Matthew Kaemingk:
Welcome to Zealots at the Gate, a podcast of Comment Magazine. I’m Matthew Kaemingk.
Shadi Hamid:
I’m Shadi Hamid.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Together we research politics, religion, and the future of democracy at Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life.
Shadi Hamid:
We are writing a book together. This podcast represents an informal space where we can talk about how to live with deep difference. Thanks so much for joining us.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Welcome to a special edition of Zealots at the Gate. My name is Matthew Kaemingk. This specific episode comes at your request. We received a lot of notes from friends and listeners and colleagues looking for Shadi and I to have a conversation about what’s happening with Israel, Palestine right now. It’s political, it’s religious, social, and cultural implications and how we can think about that together, disagree about that together, and just dig into it. And so, I’m grateful to Shadi for making some time to dig into this together.
For listeners who might be new to our discussion, Zealots at the Gate is a place where we talk about religion, politics, and deep difference. Shadi is a Muslim, I’m a Christian. I’m a theologian, Shadi’s a political scientist who specifically focuses on Middle East and international relations issues. Shadi is also now writing for the Washington Post, which we’re really excited for Shadi on that. And Shadi has recently written a piece on the situation in Gaza, which we’ll be digging into here in the conversation.
For those of you who are new, please make sure to subscribe on any podcast platform wherever you listen. You can leave us a review, and you can join the conversation, and ask us questions on Twitter by using the #zealotspod, or you can email us zealots@comment.org. With that stated, let’s jump into it.
Shadi, this has been a big couple of weeks for the world, and a big couple of weeks for you in particular as a Muslim, as a political scientist, as someone who’s written on these things for many years, but also someone not simply as an intellectual, but personally as a person of faith and just a human being. It’s been a big time. I’m wondering if you could just provide a little bit of a context for you and what these past couple of weeks has looked like for you and some of the questions that have been coming up.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. Thanks, Matt, for the intro. It’s been an intense period. I have also started a new job as you alluded to earlier. So now I have even, I suppose, one more identity. I started as a columnist and member of the editorial board at the Washington Post, and on week two of my new job everything broke out in the Middle East, and I was kind of hoping to maybe not focus as much on the Middle East going… Well, no one really seemed to care all that much. There was a kind of lull in the conversation, and I think a lot of Americans were expecting more of the same, more culture war stuff that was kind of inward looking and self-referential. And I think this is going to really scramble a lot of that. And I think we’re already seeing some shifts in the political discourse.
So as you mentioned, I’m Muslim, Arab, political scientists, all these different identities, and I obviously come at these conversations with my own starting premises. And I don’t think anyone can really be objective or even aspire to be objective. They’re just fundamentally different narratives. And each of us is going to prioritize or value some aspects of some narratives over others. It’s just inevitable.
I guess in the first couple days, one thing that did stand out to me, and I think by now after Hamas’s attacks on Israel and its massacre of Israeli civilians, and this has been said many, many times, there was a contingent of the left, of progressive activists who did struggle to offer clear condemnations of what Hamas did. Their dislike, or even more than dislike, of Israel clouded their ability to speak with moral clarity on that. There’s no doubt about that.
But I have seen a shift as we’ve kind of entered into week number two of this Israel-Hamas war. What’s been more striking to me, and what I just tend to see more on any number of levels, and not just people like posting on Twitter, but officials, US officials, Israeli officials, especially Republicans in America, the right, just complete a really striking unwillingness to see Palestinians as human beings, to speak of them as if they have any moral worth or dignity, blaming them for whatever’s to come, failing to make distinctions between Hamas and ordinary Palestinians caught in the crossfire. Someone like Lindsey Graham saying that Israel should quote, unquote, “level that place”, Senator Tom Cotton saying that anything that happens in Gaza now is on Hamas as if Israel no longer has moral agency. And this question of moral agency is really, I think, important, and this is one of the things I talked about in my debut Washington Post column, which we can include a link to in the show notes.
