Russia, Palestine and ‘moral equivalence’

I.

With regard to the war in Ukraine, I’m in a relatively strange position. When the most recent phase of the war began in February 2022, I was firmly opposed to Russia’s incursion, though I reserved a series of criticisms of the Ukrainian government with an eye to the injustices against Russophone Ukrainians and ethnic minorities in places like Bukovina and Transcarpathia which preceded it. My reasons for opposing the Russian war effort were, in retrospect, perhaps a trifle naïve. I thought the initial attack by Russia against Kharkov was inhumane and inexcusable, given that Kharkov was the site where Russophone Ukrainians first came under violent attack from the Ukrainian SBU back in April of 2014.

Later events and revelations caused me to significantly revise my stance. Whereas before I was critically pro-Ukraine in the current conflict for principled anti-war reasons, I am now critically pro-Russia… for principled anti-war reasons. I still think that the Russian armed forces have made significant strategic errors and tactical bungles in the prosecution of the war, and that the political leadership has been… inconsistent. But several factors caused me to change my view. Firstly, there were the revelations from Swiss intelligence officer Jacques Baud that western nations were conducting military exercises in the Black Sea and that the Ukrainian military were ramping up attacks on Donbas before 24 February 2022. Secondly, there were the Russian peace proposals in April of 2022 that the Western bloc, and the United Kingdom in particular, did their level best to scupper. Thirdly, there were the striking admissions by high-ranking European and American officials such as Angela Merkel and François Hollande, that the West never intended to abide by the Minsk Agreements but instead use them as a time-buying pretext to arm Kiev for war.

Although none of these three reasons by itself constitutes a valid casus belli for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (at least, in light of Western Christian just war theory), when taken together as a pattern, they cast Russia’s actions in an entirely different light. Russia was acting in response to a series of premeditated, offensive provocations from the West. And Russia had attempted numerous times to come to a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. These factors convinced me that Russia’s actions were in fact defensive rather than offensive, and that the Ukrainian nation as a whole had been grievously abused by the Western bloc, and made to serve as a catspaw to advance Western plans to weaken and compromise Russia’s political process and territorial integrity. Basically, everything the West accused Russia of doing to Ukrainian society, the West was actually doing (or planning to do) to Russian. I think it is fair to say that my previous critically pro-Ukrainian position was already being revised by July, and was already critically pro-Russian by January of this year.

I can still understand and sympathise, to a limited degree, with the attitude of anti-war moral outrage over the February 2022 Russian incursion. After all, I shared in it! But, as the great British economist John Maynard, Baron Keynes, is often famously credited with saying: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind, sir—what do you do?’ Just as the first impressions of Elizabeth Bennet of Mr Darcy and Mr Wickham had to be revised as enough of the facts became known to her and pointed to an entirely different interpretation and colouring of events and circumstances, so I too all but had to revise my position concerning the events of February 2022.

I also began to notice, in the prosecution of the ‘special military operation’, that Russia’s tactics and overall military doctrine were aimed not at territorial conquest at all costs, but instead at the degradation of Ukrainian military capacity and the protection (insofar as possible) of civilian lives. This was clearly not owing to Russian military weakness and strategical stupidity, but owing to an active choice on the part of the Russian chiefs of staff. Inexcusable high-profile incidents such as Bucha notwithstanding (and in the awareness that a full-scale impartial investigation has yet to be conducted), the Russian armed forces have taken great pains to remove civilian populations from positions of physical danger, and direct their attacks as exclusively as possible at military targets—most of these being along the line of contact.

As of four days ago, the UN Human Rights Office has reported that over the past 20 months, 10,000 civilians have been killed in the Russo-Ukrainian War. This sounds like a lot, and indeed there can be no moral excuse for such death as in any modern war. But for a modern armed conflict, Russia is actually incurring a comparatively low rate of civilian deaths. For comparison: the Iraq Body Count project (which is in fact probably a severe underestimate of civilian deaths) showed that American servicemen were responsible for over 20,000—twice as many—confirmed Iraqi civilian deaths across a similar period of time. (And the Iraq War was in fact a war of choice, and no such tragic conflict of two nations’ defensive claims as the Russo-Ukrainian War is!)

