The Moral Quandary That Is Hamas
Israel Must Choose Between Pursuing Peace or Fighting Evil
Before we can formulate a coherent opinion about Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s decision to renege on commitments to both the Quartet and Israel and join forces with the still-unrepentant, bus-bombing, Kassam-lobbing, Holocaust-denying, expressly genocidal terror organization known as Hamas, or about the Israeli government’s decision to suspend peace negotiations as a result, or about the propriety of international pressure on Israel to keep negotiating despite it all, we first must say something about the Jewish soul.
In the heart of every modern self-aware Jew there lurk two different moral impulses — secular ideologies, really — which we always hope to God will never run into conflict with each other: the longing for peace, and the struggle against evil.
Both of these invoke heavy metaphysical categories and carry practical, political implications. Both are prescriptive and deeply caring about the fate of our world. Both are grounded in ancient traditions and enlist the Holocaust in their defense. Both entail a huge dose of compassion for the fate of innocent people. Both long for a better world in this lifetime.
But they are not the same. And right now, on the question of Hamas, we are being forced to choose.
The peaceable impulse attributes much of the world’s ills to intolerance, militarism, and the arrogant excesses of collective supremacy, nationalism, and muscular flag-waving that dehumanize the Other. It stands outside every conflict and says: Leave aside your passions, your irrationality, and the past, and come to the table so that the killing may stop. It points to the Holocaust and says: You see what happens when intolerance takes over? It says: negotiate, always, with anyone.
Read more: http://forward.com/articles/197240/the-moral-quandary-that-is-hamas/#ixzz30D93Dd2k
