Look Who's Talking: G.A. Cohen on Israeli Condemnations of Palestinian Terrorism (UNLOCKED)
Let's take it is a given that terrorist attacks targeting civilians are never justifiable. Does it follow that everyone has an equal right to condemn them? G.A. Cohen didn't think so.
A few months ago at the annual festival at Hay-on-Wye in the UK, I gave a lecture about the intellectual legacy of Karl Marx and the way that’s often used as a punching bag by historically and philosophically illiterate right-wingers. The festival organizers haven’t released the video yet, but a version of the talk was published in Jacobin. This isn’t actually going to be a Marx essay, though. After my extensive debate with Tibor, we’re taking at least a short break from that topic!
Instead, what I want to talk about is an exchange during the Q&A at Hay. In the talk, I’d said something rueful about the various economic and moral failures of the “Soviet experiment” in building socialism, and a woman in the audience who I remember as having some kind of Latin American accent—although, who knows, maybe when the video comes out it’ll turn out I totally misremembered that detail and she’s speaking in a thick Scottish brogue—asked me what I thought about “the Cuban experiment.”
I don’t remember exactly what I said in response, but I do remember feeling more circumspect about criticizing Cuba than I had been about criticizing the USSR—even though at least some of the obvious criticisms of the latter also apply to the former. The difference is that, even if it was locked in a pretty lopsided geopolitical conflict with the United States, the USSR was a major world power in its own right, not a tiny country that was all but an American colony before the revolution and which now struggles to stay afloat in the face of American hostility. I think I said something like, “The kind of socialist democracy I advocate is very different from what they have in Cuba but also as a citizen of the nation that’s done so much to keep Cuba in a permanent state of siege, I’d feel a little awkward about leaning too hard into condemnation of the flaws of their system.”
Now, you can criticize (the last part of) my answer on at least two different grounds. The first and simplest is that you could just insist on the general principle that anyone anywhere should feel free to condemn anything that’s worthy of condemnation. Alternatively, you could grant that some people—in particular, some Americans—lack the moral standing to criticize Cuban authoritarianism but argue that just being an American isn’t enough to put you in that category. An American leftist with—as George Castanza would put it—an “unblemished record” of opposing American aggression to Cuba shouldn’t be lumped together with American politicians who support the embargo. Whatever you make of the second objection, though, today I want to focus on the first one—or rather on the general principle being invoked in the first objection. The particular example I’ll focus on is pretty distant from Cuba.
I just read G.A. Cohen’s 2003 essay “Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can’t, Condemn the Terrorists?” Part of the implied context of the essay is what, in 2003, was still unblushingly called “the global war on terror.” But his particular focus is on Palestine.
One of the reasons I was so fascinated to run into “Casting the First Stone” is that Cohen’s views on Israel/Palestine had been slightly unclear to me. A year or so ago, I read his fascinating book If You’re An Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?, which combines philosophical argumentation with autobiography. (I talked about it—very briefly—in Jacobin.) In there, he says something in passing about being frequently disturbed by Israeli treatment of the Palestinians and—more confusingly—being a “non-Zionist” but not necessarily an “anti-Zionist.”
To start at the end of “Casting the First Stone,” the article is ultimately a pretty dry bit of analytic philosophy but it comes with an intensely personal appendix called “Israel and Me.” In it, Cohen recalls the emotionally charged details of celebrating the creation of the state of Israel with his family at the age of seven.1 Cohen came from a Communist Party of Canada family. Some were members, others fellow travelers, but all thoroughly pro-Moscow. As hard as this may be to remember in 2023, though, in 1948 Moscow and Tel Aviv were aligned. Stalin’s USSR was the primary great-power sponsor of the fledgling state, and it was a totally normal thing for a family of Jewish communists in Montreal to join a mass gathering singing the Hatikvah—Israel’s national anthem—to celebrate the creation of the state.
Cohen then describes a 1983 trip to Israel that seems to have been a transitional fossil in the emotional archaeology of his journey to “non-” Zionism. He was starting to learn more about what he calls the “semi-apartheid-semi-colonial status” of Palestinians under Israeli rule. During the 1983 visit, he sings the Hatikvah again—at a memorial meeting for a murdered Israeli leftist—but he does so with great hesitation. In 2003, he says, he “could not dream of singing it.”
My best guess about what he meant in If You’re An Egalitarian… about not quite being an “anti-” Zionist is just that he wasn’t necessarily opposed to the continued existence of Israel in something like its present form as long as an independent Palestinian state comes into existence alongside it. He never quite says that, but several of his formulations in the paper at least hint at it.2
However that may be, in 2003 he’d arrived at a political place where he seethed with anger at hearing Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Dr. Zvi Shtauber, say this on British radio:
No matter what the grievance, and I'm sure that the Palestinians have some legitimate grievances, nothing can justify the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians.