It is also worth noting that there is no active armed resistance to speak of against Russian rule inside the territories that Russia is occupying. There are a handful of far-right neo-Nazi Russian paramilitaries and criminal groups associated with the so-called ‘Irpin Declaration’ in armed opposition to the Russian government. But these seem to operate exclusively out of Ukrainian-controlled territory and enjoy practically zero support in Russian-controlled Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhzh’e and Kherson oblasts. A critical thinker is forced to wonder why this is. If Russia really were behaving as the brutal, imperialistic, homicidal territorial aggressor so commonly portrayed, then why are the civilians in the territories it controls acquiescing to Russian rule so passively and meekly? Why not take up arms against the oppressor?

II.

This context also formed in large part my attitude toward the current war being waged by Israel against Gaza. To engage in any analysis of this conflict is to step into a rhetorical minefield. This is because the Cold War-relic snarl-phrase of ‘moral equivalence’ is again being bandied about with great abandon over the past month and a half, notably by Sam Harris, Bill Maher, Jonathan Tobin, Alan Dershowitz and other such liberast luminaries. Condemnations of ‘moral equivalence’ in this context are very nearly equivalent to a ‘how dare you!!’ non-argument. It’s almost an emotive reflex, to the effect of: How dare you liken us enlightened ones, us democratic and human-rights-respecting heroes, to those unspeakable and irredeemable villains, terrorists, baby-killers and death-cultists over there?

The first and foremost philosophical problem with condemning ‘moral equivalence’, in fact a huge problem on its face, is that all moral reasoning relies to some degree on drawing analogies between disparate situations such that certain equivalencies can be meaningfully derived. Practically all systems of ethics in Western thought going back to Plato and Aristotle rely at their basis on analogical arguments and reasoning. Plato in particular was famous for using analogies (‘the divided line’), parables (the Charioteer, the Cave, the Man chained to a Lion and a Many-Headed Beast) and even myths (Atlantis, the Ring of Gyges) to draw the characters of his dramas—and with them, his readers—into a deeper understanding of the particular point of virtue or knowledge that he was exploring. Plato’s discursive methods were formalised into a system by his student-cum-rival Aristotle.

In a very real sense, all serious moral thinking in the West is an exercise in drawing equivalences, and the ‘how-dare-you’ demand to cease drawing such analogical equivalences is tantamount to demanding that we turn off our brains and toss out the very fundaments of Western ethical thought. In this case, a fortiori, the need for meaningful analogies, and a cogent language for evaluating such analogies, is paramount. For example: I note that these same talking-heads condemning ‘moral equivalence’ seem to have no objections to the rather spurious moral equivalence of Palestinians to Nazis that the Israeli authorities are wont to engage in.

Now, it should be obvious from this example that some analogies are better, closer and more cogent than others. The benefit of accepting equivalency and analogy as a valid method of moral reasoning, is that we are better equipped to say which equivalencies and analogies are invalid. The Germans during the Second World War were in command of their own state, for one thing. The Palestinians have no state. And they have a ‘government’ only in the most risibly loose of senses. The Germans had control over an entire financial sector, an entire industrial war machine, a command structure, including an air force, that the Palestinians completely lack. And, probably most importantly, the Germans were also driven by an ideology of racial superiority and social Darwinism, which, for reasons which should be obvious, holds no endogenous currency whatsoever among the Arabs of Palestine.

Regarding the neologism of ‘Islamofascism’, a coinage which circulates promiscuously among the same people who snarl against ‘moral equivalence’, the following must be said. We must speak of the Ikhwânism of Ḥamâs on its own demerits, and these are very real. It is disgusting beyond words that the Ḥamâs leadership lives like kings in places like Dubai and Doha while the Palestinian constituency they supposedly govern gets bombed to hell. But, while Ikhwânism may bear comparison to fascism in some respects, fascism is in a very real sense secular and nationalistic, in a way that even the most brutal and death-loving forms of Islamism are not.

III.

But, having established foremost the need for ‘moral equivalencies’ (in the most basic sense of simply having an analogical method for ethical comparison), I think it may be possible to begin to discuss the parallels between the Russo-Ukrainian conflict and the Israeli-Palestinian one a bit more cogently. Hopefully a more convincing case can be put forward than Biden’s senile and inchoate conflation of Russia and Ḥamâs as fellow-dastards and enemies of all that is good and decent.

