The quest for peace always requires a leap over both sides of a war’s putative “justifications.” From Charles Eisenstein at charleseisenstein.substack.com:
I just heard someone say, “One war crime does not justify another.” My reflex as a peace advocate is to agree with that statement, but something gives me pause. It starts with a grammatical issue but it doesn’t end there.
The only beings on earth that perform the act of justifying are human beings. “War crimes” do not perform that act. What the statement intends to say is something like, “One cannot legitimately use one war crime to justify another.” But what is this “legitimate”? A substitute for justifiable. One cannot justifiably use one war crime to justify another. We are on the brink of an infinite regress that seeks to convert the subjective act of justifying something into an objective property, as if one could filter all acts through a moral sieve that separates them into two categories, the wrong and the right.
Seen this way, the statement about justifying war crimes is exactly wrong. People do indeed use one war crime to justify another. With the exception of crimes of passion, which people typically justify in retrospect, all wars and most violence begins with justification. The heinous acts of the other side are high-octane fuel for the justification engine.
In the objective sense of an ethical principle, we can argue whether this or that war was justified. But in terms of the rhetorical act of the human being called justifying, all wars are justified. Someone is justifying them.
This is why, as I have argued over the past month, we must exit the conversation about what is justified if there is ever going to be an end to the violence in the Holy Land.