Many of the actions Dr. Shtauber was condemning were genuinely pretty heinous. This is an era when Hamas and Islamic Jihad were sending suicide bombers to night clubs and pizza parlors. As Cohen spells out in the paper, however wide a net you cast for who counts as complicit in Israeli policies that keep Palestinians in that “semi-apartheid-semi-colonial status,” such actions don’t just kill complicit people (never mind just direct perpetrators). Children, for example, are going to die in some of these attacks.
Maybe you think sometimes the deliberate targeting of non-combatants is justified, presumably on utilitarian grounds. Cohen takes no stand on that one way or the other in “Casting the First Stone.” He just concedes for the sake of argument that “terrorism” in the sense of doing things like this is always wrong—and by the way, while he uses the shorthand to describe actions by “underdogs” that deliberately target civilians, since these are the actions he’s considering in the paper, he also declines to offer a definition of terrorism. Using “conceptual analysis” to arrive at definitions of contested terms is one of the core activities of an analytic philosopher, but Cohen demurs that terrorism is too “disordered” a concept for such analysis to be likely to bear fruit.3 For the record, I agree, although I’ll follow his practice in using the t-word without scare quotes in what follows. The point is that, whatever label you apply to them, Cohen isn’t interested in trying to defend the kinds of actions under consideration.
So what’s wrong with Shtauber condemning it?
If you’ve taken an introductory course along the lines of the Logic, Reasoning and Persuasion class—shorthanded, at least by me, as “Lurp”—I sometimes teach for Rutgers, you might even worry that Cohen is committing the Tu Quoque fallacy by objecting to Shtauber’s statement. That’s not quite right. He might be if his conclusion were that Shtauber’s was incorrect to say that the terrorist attacks in question were immoral. (Being a hypocrite doesn’t mean you’re wrong.) But he objects not to the “propositional content” of Shtauber’s statement but to the fact that the point of Shtauber’s “speech act” was to condemn Palestinian terrorism. If you don’t see the difference, think about someone who says, perhaps in some interpersonal context, “I know that what I’m in no position to criticize, but I still think that such-and-such was wrong.” If you understand what they mean (which, remember, is a much lower bar than agreeing with them) you should also understand the distinction between saying Shtauber is wrong about the immorality of, say, a Hamas attack on a nightclub, and saying that Shtauber has moral standing to condemn the attack, especially in the way that he does—bracketing the grievances (“I’m sure that the Palestinians have some legitimate grievances…”) as an irrelevancy.
Before we see why Cohen denies that Shtauber—or any other representative of the Israeli government—has such standing, it’s worth making a crucial distinction. There may well be practical objections to terrorism. It could be that other Palestinian strategies would be more effective. Cohen takes no firm position on that question in “Casting the First Stone,” though he does acknowledge the possibility. But this isn’t what people like Shtauber seem to be saying. Their point isn’t “well, if terrorism were the most effective strategy, then sure, by all means, terrorize away, but as a pragmatic point I don’t think it is.” Instead, they seem to be saying “terrorism is wrong even if it sometimes gets the goods” and condemning it on that basis.
First, the government Shtauber is speaking for often does things that are as bad or worse than what Shtauber condemns Palestinians for doing. Even at the height of the Second Intifada--the context of Cohen’s essay—the Palestinian civilians killed by the Israeli military vastly outnumbered the Israeli civilians killed by Palestinian militants. So we’re talking about a very dark pot calling the kettle black in this case. Secondly, if Palestinians can’t address their various grievances by using standard “non-terrorist” methods like sending a uniformed Palestinian army to do battle with the Israeli army, that is itself a result of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.
Starting with the first point, a relatively philosophically sophisticated way around the objection is to invoke something called the Doctrine of Double Effect, which says that there’s a moral difference between intending to e.g. kill a civilian and intentionally doing something that has the foreseen and accepted effect of killing a civilian. If this is the first time you’ve ever heard of the Doctrine of Double Effect, it probably sounds like silly sophistry, but I’d suggest that it actually sounds more plausible the more time you spend thinking about it. This classic paper by Philippa Foot is a good place to start. She comes up with a number of examples in which the distinction really does seem to be morally significant.
Cohen himself doesn’t deny that the Doctrine of Double Effect is plausible. He just emphasizes that it’s not supposed to be a moral get-out-of-jail-free pass for anything that falls short of directly aiming at the foreseen consequences. It’s a comparative principle. It doesn’t say “go ahead and intentionally do things that result in the deaths of civilians all you want as long as you don’t intend to.” It just says “all else being equal, it’s even worse to intentionally kill civilians than to do things that will bring about civilian deaths.” That’s completely consistent with saying that a steady stream of Israeli actions that have the foreseen consequence of killing lots of civilians but aren’t directed at that aim as such—like, say, dropping bombs on densely populated Gaza neighborhoods with the intention of killing Hamas leaders who live in them—work out to being as bad as, or even much worse than, actions by Palestinian groups that might more directly aim at civilian deaths. And as ugly as a condemnation of violence against civilians delivered by a routine perpetrator of violence against civilians may be, there’s something even more outrageous about such a condemnation being delivered by the party that limited Palestinian option in a way that arguably made terrorism the most effective remaining recourse.