Three such equivalencies, between Russia and Israel, do rise immediately to the surface.

1. Fraternal conflict.The Israelis and the Palestinians, much like the Ukrainians and the Russians, are quite literally brother-peoples.
   
   Israelis and Palestinians have been shown by objective genetic studies to share recent ancestry. Both Palestinians and Israelis are largely Semitic peoples with roots in the Levant.
   
   Likewise, all of the East Slavic peoples—Ukrainians, Belarusians and ethnic Russians—share ‘almost identical proportions’ of Caucasian and Northern European genetic material, making them incredibly close kin simply from the standpoint of heredity.


2. Defensive justifications. The Israeli case for war is, on its face, similar to the Russian one—insofar as it is justified on the basis of self-defence and security against not merely local but also regional foes.
   
   In Russia’s case, those regional foes are the eastern European nations which are members of the NATO bloc; while in Israel’s case, those regional foes are the Arab nations with which it hasn’t yet come to a modus vivendi.


3. Territorial occupation. It must be mentioned that in each case, Russia and Israel in the prosecution of their respective wars hold and occupy territory that, under international law, does not belong to them.
   
   Russia occupies much of the Donetsk Basin, Zaporozhzh’e and Kherson in defiance of international law. Israel occupies the West Bank and Gaza in defiance of the same international laws.

However, there also arise a number of dissimilarities between the two conflicts; mostly historical in their import, though not irrelevant to the current situation in each country.

1. Religious significance. Palestine is very literally holy ground to all three of the major Abrahamic religions. The Temple Mount, the Tombs of the Patriarchs, the site of Christ’s Nativity, the Holy Sepulchre, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Mount of Olives—all exist within the borders of the present Holy Land. There has historically been massive contention over these sites, both among Christian confessions and between Christians, Jews and Muslims.
   
   The Pontic territories under dispute do contain religious significance for Orthodox Christians. Sevastopol in particular is a place sacred in Russian Orthodoxy, as the site of the baptism of St Vladimir. But there is nothing in Crimea or elsewhere in the territories under dispute between Russia and the Ukraine, which qualitatively resembles in character the holy sites in Palestine.


2. Settler colonialism. The presence of Russophones in the Ukraine is not, in overall terms, the result of a deliberate concerted policy of colonialism or settlement—even though Tsarist Russia, and later the Soviet Union, did have deliberate policies of colonial settlement in numerous other places. By contrast, Israeli history is very overtly and self-consciously colonial and settlement-oriented: the main organisation for Jewish settlement was literally called the Jewish Colonisation Association; Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky both explicitly framed their project in terms of colonisation.
   
   Ironically, the use of ‘postcolonial’ discourse to describe modern Ukrainian reality is not endogenous but rather a postmodern (and post-Soviet) borrowing from the West… and this discursive strategy is, to put it mildly, broadly unconvincing to the actual former subjects of Western colonial governments, who (not without reason) see this discursive strategy as self-serving and driven by ulterior interests.


3. Social segregation. The people who now live in the Donetsk Basin are, by and large, the descendants of the same Don Cossacks that had independently lived among and intermarried with the locals since the seventeenth century. Rates of intermarriage between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine have historically been high enough that Russians and Ukrainians in the Ukrainian East are functionally the same people. No formal segregation policies have separated ethnic Ukrainians from ethnic Russians in the past, neither under the Tsars, nor under the Soviet government, nor under the current Russian Federation.
   
   By contrast, segregation in Israel has been legal and formalised since its founding. Intermarriages are vanishingly rare between Israelis and Palestinians, and the Israeli state actually erects legal barriers as well as physical ones in order to prevent it.


4. Economic disparity. There has historically been very little difference between residents of Ukrainian territories and residents of Russian territories in terms of wealth, even going back to Tsarist times. Certain politically-charged famines notwithstanding, Ukrainians were overall about as well-off as Russians throughout most of their history together. The recent disparity between overall Ukrainian wealth and overall Russian wealth has more to do with the policies chosen by their respective governments after the collapse of the Soviet Union. After the disastrous shock-therapy of the 1990s, Russia turned toward a mixed economic policy based on self-reliance and food security; while the Ukrainian government largely remained mired in Western neoliberalism with all its attendant ills.
   
