"There is no obvious stopping point": On the Bureaucratization of Death
It is a truism that war breeds Orwellian thinking, and perhaps the more brutal the war, the more damage one must do to one’s intellect and soul to defend it. From the beginning of Israel’s response to Hamas’ horrific massacre on October 7th, there has been a popular fantasy among some liberal Zionists: the possibility of Israel fighting a “just war” in Gaza — that is, a war that would protect Israeli civilians while also taking the utmost care to protect Gazan civilians, too. Of course, no one honestly assessing the history of Israel/Palestine could have believed — without willful ignorance — in such a possibility: Israeli human rights organizations have extensively documented human rights abuses and war crimes in Israel’s previous operations in Gaza, and Israel’s first move in the war was to impose a strict siege on food, electricity, and water. Beyond that, Israel is currently being run by a far-right government who, even before the war, was happily committed to permanent occupation and apartheid. And finally, that same army that some liberal Zionists keep hoping will act morally in Gaza — on a battlefield, after the worst massacre in Israeli history, and with little to no journalistic accountability — is committing daily human rights abuses in the West Bank.
Now that the IDF has killed roughly 20,000 Palestinian civilians, injured untold numbers, displaced nearly two million, and destroyed the majority of infrastructure in Gaza, one would think that such a fantasy would have been finally laid to rest. But instead of admitting the immorality of the campaign, otherwise intelligent and compassionate thinkers have instead chosen to redefine morality itself.
One disturbing expression of this new morality was stated in an op-ed this week by a popular American Jewish writer describing why they still support Israel’s war writ-large despite concern about the rising Palestinian death toll, the threat to the hostages, and the potential impossibility of Israel even achieving its stated aims. There were many elements of the piece that I took issue with, but one passage in particular stuck out to me:
Since every death in war is a tragedy, there is simply no objective way to determine what quantity of deaths should be considered “acceptable” and when we cross an imaginary threshold to say that there are “too many.”
Typically, insisting on the value of life – “every death in war is a tragedy” – is an argument against killing: “One who destroys a single soul is like one who has destroyed an entire world” (Y. Sanhedrin 4:9) — and therefore one should not kill even a single innocent person. As Avraham Chein, a 20th-century Chabad rabbi, insisted:
If all the world’s inhabitants, all of the generations, the earth itself and even the sun, too — if all of these were destroyed with this one single person, or only the latter was killed while all of the infinity of the world with all of its luminosity and sublimity remained — it would be the same.1
Each person is of infinite value, and since infinity multiplied by any number is still infinity, there is no moral difference between killing many infinities or one. Therefore, just as it would be morally indefensible to destroy the entire world, so too is it reprehensible to kill even a single person.
I can only understand the op-ed’s logic as — perhaps unconsciously or unintentionally — inverting R’ Chein’s chain of reasoning. If it is permissible to kill a single person and if there is no moral difference between a single infinity and many, then it is therefore permissible to kill many people: the tragedy is infinite either way, after all. I am sure the author wouldn’t take such an argument to its ultimate conclusion — that it is therefore permissible to kill everyone — but they seem willing to take it far enough. The error is in reducing infinity from a metaphor and symbol to a number: taming it and taking advantage of its technical properties. When infinity is bureaucratized, even death counts don’t count.
The op-ed continues,
There is no doubt that some amount of the death and destruction inflicted by Israel in Gaza could have been prevented while achieving the strategic objectives of the war, as the IDF periodically admits… I cannot say personally whether the Palestinian death toll demands an end to this war… But because leaving Hamas in place creates a permanent and imminent threat to Israeli lives, there is no obvious stopping point.
The deaths that could be prevented are those that we didn’t “have” to cause; as for the rest — those already dead and those soon to be so — what other choice could there be but to kill and kill and kill?
Even while admitting that “some amount of the death” could have been prevented, the author upholds the ultimate justness of the rest of the killing: all the other deaths, by definition, could not be prevented. We have no other choice, it seems, but to kill and kill and kill until we are safe. But what if the killing itself continues to generate new threats in turn, as the occupation has for decades — will we have to kill more? There is “no obvious stopping point,” and there is “no imaginary threshold to say that there are ‘too many.’” Who is to say how many by fire, sword, hunger, or plague? Must the gears of war grind on regardless, no matter how many get caught underfoot?
Writing shortly after 9/11, Indian critic and author Arundhati Roy described “[t]he sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice” in language that could easily be applied to the current war:
How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead women and children for every dead man? How many dead mojahedin for each dead investment banker?… Witness the infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death while they're waiting to be killed.
To accept this algebra — and the unending carnage of its conclusions — is to give in to hopelessness: that there is no way out of the violence in which we are enmeshed except to make yet another pact with that violence, even while knowing that the price of such a pact will be to more deeply lock ourselves into a violent future.
No. This is not and cannot be the way.
R’ Avraham Yehuda Chein, BeMalchut HaYehadut, vol. 1, pp. 87.