The title was, In the Israeli-Palestinian Debate, You Might Be Wrong. Be Humble, or something to that effect. And I think that if I’m just looking at my own quote unquote “side”, the progressive or pro-Palestinian side, one critique I make of that scene in my column is I say, if members of marginalized groups don’t have carte blanche to do anything they want, you can’t say that, “Oh, we have no moral agency because we’re oppressed.” Everyone retains the ability to make choices. So you can’t say that Hamas was compelled to do this. Or that excusing or justifying in this manner because they’re part of an oppressed group, and to blame the oppressor and say that Israel is responsible for everything because it has the preponderance of power. Well, first of all, it’s very theologically problematic. Each of us as individuals is accountable in the eyes of God.
The judgement will not be collective, it will be individual. So this idea that morality can be situational, and that people who are weak shouldn’t be held to moral standards, it’s also very patronizing. Weak people can be moral, and that’s even understating it. One might even argue that weak people historically might even be more moral. So I think I was very troubled by some of that. And I think it fits into some of the quote, unquote “woke” activist discourse of basically removing responsibility from the oppressed, similar to how people sometimes talk about crime that, “Oh, this person committed criminal activity because of the structures of white supremacy, that is what we have to be focused on,” as if the person didn’t make a choice to commit a crime.
But at the same time, Israel has moral agency and responsibility, and I would say at this point in the conflict has more of it because it has the preponderance of power. It is the party that is now intensifying its bombardment and then launching a ground invasion at least to one degree or another of Gazan territory. So Israel now has a real responsibility, and we should expect nothing less than a serious and not just pro forma minimization of civilian casualties, and to take that as seriously as we possibly can. Anything does not go in warfare, which is also something that I think is very important in each of our faith traditions.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, I think just on that, what strikes me here is the moral emptiness of being a victim, whether it be on the Jewish side or on the Palestinian side, or really in any sort of ethical discussion that I’m a victim of X, Y, or Z, therefore I can do this or that. There’s a sort of nihilism to it, and I think you brought up in a quote in your post article on the Palestinians being the victims of the victims.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Said? Yeah.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, Edward Said said that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. And so, I see constantly appeals on both sides to original sins or original evils that they’re responding to, be it from the Jewish side, the original sin of the Holocaust, or the original sin of Hamas’ attack just recently, that I am responding to these things. Similarly, on the Palestinian side, the original sin of 1948 or the original sin of the occupation, and then building an ethic of war off of an evil, that being the starting point.
Shadi Hamid:
Exactly.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So I just think that’s a particularly empty way to begin. And it’s really hard actually to have a dialogue or a debate with someone whose arguments are based purely off of a past evil rather than some kind of moral code that goes beyond that.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, competitive victimization, if one wants to call it that, I think, is very dangerous in these circumstances. I tend to find aspects of the Palestinian narrative more compelling, but I also… When I do try to put my, what is that expression, my feet in the shoes, whatever… Shoes… I can’t, whatever that is. But having spent time in Israel and interviewed Israeli officials, and really try to engage with that with wildly different perspectives, including from settlers, had a number of meetings with settlers last time I was in Israel in 2019, and there is a compelling, coherent pro-Israel narrative. And to kind of dismiss it, if you’re coming from a pro-Palestinian perspective and you dismiss that out of hand that they have nothing compelling on their side or no legitimate grievances, it’s a very blinkered view of a very complex conflict.
Now, complexity doesn’t mean there can’t be moral consistency, and it doesn’t mean that we can’t be morally outraged at injustice. For example, I think there should be moral outrage about what is now a more than 50 year Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. I find that to be outrageous. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there is a broader context that one has to really dive into. And it is worth, I think, suspending, at least for a moment, some of our own very strongly held convictions, and to make a good faith effort to at least try to comprehend the other side’s narrative, the other side’s historical memory, the other side’s perception of original sins. And I think that’s been a theme of Zealots at the Gate is there has to be a presumptive generosity there, even with people who we might consider to be our adversaries or opponents. And that’s very hard to do, I think, but I think it must be done.
Matthew Kaemingk:
You used the term in your article, bothsidesism, and I wonder if you could provide our listeners with a little bit of background on how that term works today and what its benefits and perhaps its detractions or its weaknesses are. What is bothsidesism?