Cohen writes:
If you rule over a people who have no citizenship in your country, and whom you therefore deny civil democratic means of redress, if it is you, moreover, who disarmed them, and you who deprive them of weaponry that is effective against your soldiers, or at least ensure that they cannot get such weaponry, then you in particular cannot complain if they use unconventional weaponry against non-soldiers, unless you can justify your constraining action, or show that the constraint was not substantial enough to make their action understandable. Israelis ensure that Palestinians cannot acquire conventional means of combatting Israeli forces, and they therefore cannot complain that the Palestinians use other ones, if the Palestinians have a legitimate and sufficiently substantial grievance.
Even if you come to the conclusion that the Palestinians are in a morally tragic situation where the only means of combatting oppression available to them are morally unjustifiable, the combination of the Israeli state (a) having done as bad or worse itself, (b) causing the very grievances Shtauber wants to bracket as irrelevant to his condemnation, and (c) preventing the Palestinians from resisting in other ways makes condemnation by representatives of that state particularly galling.
As he points out, (b) and (c) don’t, at least in this particular case, simply “lie side-by-side”:
Though logically and practically independent, in the general case, they are, in a certain manner, fused here. For consider. If the Palestinians had normal democratic sovereignty and normal civil liberty they would have a normal army which is not equipped merely to police its own people. It is central to their grievance that they lack a state, and, therefore, among other things, the approved means of violence that a state possesses. But the lack of what they would have, if they had a proper state, to wit, just such an army, contributes strongly to the explanation of their mode of pursuing their grievance. For it is only by unconventional means that you can pursue any grievance which includes the grievance that you lack conventional means of pursuing grievances.
Cohen does scrupulously point out that a “hypothetical leftist” who concluded that no one can condemn the tactics of groups like Hamas would be overstating the case—and, indeed, simply Shtauber’s fallacious assumption that if something is condemnation-worthy, anyone can condemn it. But he does conclude from all this that the Israeli government, its representatives and its apologists are in no position to do so.
I find this fairly plausible, and I’ll close with an admittedly extreme analogy that captures some of why, putting together several of Cohen’s points:
In a movie I remember watching many times back when I watched movies on VHS, Silence of the Lambs, serial killer “Buffalo Bill” captures an innocent woman named Catherine and keeps her at the bottom of a dry well. Bill also dotes on a small dog named Precious. At one point, Catherine gets ahold of the dog and threatens to hurt her if Bill doesn’t let her go. I’ll fully admit to being the kind of person who might have had to stop watching the movie if she’d actually carried out this threat. Like any red-blooded American moviegoer, I’m pretty desensitized to cinematic depictions of human-on-human violence, but I still find violence against dogs pretty upsetting. Maybe you’d be completely untroubled by it and you think I’m a bit of a weirdo about the dog thing. If so, let’s change the example and make Bill not a serial-killer dog owner but a serial-killer single father, and keep everything about the scene the same except that Precious is now a human baby.
Now, presumably, it’s at least slightly unclear even to you—the hypothetical cold-eyed dog-hating reader—that Catherine would be justified in hurting or killing Precious as a strategy for fighting back against Bill. I mean, I see people talking about “would you kill baby Hitler to prevent the Holocaust” as an open and vexing moral question all the time, and that’s the Holocaust, not just one individual Catherine being killed by Buffalo Bill.
Let’s say that, in this modified version of the scene, Bill doesn’t give in and Catherine kills Precious-the-human-baby. Maybe she’s just too angry to care that she’s not getting anything out of it, and that Bill’s anger may actually make her situation worse. Maybe she reasons that it’s important to prove that she’ll make good on even her most gruesome threats just in case she’s ever in a position to threaten him again. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that we all agree that this was wrong of her to do—that nothing could justify killing an innocent baby.
Fine. But we should also agree that the one person who doesn’t get to wag his finger in condemnation is fucking Buffalo Bill.
The night I read this paper happens to be the same night I read the opening pages of Quentin Tarantino’s book Cinema Speculation, where he talks in detail about the plots of movies his parents took him to see when he was seven. Tarantino tells us which bits made him laugh, which he found confusing, and so on. The one-two punch of reading Cohen and Tarantino made me wonder if most people remember stuff that happened to them when they were seven in this kind of detail. I sure as hell don’t.
My own view is that if Palestinians were to achieve some limited degree of justice through the end of Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, that would be a step in the right direction, but ultimately there’s a pretty robust case for a secular democratic “one-state solution.”
In other words, to translate the point from the way a scrupulously polite Oxford don would put it to how, say, a Jacobin columnist might put it, “terrorism” has no coherent meaning since it’s only real function is as a free-floating label for the things They do, which of course (a) are ontologically evil and (b) justify everything We do in response.