The Way We Kill

There’s a photo from the October 7 attacks in Israel that shows a female hostage with blood covering the seat of her pants, suggesting she endured profound sexual trauma. I didn’t have the courage or the stomach to look at the image myself, but I was on the phone with a friend on Saturday and she described it to me. My friend spoke of how the photo made her think of her own daughters and how she hasn’t been able to shake the image from her mind. She said this as I cried. In part, I cried because of the obvious brutality of it all. But my tears were in part because I have struggled with how to reconcile the attacks with my own sense of the world. 

Professionally and personally, I hold a deep commitment to the idea that the things we care about the most tend to be morally and ethically complex. What’s more, I believe that the binary thinking that feeds moral outrage and righteous indignation threatens democracy itself. I have argued elsewhere that, when we’re going to condemn something or someone, we need to do so based on a principle or a value or that can be applied consistently and in terms that are universally understood. What’s more, my work on how we think and communicate on contentious issues includes a call to assume positive intent, at least unless you have reason to believe otherwise. 

I was crying on that phone call because I didn’t know how to listen to the description of the photo and also hold in my mind that the situation is complicated. Am I a worse person if I see the complexity or if I don’t? I have sought in vain for a mutually intelligible moral rule that could help me distinguish one group’s wrongs from another’s in a way that felt tangible.

I told my friend that one of the hardest pieces for me to get my head around is that nearly every claim that can be made on the Israeli side can be countered by one on the Palestinian side. And vice versa. You can seemingly shift blame by taking one step further back or by changing the viewing angle. And in so doing, where and when to stop turns into an unwinnable battle. Consider:

• Those kids on October 7 were innocents killed at a music festival. Palestinian kids are being killed by Israeli bombs. 

• October 7 showed us acts of Hamas’s terrorism. Terrorists are made, not born. 

• Israel has claim to the land. No, they don’t. They stole it.

• Hamas launches rockets from schools. They have no choice but to do so because Israel is the stronger military power.

• Palestinians rejected the chance at a two-state solution. That solution didn’t include the right of return.

• Israel has had a blockade into Gaza. Without it, Hamas could sneak in even more weapons material. 

• The conditions in Gaza are inhuman and ripe for an uprising. Hamas probably had a hand in creating those conditions.

• Hamas attacked first. The body count of Palestinians is higher than that of Israelis.

• And even: What is Israel supposed to do now? I don’t know, but not this.

I’m not making a claim that these are equivalent, in their morality or necessarily in their accuracy. I’m simply pointing out that this conversation, such as it is, can go nowhere. And this should worry all of us because, if we know anything, it’s that nothing good happens when human beings can’t talk through conflict.  

While a moral rule continues to elude me, during that phone call, I realized there is at least one difference that is both disturbing and hard to overlook. It goes back to the photo my friend described and it comes down to the way we kill.

To be horribly callous, on the one hand, when you’re dead, you’re dead. This is true regardless of whether you died a bombing or you were beheaded. On the other hand, we can probably all agree that being killed without being tortured first has to be better. 

In other words, while dead may be dead, how we die matters. And, it turns out, so does how we kill.

October 7’s raping, maiming, and torturing are horrific in part because they tell us how those Hamas fighters viewed their victims. Such desecration requires seeing the enemy as less than human. 

If you’re unsure how important this connection is, run the following thought experiment. Imagine that, instead of the fighters marauding through Israeli towns, Hamas had bombed the music festival. Would that change anything?

At this point, it would be fair for someone to point out that Hamas fighters see Israeli Jews as inhuman because that’s what they’ve been taught and how they’ve been raised. And that is, to be sure, an important point to make in this complex problem. 

At the same time, it doesn’t change that this is where we are now. History has shown us over and over that the belief that my opponent is subhuman is the worst form of the Certainty Trap. It’s the kind of thinking that underpins every genocide we’ve ever seen.

The upshot is this: We can and should continue to try to talk to one another about how we got to this point and what to do now. This conversation is fully compatible with an understanding that the brutality of the October 7 attacks is a warning in its own right. Because, while I imagine it’s possible to kill a person you see as fully human, it’s much harder for me to see how you could and why you would degrade them first.