Shadi Hamid:
So I think it was maybe the day after Hamas launched its attacks on Israel, I tweeted something like, I think it was, “We can — and must — condemn Hamas’s heinous acts against Israeli civilians while refusing to forget that Israel has been a perpetrator of a brutal occupation against Palestinians.”
Matthew Kaemingk:
I think what you said there was, it must be possible to say two things at once, is the core of that.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. That’s the part before, exactly. It should be possible to… One kind of suffering should negate another. It is possible to speak even in one sentence about quote, unquote, “both sides.” And in this case, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there are actually both sides in so far as there are two primary parties to the conflict. So at a very basic level, we should be looking at perspectives on both sides.
But obviously, some people, I think it is difficult to talk about atrocities after the fact. So because Hamas’s targeting of innocent civilians was just so brutal and grizzly and bloody, and many of us saw those very disturbing images, there is an interesting, and I think challenging, question of what is the appropriate way to talk about those atrocities? Because at some level, you want to make sure you’re focused on the immediate victims, the people who were killed by Hamas.
But at the same time, as analysts and observers, we also have to think about what comes next, what the Israeli response will be. How do we analyze what’s going on? How did Gaza become this place that has just been festering for such a long time without much international attention? There’s all these different angles to the broader conflict, so when is it appropriate to actually bring those up and talk about the broader context? Because I think one of the concerns is that if you do talk about the broader context, you’re not focusing on the immediate victims and what they’re going through. And I think it’s somewhat similar to how I think some of the tensions, many of us felt post-9/11 is 9/11 happens, but when is it appropriate to start talking about why the attacks might have happened or what led to them? Obviously in the end, everyone started talking about that, but should you wait? Is there a kind of sensitivity period?
But part of the issue with 9/11 is that you can’t wait too long to talk about the broader context when US policy is changing rapidly and civil rights abuses are happening, the Patriot Act was passed, America gets on a war footing almost immediately. So you have to be able to engage with those broader questions. So I think that’s the balancing act that becomes very challenging, and what I wanted to say is that there is a way to do this, and to talk about this with moral consistency and moral clarity, and that means that we can’t look at one thing to the exclusion of the other.
Matthew Kaemingk:
But to be clear, you’re not advocating that we should be Switzerland, that we should just kind of stay out of it and say, “Well, it’s complicated. Both sides are at fault,” so-
Shadi Hamid:
No, I have strong views.
Matthew Kaemingk:
… how might we actually take a side, but do so with a moral awareness of the fault within our own? And the value of the other, I think might be the core question, because you’re wanting to name in that post that there’s real evil on both sides, and yet you also do want to take a side owning the Palestinian cause. So talk about that challenge.
Shadi Hamid:
So I do think what some folks on the left say about power differentials is important. As longtime listeners will know, I don’t love the language of marginalized groups and kind of reifying our marginalization as minorities in America. I think that can be destructive if we take it too far.
But at the same time, power differentials matter. And the fact that the Israeli military and the Biden administration have the preponderance of power, more so the Israeli military, but in the end, the US is the primary military patron of Israel, has a lot of influence with what Israeli officials do, how far they might go in terms of bombings and Gaza and actually going in on the ground. So I think there’s something weird and morally distasteful to me that you see a lot of pro-Israel voices obsessing over campus activists and saying, “Oh my God, look at these student groups that couldn’t condemn Hamas!”
Yeah, it’s really bad what some of these student groups said or failed to say. And that deserves some attention. But we’re in the middle of a war, and those college students are relatively fringe, they have no influence on American policy, no one who actually controls a serious military is listening to their advice. So there’s just something very odd to me about how it’s, if you’ll forgive the term, punching down. Yeah, sometimes you want to punch up a little bit. You want to look more closely at those who actually have the most power.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah.
Shadi Hamid:
Because that’s what’s ultimately going to affect the most lives. So ultimately, Israel is the more powerful party here. It has one of the most advanced militaries in the world. It’s a very successful country.