   The marked disparity between Israeli wealth and Palestinian wealth, by contrast, is the product of deliberate design rather than negligence or happenstance. The Palestinians were not only driven off the land they had once owned, but they were directly plundered of their resources of all sorts, by both legal chicanery and outright burglary, under Israeli administration. This was the case both in the 1948 Nakba, and in the wake of 1967.


5. Violent resistance. Both Ukraine and Palestine do have histories of violent resistance, though these are different in character. Ukraine has witnessed sporadic uprisings against Tsarist rule; it resisted incorporation into the Soviet Union during and after the First World War; and Ukrainian nationalists fought in the Nazi SS against the Soviets during the Second World War. Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule was largely politically rightist and middle- and upper-class in terms of class base, being motivated largely by nineteenth-century nationalist ideas.
   
   By contrast, there has been armed resistance to Israeli occupation of Palestinian land practically since the very beginning. Palestinians of all social classes began fighting back against the expropriation of their land and the expulsion of their people almost immediately after 1948, and again repeatedly through the Intifadas. The Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and displacement has been ideologically diverse: ranging from left-wing Marxist-Leninist (PFLP) through secular-liberal (Fataḥ, Third Way) to right-wing Islâmist (Ḥamâs).
   
   Currently there is no real resistance movement to speak of against Russian rule inside the territories it occupies. (The aforementioned Irpin-aligned groups operate within Ukrainian territory and with Ukrainian state support.) Though one may (and should!) deplore Ḥamâs’s ideology and its methods, the fact of its very existence points to the adverse conditions under which Palestinians live, and the continued determination of Palestinians to resist their occupiers. Clearly these conditions of life are not mirrored in Donbass, Zaporozhzh’e or Kherson.


6. Avoidance of civilian casualties. In the present conflicts, there are clear distinctions in the treatment of civilians in war. The best UN estimates of civilian death toll in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict since February 2022 sit right around 10,000; 545 of whom are children. This is over a time period of 20 months. These deaths are not to be minimised in terms of the moral harm done; however, as noted above, Russian forces have been demonstrably willing to sacrifice territorial gains and forward momentum on the battlefield precisely in order to avoid placing civilians in harm’s way.
   
   By contrast, over the past 7 weeks, Israeli forces have already killed 13,000 civilians; about 5,300 of whom are children. This comes from a deliberate military policy of targeting civilian areas and humanitarian infrastructure with shells and air strikes.

IV.

In drawing these parallels, and showing points of similarity and dissimilarity between the conflicts in Gaza and in the Ukrainian East, it is not my primary intention to make a simple and straightforward case of ‘Russia good; Israel bad’—even if one of my secondary intentions was indeed to complicate President Biden’s (and the US State Department’s, and that of the ‘moral equivalence’-shouters) narrative of ‘Russia bad; Israel good’. I have neither the desire nor the inclination to hide or hedge about my sympathy for the Palestinian cause… or my comparative lack of sympathy for the Ukrainian one. But I equally have no desire to fall into a ‘how dare you!!’ trap of my own. There are numerous complexities and tragic historical contingencies to both conflicts that render any such Manichæan interpretation analytically worthless.

In the case of Palestine in particular, no historical reckoning can be complete without a thorough accounting for Western Europe’s colonial designs on the region after the Ottoman collapse, or for its inexcusable and genocidal crimes against European Jewry during the Shoah which lent new urgency to the Zionist plea. And in the case of the Ukrainian problem, one has to navigate the disparate experiences of the Galician west, the maritime south and the industrial Russophone East, and the attempts they did make to live together in peace in the wake of independence. There one also has to navigate the problems of debt politics and the legacy of the same European genocide.

In leaving off this analysis, I think the only truly proper thing to do is to lift it up to the Most High, in Whose hands justice is complete and not partial, and in Whose ultimate reckoning all things will be given their proper place and due, and before Whose Truth I hope I dare not exalt the fruits of my own reasoning or prejudices as rivals.