Palestinians stand amid the ruins of the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. Photo by Mohammed Hajjar/AP.
By Judi Rever, Canadian Dimension, October 8, 2024
We have accepted genocide while refusing to examine our role in fuelling the violence. How do we rationalize our own inhumanity? \
A US-made precision-guided bomb manufactured by Boeing shreds a little girl and renders her body unrecognizable in the arms of her mother facing oblivion. Charred and limbless survivors writhe in inconsolable torment at a hospital that has been attacked so many times it is barely functioning. Every moment of every day in Gaza, thousands of lives fragment and miseries mount.
Only the victims know the depth of their suffering but the images and testimony of their agony are available for all of us who care to take a look. The genocide of Palestinians has been documented in real time, mainly on social media, by Palestinian journalists. Westerners can no longer deny the crimes or say the pain is unimaginable. What we are witnessing is vivid and grotesque, and is a testament to who we are.
The immediate, intentional destruction of human life in Gaza should be an international emergency. In the West, it should be the most important electoral issue, not because the suffering of Palestinians is more important than that of the Sudanese or the Rohingya, but because Western nations have close ties to the perpetrator.
We could stop the bloodshed or at least mitigate the intensity of it. We could boycott, sanction, condemn and prosecute Israel for committing a genocide. But our leaders refuse to do so; they are unwilling to enforce international law and they go out of their way to avoid qualifying the violence. And we let them get away with it. Worse, our governments and industries enable, sanitize and justify Israeli crimes. They have given Israel the means to massacre civilians and have even cheered on its biggest war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Ordinary people may view this spectacle with horror, but most of us seem to have accepted the barbarity as though we have no ability to stop its course. Even if we are disgusted by the carnage, we are not willing to take our leaders to task for being complicit. We are either fatalistic or largely indifferent to this depravity.
The murder of old people, women and children in Gaza is not a burning political issue in the West. Some of us even agree with the boilerplate rhetoric in Washington, Ottawa or London which asserts that Israel has a right to defend itself, while conveniently skirting the question of whether Palestinians have a right to resist occupation and defend themselves. How often do we hear that Israelis and Palestinians are always killing each other, as though this banal assessment assuages our conscience?
The geopolitical tropes underpinning Western support for Israel are well known. But the question is how have our leaders and society as a whole become so morally disengaged when faced with cruelty, or while inflicting it? How do we justify the crimes in Gaza and condone Israel’s latest military offensive in Lebanon? And how do we evade our responsibility for them?
The legendary psychologist Albert Bandura provided an astonishing framework for understanding the extent of our moral disengagement. A decade before his death in 2021, the Canadian-born professor who taught at Stanford University studied the mechanisms through which people selectively engage and disengage their morality. One of the most powerful mechanisms that he explored was moral justification, which involves using moral and worthy ends to sanctify destructive behaviour.
“Voltaire put it well when he said if you can lead people to believe absurdities, you can get them to commit atrocities,” Bandura, a pioneer in developing social cognitive theory, said in an interview. “We do a lot of killing in the name of religious principles, political ideologies, national imperatives and so on.”
Bandura discovered a second mechanism that transforms behaviour: using sanitized or convoluted language and euphemisms that mask the injury that we are causing. A third mechanism is through advantageous comparison where our own inhumanities look minor when compared to more egregious ones.
Bandura argued that these mechanisms are extraordinarily effective in distorting the relationship between our actions and the effects they cause because they not only disengage our morality from destructive behaviour, but if we feel justified, this engages our morality in the action.
Two other mechanisms involve mucking up our individual sense of agency for destructive behaviour: displacement of responsibility—by shifting responsibility onto someone else—or the diffusion of responsibility, where people are less likely to take responsibility for acting or not acting when other bystanders or witnesses are present.
Bandura argued, as well, that leaders use “surreptitious authorization” through maze-like structures of authority, building deniability into these authorization systems because they do not want to be held accountable if the policy fails. “You do not want blood on your hands. This is why we have mazy systems of non-responsibility,” he explained. “If an incident happens that is problematic, then this is treated as an isolated incident, and you blame your subordinates for either misunderstanding or being over-zealous.”