Matthew Kaemingk:
No, I get that. I think power is an important aspect of these sorts of things, but I think one of the tempting things is neutrality. In these kinds of situations, for Americans in particular, is simply to say, “Well, it’s a messed up region. It’s complicated. I have other things to do with my life. I’m not going to care about this.”
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. And I would advise against that as I have been saying. I think that if at some basic level we have to address the failure to establish a Palestinian state. The fact that this conflict has been left to fester, the fact that Gaza has been under a land, air, and sea blockade since 2007 with relatively little international attention, it just became this thing that people, “Oh, that’s unfortunate what the Gazans are going through, but what can we do? Let’s just kind of throw up our hands.”
People weren’t paying attention to how a lot of terrible impulses were building, and that while everyone was looking away, Hamas was preparing this assault. Even Israelis were caught off guard. This is a danger of not paying attention to the Middle East, not caring, thinking that we can pivot to Asia and just completely give up any sense of having a more moral and just policy in the Middle East. And the middle, it’s not just the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The whole Middle Eastern order is one that is very prone to outbreaks of extremism, violence, terrorism, we’ve really been telling the same story since 9/11. That at some basic level, you have to address some of the quote, unquote, “root causes” that contribute to terrorism.
That was, I think, one of the main lessons of 9/11, and it’s worth noting that was actually at the heart of… As much as people might’ve hated the Bush administration, even the Bush administration, with all of its folly, came to this conclusion. The whole premise behind the freedom agenda was to say that the only way to fight terrorism in the long run is by addressing these contributing factors. And that if people don’t have the ability to express their grievances through legitimate political means, they’re more likely to resort to violence. You have to try to channel people’s anger and even their hatred in a constructive political process. If there isn’t a constructive political process, if people don’t see any way out, then terrorists are going to feed on that kind of hopelessness. And they’re going to be more likely to resort to brutal acts themselves.
It’s almost so obvious that I feel sort of weird talking about it, but I also realize that it is controversial to say that in some quarters, because just talking about root causes, sometimes people can see that as absolving people. Again, it goes back to what we were saying. If we talk so much about the structure and the context, are we actually giving individuals a pass?
But we’re not.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. So let’s talk just a little bit about how our faith and theological convictions intersect with all of this. I am curious watching your fellow Muslims respond to this event and think as they articulate themselves theologically as what God might will or want in this situation. I’m curious of your reflections on how your fellow Muslims are behaving and speaking and talking right now, and maybe how your own personal faith is informing the unique way that you’re approaching this. You’re trying to add something to public discourse in America, and you’ve said it’s not Islamic the way we’re behaving. So what would be an Islamic way to respond to this?
And before you do, and I’m happy to reflect a little bit on my own Christian faith, and how my fellow Christians are behaving themselves right now. But before you do, I do think it’s important to note that we do not have a citizen of Israel or a Jewish person as a part of this conversation, and I would love, in the future, to include that voice as we move forward. So we might think together about a voice that we might include in the future. But yeah, Shadi, can you talk just a little bit about what you’re seeing in quote, unquote, “the Muslim world,” how they’re thinking theologically or articulating themselves theologically about this, and maybe how your own faith shows up in your posture and response to this?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, I wouldn’t want to overstate how common this is, but I think there’s no avoiding that in some parts of the pro-Palestinian movement and among Muslims more broadly, especially in the Middle East, because it’s so visceral just how much this conflict has played a role in historical memory and a sense of injustice from an Arab perspective that I think a knee-jerk reaction that I often see is to always to just obsess over Israel and how that distracts from an ability to call out your own quote, unquote, “side”.
Now, I don’t think… Hamas is not anyone’s side, it’s really worth noting. Hamas claims to speak on behalf of Muslims. It claims to have a broad popular support, and of course that’s going to be their narrative. But the argument that Hamas makes, first of all, they, for a long time, have justified targeting innocent civilians, suicide bombings in the 2000s in particular in that there is no such thing as an Israeli civilian. That’s just a made up… These ideas don’t really have any basis in the Islamic tradition, there’s combatants and there’s noncombatants. This idea that people can be held responsible for what their government does is a kind of collective punishment. It’s saying that individuals are responsible for the collective, which is a fundamentally un-Islamic idea. Because in judgement, in the eyes of God, you are only responsible for your own sins as an individual. No one else’s sins can be put onto you. That goes against the whole moral system of Islam. And so that’s one thing that I feel very strongly about.
