks, including women and children on both sides, were murdered by marauding slaves and the slave owners who put up a defence. Rather than condemn Turner and the slaves, abolitionist publications like The Liberator, edited by William Garrison, criticised the slave owners: We told you so, they railed. Garrison was warned by southerners not to come to the southern U.S., otherwise he would be dispatched immediately. Some counties of Virginia reacted by expunging all blacks from the area. Others proclaimed the virtues of slavery. Yet others described Turner as a patriot.

The thing is that the slave owners of Virginia who doubled down on their cruelty to slaves had nonetheless firmly understood the reasons for the rebellion just as much as the rebels and abolitionists had: the denigrating conditions under which slaves were held were intolerable to the point of triggering the rebellion. However, the whole controversy following Garrison’s publication of his article The Insurrection in September of 1831 turned on the act of rebellion itself and its aftermath. While the cause of the rebellion was implicitly understood, it was in no way debated. Instead, the general public were exhorted either to condemn the rebellion or to approve it, and thereby seal their ostracisation from southern slave-owning society. Declarations of understanding as to why the rebellion had occurred were deemed approval of the acts of murder it had entailed. But, however such cogitations were construed, whether as understanding or explicit approval, they did nothing to free any southern slaves; in fact, they in turn attracted condemnation from the slave owners and those sympathetic to slavery, coupled with threats to life and limb. The only benefit—and it’s debatable whether it was even palpable—in condemning slavery and declaring that one understood the roots of the rebellion was to have taken a principled stance against the practice, with no real betterment other than to have spoken according to one’s conscience.

Now, I have not read every last tract that has been written on the subject of 7 October. But to my mind there has been little to no analysis by the pro-Israeli camp of the reasons that led up to what I would label the jail break on that day. There has been no comment on the pro-Palestinian arguments concerning the fact that Gaza Palestinians lived in a concentration camp (as described by American and United Nations commentators), the inhumane practice of mowing the grass (periodic Israeli military operations in the Strip resulting in thousands of deaths), the depressing prospects of being born into, spending your entire life in, and ultimately being destined to die and be buried in, a strip of land measuring 365 square kilometres. Much of the argument turns on whether or not one condemns what occurred on 7 October.

Even that judgment is tainted by a lack of public knowledge over the extent to which the preparations by Hamas might have been negligently, or even deliberately, dismissed as unimportant by Israel’s security architecture, or even the extent to which the attacks on that Saturday might have been actively encouraged by Israel. There is also the element of whether the Hannibal directive was deployed (an Israeli tactic of shooting their own operatives and hostages to avoid a ransom situation arising).

What is more, condemning the attacks on the pure basis that they contravened Israeli law is to assume a somewhat naive position regarding the status of Israeli law, or of any law for that matter, for one very simple reason: law might pretend to be a definer of moral rectitude, but unfortunately its purview is limited to that of defining legal rectitude. Moral rectitude is something that, jurisprudentially and philosophically, resides outside the remit of the law, regardless of how much it may lay claim to being an ultimate arbiter of what is morally right and morally wrong (the law is notorious for doing this under some sort of artificial smokescreen). And, because law is no arbiter of morals, and a condemnation is a moral judgment, and not a legal one, it is not possible to condemn a breach of the law unless, by doing so, one ventures into the dangerous mix that sees law and morals swirl around each other in the same fiery cauldron.

To condemn an act is to judge it to be morally repugnant. To all the questions I’ve heard put about whether people condemned the Hamas attacks on 7 October, I never heard a follow-up asking for the moral ground on which the attacks are condemned, if condemned they are. Not the legal ground: sure, everyone condemns the attacks on a legal basis, just as we condemn tax evasion, breaking the speed limit, and fishing without a permit. But no one ever asked On what moral ground do you condemn the attacks? On the ground that concentration camp inmates are not justified in wreaking vengeance against their oppressors? On the ground that killing is repugnant regardless of pretext (thus rendering World War II’s Operation Market Garden morally repugnant in its entirety, including the German response). Or on some moral ground that Israeli law decrees that Gazans must remain in Gaza, and even merely crossing the border between Gaza and Israel constitutes an act of war and is therefore ripe for condemnation. Condemnation is like pissing at a urinal: people who do it should be sure they remain focused on what the heck they are doing and not swing their willies around like some garden hose.

He who morally condemns in turn opens himself up to moral condemnation. He who condemns breach of a law must then enforce the law according to the rule of law. That excludes blanket collective punishment. As a result, whether or not I condemn the Hamas attacks on 7 October, and thereby issue a moral judgment on them, does nothing to impinge on the understanding I might have for why they took place, any more than condemning Charles I for dissolving the English parliament precludes an understanding of why he did so.

Operation Market Garden in 1944 was an Allied campaign to capture five bridges over rivers in the Netherlands and secure a route into Germany avoiding the fortified Siegfried Line. Market was an air offensive and Garden was the ground offensive. They failed, even if their progenitor, Field Marshal Montgomery, claimed they had succeeded 90 per cent. Why they failed is broadly recognised as being an inability to attack the Rhine river crossing at Arnhem from close enough to secure the bridge, the fact that Dutch Resistance intel on two SS Panzer divisions in the vicinity of Arnhem went ignored, the German capture of RAF drop zones, the failure of radio communications, lack of ammunition, and so on and so forth. The events are depicted more or less accurately in the 1976 movie A Bridge Too Far. The Allies (Britain, the U.S. and Poland) lost about 17,000 men. The Germans lost 13,000. And there were something like 1,000 Dutch civilian deaths.

So, first question: do you support the Germans? The Allies? Or the Dutch? And, given the campaign failed and ended up killing over 30,000 people, do you condemn the operation? I mean, think of all those people who died unnecessarily (not to mention the many who died the following winter from hunger caused by the split of Holland into a southern Allied-occupied territory and a northern German-occupied area). Will you condemn Eisenhower and his failed leadership? Will you condemn Urquhart for getting holed up in a Dutch house for a day? Will you condemn the engineers who brought the wrong crystals with the wrong radios? Will you condemn Browning for ignoring the intelligence about tanks at Arnhem? Will you level a moral judgment against Montgomery and his hubris about ending the war before the Russians could reach Berlin? Was that what Market Garden was all about: Montgomery beating Stalin to Berlin? Hm?

Anyone who answers an A-level History question about the Gaza crisis following the attacks of 7 October and who makes no mention of the preceding events dating back to the 1967 Six-Day War and the occupation of Gaza by Israel as the successor to the Egyptian control that had obtained there following the 1959 dissolution of the All-Palestinian government will, I can assure you, earn a fail on that question. The Gaza question did not start on 7 October 2023, and whether the candidates answering their A-level questions in the future choose to limit their citations to the life experience of the actual assailants who conducted the attacks—young men in their prime, just as much as the combatants at Arnhem—or extend their references to the post-1967 events there, or want to fold into the mix the Zionist movement of the late 19th century and Arthur Balfour’s 1917 declaration, they will not obtain a pass mark by simply parroting the propaganda of one party to the dispute and concluding with a blanket condemnation of the one side or the other. That is not what examiners seek in an Oxbridge History examination at Advanced Level. Even if it might at some point become the favoured stance assumed by the dons teaching at those universities, and then on slightly different grounds.

To state that you understand the reasons for the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023 is not to condone them or to condemn them. It is to understand them.

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