He believed that good functionaries carry out orders when bosses are not around; they honour the authority with regard to the policy but do not assume responsibility for the destructive behaviour. He also believed that such systems require surreptitious sanctioning, which is akin to a nod and a wink. Israel has used white phosphorous on southern Lebanon and Gaza, despite knowing that firing incendiary weapons into civilian areas is a clear violation of international humanitarian law.
The diffusion of responsibility requires group decision-making, group action and anonymity.
“Napoleon once creatively said that collective crimes incriminate no one,” Bandura noted.
It is in these realms of anonymity and displacement of responsibility where ordinary people become ambivalent, lose their moral agency and find excuses for accepting what they would otherwise consider reprehensible. When our leaders take decisions, it allows us to shift the moral burden onto them and it shields us from moral scrutiny or self-examination.
Bandura reminded us that we go to great lengths to avoid the consequences of our actions and our inaction. If we deny, minimize or dispute the harm being done then there is no reason why our moral agency should even be activated. Avoiding consequences is easier if evidence of crimes is harder to come by, or if the mainstream media is reticent to share it. Bandura’s work also showed us how easy it is to morally disengage when we blame or dehumanize victims, casting them as sub-humans as a way to restrain a sense of empathy and destroy a sense of common humanity.
Ordinary people have not cast Palestinians as sub-humans. On the contrary, there has been a great outpouring of empathy and protest among millions of global citizens. Human rights activists and students, including the children of liberal elites, have staged protests against Israel, and many have been punished for it.
But the Western-backed Israeli genocide of Palestinians has not unleashed widespread political or civic unrest in North America or Europe. Our leaders do not appear worried about their complicity in these crimes or concerned that Western-made weapons are dismembering and killing civilians in Gaza.
Canada, one of the biggest arms dealers to the Middle East, has misled the Canadian public and used surreptitious methods to transfer weapons to Israel. In March, Parliament passed a non-binding motion to suspend new arms sales to Israel, although existing permits have remained intact. In August, the US government announced that the Québec-based company General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems was the principal contractor in the sale of 50,000 high explosive mortar cartridges to the Israeli army. In other words, while Canada claims to have halted direct arms transfers to Israel, it is actually making indirect transfers of lethal weapons to Israel under a US-Canada trade deal.
“For them to say we’ve ended the export of weapons to Israel, it’s a lie. They haven’t,” said Rachel Small, a Canadian organizer for the international peace movement, World Beyond War. “They’ve ended putting their stamp of approval on new, theoretical future weapons permits, but companies are very happily shipping their weapons that they got approved in 2023, including the first few months of the genocide.”
In a recent podcast, Small told the advocacy organization Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East that thousands of Canadians have protested and held weekly gatherings in solidarity with the Palestinians. More than 75 people have been arrested or charged, she noted. “People are being criminalized for this, and are not slowing down.” A group of Canadian lawyers and Palestinian human rights activists have taken the federal government to court for violating Canadian laws regarding weapons transfers, Small pointed out, and people have shut down railways, ports and weapons factories.
She calls the mobilization against the violence a partial, yet important victory. “All of that is what’s gotten us to a point where the Canadian government was forced to stop approving new permits and where they are now forced to kind of lie and scramble to make us think that they’ve done something… [it’s] a real testament to people organizing and thousands of people putting themselves on the line across the country.”
Incidentally, Bandura also examined the power of humanization to bring out the best in people. He argued that people—in particular enemies—need to get to know each other in order to understand their common humanity. He said humanization is enhanced by promoting and funding social policies that ensure our well-being. Schools that teach cooperative learning and conflict resolution have statistically fewer dropouts, higher educational development, and lower rates of violence, alcohol consumption and teenage pregnancy, according to Bandura. He also recommended the teaching of civic engagement in schools. His core research centred on the belief in personal efficacy as a foundation of human agency. Unless people believe they can produce desired effects and forestall undesired ones by their actions, they have little incentive to act.
There is no greater example of human agency at this moment than the resilience of Palestinians against Israel’s attempt to erase life, culture and history in Gaza. If there is any lesson to draw, it is from this resilience, which has reshaped our perceptions of the liberal international order and inspired young people around the world to resist the damage we have created and condoned.
Judi Rever is a journalist from Montréal and is the author of In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.