And also, just as I mentioned earlier, the situational ethics or situational morality that if you’re oppressed, you can then justify terrible things. The desperate… But there’s also a secular version of this, “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” You suspend the rules of war because your enemy is so evil. There’s always a temptation to do this. But it’s worth remembering that in the founding of Islam, in the early days of the Muslim community, prophet Muhammad and his followers were fighting for their very survival. There was a very proximate risk of annihilation. And that was one of the worst periods in Islamic history. And yet, the prophet and his supporters never said, “Oh, well now we can just kill everyone. Now we can target non-combatants.” And there were clear rules of engagement that Prophet Muhammad did take quite seriously.
So I just think that if it’s good enough for the prophet Muhammad, it’s good enough for you in Palestine, as difficult as your situation might be. You can’t target children, women, you can’t lose your morality if you claim to be fighting an injustice, because we all know how that ends up. Two wrongs don’t make a right. These are very basic things that I think we derive either directly or indirectly from our faiths. The golden rule, just because someone did something terrible to you… Again, this is what Hamas says. Oftentimes they don’t make religious arguments. They’re saying, “Well, look what Israel does to us.” That is not a theologically or morally coherent argument. That’s like school playground talk.
So I think the golden rule or two wrongs don’t make a right, there is some basic wisdom there that some of these groups seem completely unable to follow.
But I’d be curious, and Matt, we haven’t really had a chance to talk about this. I have been getting some comments from folks saying that they’re disappointed to see how some Christian leaders in America have talked about Palestinians, or not having as much empathy for what the suffering of Palestinians, and that sort of thing, actually but there’s so many different directions we can go from your perspective, and we’ve never really talked all that much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more broadly. But how do you come at this as a Christian? How are you trying to make sense of what’s going on? And does what I just said kind of resonate from a Christian perspective?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Right. Well, so the Christian response to the Israel-Palestine conflict over the last 75 years has been predictably complex. So you have Christian Zionism, which, in its most extreme sides, can basically see no wrong for the people of Israel, and just a total blind support that is theologically and spiritually charged, often with a sort of eschatological or end-times type energy that we support Israel, because God supports Israel. And in supporting Israel, we will usher in a new age in which Jesus will return. And it’s not hard to imagine what the political consequences are for that kind of a theological commitment. So that might be the Christian right on Israel-Palestine.
And then on the Christian left, you can kind of have a sort of spiritual, anthropological flatness. What I mean by that is, there’s nothing special about Judaism. There’s nothing special about Jews. They’re just human beings like everyone else, and God loves all people. And so, there should be no state of Israel. The Palestinians should inhabit that land, because it was theirs first. And so, those on the Christian, that maybe the far Christian left, would just have no real stake in the state of Israel, politically or theologically.
Where I sit on that spectrum, I hate being described as a moderate. I always kind of bristle at that. But I do feel compelled genuinely by both sides in that I 100% want to affirm the humanity and the deep value of Palestinian Christians and of their placeness on that land and their right to that land. However, I also theologically, as a Christian, I believe that the Jewish people are treasured by God, and that they matter deeply, and that they somehow mysteriously have a connection to that land, and that’s valued. And so, I really do come at this theologically valuing both sides and wanting real justice and reconciliation between both sides. But I think one of the reasons why I’ve never talked with you about Israel-Palestine is genuinely-
Shadi Hamid:
We’ve really never talked about it?
Matthew Kaemingk:
We’ve never talked about Israel-Palestine, you and I.
Shadi Hamid:
Wow! First time…
Matthew Kaemingk:
We’ve never talked about it. It is a genuine moral paralysis that I experience around this particular issue. And it’s a little bit embarrassing for me as a Christian ethicist and a political theologian that I don’t have the kind of moral clarity on this issue that I would love to have, to be honest with you. So it’s very easy for me to criticize Christian Zionism, and it’s very easy for me to criticize a sort of blind, woke Palestinian. Those are the simple things. I’m more interested in the complex theo-political problem of what do you do with the reality of what you have there?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
You can ask me more questions about it, but that’s the short answer of where I am.
Shadi Hamid:
No, that’s great. And what would you say about the place or role of Palestinian Christians in the Christian imagination? Because it seems that American Christians often forget that many Palestinians are Christian.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah.
Shadi Hamid:
And that there is a longstanding, strong Palestinian Christian community. And often I hear a kind of indignation like, “How come no one pays attention to us? We exist too. And why don’t our Christian co-religionists seem to value our perspectives?”
Matthew Kaemingk:
Right. A couple things. One is, I think it’s terribly sad that American Christians do not see, acknowledge, or listen to Palestinian Christians, and that they do not allow Palestinian Christians to teach them something about this situation. I was just sent three different Palestinian pastors and ethicists who are working on this issue. And I thought, “Oh, I’ll go hop on Twitter and follow them.” And I imagined, “Oh, they will have thousands and thousands of followers and everyone will be engaging with them and listening to them and…” They have like 800 followers, 1,200… No one’s listening to these Palestinian Christian brothers and sisters and the careful reflections that they have.
So yeah, I think that is a tragedy. However, I have heard… Some people would argue that, “Oh, Christians should be on the side of Palestinians because there’s fellow Christians there.” Sort of this, “They are our brothers,” but I don’t think that’s quite how Christian morality works. That we sort of, “Oh, we’re going to value the West Bank more than Gaza because there’s more Christians there.” In terms of Christian political ethics, we value the West Bank because there’s human beings there. And we value Gaza because there’s human beings there. It shouldn’t matter more to us because the church is larger or smaller there.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. And what about… Obviously, I don’t think this is the predominant strand in American Christianity today, and we’ve talked about this in previous episodes, that there’s much more of a John Wayne kind of Christianity, especially among evangelicals, which is maybe less focused on the weak, and the most destitute, and the most poor. But obviously, at least when I think about Christianity, I do think about a religion that very much identifies with the weakest of the weak, and pays close attention to the struggles of the weak. And again, kind of obvious, but the fact that Palestinians are on the other side of the power differential, again, we’re not saying that that allows getting rid of standard morality, but the fact that in a David-Goliath kind of situation, I guess the Palestinians would be more in the place of David in terms of lack of power and fighting, of contending with a much stronger force. How do you view the question of weakness and morality?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, I have to say, it’s morally embarrassing to hear, and I would hope that the Christians who are listening to this feel this moral embarrassment. It’s morally embarrassing to hear a Muslim say to me, “I thought Christianity cared about weak people,” right? Because that is, it’s supposed to be the core of what the Christian faith is about. So the next question is, why don’t American Christians care about these clearly weak Palestinian people? And the answer, of course, is complicated. A big part of it is that evangelical Christianity has been deeply influenced by Christian Zionism, which I think was more popular amongst evangelical Christianity in the 1970s, ’80s… You don’t really hear a lot of younger evangelical pastors banging the drum of Zionism like you would have 20 years ago or 30 years ago. But it’s still kind of in our blood. It’s still kind of in the water we drink of this deep concern for… I would say it’s more of a sort of general concern for Israel as opposed to maybe 20, 30 years ago when evangelicals were writing lots of books about being intense Zionists.
Shadi Hamid:
Interesting.
Matthew Kaemingk:
It’s more of just sort of a vague Zionism, if you will. But yeah, there is a lack of concern for the weak. I was listening to your discussion with Damir at Wisdom of Crowds the other day, and I couldn’t help but think of this book by Reinhold Niebuhr, a sort of core book on Christian theology and international relations, which is Moral Man and Immoral Society, which frankly I would love to talk with you and Damir sometime about that book.
Shadi Hamid:
That would be fun.
Matthew Kaemingk:
It’s a core book on realism, and that was written a hundred years ago now. But one of his core arguments is that you might have a lot of moral individuals. If you were to drop individual evangelical Christians into Palestine and you walk them around, they might be individually impacted by the plight of Palestinians.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
They might be touched by that. They might make friendships with little Palestinian kids, and play soccer, and it would be like this morally momentous experience for them. But what Reinhold Niebuhr argues is that, when you gather these individual moral people or good people together into a collective unit, they tend to get selfish really quickly. They tend to get fearful. They tend to get vengeful when you collectivize them, that communities tend to lose their moral vision when blame can be diffuse.
So essentially, I can ask the Israeli army to do really intense things as a nation and not bear that responsibility, whereas if I had to do it myself, I wouldn’t want to. And so that’s Niebuhr’s case, and I think it’s particularly helpful in thinking about the ways in which Christians can be hypocritical when they start acting politically as a group. Whereas individually, you’d get to know a regular evangelical Christian and you’d be think, “They could never support something so horrible.”
Shadi Hamid:
That’s a fascinating point, because it’s sort of the opposite of the wisdom of crowds.
Matthew Kaemingk:
It is absolutely the opposite, right? Is that groups are morally suspect.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, it absolutely does.
Shadi Hamid:
That seems to be a problem. It’s not an easy one to solve. This is maybe not the best analogy, but I’m also reminded of some of the moral debates around when executions… There used to be a method of firing squad into the 20th century, even here in the US. And I guess that that way if you have a larger firing squad, because you obviously don’t need 10 or 15 shooters to kill one person, is that way it sort of distributes moral responsibility away from any one person that there isn’t one person who did the killing, it was the group that did the killing. That just came to mind. Don’t know how relevant it is.
But I think there are some really interesting sort of moral questions around how the individual moves from his own individual responsibility to a collective. And unfortunately, with very large populations and powerful states, when we talk about the US doing something, we’re talking about the sum total of hundreds of thousands of people who are in the bureaucracy or the national security apparatus. So the US, when it does terrible things abroad or commits various injustices, it’s not a person doing it. It’s a country. And I think that raises some interesting questions about moral culpability and what does it mean to condemn a country versus condemning individual officials or condemning the product of policy decisions that are taken on the individual level? What is policy but the sum total of a very large number of individual decisions and impulses that are all sort of collected as some kind of final product?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. One other thing I wanted to mention on the Christian side of ethics here is, you have a number of different ethical traditions that would argue that, as you said, Christians should care, not simply care about the weak, but actually offer a preferential option or a leaning towards those who are on the weaker side of things. That in understanding that Jesus, Jesus identifies with the weak. And in the gospel, Matthew 25, that when you care for the weak, you care for me.
Now, the way that this can be twisted in Christian theology and ethics is to say the weak or the marginalized person is Jesus. And so then what you do is you take the oppressed person and you make them an idol or you make them absolutely Jesus. So then the Palestinian can do no wrong because God is absolutely with the Palestinians, right? So there’s a key moral distinction here for Christians. So they need to be able to say that, “Jesus is with the Palestinians, and so I need to be with them.” But you don’t want to say, “Jesus is the Palestinians, and the Palestinians can do no wrong.”
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And that’s a tricky, nuanced distinction that can be difficult for those who had developed something, we call it liberation theology in Christian-
Shadi Hamid:
I was just about to ask you, yeah. But is there something more inherent… Are the weak inherently more moral? If we think about the weak as a large collective group throughout history, is there something about their weakness that imparts upon them a kind of special closeness to God on average? To what extent can we say that that’s sort of intrinsic to weakness?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, I would personally say no, not at all. And it’s not the value of the weak or the marginalized within God’s moral economy, is not because they’re so good, it’s not because they’re so humble. It’s because of their value to me is because I know God loves them. It’s not that I don’t have to romanticize the poor or the marginalized. I don’t have to say they can do no wrong or anything like that, but my concern from them comes from my knowledge that God cares about them, and God is concerned for them, and that Jesus identifies with them, not that they are Jesus or they are God, right?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. And what would you make of the biblical verses? I forget the famous one about the rich… What is it? The rich passing into heaven is like a needle… I’m just totally making this up now. But it’s something… There’s something to that effect, that there’s something about those who are wealthy or have a lot of material success that actually creates a detachment from God or brings them further away from him. Obviously, the prosperity gospel is, I suppose, the opposite of this. So there are very conflicting Christian currents on this. And Calvinists also have interesting views about the elect and to what extent God displays his favour towards the believer.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah.
Shadi Hamid:
I guess there’s a lot there that would probably require a lot of exposition.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. So let’s stick with the first part. The first part is that money, power, and privilege in the Christian imagination is not evil in itself, but it makes for a life that is morally dangerous and difficult. So it is not evil to have money, power, privilege, responsibility, those things aren’t evil. But the more that you amass, the more difficult your life will be, morally speaking, and the more dangerous. So that is something that should be… Power, privilege, money should be held with a level of fear and trembling, to put it short. We should have an episode on money sometime.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
That’d be a fun one to talk about.
Shadi Hamid:
That would be.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Hopefully, this is the last thing I wanted to say about Christianity on this thing is, with Israel-Gaza, if you’re a Christian pacifist, the responses is relatively simple, though costly of what Christian faithfulness looks like in this.
Shadi Hamid:
What would that answer be, just to share that with listeners? What is the Christian pacifist position?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, I think there’s a number of different traditions within it. One is just total passivity, just allowing whatever to happen happens. Another is nonviolent resistance where Christians would stand in between, and would block violent action with their bodies, and would willingly sacrifice. I saw that there’s a Christian pastor there in Israel who’s offering himself to Hamas in exchange for hostages right now.
Shadi Hamid:
Whoa!
Matthew Kaemingk:
And that’s, of course, a very Christ-like sort of response, right? To offer yourself as a sacrifice. So that’s the sort of pacifist or peacemaking, nonviolent resistant response that is very costly and very complicated.
The other tradition is the Christian just war tradition, which I think… It basically says if you’re going to go to war, it has to be under these circumstances, and it has to be in this sort of way, and you have to conduct yourself in an honourable way. And there’s all these sort of ethical constraints on this. But it’s very complicated with this particular issue, because of the way Hamas is behaving. Just war traditionally has been something where like my army meets your army out on a field, and this is how we’re going to conduct that battle in a way that’s just, fair, and right. But when Hamas hides amongst civilians and uses them, and is willing to destroy you in any way imaginable, it’s very difficult to conduct a battle in terms of just war ethics. So I’m just saying, this particular circumstance sort of highlights a need for Christian ethical reflection on warfare in general.
Shadi Hamid:
Well, that’s a good note to end on a morally complex note. And it does make me think at some point… Well, maybe this would be challenging to do an episode on just war theory. That could be interesting in the future. But thanks, Matt, for kind of prompting this conversation, and I hope listeners will benefit.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Well, this is all to say, if you want to continue to learn about this, I do want to encourage you to follow Shadi on Twitter and his writings now at the Washington Post, and continue to pray, friends, and brothers, and sisters. This is a particularly brutal conflict for those in that 50 square mile area. But I would say that in the weeks and months ahead, there is a real concern that this conflict could spread to other countries around the Middle East, and has implications for a larger world. And so, please do pray if you are the praying sort.
Shadi Hamid:
Amen.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Friends, thank you for listening to Zealots at the Gate. If you like what you’ve heard, please check out our podcast Intellectual Seedbed. We are run by Comment magazine. You can go to comment.org where you’ll find lots of illuminating essays on politics, culture, and faith.
Once again, we want hear from you, so you connect with us at Twitter, find Shadi @shadihamid and me @matthewkaemingk. You can write to us as well or email zealots@comment.org. And you can expect a sincere and thoughtful exchange.
Our thanks as well to our sponsor, Fuller Seminary, The Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life. That’s where Shadi and I serve as scholars. So yeah, Zealots at the Gate is hosted by Comment nagazine, produced by Allie Crummy, audience strategy by Matt Crummy, and editorial direction by Anne Snyder. Thank you so much for joining us. Finally, I’m Matthew Kaemingk.
Shadi Hamid:
And I’m Shadi Hamid. Thanks, everyone.
